The Relevance of Romanticism - Essays On German Romantic Philosophy (Dalia Nassar, 2014)

Title Pages
The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on

German Romantic Philosophy
Dalia Nassar
Print publication date: 2014

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2014
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) The Relevance of Romanticism (p.ii)
(p.iii) The Relevance of Romanticism
(p.iv)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The relevance of Romanticism : essays on German romantic
philosophy / edited by Dalia Nassar.
pages cm
ISBN 978–0–19–997620–1 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–
997621–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, German—18th century. 2. Philosophy, German—19th
century.
3. Romanticism—Germany. 4. Romanticism—Germany—Influence. I.
Nassar, Dalia,
editor of compilation.
B2748.R64R45 2014
141'.60943—dc23
2013034627
987654321
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Acknowledgments

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the contributors to this volume, from whose work I have
learned and with whom I have enjoyed working. I would also like to acknowledge
the support of the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research
Award (DE120102402), which enabled me to undertake and complete this
project. Finally, I wish to thank Ryan Feigenbaum for his invaluable help and
editorial work on the manuscript. (p.viii)
Page 1 of 1
Abbreviations

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
(p.ix) Abbreviations
Frequently cited works have been identified by the following abbreviations.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
GA
Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Edited by Reinhard Lauth et al. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog,
1962–2012.
FW
Fichtes Werke. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Berlin: W. de
Gruyter, 1971.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
FA
Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurter Ausgabe). Edited by H. Birus et al.
Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1999.
LA
Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft. Edited by D. Kuhn et al.
Weimar: Hermann Bölhaus Nachfolger, 1947.
MA
Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner
Ausgabe). Edited by K. Richter et al. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985–98.
WA
Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe). Edited by P. Raabe et al.
Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887–1919.
Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)
NS
Page 1 of 3
Abbreviations
Novalis Schriften: Die Werke von Friedrich von Hardenberg. Edited

by Richard Samuel, H.-J. Mähl, P. Kluckhorn, and G. Schulz. Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer, 1960–88.
Johann Gottfried Herder
HW
Johann Gottfried Herder: Werke in zehn Bänden. Edited by Ulrich
Gaier et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–
2000.
(p.x) Friedrich Hölderlin
HSW
Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke (Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe). Edited by
Friedrich Beissner. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1962.
HFA
Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurter
Ausgabe). Edited by D. E. Sattler. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/
Roter Stern, 1975–2008.
Immanuel Kant
AA
Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Preußischen Akademie der
Wissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
HKA
Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Edited by H. M. Baumgartner,
W. G. Jacobs, and H. Krings. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1976–.
SW
Schellings Sämmliche Werke. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1856–1861.
Friedrich von Schlegel
KA
Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by E. Behler, J. J.
Anstett, and H. Eichner. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
FSSW
Page 2 of 3
Abbreviations
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s sämmtliche Werke. Edited by O. Braun

and J. Bauer. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1835–1864.
KGA
Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Günter Meckenstock et al.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980–2005.
All citations will contain volume and page numbers. In cases where there are
separate parts to a volume, the volume number will be followed by a “/” and then
the part number.
Page 3 of 3
Contributors

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
(p.xi) Contributors
Karl Ameriks is the McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Kant and the Historical
Turn (Oxford, 2006), Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge,
2000), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism
(Cambridge, 2000). He is a founding coeditor of Internationales
Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus (International Yearbook of
German Idealism), and since 1994 he has served as a coeditor of the
approximately seventy-volume series Cambridge Texts in the History
of Philosophy. Professor Ameriks was elected a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He is also the recipient of
several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Earhart Foundation (most recently in 2010), and an Alexander
von Humboldt Fellowship. He is a former member of the American
Philosophical Association Board of Officers (2003–2005) and past
president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical
Association (2004–2005) and the North American Kant Society (1991–
1994).
Frederick Beiser, one of the world’s leading historians of German
philosophy, is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. He has
also taught at Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
His book The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
won the 1987 Thomas J. Wilson Prize for the Best First Book. He is
also the author of German Idealism: The Struggle against
Subjectivism (Harvard, 2002), The Romantic Imperative (Harvard,
2003), and more recently, Schiller: A Re-examination (Oxford, 2008).
Brady Bowman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the
Pennsylvania State University. Before coming to Penn State, he was a
research associate in philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller Universität
Page 1 of 5
Contributors
Jena (2000–2007). His recent publications include Hegel’s

Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity (Cambridge, 2013); G. W. F.
Hegel’s Heidelberg Writings. Translation and Commentary, ed. and
trans. with Allen Speight (Cambridge, 2009); “Spinozist Pantheism
and the Truth of ‘Sense Certainty’: What the Eleusinian Mysteries
Have to Tell Us about (p.xii) Hegel’s Phenomenology,” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 50 (1): 85–110; and “Goethean Morphology,
Hegelian Science: Affinities and Transformations,” Goethe Yearbook
18: 159–82.
Laure Cahen-Maurel is the author of a number of articles on the
aesthetic interactions between German idealism and romanticism,
and has published the first complete translation of the main text of
Caspar David Friedrich into French, titled En contemplant une
collection de peintures (Paris: José Corti, 2011). She has prepared the
French editions of some of the principal writings of the German art
historians: J. J. Winckelmann’s Pensées sur l’imitation des œuvres
grecques en peinture et en sculpture (Paris: Editions Allia, 2005), Aby
Warburg’s La Naissance de Vénus et Le Printemps de Sandro
Botticelli (Paris: Editions Allia, 2007), and La légende de l’artiste by
Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz (Paris: Editions Allia, 2010). She is a
collaborator on the forthcoming collection of essays on German
philosophy called L’idéalisme allemand (Paris: Le Cerf, 2014).
Richard Eldridge is the Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell
Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He is the author of
The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature
(Cambridge, 2001), Literature, Life and Modernity (Columbia, 2008)
and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature
(Oxford, 2009). He is the recipient of numerous awards, and has been
a guest Professor in Erfurt (2005, 2007) and Freiburg (2009–2010).
Michael N. Forster earned his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton
University. In March 2013 he became the Alexander von Humboldt
Professor, holder of the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and
Codirector of the International Center for Philosophy at Bonn
University. Previously, he was the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service
Professor in Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago.
He is the author of six books on German philosophy, as well as many
articles on German philosophy, ancient philosophy, and contemporary
philosophy of language. His most recent publications are German
Philosophy of Language from Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford,
2011) and After Herder (Oxford, 2010).
Manfred Frank is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University
of Tübingen. He has published numerous books on romanticism,
idealism, and the philosophy of mind, including Einführung in die
frühromantische Ästhetik (Suhrkamp, 1989); Unendliche Annäherung:
Page 2 of 5
Contributors
Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Suhrkamp, 1997);

partial English translation, The Philosophical Foundations of Early
German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (SUNY, 2004);
and Selbstgefühl: eine Historisch-systematische Erkundung
(Suhrkamp, 2002).
(p.xiii) Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Temple University. Her work has appeared in journals including Kant-
Studien, Hegel-Studien, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History
of Philosophy Quarterly, and British Journal of the History of
Philosophy. She has written the “Novalis” and “Hermeneutics”
entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the latter
coauthored with Bjørn Ramberg). Her book Gadamer and the Legacy
of German Idealism appeared with Cambridge University Press in
2009. She has been a visiting scholar at the Goethe-Universität,
Frankfurt, and Columbia University, as well as a postdoctoral
Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2009 she received a
fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany.
Amanda Jo Goldstein is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell
University. She works on European romanticism and the life sciences,
with special interests in rhetoric and figuration, pre-Darwinian
biology, and materialist theories of history, poetry, and nature. Her
book project, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New
Sciences of Life, shows how writers from Erasmus Darwin to Percy
Shelley revived ancient materialism to cast poetry as a privileged
technique of empirical enquiry—an experimental practice fit to
connect the biological problem of living form to the period’s pressing
new sense of its own historicity. Goldstein received her PhD in
Comparative Literature (English, German, French) from the
University of California. Before joining the Cornell English
department, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in biopolitics at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Keren Gorodeisky is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Auburn
University. Her primary research areas are Kant, philosophical
aesthetics and eighteen- to nineteenth-century German philosophy.
She is currently working on two projects. The first is a book-length
interpretation of Kant’s view of the special form that characterizes
aesthetic judgments. The second is a reconstruction of the philosophy
of the “Early German Romantics,” particularly Friedrich Schlegel.
Her publications include “A New Look at Kant’s Account of Testimony
Concerning Beauty,” British Journal of Aesthetics; “A Tale of Two
Faculties,” British Journal of Aesthetics; “(Re)encountering
Individuality: Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic Imperative as a Response
to Nihilism,” Inquiry; and “Schematizing without a Concept—Imagine
That!” Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense (Berlin: Walter
Page 3 of 5
Contributors
de Gruyter, 2012). Gorodeisky is the recipient of the 2012–13 Philip

Quinn Fellowship for Young Women in Philosophy at the National
Humanities Center.
Jane Kneller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy
at the Colorado State University. She has published Kant and the
Power of Imagination (Cambridge, 2007) and translated Novalis’s
Fichte-Studien (Cambridge, 2003). (p.xiv) She has received several
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is
past vice president of the North American Kant Society (NAKS), and
current member of the advisory board for NAKS, as well as a member
of the editorial board of the Kantian Review.
Bruce Matthews is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, and has
been a Visiting Professor at Tübingen University (2004) and Freiburg
University (2011). He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants,
including the Hans Jonas award, two Fulbright Senior Scholar
awards, two University of Chicago Teaching awards, and a National
Endowment for the Humanities grant. His books include F. W. J.
Schelling’s Berlin Lectures: The Grounding of Positive Philosophy
(SUNY, 2007); Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the
Schema of Freedom (SUNY, 2011), and the forthcoming Schelling:
Heretic of Modernity (SUNY). Founding member of the Schelling
Society of North America, he is also a member of the International
Schelling Society, the American Philosophical Association, and the
Society of Intercultural Philosophy.
Dalia Nassar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Villanova
University, and Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council at
the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute:
Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804
(Chicago, 2013). Her article “From a Philosophy of Self to a
Philosophy of Nature: Goethe and the Development of Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2010) was
awarded the prize for “Best Essay published in 2010” by the Goethe
Society of North America. She has been a recipient of research
awards from the DAAD (2003, 2004), the Thyssen-Stiftung (2009),
and, most recently, the Australian Research Council (2012–2015).
Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney
and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He works
mainly in the areas of Kantian philosophy and the tradition of German
idealism. In particular he is interested in the relationship of the
idealist tradition to the later movements of analytic philosophy and
pragmatism, and in issues in idealist logic, philosophical psychology,
and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Hegel’s Hermeneutics
(Cornell, 1996), The Logic of Affect (Cornell, 1999), Analytic
Page 4 of 5
Contributors
Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, 2007),

and Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009).
John H. Smith is a professor of German in the Department of
European Languages and Studies at the University of California,
Irvine. His books include Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The
Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought (Cornell, 2011),
and The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s
Philosophy of Bildung (Cornell, 1988). He was also coeditor of
“Goethe (p.xv) and Idealism: Art, Science, Religion, and Philosophy
—1790 to 1817,” a special issue of the Goethe Yearbook (2011). He is
the recipient of research awards from the Humboldt Foundation
(1991–1992, 2004, 2010) and the Fulbright Commission (1998–1999),
and was guest researcher at the Freie-Universität, Berlin in 2010–
2011.
David W. Wood received his PhD in Philosophy jointly from the
Sorbonne, Université Paris IV and the Ludwig-Maximilians-
Universität in Munich. From 2009 to 2011 he was a postdoctoral
researcher at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, where he
collaborated on the Johann Gottlieb Fichte Gesamtausgabe. He is the
author of “Mathesis of the Mind”: A Study of Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry (Rodopi, 2012); editor and
translator of Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das
Allgemeine Brouillon (SUNY, 2007); coeditor and cotranslator (with
Michael G. Vater) of J. G. Fichte and F. W. Schelling, The Philosophical
Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and
Correspondence, 1800–1802 (SUNY, 2012), and joint editor of the
forthcoming Routledge Handbook of German Idealism. With Daniel
Breazeale he is currently preparing an edition of J. G. Fichte’s earliest
philosophical writings entitled From Kant to the Wissenschaftslehre:
Zurich Writings, 1793–94.
(p.xvi)
Page 5 of 5
Introduction

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
Introduction
Dalia Nassar
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

The introduction serves to contextualize the question underlying the edited
volume, namely: what are the reasons behind the recent rise of interest in
philosophical romanticism? To do this, the introduction highlights key themes of
romantic thought, distinguishes the meaning and significance of the term
“romanticism” and how it is understood in the volume, and remarks on the
(apparently sudden) rise of interest in philosophical romanticism. It argues that
the recent interest in philosophical romanticism—by philosophers from a
number of different fields (social and political philosophy, hermeneutics,
philosophy of science, aesthetics)—is both unprecedented in size and unique in
focus, in that it is specifically concerned with the philosophical aims and
methods of romanticism. It then offers synopses of each of the chapters in the
volume, emphasizing how the individual contributions seek to answer the
question regarding the relevance of romanticism.
Keywords: romanticism, idealism, themes in contemporary philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich

Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), J. W. von
Goethe, Gottfried Herder
“The romantic imperative,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1797–1798, “demands

the mixing of all genres. All nature and science should become art—[and all] art
should become nature and science....Poetry should become ethical and ethics
should be poetic” (KA 16, 134, no. 586). The attempt to bring together (to “mix”)
various disciplines and ways of knowledge, to make philosophy poetical and
poetry philosophical, to introduce poetic insight into ethical norms, to bring art
and science together—these were the aims of the movement that has become
Page 1 of 12
Introduction
known as romanticism. Science and art, philosophy and poetry, the romantics
repeatedly proclaimed, should become one. The various disciplines, as Schelling
put it in the introductory remarks to the inaugural edition of his Zeitschrift für
spekulative Physik (1800–1802), must “enter into one another in the most
precise and closest alliance, in order to bring forth the highest, where the
interest of art and poetry with science and vice versa begin to become absolutely
one and the same” (HKA 1/8, 250–51). Hölderlin, Goethe, Novalis, Schelling,
Schlegel, and Schleiermacher each sought to realize this ideal in his practice as
a poet, philosopher, and scientist. Their aim was nothing less than developing a
new way of knowledge and a new compendium of knowledge, a “bible” or an
“encyclopedia,” as Schlegel and Novalis called it, in which the different
disciplines are united by common insights and goals.1
At a time of greater disciplinary specialization and rigid distinctions between

ways of knowing, the romantic imperative seems both anachronistic and
undesirable. Yet the last two decades can be described as nothing less than a
genuine revival of interest in German romantic philosophy. Philosophers working
in a variety of areas have embraced the ideas of the German romantics,
disentangling them from false or misunderstood legacies, and reexamining them
in light of contemporary debates. While this increase of interest began in
Germany—with the publication of Manfred Frank’s lectures Einführung in die
frühromantische Ästhetik in 1987—since the 1990s, philosophical interest in
romanticism has become an even stronger current within the Anglophone
context.2 What are the reasons behind this (apparently) sudden and (largely)
unprecedented interest in philosophical romanticism?3 Why have philosophers
(p.2) from a number of fields—aesthetics, epistemology, social and political
philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, hermeneutics—turned
to romanticism?4
The general historical interest in romanticism is, perhaps, not surprising. After
all, the so-called romantic movement, which began in Germany in the 1790s, has
had a lasting effect on Western culture. Romantic theories of literature, romantic
conceptions of nature, and romantic interest in non-Western culture (especially
Indian culture and language) have played significant roles in shaping both the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the recent revival does not simply
have to do with a desire to understand the past, or an attempt to grapple with
the “romantic legacy.” For it is a specifically philosophical revival, motivated by
philosophical questions.
Before discussing the reasons behind this philosophical interest, I want to note
that, at least within the Anglophone context, philosophical romanticism has
generally been regarded in the wider sense of the term “romantic.”5 This is in
contrast to the narrower sense that is usually associated with the Jena
romantics, or Frühromantik in Germany, and specifically denotes the circle of
friends and acquaintances in Jena who congregated around Friedrich and
Page 2 of 12
Introduction
August Wilhelm Schlegel and their journal, the Athenäum.6 The recent
(Anglophone) reception of romanticism almost always includes Hölderlin (who
was only associated with the Jena group indirectly through Schelling and Hegel)
and often includes Schelling,7 as well as figures who were directly connected to
the Jena romantics, but did not contribute to the Athenäum, such as Goethe.8
Thus, the term romantic—at least within the Anglophone context—means
something like an extended family of thinkers rather than a smaller coterie.9
There is, however, a second reason for widening the connotations of

romanticism. A philosophical investigation into romanticism seeks, first and
foremost, to understand the concerns of the romantic movement and its
philosophical aspirations, as epitomized in the “romantic imperative.” The focus
is thus on the questions, methods, and aims that a number of thinkers—spread
throughout the German-speaking regions of the late eighteenth and early
twentieth centuries—share and that speak to us today.
Philosophers working on romanticism generally concur on its contemporary

significance. Frank, for instance, has argued for the relevance of romantic
theories of self-consciousness for the philosophy of mind, theories of
individuality, and conceptions of the self.10 While Frederick Beiser’s approach
differs from Frank, he agrees that “many of the aims and problems of romantic
philosophy are still vital today” such that philosophical romanticism is not only
historically significant but also, as he puts it, carries “contemporary
relevance.”11 What are these aims and problems that underlie romanticism and
remain (or have recently become) relevant?
(p.3) The aim of this volume is to answer this question. By situating

romanticism both in its historical context and in ours, the volume seeks to shed
new light on romanticism as a distinctive movement in the history of philosophy
as well as offer important insight into today’s pressing questions and concerns.
By drawing together the fruits of the intensive recent engagement with
romanticism, the volume aims to stimulate and facilitate a dialogue on the
significance of romantic philosophy and its continuing relevance for
contemporary debates.
The volume is divided into four parts. The first consists in a debate between
Frank and Beiser, in which they elaborate their differing interpretations of
romantic philosophy and address their disagreement. Frank’s “What Is Early
German Romantic Philosophy?” recounts some of his key claims regarding both
the development and the character of philosophical romanticism, by situating it
within a realist and skeptical critique of Fichtean and Reinholdian
foundationalist philosophy. Frank thus introduces an English-language audience
to his long-held and influential understanding of romanticism as a distinctive
philosophical movement that should not be identified with idealism. In contrast,
Page 3 of 12
Introduction
Frank contends that romanticism was a realist movement that was opposed to
the view that the “absolute” is knowable or attainable.
Beiser’s chapter directly challenges Frank’s interpretation of the romantics,

particularly in relation to idealism. Beiser illustrates, contra Frank, that the
romantics and idealists held many similar views, and argues that the differences
between the two movements are not essential. Thus, these two chapters serve to
situate the contemporary interpretations of romanticism and thereby introduce
the reader to some of the most important questions concerning the meaning of
romanticism and its significance in our time.
Each of the three following parts of the book focuses on a central concern of the
German romantics: Part 2 considers history, culture, and education; Part 3
concerns aesthetics and mythology; and Part 4 investigates science and nature.
As each of the chapters demonstrates, the “romantic imperative” motivates the
romantic project, and guides the romantics’ conceptions of truth and knowledge,
beauty and reality. In every insistence, the romantics insist on uniting a poetic
and philosophical way of knowing, of bringing aesthetic insight into our
understanding of social and natural phenomena, and scientific knowledge into
human life and art.
Part 2 focuses on romantic views of human culture and education. The romantic
conceptions of history, language, and sociability, as well as the idea of Bildung,
are considered in light of contemporary social and political thought. Karl
Ameriks’s “History, Succession, and German Romanticism” investigates the
romantic notion of a “progressive universal poetry” and argues that it provides a
useful framework for defining a distinctively romantic conception of history, one
that is all at once political, philosophical, and aesthetic in a broadly (p.4)
religious sense. Ameriks contends that, especially for our late modern age, this
early German romantic conception has advantages over merely linear, circular,
or chaotic conceptions. By situating the romantic model in the context of
debates about the teleological and providential nature of history, as understood
by Kant, Reinhold, and Hegel, and comparing it with views developed in later
antiteleological writings by figures such as Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, Ameriks illustrates the ways in which the romantic model remains
the most promising.
Michael N. Forster’s “Romanticism and Language” challenges the common

misconception that the German romantics were theoretical lightweights, by
looking at their views on language. Building on Herder’s revolutionary views
about language—especially, his principles that thought is essentially dependent
on and bounded by language, that meanings/concepts consist in word-usages,
and that thoughts, concepts, and language vary profoundly between periods,
cultures, and even individuals—Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel, Forster
Page 4 of 12
Introduction
argues, made vitally important and new contributions to the philosophy of

language, linguistics, hermeneutics, and translation theory.
Kristin Gjesdal’s “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher’s

Idea of Bildung in the Landscape of Hegelian Thought” sheds critical light on the
view that there is a sharp, unbridgeable division between the romantics and
Hegel, and between the emphasis on individuality, on the one hand, and the
commitment to a philosophy of Bildung, that is, education in and through
culture, on the other. She begins with an examination of Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation, which is often viewed as a proto-
example of aesthetic-romantic attitudes. In contrast to this view, Gjesdal
illustrates that Schleiermacher’s model addresses meaning and thought as
expressed in the communal medium of language and thus regards Bildung and
understanding as two sides of the same coin. Thus, Gjesdal shows that the chief
difference between Hegel and the romantics is not that Hegel has a notion of
Bildung and the romantics do not. Rather, the difference has to do with
alternative conceptions of Bildung. Gjesdal examines these alternative
conceptions and argues that while Schleiermacher’s view differs from Hegel’s, it
in fact offers a necessary complement to Hegel’s scheme, and is, as such,
deserving of rehabilitation—be it within the field of interpretation studies or
within the larger philosophical discourse of Bildung.
Jane Kneller’s “Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What We Can Learn
from Early German Romanticism,” describes the model of sociability developed
by the early German romantics with the aim of showing its relevance to
academic discourses that seek to be more diverse and inclusive. Kneller begins
by linking the early romantics’ conception of “symphilosophizing” to the art of
“reciprocal communication” hinted at by Kant at the end of the “Critique (p.5)
of Aesthetic Judgment” and to the transformation of academic discourse in Jena
during that period. She goes on to discuss the ways in which the work of three of
the central figures of early German romanticism—Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis,
and Friedrich Schleiermacher—developed Kant’s notion of a “sociability that
befits our humanity” by socializing Kant’s account of genius, thereby giving rise
to a theory of genial conversation that is still worthy of study and emulation.
Part 3 offers highly innovative accounts of and responses to romantic

contributions to aesthetics. Richard Eldridge’s “‘Doch sehnend stehst/Am Ufer
du’ (‘But longing you stand on the shore’): Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity,
and Finitude,” serves as an apt segue into a discussion of romantic aesthetics, as
it considers the significance of art (particularly poetry) in illuminating the
human condition. Eldridge begins with a survey Hölderlin’s mature philosophical
sense of the human subject as caught ineluctably between abstract reflection
and concrete receptivity, and contrasts that sense briefly with the stances taken
by Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. He then traces the consequences of this sense for
Hölderlin’s poetology, and concludes by showing how both this philosophical
Page 5 of 12
Introduction
sense and this poetology are enacted in Hölderlin’s late, major fragment
“Rousseau.”
Brady Bowman’s “On the Defense of Literary Value: From Early German
Romanticism to Analytic Philosophy of Literature” argues that doubts about
literature’s cognitive relevance are shaped today in part by the institutional fate
and ambivalent legacy of early German romanticism. While the romantics
succeeded in bringing modern literature to the university as an academic
discipline, their attempt to revolutionize traditional scientific cognition failed,
rendering literary studies a conceptual orphan within the university. Bowman
contends that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the
relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. The
Schlegelian legacy of skepticism, antirealism, and antifoundationalism, still vital
to poststructuralist thought, he argues, is powerless to give a positive account of
literary value; it offers no principled justification of the institutions on which it
nevertheless depends. In contrast, Bowman locates a complementarist legacy
associated with figures like Schiller and Schelling, which emphasizes literature’s
cognitive priority to discursive knowledge and its role as the cognitive fulfillment
of such knowledge. This tradition, Bowman maintains, offers important
resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of
literature and the institutions that support it. Drawing on John Gibson’s 2007
work Fiction and the Weave of Life, he goes on to argue that the expanded
romantic space of cognition is best understood in terms of a complementarity
between propositional knowledge and Cavellian “acknowledgment.” When
viewed in these terms, Bowman concludes, German romantic theories (p.6) of
aesthetic experience can provide systematic orientation for current analytic
philosophy of literature.
Keren Gorodeisky’s “‘No Poetry, No Reality’: Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction, and

Reality” continues the consideration of romantic aesthetics in relation to analytic
aesthetics but, in contrast to Bowman, finds in Friedrich Schlegel’s conception
of poetry and its relation to truth significant resources for clarifying and
overcoming confusion in contemporary discussions of art and its value.
Gorodeisky notes that Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality have often
been regarded as outlandish, “poetically exaggerated,” statements. This is the
case, she argues, because they are taken to suggest that there is no difference
between poetry and reality or to express the view that there is no way out of
linguistic and poetic constructions. In contrast to these views, Gorodeisky
illustrates that Schlegel’s remarks are philosophical observations about a
genuine confusion in theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction
and reality. The confusion at stake involves the assumption that this distinction is
and must be fixed independently of the ordinary practices of using these terms
to mean certain things in specific situations—an assumption that is grounded in
a confused picture about the way language works. She contends that this
confused understanding of the distinction between fiction and reality is not an
Page 6 of 12
Introduction
object of the past, but a picture that is still shaping a central strand in the
contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics on our emotional responses to
fiction. Although she does not use Schlegel’s approach to argue against this view
directly, Gorodeisky suggests that his philosophical method offers resources for
unraveling a central confusion in this contemporary debate.
Laure Cahen-Maurel’s “The Simplicity of the Sublime: A New Picturing of

Nature in Caspar David Friedrich” shifts the attention from poetry and literature
to the visual arts, by considering the meaning of the sublime both in the
romantic era and in contemporary painting. Her underlying question is: given
Hegel’s famous philosophical dismissal of the notion of the sublime, and in a
postmodern age deprived of theological doctrines, why has the romantic notion
of the sublime resurfaced in contemporary art, particularly in the work of British
artist Anish Kapoor? To answer it, she turns to the painter whom Kapoor names
as his most significant inspiration, Caspar David Friedrich, and asks whether
Friedrich supplies a distinctive notion of the sublime that is not identifiable with
the Kantian sublime. Cahen-Maurel investigates the role assigned to the sublime
by Friedrich and offers a detailed analysis of Kapoor’s use of the Friedrichian
sublime and its meaning in his art.
In “The New Mythology: Romanticism between Religion and Humanism,” Bruce

Matthews argues that it is essential to develop the romantic notion of a “new
religion,” which, he maintains, seeks to unite with humanism in order to create
and sanction new normative values. Precisely because this proposed (p.7)
union of religion’s divine necessities and the freedoms of humanism was never
consummated by the romantics, Matthews argues, the problem that troubled the
romantics remains with us today. Matthews identifies the environmental crisis as
the most obvious and troubling example of our failure to create new values and
argues that Schelling’s “organic form of philosophy” offers a viable alternative
to this destructive course. Schelling’s alternative course, Matthews maintains,
suggests a new mythology of nature whose utopian potential may, both in formal
and in substantive terms, provide the emancipatory power capable of liberating
an engaged hope from its bondage to the ideology of irony that currently
emasculates transformative political action.
Part 4 offers rigorous examinations of romantic conceptions of science that seek

to demonstrate the ways in which the romantics understood mathematics and
natural philosophy and developed new and significant methods of investigating
natural phenomena. In “Mathematics, Computation, Language, and Poetry: The
Novalis Paradox,” Paul Redding challenges the stereotypical view of Novalis as
the romantic poet par excellence. He begins by establishing Novalis’s serious
interest in mathematics and goes on to show that his view of language is
founded on a mathematically based computational approach, which can be
traced back to Leibniz. Redding then examines Novalis’s approach to language,
and his attempts to bring mathematics to bear on poetry, in light of debates that
Page 7 of 12
Introduction
developed later in the eighteenth century concerning the relation between

language and thought—debates that continue to be relevant today.
John H. Smith’s “Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic Calculus: Reflections on the

Mathematical Infinite around 1800” offers a new interpretation of the romantic
notion of unendliche Annäherung or “infinite approximation,” by exploring the
significance, context, and consequences of discussions in the latter part of the
eighteenth century around the “mathematical infinite.” Smith begins by looking
at Salomon Maimon’s 1790 Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, which
introduces the notion of the infinite into philosophy, and argues that by replacing
Kant’s radical distinction between the faculties of sensibility and understanding
with a view of their infinitesimal difference, Maimon opens new avenues for
idealism and romanticism. By pursuing the relevance of these discussions for
philosophy around 1800, Smith specifically deals with the mathematical
conceptions of that period, while arguing that although these earlier conceptions
are considered “wrong” or ambivalent by (some) mathematicians today, they
nonetheless provide powerful tools for rethinking the nature of both reality and
consciousness.
In agreement with Redding’s assessment of Novalis’s grasp of mathematics,

David W. Wood’s “The Mathematical Wissenschaftslehre: On a Late Fichtean
Reflection of Novalis” offers an analysis of Novalis’s neglected final philosophical
fragments, particularly those found in the concluding sections of the (p.8)
Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798/99) and the Fragments and Studies (1799–1800).
He argues that in his late writings Novalis was one of the first thinkers to
positively grasp the underlying mathematicity of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.
While recognizing differences between the two thinkers, Wood argues that they
are united by a number of shared commitments. The fact that mathematical
elements of Fichte’s system only became more widely acknowledged in the
twentieth century by philosophers of mathematics such as Hermann Weyl,
Andreas Speiser, and Jules Vuillemin, Wood claims, should be considered as a
belated but independent confirmation of Novalis’s original insights on the
relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre.
The final two chapters of the volume focus on what the authors have called
“romantic empiricism,” which, as Amanda Jo Goldstein puts it, emphasizes “the
scene of empirical observation.” In her “Irritable Figures: Herder’s Poetic
Empiricism,” Goldstein challenges the “two culture” framework that has shaped
the pursuit of knowledge over the last two centuries, and argues for a
reappraisal of romantic philosophy of science, as developed by Johann Gottfried
Herder. Goldstein begins by tracing the development of Herder’s philosophy of
science, its relation to the legacies of New Scientific experimentalism and
classical empiricist psychology, and its engagement with the emergent sciences
of life. She then elucidates Herder’s account of perception and cognition, which
Page 8 of 12
Introduction
grounds his understanding of scientific knowledge and truth. Herder recognizes,

Goldstein explains, the essentially figurative and analogical process of
knowledge and, on that basis, develops a philosophy of science that accounts for
the figurative aspect of scientific representation and truth, and reciprocally, the
scientific aspect of figurative representation. In this way, Herder does not only
anticipate twentieth-century views on the metaphorical nature of knowledge, but
also offers one of the most rigorous explanations of the relationship between
poetic and scientific truth.
In the concluding chapter, “Romantic Empiricism after the ‘End of Nature’:

Contributions to Environmental Philosophy,” Dalia Nassar similarly distinguishes
an empiricist tradition within romanticism, which she identifies with Herder’s
close friend and ally, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Following the various recent
proclamations that the idea of “nature” is no longer desirable or plausible,
Nassar argues that environmental philosophy has arrived at an impasse: without
any notion of a world other than the human world—or the world manipulated by
human action—environmental philosophy is unable to justify itself or explain its
aims. In contrast to the abstract or vague conceptions of nature that
contemporary theorists reject, she offers Goethe’s grounded, empirical approach
to phenomena, which, she argues, offers a rigorous and nonreductive method of
inquiry that seeks to grasp the integrity of natural phenomena without
undermining their differences. Furthermore, she contends (p.9) that Goethe’s
claim that knowledge involves transformation implies that it cannot be divorced
from ethical responsibility. For it is in remaining open to what is before me, and
allowing myself to be transformed by it, that I come to grasp it. The act of
knowledge thus demands an honest engagement with reality, with the
phenomena. While this is not a thorough and comprehensive environmental
ethics, the claim that we are under an epistemological obligation to what is
before us, Nassar maintains, provides an important first step in that direction.
Notes:
(1) . Schlegel writes that “the encyclopedia must be constructed out of a
synthesis of the science of knowledge [Wissenschaft] and the science of art
[Kunstlehre]” (KA 18, 374, no. 652). Novalis describes the encyclopedia as “the
book of all books” and as “producing a living scientific organon” (NS 3, 558, no.
21; NS 4, 263).
(2) . Two recent articles enumerate this (to many, surprising) course of events.
See Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, “The Revival of Frühromantik in the Anglophone
World,” and more recently Peter Thielke, “Recent Work on Early German
Idealism 1781–1801).” Although Thielke’s article looks at new work on German
idealism, he devotes several pages to detailing the rise of interest in
romanticism within the Anglophone context and recognizes that many of the
Page 9 of 12
Introduction
English-language works on so-called idealism (such as Frederick Beiser’s

German Idealism, and Paul Redding’s Continental Idealism) contain a number of
chapters on the romantics. As we shall see, within the Anglophone context in
particular, the term “romantic” describes a much wider phenomenon than the
German Frühromantik, which specifically denotes the circle around the Schlegel
brothers and their journal, the Athenäum. The fact that the word “romantic”
remains contested is elegantly demonstrated by Frank and Beiser’s debate in
Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume.
(3) . The reasons why the romantics have been long overlooked by philosophers
have been elaborated at length by Beiser, “Introduction: Romanticism Now and
Then,” in The Romantic Imperative, 1–5.
(4) . See Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life (2002) for views of
science and nature; Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life (1997) and The
Persistence of Romanticism (2011), on the significance of romantic thought for
epistemology; Michael Forster, German Philosophy of Language (2011) and
Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of Idealism (2009), for hermeneutics;
Paolo Diego Bubbio and Paul Redding, ed., Religion after Kant (2012) and John
H. Smith, Dialogues between Faith and Reason (2011) on romantic religion; Jane
Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (2007) on theories of imagination and
their significance for social thought.
(5) . The meaning of “romantic” has long been contested. Arthur Lovejoy was
one of the first to challenge the notion that the word represents a specific
movement: “the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself,
it means nothing” (Arthur Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticism,” in
Essays in the History of Ideas, 235). Beiser offers an account of the various
responses to Lovejoy, and also his own response in “The Meaning of ‘Romantic
Poetry,’” in The Romantic Imperative, 6–22. For the variety of meanings of the
word in the German context (and its various historical sources), see Hans
Eichner, “Germany / Romantisch—Romantik—Romantiker,” in ‘Romantic’ and its
Cognates.
(6) . Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy claim that the “romantic
period” can only be identified by a place—Jena—and a journal—the Athenäum
(The Literary Absolute, 12). Although Frank does not explicitly identify
romanticism with Jena and the late 1790s, he excludes Schleiermacher (who was
in Berlin) and Hölderlin (in Tübingen) from his major examinations of
romanticism, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik and Unendliche
Annäherung. However, as he argues in Chapter 1 of this volume, Frühromantik
encompasses a large number of (lesser known) figures, and should be grasped in
terms of its questions and concerns, rather than in terms of its location.
Page 10 of 12
Introduction
(7) . Schelling’s place in romanticism is a topic of debate. Beiser, for instance,

includes him in his German Idealism, but in so doing considers the romantics to
be idealists. See his Chapter in this volume on the relation between romanticism
and idealism. For Schelling’s place in both romanticism and idealism, see Dalia
Nassar, The Romantic Absolute. Schleiermacher is another figure that
ambiguously fits into the group, as he was a close friend of F. Schlegel’s while
the latter was in Berlin, but did not live in Jena or contribute regularly to the
Athenäum. On Schleiermacher’s romanticism, see John H. Smith, “Living
Religion as Vanishing Mediator: Schleiermacher, Early Romanticism, and
Idealism.”
(8) . Goethe did, however, have editorial input on the journal. See Nicholas
Boyle, Goethe, the Poet and the Age, vol. 2, 646ff. In the German context, the
time period which in English is often described as “romantic” is identified as the
Goethezeit, the time of Goethe. This more inclusive term might be a better
translation of the Anglophone use of romantic than Frühromantik, which is much
more limited. For recent investigations into Goethe’s philosophical contributions
and his relationship to romanticism and idealism, see the special edition of the
Goethe Yearbook (vol. 18; 2011), co-edited by Elizabeth Millán and John H.
Smith, Goethe and German Idealism, and Nassar, The Romantic Absolute. Finally,
Herder has also received more attention in the context of romanticism in the
Anglophone context. See Michael Forster, After Herder and German Philosophy
of Language, and Amanda Jo Goldstein’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 15.
(9) . It is important to keep in mind that those usually associated with

romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis) never identified themselves as
romantics, but rather used the verb “to romanticize” (romantisiren) to describe a
way of seeing the world. Thus, Novalis famously writes “the world must be
romanticized” adding that “romanticizing [romantisiren] is nothing more than a
qualitative involution. In this operation the lower self is identified with a better
self...When I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the customary a
mysterious appearance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the
appearance of the infinite, I romanticize it” (NS 2, 545, no. 105). And in his
famous fragment in the Athenäums-Fragmente, Schlegel speaks of romantic
poetry as “universal progressive poetry” (KA 2, 182, no. 116). The meaning of
romanticism, then, should not be determined by a place or a time period (for,
importantly, even Novalis was not in Jena at the time), but by particular
philosophical questions and concerns. Thus, this volume in part aims to rethink
romanticism in terms of questions and concerns, rather than in terms of a
specific time and place.
(10) . See Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine; Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare;
Selbstgefühl: eine historisch-theoretische Erkundung. Beiser’s interests,
although primarily historical, nonetheless affirm the relevance of romanticism.
Page 11 of 12
Introduction
See especially, “Introduction: Romanticism Now and Then,” in Romantic

Imperative, 1–5.
(11) . Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 3–4.
Page 12 of 12
What Is Early German Romantic Philosophy?

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Manfred Frank
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0002

According to a general belief, it is a fundamental trait of modern philosophy to
have articulated itself as a thinking grounded in the certitude of self-
consciousness. Pioneered and launched by Descartes, this thinking is said to
have climbed to its height with Kant and, more so, in Fichte’s philosophy.
Romanticism has also been interpreted as part of this movement. However, since
Dieter Henrich and his students published their investigations of previously
unknown philosophical sources, it has become clear that these earlier
interpretations are not entirely accurate. This chapter considers the
constellation of early romantic philosophy, i.e., what was left out of Henrich’s
research; or rather, it summarizes the results of Manfred Frank’s work over the
last twenty-five years.
Keywords: romanticism, skepticism, constellation research, Dieter Henrich, first principles,

antifoundationalism, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Manfred Frank
1.1. The Realization of “Constellation Research”

According to a general belief, it is a fundamental trait of modern philosophy to
have conceived of itself as grounded in the certitude of self-consciousness.
Pioneered and launched by Descartes, multifariously diversified by Leibniz, this
thinking, after an empiricist intermezzo, is said to have achieved its highest
manifestation in Kant and, even more so, in Fichte’s philosophy, since in it
subjectivity finally becomes the principle of a deductively unfolding system of
knowledge, whose elements receive their peculiar objective justification by
virtue of their derivability from the Self.
Page 1 of 16
Following in Heidegger’s footsteps, several thinkers working within the

spectrum of what has been called “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism” have
put forth the view that subjectivity’s absolute seizure of power (Machtergreifung)
is the peak of the occidental forgetting of Being or différance. Because perennial
prejudice stylizes Fichte as the developmental climax of subjectivistic
dazzlement, and because we are accustomed to reconstructing early
romanticism in Jena as dependent on Fichte, it has become common practice to
label leading philosophical figures such as Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)
and Friedrich Schlegel as developing a kind of “subject philosophy.” This might
explain why in the context of feuilletonistic writings one often finds catchwords
like “early romantic subjectivism” and “occasionalism,” or even references to the
“arbitrariness of romantic theory.”
These descriptions are, however, deeply problematic and even nonsensical.

Following the research undertaken by Dieter Henrich and his students, we can
(p.16) afford to boldly turn our backs on these misunderstandings and
misconceptions of romanticism. By extensively combing through new textual
sources from the period between 1789 and 1796 in Tübingen and Jena and using
the method of Konstellationsforschung, their research has shed surprising new
light on the philosophy of early romanticism.
What do the dates 1789 and 1796 refer to? They demarcate a space of thought
(“Denkraum”) that Konstellationsforschung has been studying in detail with
hitherto unknown precision and thoroughness. The beginning of this epoch is
marked at one end by Reinhold’s Essay towards a New Theory of the Human
Faculty of Representation (Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen
Vorstellungsvermögens) and by the second (and considerably reworked) edition
of Jacobi’s Letters on Spinoza’s Doctrine (Briefe über die Lehre Spinozas). At the
other end, the years 1795/96 mark the time in which Hölderlin developed his
important sketch “Judgment and Being” (Urtheil und Seyn), Novalis completed
his “Fichte Studies” (Fichte-Studien), and Friedrich Schlegel began his
“Philosophical Apprenticeship” (Philosophische Lehrjahre). These various
writings considered Fichte’s approach in the “Science of
Knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre) to have been superseded. The intervening
years between 1789 and 1795/96 were molded by long disputes with the legacy
of orthodox theology, by Kant’s revolutionary spark in Tübingen, by Reinhold’s
attempts to systemize Kantian philosophy, and by the first emergence of doubt in
Jena and Klagenfurt concerning the feasibility of a philosophy that pretends to
derive and develop its whole content from and out of a single first principle. This
type of philosophical project was introduced by Reinhold’s “Elementary
Philosophy” (Elementarphilosophie) and by Fichte, who soon joined him and
adopted the programmatic label.
Page 2 of 16
In 1794, when Fichte first presented himself in Jena as Reinhold’s successor, he

was initially “enthusiastically” acclaimed as a “Titan”—as Hegel reports to
Schelling at the beginning of 1795.1 Fichte seemed eager to celebrate before his
audience all the refinements of the project of the Elementary Philosophy he had
elaborated. He was not aware of all the nagging questions that Reinhold’s
pupils, such as Novalis, had been focused on since 1791—questions that
challenged the usefulness and sense of such an undertaking. In fact, by the time
of Fichte’s arrival, the debate was deemed to be passé and superseded in those
circles. Nonetheless, Fichte’s arrival in Jena and the presence of many of
Reinhold’s pupils among his audience managed to spark new interest in the
debate. For instance, Niethammer (who was Hölderlin’s cousin, a fellow student
of Novalis’s in 1790–1791, and later Friedrich Schlegel’s mentor in Jena), talked
about the “dispensability of a highest and single principle of all knowledge.”2 In
fact, it was the patron and Maecenas of the Reinhold circle, Franz Paul von
Herbert (1759–1811) from Klagenfurt, (p.17) who, by a remark of his own, had
stimulated Niethammer to express himself in such a way. Herbert writes,
From now on I declare myself an irreconcilable enemy of all so-called first

principles of philosophy, and he who thinks he needs such a principle, I
declare to be a fool, who deduces and syllogizes everything from these
principles whenever he suffers from paroxysmal attacks... How much is
lost for philosophy only because of a stupid envy of Kant’s fame; look at
Kant’s first principle in the Critique of Reason; and if this does not seem
sufficient to you, there is no remedy.3
Von Herbert left space at the end of the letter, in order to invite Johann Benjamin
Erhard (1766–1826), the leading intellectual figure of the Reinhold circle, to add
some personal remarks. A few years later, in 1797, Novalis described Erhard as
“the only true friend” of the Reinhold circle (NS 4, 202). Erhard agrees with
Herbert’s portrait of the situation and specifies the shared anti-Fichtean
conviction it expresses:
From one point of view Herbert’s position regarding the one principle is
justified. A philosophy that starts out with one principle and pretends to
deduce everything from it will always be nothing more than a piece of
sophistry; only that philosophy which is capable of climbing to the highest
principle and manages to show how everything stands in harmony with
that principle without being deduced from it, only that philosophy is the
true one.4
It is not difficult to see how in this letter Erhard already starts the move,
motivated by the sterility of Elementary Philosophy, that will lead him to a
reaffiliation with the Kantian theory of ideas and the systematic use of
teleological principles embedded within it.
Page 3 of 16
As a lawyer and liberal enemy of Fichte, another one of Reinhold’s pupils, Paul
Johann Anselm Feuerbach (the father of the famous philosopher Ludwig
Feuerbach and a fellow lodger with Friedrich Schlegel), spoke of the
“impossibility of a first absolute philosophical principle.”5 Friedrich Carl
Forberg, another former pupil of Reinhold’s and a dear friend of Novalis’s, who
later became the catalyst and then, alongside Fichte, the victim of the Atheism
Controversy in 1798, similarly proclaimed the impossibility of philosophical
foundations.6 Both Novalis’s “Fichte Studies” and Feuerbach’s text were most
likely requested by Niethammer as contributions to his journal, to which
Schlegel also contributed.7 It was essential for the newly founded Philosophical
Journal (Philosophisches Journal) to serve as a forum for discussing the
legitimacy or futility of a philosophy starting from a first principle.
(p.18) Consequently, subsuming early German romanticism under the project

title of a so-called “Philosophy of the Subject” is inaccurate for a number of
reasons. This has become clear, however, only after a series of groundbreaking
investigations and archival findings in the 1960s and 1970s, which include the
publication of Hölderlin’s “Judgment and Being” in 1961, the publication of parts
of Schlegel’s “Philosophical Apprenticeship” in 1963 and 1971, and, finally, the
first complete and critical publication of Novalis’ “Fichte Studies” in 1965.8
Scholars working on Hölderlin, Schlegel, and especially Hegel, were unaware of
these texts or of the letters commenting on them. Again, Dieter Henrich and his
students were the first to realize the importance of these editions and findings.
Thus it became clear that although subjectivity remained a significant topic for
the early romantics, this was only as a result of the critique of Elementary
Philosophy, which led Fichte’s students to deny the status of absoluteness to
subjectivity. Instead, they considered subjectivity to be a derivative phenomenon
that only becomes accessible to itself under a condition or presupposition
(Bedingung, Voraussetzung), which is beyond its (subjectivity’s) control. In turn,
the elusiveness (Unverfügbarkeit) of this condition can only be clarified through
the structure of self-consciousness. By choosing this path of reflection, early
romanticism swiftly departed from a type of speculation that the history of ideas
associates with the names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and is usually
cataloged under the lemma “German idealism.”
Before I go on to elaborate on the highly opaque concepts and problematic

issues mentioned in this introduction, I should say something concerning the
viable strategies for developing a theory that conceives of subjectivity as being
derived from a transcendent ground. A first strategy (section 1.2) consists in
clarifying the relation of dependence, which above all means specifying the
object of that dependency. Additionally, there is a second strategy that draws
Kantian consequences from the irrepresentability of the Absolute and redefines
striving after the infinite as an endless striving. (In the above passage quoted
from the letter by Erhard, we could already get a glimpse of that strategy.) I will
pursue this strategy in section 1.3. According to this second strategy, the
Page 4 of 16
Absolute is transformed into an idea in the Kantian sense of the term. In what
follows I will show that Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel were quickly driven from
the first to the second consequence. But to begin with, I will consider the first
consequence.
1.2. Identity and Existence Precede Reflection

I have already mentioned the conception of a transcendent presupposition of
self-consciousness, which, as transcendent, undermines its ability to ground (p.
19) a deduction. The term “transcendent” in this context means that the subject
merely presupposes this condition without having it at its epistemic disposal. In
1795 Hölderlin and Novalis refer to this presupposition (independently yet
almost indistinctly) as “Being” or “absolute identity.” But what is the link
between the two terms “Being” and “identity”?
With respect to the latter: in the play of appearance and reflection, self-
consciousness manifests an identity that it cannot represent as such. In Novalis’s
words: the bipartite form of judgment denies the monadic content. The
nominalized reflexive pronoun “self” stands for this detour or indirect
representation: “We abandon the identical,” writes Novalis in September 1795,
“in order to represent it” (NS 2, 104, no. 1). Hence self-consciousness is the
representation of something that is in itself nonpresentable. He writes,
In order to render a clearer [a being the constant of identity], A is divided.

It is posited as general content, a as determinate form. The essence of
identity can only be presented in an illusory proposition [Scheinsatz].
(NS 2, 104, no. 1)
In order to be clear on the necessity of this obstructive detour, it is helpful to

note that what we usually refer to as self-consciousness is the result of a return
of consciousness to itself. Philosophical terminology has coined the word
“reflection” for this particular kind of returning or turning back onto one’s self.
Two things are implied here: first, it implies what Hölderlin in “Judgment and
Being” calls the “primordial division” of something that is essentially united,
namely, the subject and the object, into two relata. Second, this immediately
leads us to the question of how it is possible to learn from the duality of
reflecting and reflected the fact that, originally, the self was one (although it
seems impossible to doubt that this unity is a characteristic trait of my conscious
life). “The I is one and at the same time divided,” observes Novalis (NS 2, 136,
no. 32). And in his private lectures delivered in Cologne in 1804, Friedrich
Schlegel remarks, “this is the actual contradiction in our I, that at the same time
we feel ourselves to be finite and infinite” (KA 12, 334).
In the expression reflection there is another layer of meaning which was already
prefigured in Novalis’s notion of an “illusory proposition.” Even if consciousness
emerges only through reflection, it is only a perverted and apparent one. The
Page 5 of 16
reason for this view becomes clear when we take into account the fact that
Novalis thinks of consciousness as an “image” or “sign” of “Being” that
transforms Being into appearance. Indeed, another meaning of “reflection” is an
inverted mirroring (verkehrende Spiegelung). Our original consciousness—
Novalis speaks of a “self-feeling” or “sense of self”—stands in an inverted
position to reality. It is inverted because by reaching from out of itself,
consciousness encounters the (p.20) world secundo loco, as something
secondary. “Our theory has to proceed from the conditioned,” Novalis writes,
and not, as is the case with Fichte’s philosophy, from the unconditioned (NS 2,
147, no. 86). That which depends on Being, namely, consciousness, is not itself
that of which it is conscious (namely Being), but only copies or “represents” it
through a “sign” (NS 2, 106). Nonetheless, consciousness detects in itself the
means by which to correct this inversion by a second inversion (“ordine
inverso”) (NS 2, 127f., 131ff.). “There is always an alteration between image and
Being. The image is always the inversion of Being. What is located to the right of
the person appears in the image on the left” (NS 142, no. 63; cf. 114ff.). The
reflected mirror image or the self-reflection restores the original order, so that
the I becomes conscious of its ontological dependence on Being.9 Fichte,
according to Novalis, did not perform this self-reflection and consequently, in a
Berkeleyean vein, conceived Being as something dependent on a thematizing
consciousness or rather as some kind of inert condensation of an antecedent act.
Consequently, for the idealist, Being is neither understood as something positive
nor as a Kantian “absolute position,” but rather as a “negative concept” that only
demarcates itself against the truly positive concept of conscious action (GA 1/1,
498f.). But Novalis did not want to be an idealist.
Let me return to the first meaning of “reflection,” as it is present in Hölderlin’s

thesis of judgment as primordial division. The first person to analyze the
problem in this way was Reinhold, who was Hölderlin’s teacher in 1790–1791
and with whose Elementary Philosophy Hölderlin was acquainted (by reading
Reinhold’s work and through reports from Niethammer). Through Niethammer,
Schlegel—who had been a follower of Fichte—also became familiar with the
objections raised by Reinhold’s pupils. In Jena, Schlegel immersed himself in the
intellectual culture, assimilated the criticisms of a philosophy based on a first
principle developed and radically revised his views.
In his Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation,

Reinhold asked how we can conceive of “the identity of the object of
consciousness with the subject,” if subject and object are determined by
completely different conditions of cognizability?10 It might be the case that
representation in self-consciousness is de facto identical with the represented.
But from the objective presentation of one relatum only, its identity with the
other relatum is not yet intelligible. Hölderlin, with insurmountable conceptual
precision, gets to the heart of the matter in April 1795:
Page 6 of 16
How is self-consciousness possible? By opposing me to myself, through

self-separation, and, regardless of this separation, nonetheless perceiving
myself as the same in the opposed.
(HFA 17, 156; emphasis added)
(p.21) The implicit reference to Reinhold should not be overlooked. Reinhold

was the first to illustrate that self-consciousness does not merely consist in the
presentation of a self, posited as object, but also consists in a presentation of the
self as self. The term as must be employed if self-consciousness is to be
explained. One might have consciousness of her- or himself without, however,
knowing that it is herself of whom she is conscious. (I might be ignoring a mirror
or mistaking myself for someone else.) Indeed, it would be completely pointless
to expect the instruction that I am this alien thing, from a stranger or somebody
identified as a stranger. However, as soon as I recognize the alien thing as me,
this cognition of the self as object—in Novalis’s words—must occur and be
certified through a nonobjective self-feeling—or a “sense of self” (NS 2, 113, no.
15).
But what is a self-feeling? The insight that Novalis achieves in a few steps leads
from the presupposition of an absolute identity to the presupposition of Being,
and, in so doing, to a second concept, whose meaning we have yet to clarify.
Hölderlin and Novalis are directly referring to Jacobi, and indirectly referring to
Kant and his famous thesis on Being.
Kant first presented this thesis in his early text The Only Possible Argument in
Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763). The indeterminate
verb “being” has a “completely simple” meaning, namely, position (“Position”)
(AA 2, 73; see also 70). Kant’s thesis resounds in Hölderlin’s discussion of
“Being, in the only sense of the word.”11 Position is nearly the name of the genus
or class “Being,” which is—Kant maintains—conceptually almost irresolvable or
unanalyzable (“unauflöslich”) (AA 2, 73). Almost unanalyzable because there is
nonetheless a double specification we can wrench from it, which distinguishes
relative and absolute positing. The relative position of a concept is one that
poses a general term in relation to a subject. This is the case in usual predicative
sentences. A concept is posited absolutely, by contrast, when something general
corresponds to it, and when the concept’s class of reference is not empty, as in
the following nonpredicative sentences: “There is a God” or “I am.” Strictly
speaking, the meaning of “Being” (qua existence) is restricted to the meaning of
the absolute position.
But how are Being and predication connected? What makes them conceivable as
varieties of position or positing? The synthesis in judgment (the “relative
position”) must be grasped as an inferior type of what Kant calls “absolute
Page 7 of 16
position.” This seems to be exactly what Hölderlin envisioned as he jotted down

the following in the spring of 1795:
Being—expresses the union of subject and object... Judgment. is... that kind
of separation by which object and subject become possible, the primordial
division [Seyn—drükt die Verbindung des Subjects und Objects aus.... (p.
22) Urtheil. ist... diejenige Trennung, wodurch Object und Subject
möglich wird, die Ur-theilung].
(HFA 17, 156, 19–22)
In exactly the same way, Novalis conceives of the manner in which existential
Being—embedded in the form of a judgment—mediates itself to consciousness,
as Pseudo-Being, or, as he drastically puts it, as “improper Being,” adding that
“improper Being [unrechtes Seyn] is an image of Being” (NS 2, 106, no. 2). In
the language of Kant: the relative position, which is constitutive for
consciousness, displays the absolute position in the form of judgment.
One might have noticed that Hölderlin and Novalis articulate the primordial
division in both semantic and epistemological terminology; they use “subject”
and “predicate” as well as “subject” of consciousness and its “object” in parallel
to “predicate” which is singular. This has to be seen in light of the fact that this
generation (unlike Kant) interprets the predicative “is” as an indication of
identity. In so doing they follow the Leibnizean thesis that all true judgments
consist in an analysis of what is comprehended in the subject term:
“praedicatum inest subjecto.” Moreover, the group operating in Tübingen was
influenced by the view, espoused by the logician and metaphysician Gottfried
Ploucquet, that predication is a statement of identity. Ploucquet’s writings were
canonical in the Tübingen Seminary and for a long time served as the basis for
the theses and dissertations produced there.12 If we want to bring this view (of
predication as identity) to some kind of convergence with the Kantian one, then
predication simply consists in a relative identification, while Being is an absolute
identification. By superimposing Kant’s famous thesis on Being and the
conception of predication as a statement of identity, a distinctive view emerges—
one that was shared by both Hölderlin and Novalis, and incidentally also by
Schelling—namely, the notion of the essence of absolute identity as enclosing a
ground that repels all consciousness. Being, the late Schelling will say, is prior to
thought (“unvordenklich”). In other words, there is no thought—no real
predicate—that can be inserted or presupposed in order to function as a ground
for deducing or grasping existence (SW 2/3, 227f., see also 262).
Now that the nexus between Being and identity has become clearer, we can take
the next step and ask: how can Being refer to a specific feeling, as Novalis
maintains? Again, the decisive inspiration stems directly from Jacobi, and
indirectly from Kant. It was Jacobi who, with the term “feeling,” moved the focus
Page 8 of 16
to an expression that is closely connected to the semantic domain of sensations

and the a posteriori given. Jacobi explains that it was the French language that
suggested to him “the expression, le sentiment de l’être”13—an expression that
he deems to be “purer and better” than the German
“Bewußtsein” (consciousness). Following a widespread tradition (of empirical
psychology of the late eighteenth century), Jacobi also speaks of the “sentiment
de soi-même,” literally, (p.23) the “feeling [or sentiment] of one’s self.”14
Sentiment of Being and self-feeling are two faces of the same coin. “Sum,” “I
am,” and not “cogito” or “I think,” was the name of the first cognition, Jacobi
claims.15 Thus the primordial experience of the self is an experience of Being, or
rather an experience of actuality “that immediately displays itself in
consciousness and verifies itself through the deed.”16 The mode of this kind of
consciousness is feeling: “Even of our own existence we only have a feeling; but
no conception.”17 A conception would be a “real predicate.” However, existence
is not grasped with concepts, it is felt.
1.3. Reinterpreting the “Highest Point of Philosophy” as a “Kantian Idea”

I will now turn to the second consequence of the early romantic approach. Its
unfolding redirects us once more to Jena in the years prior to Fichte’s
appearance and leads us into the lively debates of Reinhold’s pupils. It gravitates
around the idea that Being or absolute identity was not even the passively
acquired content of a sentiment or, as Hölderlin says, “of intellectual
intuition” (HFA 17, 156). Rather, they are thought to be unreachable targets, or
even rational projections, much like an idea in the Kantian sense. Such an idea
can only be infinitely approximated, without ever being achieved. We saw that
this goes hand in hand with a deeply rooted skepticism in the face of first
principles, which Fichte’s “I” or Reinhold’s “fundament” claimed to be. This
skepticism is quite deep in the cases of Novalis and Schlegel. In the second part
of his “Fichte Studies,” Novalis describes concepts that guarantee the unity of
the system of beliefs and its justification as “necessary fictions” (NS 2, 179).
Unlike a feeling, a fiction is not something found (Findung), but something
created (Erfindung).
The highest principle must not at all be something given, but something
freely produced, something fabricated [Erdichtetes], devised [Erdachtes],
in order to lay down the foundations for a general metaphysics.
(NS 2, 273)
This not only offers a strong response to the foundationalist context of absolute
idealism, but also illustrates the will to radically break with a philosophy based
on first principles and demonstrates an unexpected high regard for poetry.
But let us proceed step by step. The early romantic definition of philosophy as
“yearning for infinity” emphasizes the nonpossession, the lack, of a principle.18
If there is no safe foundation that presents itself to our consciousness as evident,
Page 9 of 16
then it is possible to doubt each of our beliefs: “the clinging, the being glued to
the finite,” maintains Schlegel, “is the true character of dogmatism” (KA 12, 51).
So-called romantic irony allows for that; it is not a particular feature of the (p.
24) content, but a trait of the style of speech. Something is uttered ironically
when the way of saying it neutralizes the determinateness of the content, brings
it into suspense, or sets in motion a withdrawal from it in favor of an infinity of
options that might as well have been uttered in its place. Ironic speech keeps
open the irrepresentable location of the infinite by permanently discrediting the
finite as that which is not intended.
One of the deep convictions of the young intellectuals, who were later called the
Jena romantics, was that beliefs cannot be ultimately justified, but—as Schlegel
ironically puts it—“are eternally valid only for the time being” (KA 2, 179, no.
95).19 Like Reinhold’s students, the Jena romantics dismissed epistemological
foundationalism as the Scylla, without throwing themselves into the arms of the
Charybdis of skepticism, or “intellectual anarchism” as they also called it (NS 2,
288–89, no. 648).20 At the beginning of July 1796, during a visit with his former
fellow student Forberg,21 Novalis again takes up the question that marks the
beginning of his “Fichte Studies.”22 He writes, “What do I do when I
philosophize? I reflect on a ground...All philosophizing must result in such an
absolute ground” (NS 2, 269, no. 366).
Why must philosophizing result in an absolute ground? Because a relative

ground would place itself within a chain of further grounds, which would not
lead to a final link (or ground). But it is precisely this which seems to happen,
and which leads Novalis to pose the following question:
What would it be like if this absolute, all-embracing ground were not given,
if this concept contained an impossibility: the drive to philosophize would
be an infinite activity—and therefore without end, because an eternal need
for an absolute ground would exist, which can only be partially sated—and
therefore would never cease.
(NS 2, 269, no. 366)
The problem of infinite regress was brought up by Jacobi in the seventh

supplement to the expanded second edition of his book on Spinoza: if we go on
to describe knowledge as justified belief, as has been the case in a time-honored
(and still lively) tradition, then, he explains, we fall into an infinite regress.23 We
base our knowledge claims on propositions, which express knowledge only
under the condition that they are themselves justified by other propositions that
express knowledge and so on. This regress could only be terminated by a
proposition whose validity is unconditioned. “Unconditioned” thus means not
depending on a higher condition. The validity of an unconditioned proposition
ought to be clear without further elucidation: “neither in need nor capable of
Page 10 of 16
further justification.”24 This proposition must thus be (self-)evident, since

“(self-)evident” literally means that which is clear in and through itself.
(p.25) With an unconditioned transformed from a possession of knowledge into

a regulative idea that can only be infinitely approximated, Reinhold’s
“consulship of the ground-seeker,” now inherited from Fichte, loses its
stabilizing function (KA 18, 19, no. 5; KA 2, 155, no. 66). First of all, Reinhold’s
students contested the possibility of basing a system of beliefs on an evident
cognition, since cognitions of that kind, they argued are private experiences of
consciousness. By invoking them it should remain impossible to give an
explanation of the formation of an intersubjective consensus. The formation of
such a consensus is a criterion of what we call knowledge. Furthermore, a more
accurate analysis shows that evident cognitions are hard to distinguish from the
claims of common sense.25 The latter must also be grounded in so-called
intuitions, that is, we must believe in them. Propositions of belief have a
character similar to that of Euclidean axioms (an axiom literally means
“something believed”). Were it possible to demonstrate them, they would
suddenly lose their status as ultimate principles, since a proposition that is
justified by another cannot be ultimate. The justification of knowledge thus
becomes an article of faith. Novalis thus states that “it is a product of
imagination in which we believe, and which, according to its and our own
nature, we will never be able to cognize” (NS 2, 273, no. 568). But the most
serious and far-reaching objection turned out to be the third one: Reinhold’s
highest principle is not as independent as it claims to be. Rather it presupposes
other propositions to justify it, ones that allegedly ought to be deduced from it.
This criticism was most strongly established by Reinhold’s colleague in Jena,
Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, and by the former repentant at the Tübingen
Seminary Carl Immanuel Diez, who later studied medicine in Jena.26
Should this critique be legitimate, it would have disastrous consequences for

Elementary Philosophy. Indeed, as a result of it, Reinhold soon felt compelled to
revise his position.27 Furthermore, Novalis’s fundamental critique is only
comprehensible in light of his familiarity with the critics of first principles in
Reinhold’s circle and in light of his proximity to the views of his former tutor,
Schmid.28
I shall forgo the details of this claim and only anticipate the conclusion at which
Novalis arrives. Searching for an ultimate concept from which all the others can
be derived, he claims, is “nonsense” and leads us into the “areas of nonsense.”
“Representation” (Vorstellung) is the highest mental concept (i.e., concept
concerning mental entities). However, it is—just like all other concepts—
achieved through comparison between and abstraction from singular mental
acts and experiences. This means that if it is derived from these mental
operations, it cannot be their source. In other words, the pretension of
Page 11 of 16
foundational philosophy is based on a circular argument: what is purportedly

derived from the highest principle is in fact already presupposed by it.
(p.26) I hope that my sketch—in spite of its gaps—has been successful in

showing the objection that induced Reinhold in the early spring of 1792 to
remodel his system, the only difference being that Novalis does not use this
argument against Reinhold, but against Fichte. In so doing, he can once again
refer to his old teacher Schmid, who criticized a technical mistake in deductions
proceeding from the I: a logical deduction typically proceeds from a universal
major premise to a singular minor premise, which is logically independent of the
major premise.29 Yet Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness”—exactly like
Descartes’s or Kant’s “I think” or Fichte’s “I am”—does not state something
general, but a singular fact. In order to produce the consequences presumed by
the followers of First Principle Philosophy, the logical support of a major premise
was needed, which, however, could only have been discovered inferentially
(which proposition could do the job?). In short, Fichte’s derivations display only
the characteristics of a hypothetico-deductive procedure, in the same vein as
Kant’s derivation of the regulative ideas of reason or Popper’s essentially fallible
derivations. As Schmid puts it, “but that which is accepted only as a hypothesis
[and not—as asserted—as immediate evidence] cannot in this respect lay claim
to universality, because there is freedom of choice concerning the question,
whether this, that, or no hypothesis at all is required to explain the indubitable
fact.”30 Finally, the set of premises from which an explicandum follows according
to one or several general rules is unlimited. In other words, the set of premises
is not sufficiently determined by the existence of this concrete explicandum.
1.4. Romantic Realism

The undesirability of the first consequence was vividly exemplified to these
independent thinkers by Fichte’s foundation of his idealism on an “I” that was
boosted into something absolute. However attractive this solution might have
appeared, it yielded several problems, just like the dualisms at the root of
Kantian philosophy. In turn, however irresistible the solution of absolute
idealism might have appeared in the face of the systematic burdens inherited
from Kant, the early romantics deemed this way unviable and looked for
loopholes out of the idealistic fly bottle.
In light of the comfortable Fichtean liquidation of the external world and the
thing-in-itself, which Forberg had witnessed in Jena, he wrote in his Fragments
from my Papers that in the presence of Fichte he had “not felt differently than in
the company of a conjurer,” adding that he only begs God to save Kant from his
self-declared friends, since “as far as his enemies are concerned he probably will
be aware of them personally.”31 Like many of Reinhold’s (p.27) pupils, Forberg
stuck to the motto: Better to fail with Kant, than to win with Fichte.
Page 12 of 16
Did Kant not emphasize with all the desirable clarity that, according to his
theory, “representation in itself does not produce its object in so far as existence
is concerned,” but ought to receive it from the world (KrV A125)? Novalis simply
offers a twist to this when he writes, “consciousness is a Being outside of Being
within Being.” He continues:
Being outside Being must not be proper Being [kein rechtes Sein].
An improper Being outside Being is an image—Hence Being outside
Being must be an image of Being inside Being.
Consequently consciousness is an image of Being within Being.
(NS 2, 106, no. 2)
Images are representing entities. As such they are ontically dependent on

whatever they represent: as a representing entity the image is dependent on the
represented: “wherever there is cognizing—there also is Being” (NS 2, 402). But
the opposite does not hold. In contrast to Fichte, and in agreement with Kant,
Novalis professes an ontological realism. Such a realism is perfectly compatible
with the view that the unity of being and consciousness is the transcendent
presupposition of our self-consciousness, an unachievable idea of reason in the
Kantian sense. Such an idea, according to Novalis, can only be realized
aesthetically:
We strive everywhere for the unconditioned, but always find just

conditions.
(NS 2, 412, no. 1)
The attainment of the unattainable is, according to its character,

inconceivable.
(NS 3, 413, no. 745)
When the character of a given problem consists in the impossibility of

solving it, we will solve it by representing its insolubility as such.
(NS 3, 376, no. 612)
The sense for poetry...presents the nonpresentable..
(NS 3, 685, no. 671)
The highest-ranking works of art are absolutely unobliging. They are ideals
that can—and should—please us only approximately: aesthetic imperatives.
(NS 3, 413, no. 745)

Page 13 of 16
Around the time that Novalis was jotting down his thoughts about infinity, or
rather about the impossibility of philosophy as a search for knowledge, he
received a visit from Forberg in Jena, who, as Novalis remembers, “after a
longer interruption of our friendship showed...a heart full of tenderness toward
me” (NS 4, 187). As previously mentioned, Forberg had studied with Novalis (p.
28) under Reinhold. Apparently Forberg was so taken by Novalis’s views,
quoted above, that a year later, in his Letters on the Newest Philosophy, he
wrote:
Thus it will be something like an ultimate therefore [Darum] or ground that

I will have to look for, in order to meet the demand of my reason.
But what if such an ultimate ground were impossible to find... ?
Nothing else would follow than this: that the demand of reason could never
be completely met—that reason would have to continue its investigations
into the infinite, without bringing them to an end even into eternity. The
absolute thus would be nothing more than the idea of an impossibility.
But: is a goal that is unattainable less of a goal? Is the view towards the
sky less enchanting, only because once and forever it remains a VIEW?32
Notes:
(1) . Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, eds., Materialien zu Schellings
philosophischen Anfängen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 122.
(2) . Niethammer to von Herbert (June 2, 1794). Friedrich Immanuel

Niethammer: Korrespondenz mit dem Herbert- und Erhard-Kreis, ed. Wilhelm
Baum (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1995), 86.
(3) . Ibid., 75f. The letter from von Herbert to Niethammer is dated May 6, 1794.
(4) . Ibid., 79.
(5) . This is the title of his 1795 essay, which appeared in the Philosophisches
Journal 2, no. 2 (1795): 306–22.
(6) . See Mähl’s comment in NS 2, 32f.
(7) . See Niethammer’s preface to the first edition of the Philosophisches

Journal.
(8) . Hölderlin’s “Urtheil und Seyn” (“Judgment and Being”) appeared in HSW 4,
226–7. Schlegel’s “Philosophische Lehrjahre” (“Philosophical Apprenticeship”)
appeared in KA 18. Novalis’s “Fichte-Studien” (“Fichte Studies”) is in NS 2, 104–
296.
(9) . See also Schelling for a similar conception: SW I/4, 85ff.; SW I/9, 230ff.
Page 14 of 16
(10) . Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen

Vorstellungsvermögens (Prague and Jena: C. Widtmann & J. M. Mauke, 1789),
335; Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der
Philosophen, Erster Band, das Fundament der Elementarphilosophie betreffend
(Jena: Michael Mauke, 1790), 181f., 197, 222.
(11) . Friedrich Hölderlin, Vorstufen zum Hyperion, in Sämmtliche Werke,

Kritische Textausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler (Darmstadt: Luchterland, 1984), 163.
(12) . See Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 13–14; Gottfried Ploucquet, Logik, trans. and ed.
Michael Franz (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), xxxff.
(13) . Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses
Mendelssohn. Neue vermehrte Auflage (Breslau: Löwe, 1789), 193f. The new
critical edition reference is Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke, vols. 1/1 and 1/2,
Schriften zum Spinozastreit, ed. Klaus Hammacher and Irmgard-Maria Piske
(Hamburg and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Meiner and Frommann-Holzboog,
1989). The old pagination is provided in the margins of the new critical edition.
(14) . Jacobi, Briefe (1789), 109; cf. Manfred Frank, Selbstgefühl. Eine historisch-
systematische Erkundung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).
(15) . Jacobi, Briefe (1789), xxivf.; similarly NS 2, 268, no. 559.
(16) . Jacobi, Briefe (1789), xxxvif., no. xxix.
(17) . Ibid., 420, n.
(18) . See for instance KA 12, 7, 51; KA 18, 418, no. 1168; KA 18, 420, no. 1200.
(19) . This is an allusion to Niethammer’s essay “Von den Ansprüchen des

gemeinen Verstandes an die Philosophie,” in Philosophisches Journal 1, no. 1
(1795): 1–45; here: 41ff.
(20) . See also Friedrich Schlegel: KA 18, 80, no. 614.
(21) . See NS 4, 187.
(22) . See NS 2, 113, no. 15.
(23) . Jacobi, Briefe (1789), 424ff., 430ff.
(24) . Ibid., 215.
(25) . Niethammer, “Von den Ansprüchen des gemeinen Verstandes an die

Philosophie.”
Page 15 of 16
(26) . Schmid, Empirische Psychologie (Jena: Cröker, 1791), 57f.; cf. Dieter
Henrich, Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des
Idealismus Tübingen-Jena (1790–1794) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004),
316; 600ff.; Immanuel Carl Diez, Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften.
Wissensbegründung in der Glaubenskrise Tübingen-Jena (1790–1792), ed. Dieter
Henrich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 912 (from a report from Reinhold to
Erhard dated June 18, 1792).
(27) . Reinhold, Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung no. 53 (May 1792): 425–27;

Reinhold, “Ueber den Unterschied zwischen dem gesunden Verstande und der
philosophierenden Vernunft in Rücksicht auf die Fundamente des durch beyde
möglichen Wissens” (composed in summer 1792), in Beyträge zur Berichtigung
bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen, vol. 2, die Fundamente des
philosophischen Wissens, der Metaphysik, Moral, moralischen Religion und
Geschmackslehre betreffend (Jena: Johann Michael Mauke, 1794); Henrich,
Grundlegung aus dem Ich, 910ff.; ch. VI, esp. 230, 298ff.
(28) . Schmid, Empirische Psychologie I, 18f. (§ VI of the “Introduction”).
(29) . Schmid, “Rezension von Reinholds Fundament des philosophischen

Wissens,” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung nos. 92 und 93 (April 1792): 49–60; here:
52f., 57ff.
(30) . Ibid., 59; cf. his argument against Fichte: Schmid, “Bruchstücke aus einer
Schrift über die Philosophie und ihre Principien,” Philosophisches Journal So the
Journal was quoted earlier and later. 3, no. 2 (1795): 95–132; here: 101.
(31) . Forberg, Fragmente aus meinen Papieren (Jena: J. G. Voigt, 1796), 74, 42.
(32) . Forberg, “Briefe über die neueste Philosophie,” in Philosophisches Journal

6, no. 1 (1797): 44–88; here: 66f.
Page 16 of 16
Romanticism and Idealism

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Frederick Beiser
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0003

This chapter will attempt to resolve a dispute between Frederick Beiser and
Manfred Frank about the relationship between romanticism and idealism. In
German Idealism Beiser placed the romantics within the German idealist
movement, seeing them as part of the same tradition as Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. This aroused the objection of Frank, which appears in his Auswege
aus dem deutschen Idealismus, and others who follow him (viz., Elizabeth
Millan-Zaibert in her Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic
Philosophy). They claim that romanticism and idealism are opposed movements
because idealist is foundationalist whereas romanticism is antifoundationalist.
This chapter argues that this debate partly rests on a confusion between
methodological and metaphysical issues: that the romantics had an idealist
metaphysics even though they did not share the methodology of Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel. There are other issues causing confusion, viz., who
precisely do we want to regard as a romantic, which the chapter also attempts to
sort out.
Keywords: German idealism, German romanticism, Manfred Frank, Frederick Beiser, foundationalism,
antifoundationalism, subjective idealism, absolute idealism
2.1. The Question, A Windmill?

Whenever we think of the great German cultural revival of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, we are bound to have in mind two intellectual
movements: romanticism and idealism. These movements are clearly
fundamental for an understanding of German culture in this epoch, and so both
have been studied in depth by generations of scholars. It is somewhat surprising
Page 1 of 15
to find, therefore, that the relationship between them has been so understudied.
What they have in common, and how they differ, is still very obscure. They are
indeed so obscure that some scholars have begun to dispute their proper
relationship.
Two such scholars are myself and Manfred Frank. Over the years we have
formed antithetical conceptions of the relationship between idealism and
romanticism. In his Unendliche Annäherung Frank has seen the early romantic
movement as fundamentally opposed to idealism.1 He has stressed the
opposition between these movements for two reasons: the romantics were
realist in their ontology, and they were antifoundationalist in their epistemology,
unlike the idealists, who were foundationalists. In my German Idealism and
Romantic Imperative I have placed the early romantic movement within German
idealism,2 which Frank and others see as a terrible mistake because it seems to
attribute Fichtean idealism and foundationalist concerns to the early romantics.
Recently, Frank has declared our differences on this score in a prominent (p.31)
place,3 and so it is imperative that I try to clarify the issues. The point of this
article will be to do just that.
But before I go into details, it is necessary to clarify the main issue. Someone
might object, quite understandably, that the quarrel between Frank and myself
is a storm in a teacup, a mere dispute about words. Why not just declare with
Humpty Dumpty that words mean what we want them to mean, so that Humpty
(Beiser) gets to call romanticism one thing and Dumpty (Frank) gets to call it
another? The relationship between romanticism and idealism is understudied
and disputed, the objector will say, for the simple reason that the terms
“romanticism” and “idealism” have no definite meaning. Since they have no
precise meaning, there is no such thing as a fixed or definite relationship
between romanticism and idealism. What relationships scholars find just
depends on the meanings they give the terms. And so it seems the better half of
prudence to regard the whole question as a purely verbal one, a trap for
scholars unwary and naive. It was on just these grounds that, nearly a century
ago, Arthur Lovejoy bid us to abandon the very concept of romanticism.4 That
concept had been given so many different, even opposing, definitions, Lovejoy
complained, that it was better to talk about “romanticisms” in the plural than
“romanticism” in the singular. Since idealism is in no better shape than
romanticism, perhaps we should abandon that concept too, and so drop the
whole question about its relationship with romanticism?
Such advice has its point, of course. There is a real danger that discussion of the
relationship between romanticism and idealism gets bogged down in mere
words. Some of the dispute between Frank and myself, I have to confess, is
verbal, revolving around the different meanings of the term “idealism.” Still, it is
a mistake to think that the issue is entirely verbal, as if there were no
substantive issues at stake. The fact of the matter is that the denotation or
Page 2 of 15
extension of the terms “idealism” and “romanticism,” though not their

connotation or intension, has been fairly well fixed by generations of scholars.
The term “German idealism” generally refers to the tradition of philosophy from
Kant to Hegel, and more specifically to the doctrines expounded by Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel from roughly 1781 to 1801.5 “Romanticism” in those years
means the period known as Frühromantik, and it refers to the circle of poets and
philosophers in Jena and Berlin, which includes the Schlegel brothers, Schelling,
Novalis, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, and Tieck. If we limit ourselves to these
dates, the terms “romanticism” and “idealism” do have a definite extension. The
question of the relationship between idealism and romanticism during this
period then becomes twofold: (1) What do the thinkers in each group have in
common? (2) What do the two groups have in common and how do they differ?
These are not verbal questions at all, but very complex and very difficult
substantive ones. They involve the comparison of many thinkers, many writings
of each thinker, many of which are very obscure. (p.32) So, to this extent, the
obscurity of the question does not derive only from the obscurity of the words
but from the very subject matter itself.
Granted that we have a real question before us, it seems to me to be eminently

worthwhile to try to answer it. This is first and foremost because, by common
consent, these movements are so important, and important not only for German
cultural history but the history of philosophy in general. But there is another less
important, but still pressing, reason why we should try to answer it: namely, the
old standard theory about their interrelation, which has prevailed for
generations, has broken down utterly. According to this theory, which was put
forward by Rudolf Haym, H. A. Korff, and Nicolai Hartmann,6 romanticism was
essentially a parasitic form of idealism, and more specifically a poetic form of
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. It was, as Haym put it, “poetically exaggerated
Fichteanism.”7 This interpretation has failed not simply because of more careful
interpretations of old texts but also because of the publication of many new
texts, materials that had not been available to Haym, Korff, and Hartmann. It has
only been since the 1960s, with the publication of the new critical editions of
Hölderlin, Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, that scholars have been in
position to examine, in all their variety and depth, the many philosophical
writings of the early romantics. These show us clearly that the romantics were
not disciples but critics of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, and that one of their
major aims was to overcome what they perceived as the inadequacy of Fichte’s
idealism. The early romantics rejected not only Fichte’s methodology and
conception of nature, but also his idealism, which seemed to trap the self inside
the circle of its own consciousness. For them, Fichte’s idealism was not the
solution to be celebrated but the problem to be avoided.
So, given that the old theory has collapsed, it is necessary to rethink the whole
question of the relationship between idealism and romanticism. There are two
ways of going forward. One would be to stress the difference between idealism
Page 3 of 15
and romanticism, to make a sharp distinction between them. The other would be
to continue to emphasize the affinity between them but to hold that Fichtean
idealism is only one part or aspect of idealism in general. Manfred Frank has
gone down the first path; I have gone down the second. Over the years I have
tried to convince Frank to go down the path of salvation and righteousness, but
he has stubbornly resisted. Rather than recanting and renouncing the error of
his ways, he has challenged me in public. And so he has, in effect, thrown down
his gauntlet. In full recognition of such a worthy opponent, who has taught me
so much over the years, I now pick it up and prepare to joust.
Joust? A sense of occasion demands an appropriate metaphor, and this occasion

is a romantic one. So I ask the reader to imagine the following: a tournament
between two aging knights in rusty and creaky armor, fighting for the hand of a
beautiful mistress, who holds in her hand a blue flower. Call her (p.33)
Mathilde, if you like, or even better Dulcinea. Following chivalrous custom, I will
abandon my claim to her if my opponent knocks me off my horse, my trusty
steed Rocinante. That said, ladies and gentleman, let us commence. Arre!
Rocinante, arre!
2.2. Romanticism and Forms of Idealism

To begin, let me briefly summarize the status controversiae. The basic difference
between Frank and me is that I firmly place early romanticism inside the
tradition of German idealism while Frank places it equally firmly outside that
tradition, and indeed against it. Frank and I agree that the old Fichtean
interpretation of early romanticism is obsolete; but he regards this as a
sufficient reason for distinguishing early romanticism from idealism in general,
whereas I think that such reasoning is a non sequitur because Fichte’s idealism
is only one part of the idealist tradition as a whole. I see my differences with
Frank as partly verbal, stemming from the different meanings of the term
“idealism,” but also as partly substantial, reflecting our different approaches to
and interpretations of the texts.
Regarding the verbal issue, it is necessary to be precise about the meaning of

“idealism.” Frank and I differ in our use of this term, and it is the source of half
the difference between us. We can avoid a lot of confusion if, at the outset, we
make a very basic distinction between two forms or kinds of idealism. Very
crudely, there is “idealism” in the subjective sense, according to which “the
ideal” denotes the realm of consciousness of the self-conscious subject (whether
that subject is empirical or transcendental, individual or universal). There is also
“idealism” in the objective sense, according to which “the ideal” denotes the
realm of the archetypical or intelligible.8 The subjective idealist holds that
everything within our experience—though not necessarily everything that exists
—is only for some self-conscious subject. The objective idealist maintains that
everything within our experience—and indeed everything that exists—is the
appearance, manifestation, or embodiment of some archetype or ideal. Taken in
Page 4 of 15
such general terms, it should be clear that these forms of idealism are
conceptually distinct. A subjective idealist need not hold that everything in
experience is an appearance of some ideal or archetype; for he might be a
nominalist who denies the reality of archetypes and who affirms that everything
that exists is particular. An objective idealist need not claim that those particular
things that embody or instantiate the archetypical are perceived by or exist for
some self-conscious subject; for they could still be embodiments or instantiations
of the ideal even if no self-conscious subject existed to perceive them.
(p.34) Any adequate account of the German idealist tradition has to be broad
enough to accommodate both these senses. A narrow univocal account will not
work if only because the paradigmatic thinkers that we place in this tradition—
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—use “idealism” in both these senses. As all
students of the tradition know, there was a fundamental break around 1800
between the “subjective idealism” of Kant and Fichte and the “objective
idealism” of Schelling and Hegel. That break appears in Schelling’s
correspondence with Fichte, and then in Hegel’s Differenzschrift, which defends
Schelling’s break with Fichte. Schelling and Hegel argued that their “objective
idealism” is superior to the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte because it
accommodates the independent reality of nature and because it does not reduce
nature down to the experience of the self-conscious subject alone. That was, as I
read it, the point behind Schelling’s famous Durchbruch zur Realität, which he
makes in his 1799 Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses.9
Given that subjective and objective idealism have such different senses, and
given that there was such a deep and self-conscious break between its chief
protagonists, one might well ask why or how there is one idealist tradition at all.
Why not speak of two traditions, or “idealisms” in the plural, as Lovejoy advises
us to do with “romanticism”? I would do so if it were not for the fact that a hard
and fast distinction between these idealisms, as if they have nothing in common,
is equally problematic. There is still one general sense of “idealism” common to
both strands of the tradition insofar as both regard the realm of thought or the
ideal as the key to understanding experience or reality, and insofar as both
oppose materialism. The basic difference between these strands is simply
whether we attach or detach the ideal—the realm of thought or meaning—from
the self-conscious subject: subjective idealists attach it, objective idealists
detach it. What the common principle of these idealism might be is a difficult
question that I cannot pursue here. But, quite apart from how we formulate that
principle, there is still another reason to write of a single tradition from Kant to
Hegel. Namely, Schelling and Hegel themselves self-consciously continued to
place themselves within the Kantian-Fichtean tradition. It is noteworthy, for
example, that Hegel, in his Differenzschrift, still sees himself as completing the
Kantian revolution in philosophy.10 No account of German idealism is complete
or adequate, I believe, unless it can explain this apparent paradox: that
Page 5 of 15
Schelling and Hegel broke with Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism yet both placed
themselves within the Kantian-Fichtean tradition.
Now my major difference with Frank regarding the concept of “idealism” is that
he narrows its meaning down to subjective idealism alone. According to his
definition in Unendliche Annäherung, “idealism,” “crudely put” (grob gesagt),
denotes the view that “the basic givens of reality are mental [geistige] entities or
can be reduced down to them.”11 This is a passable definition for (p.35)
subjective idealism all right; but it does not work at all for objective idealism,
which does not hold that the basic givens of reality are mental. If we were to
adopt Frank’s definition for the idealist tradition as a whole, we would have to
limit it down to Kant and Fichte and leave aside Schelling and Hegel. It would
become impossible to make any sense of “objective idealism,” not to mention
Schelling’s and Hegel’s break with Fichte and their advocacy of an idealism that
takes into account the independent reality of nature. There are passages in
Unendliche Annäherung where Frank does talk about “absolute idealism,” a
synonym for “objective idealism,” which he defines in terms of the doctrine that
an absolute ego creates all of reality.12 But this is still “subjective idealism” in
my terms because it does not matter whether the realm of consciousness
belongs to a transcendental or empirical, universal or particular, subject. In any
case, absolute idealism in this sense—a supersubject creating the entire world of
empirical reality—is not a useful term to describe anyone in the idealist
tradition. It is an old misconception that is better laid to rest.13
The different meanings Frank and I attribute to idealism are decisive for the
dispute between us. Because he defines the concept in subjective terms, he
distinguishes it from early romanticism; because I define it more broadly, not
only in subjective but also objective terms, I place it under the general heading
of idealism. But in an important sense Frank and I agree. Namely, if one were to
define idealism in the subjective sense, then the romantics are not idealists, and
they were indeed opposed to it. It was this narrow subjective sense behind the
old Fichtean interpretation of early romanticism, which Frank and I both reject.
Furthermore, Frank and I are at one regarding the realism of early romanticism.
In Unendliche Annäherung Frank argues that the romantics were not idealists
but realists in holding that the realm of being exists independent of the self-
conscious subject. After Fred Rush complained about the vagueness of Frank’s
use of “realism,”14 Frank made some fine distinctions in Auswege aus dem
deutschen Idealismus.15 We need not pursue these distinctions here, useful
though they are. The relevant sense of realism for the romantics Frank calls
“ontological realism,” according to which “there are things existing independent
of consciousness and whose independence is denoted by the term being.”16
Though it might surprise Frank and others, I have to stress that I agree with him
entirely that the early romantics were committed to just such a realism. It is
important to add that this realism was meant to be full and robust, allowing for
Page 6 of 15
the existence of being or nature independent of any subjects whatsoever

(empirical or transcendental). It is not reducible, therefore, to the “empirical
realism” that Kant and Fichte tried to accommodate under their subjective
idealism, for that empirical realism, though allowing for the intersubjective
existence of objects “outside us” in space, still saw space itself as
“transcendentally (p.36) ideal,” that is, as forms of intuition of the self-
conscious subject. This form of realism would not have satisfied the romantics,
who wanted, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, “a higher realism” that would give an
independent reality to nature apart from any subject, whether empirical or
transcendental.17
Granted that the romantics aspired to a higher realism, which is indeed the kind
of ontological realism that Frank attributes to them, it is tempting to conclude
that they were opposed to idealism. This is indeed just the inference that Frank
makes. It is misleading, however, because it fails to distinguish between
subjective and objective idealism. While the higher realism is indeed
incompatible with subjective idealism, it is perfectly compatible with objective
idealism, and the whole point of objective idealism is to accommodate that
realism. Even if there were no self-conscious subject, it is still possible to hold
that everything that exists in nature is a manifestation of the ideal, where the
ideal is the archetypical or intelligible.
If we accept that the romantics held such an objective idealism, then it becomes
possible to explain one extraordinary feature of their philosophical language:
namely, their demand for an ontology that is both idealistic and realistic. During
the late 1790s and early 1800s the early romantics would often write of an
“ideal-realism” or “real-idealism.” This was not a deliberately paradoxical or glib
turn of phrase but the expression of a very reasonable philosophical program:
the call for a form of idealism that could do justice to the reality of the external
world. The early romantics were convinced that there should be some middle
path between a complete materialism on the one hand and a total subjective
idealism on the other hand. That middle path was their objective idealism. It
alone could interpret the world as a manifestation of the ideal—and so avoid
materialism—but it could also allow the world to exist independent of the subject
—and so escape subjective idealism.
Realizing that the early romantics are objective idealists in this sense also makes
it possible to stress a side of early romanticism that has been underplayed by
Frank but that has been rightly emphasized by some older commentators.18 This
is the Platonic dimension. All the early romantics—Friedrich Schlegel,
Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling—were profoundly influenced
by Plato in their youth, and this had a pervasive impact on all their thinking.
Oskar Walzel was entirely correct, I believe, when he wrote, nearly a century
ago, that romanticism was the greatest revival of Platonism since the
Renaissance.19 The Platonic dimension of the romantics’ idealism appears in
Page 7 of 15
their identification of the absolute with reason or logos or idea. I will have to
forgo here marshalling and citing all the evidence for this interpretation, a task I
have executed elsewhere.20 Assuming, however, that we adopt this Platonic
interpretation, the consequences for our general interpretation of romanticism
are weighty. For it means that we have to reject the pervasive and popular (p.
37) interpretation of romanticism as a form of irrationalism, as a rebellion
against the Aufklärung and as a more radical form of the Sturm und Drang. The
romantic doctrine of the primacy of aesthetic experience over the forms of
discursive thinking was not meant as a rejection or limitation of reason in
general but was intended to elevate intuitive forms of reason over discursive
ones. It was never intended as a rejection of rationality as such.
Some object to attributing objective idealism to the romantics, and subsuming

them under the Platonic tradition, on the grounds that the romantics rejected
the thesis that being is completely transparent and intelligible. On this view it is
necessary to distinguish between idealism and romanticism along the following
lines: the idealists insist on the transparency of being while the romantics stress
its opacity.21 This seems simplistic to me, too black and white, because
knowledge of being can be a matter of degree. While the romantics certainly did
not hold that we can have a perfect knowledge of being, they did think that we
can know it a little, through a glass darkly. The medium by which we know it
would be aesthetic intuition, the vision of the forms in Plato’s Phaedrus. In any
case, objective idealism does not presuppose any doctrine about the knowledge
of the ideal or intelligible. Objective idealism, on my account, is an ontological
thesis that holds that everything is an appearance of the ideal or intelligible; but
it is not an epistemological claim that we, as finite human beings, have complete
or perfect knowledge of being itself.
This objection is partly inspired by and based on the point that the romantics
were opposed to foundationalism, which was part and parcel of the idealist
tradition. This is indeed one of the chief reasons for the distinction between
romanticism and idealism. According to this version of the distinction, the
romantics were fundamentally antifoundationalist, while the idealists were
essentially foundationalist in their epistemology.22 Fichte and the early Schelling
were followers of Reinhold’s foundationalist program—his Elementarphilosophie
—which was basically a revival of the old philosophia prima that we find in
Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. While Hegel rejected the Reinholdian program,
he never abandoned foundationalism but simply pursued it through other means:
his famous dialectic. The early romantics were among those many philosophers
in the Jena Wunderzeit who rejected the Reinholdian program, which was one of
the starting points for their own philosophy. Frank has especially stressed the
antifoundationalism of early romanticism, and his explorations and elaborations
of this theme are, I believe, one of his major contributions to research on early
romanticism. I agree with Frank entirely about the antifoundationalism of early
romanticism, and I have, following in his footsteps, incorporated it into my own
Page 8 of 15
work. Here we have indeed good reason to make a distinction between early
romanticism and idealism, and I do not think I have emphasized that point
enough in my earlier work. (p.38) However, it is necessary to add: the
antifoundationalism of early romanticism does not make it any less idealistic in
the precise sense of idealism I have in mind. There is nothing in the thesis of
objective idealism, as explained above, that commits its adherents to
foundationalism. We can affirm that all reality is a manifestation of the ideal and
deny every form of foundationalism. It is possible to hold the following position:
that we perceive the ideal through intuition or feeling, through the dark glass of
aesthetic experience, and to be critical of all foundationalism. That was indeed,
as I see it, the romantic position.
2.3. Romantic Aesthetics and Idealism

Having laid to rest, at least for now, the question of how romanticism in general
relates to idealism, I want to move onto another more specific question about
that relationship, namely, how romantic aesthetics relates to the idealist
tradition. And now, for your amusement, Frank and I will exchange roles. The
knights, now battered and bruised, will swap armor and horses and charge from
opposing sides of the court. For now it will be Frank who stresses the
importance of the idealist legacy for romanticism, and it will be I who
underplays its significance. Why this strange role reversal? It has come about
because Frank, in his Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, champions
the cardinal importance of Kant’s Copernican Revolution for romantic
aesthetics. There Frank points out a striking analogy between Kant’s
epistemology and romantic aesthetics: that just as the Kantian subject creates
its standard of knowledge, so the romantic genius creates the standards of art.
Supposedly, it was Kant’s revolutionary claim that knowledge consists in the
conformity of object with concept (rather than concept with object) that
liberated aesthetics from the stranglehold of the classical doctrine of imitation,
according to which the artist has to copy the given appearances of nature.23 In
thus stressing the affinity between Kant’s Copernican Revolution and romantic
aesthetics Frank follows a venerable tradition. This analogy has a long history,
having had some powerful advocates besides Frank himself. One of its greatest
champions was Hans Georg Gadamer, who, in Wahrheit und Methode, made it
the basis for his charge that the romantics had undertaken a radical
subjectivization of aesthetics.24 Among its adherents were Haym, Korff, and
Hartmann, those protagonists of the old theory that romanticism is simply “a
poetic form of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.” The tradition shows no signs of
dying out, and its latest appearance is Jane Kneller’s Kant and the Power of
Imagination.25 So I am charging my Rocinante against a formidable phalanx
indeed!
Before I spur that stubborn beast, let me pause to note the curious tension in
Frank’s position. It is strange that he separates romanticism so firmly (p.39)
from idealism but then stresses the significance of the Kantian Copernican
Page 9 of 15
Revolution for romantic aesthetics. For if we adopt the paradigm of knowledge

behind Kant’s Copernican Revolution, we quickly get back into the squalid
depths of subjective idealism. That paradigm states, as Kant famously formulates
it in the preface to the second edition of the first Kritik, that we know a priori
only what we create.26 If we insist that such creativity is necessary for all
knowledge, as Kant surely does, then we get caught inside the circle of our own
representations. What the world would be on its own, prior to the application of
our creative cognitive activity to it, turns out to be that notorious monster, the
Kantian thing-in-itself.
Here something has to give because Frank cannot have it both ways. And what
does give is Frank’s emphasis on the Copernican Revolution. For in the course of
his Einführung Frank finds himself retracting the importance of the analogy he
first made his guiding theme. He sees, perfectly correctly, that there is
something amiss with the analogy. The problem is this: when the Copernican
doctrine is applied to aesthetics, it leads to the doctrine that aesthetic judgment
is noncognitive. It is no accident that Kant tells us emphatically and explicitly in
the first paragraph of the Kritik der Urteilskraft that aesthetic judgment has
nothing to do with truth, that it does not refer to anything whatsoever in the
object, because it concerns only the feeling of pleasure in the spectator.27 The
Kantian doctrine of the strictly subjective status of pleasure is the immediate
consequence of the Copernican Revolution because it places the standard of
beauty in the faculties of the perceiver rather than in the object itself. Kant saw
the opposing doctrine—the rationalist theory that aesthetic judgment formulates
an intuition of perfection in the object itself—as a relapse into the bad old ways
of metaphysical dogmatism, which placed the standard of beauty in the object
itself, and more specifically in its perfection or unity-in-variety. But it is precisely
Kant’s denial of cognitive status to aesthetic judgment that shows the profound
difference between his Copernican Revolution and the romantics. For the
romantics were, one and all, passionately committed to the doctrine that
aesthetic perception is cognitive, that it does give us insight into truth. Frank
knows this all too well, of course, and it is noteworthy that for this reason he
retracts, qualifies, or fails to follow through with his analogy.28
As soon as we consider the consequences of Kant’s Copernican Revolution for

the cognitive status of aesthetic judgment, we have to acknowledge that Kant’s
aesthetics was more a challenge than a stimulus for romantic thinking. If we
wish to trace the sources of romantic aesthetic theory, then we have to go back
to classical doctrine, and more specifically Platonic doctrine. So here again I
want to strum my Platonic lyre! For it was the Plato of the Phaedrus and
Symposium—not the Plato of the Republic—who was the main inspiration for the
romantics. The romantics too were Diotima’s children, and the source (p.40) of
their aesthetic doctrine goes back to Diotima’s teaching that beauty consists in
the sensual perception of intellectual form. That teaching was also the heart of
the rationalist tradition—the aesthetics of Wolff, Baumgarten, Gottsched,
Page 10 of 15
Winckelmann, and Mendelssohn—according to which beauty consists in the

intuition of perfection (intuitio perfectionis).29
Now, having made some grand sweeping claims, let me make another, one more
heretical than the preceding. Namely, rather than seeing romantic aesthetics as
built on a Kantian foundation, we should see it as an attempt to rehabilitate
rationalist aesthetics and as a reaction against Kant’s Copernican Revolution.
For the romantics wanted first and foremost to restore the classical doctrine of
the cognitive status of aesthetic judgment against Kant’s subjectivism. The very
doctrine that Kant was intent on burying they were intent on reviving. The
romantic emphasis on the truth behind poetry and art, and their Platonic
heritage, permits no other conclusion.
There is still, of course, a great difference between the romantics and their
rationalist forebears. Namely, the romantics turned the rationalist hierarchy of
knowledge upside down. While the rationalists placed aesthetic experience
below the powers of reason—here understood in the traditional sense as the
powers to conceive, judge, and infer—the romantics placed it above them. It is in
just this respect, of course, that it is fair to stress Kant’s influence on the
romantics, for they did accept some of his critique of traditional metaphysics.
Kant’s attack on the powers of discursive reason was indeed crucial for their
elevation of aesthetic experience over all forms of knowledge. But this point has
been taken too far, as if the break with rationalist metaphysics meant a break
with its aesthetics. That too is a non sequitur.
Although there is a clear affinity between romantic aesthetics and the rationalist
tradition, and although there is a clear tension between romantic aesthetics and
the Kantian tradition, I am not optimistic that scholars will begin to turn their
attention away from Kant and toward the rationalists. The old habits of looking
at Kant as the fount of aesthetic wisdom are simply too hard to break. We
romantics know what the Kantians do when the post coach from Königsberg
breaks down. Rather than going without truth for weeks, they go ferreting into
the more obscure recesses of the Kritik der Urteilskraft to find solace. They
rummage through the text for every trace of evidence for the romantics’
indebtedness to this non plus ultraof the aesthetic universe. And, sure enough,
they find doctrines that seem to anticipate later romantic themes. Thus they
point to Kant’s concept of genius, to his idea of art as a symbol of morality, and
to the paradox of purposiveness without a purpose. All of these ideas might have
been indeed suggestive to the romantics. But the problem with them is that they
are too hedged with regulative qualifications to support the romantic faith in the
cognitive status of art. Kant never permits the artist to (p.41) have insight into
the ideas behind nature for the simple reason that these ideas have for him only
a regulative validity. He permits us to treat nature only as if it were created
Page 11 of 15
according to ideas, but not to assume that it actually is so. The Kantian artist is
still left trapped inside the circle of consciousness of subjective idealism.
Regarding these old Kantian habits, I frankly have to state my incredulity. The
romantics were never fervent admirers of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, and they
never went poring over the text to find inspiration. What could one say after all
about a text that made the arabesque the height of aesthetic perfection? The
great admirer of the Kritik der Urteilskraft was Schiller, and it seems that Kant’s
influence on Schiller, and Schiller’s influence on the romantics, licenses by
transitivity Kant’s influence on the romantics. But there is a great gap between
Schiller’s Aesthetische Briefe and Hölderlin’s Neue Aesthetische Briefe. The
latter work was meant to vindicate the claim to aesthetic truth undermined by
the former. One reason the alleged affinity between Kant and the romantics
lacks credibility is because it fails to acknowledge, and to see the consequences
of, one basic but simple fact: Kant did not read Greek. Most of the young
romantics were trained in that language from an early age, and it is that which
gave them access to, and a deep appreciation of, Plato’s Timaeus, Symposium,
and Phaedrus. It was Kant’s ignorance of Greek that puts a major cultural
barrier between him and the romantic generation. Let us face it: the stiff and dry
sage of Königsberg had no appreciation of the erotic, and so he would never
have understood the soul of Diotima’s teaching.
In one respect I am willing to concede that the old analogy between Kant’s
Copernican Revolution and romantic aesthetics contains a grain of truth.
Namely, the romantics did stress the creative role of the artist, and they did not
expect the artist simply to replicate the appearances of external nature. But this
point leaves us with a problem, which the protagonists of this analogy do not
recognize. Namely, how could the romantics stress both the creative role of the
artist and the power of art to reveal the truth? It might seem that the artist’s
creativity simply reveals his own feelings and desires rather than anything about
the world outside him. The problem here is how to bring together the romantic
faith in artistic creativity with a doctrine of the imitation of nature, a doctrine
the romantics never really renounced and which is even required by their
ontological realism. The explanation for this apparent paradox, I would suggest
here, lies in the romantics’ general conception of nature, and more specifically,
their conception of nature as an organism. According to that idea, the organic
powers of nature reach their highest organization and development in the
creativity of the subject, so that what he creates is also what nature creates
through him. The artist, through his own creativity, then becomes the instrument
for the (p.42) self-realization and self-revelation of nature herself. The
paradigmatic expression of this idea is in Schelling’s System des
transcendentalen Idealismus. If I am correct that this is the solution to the
paradox, then it shows the importance of romantic Naturphilosophie for their
aesthetics. It is only when we place romantic aesthetics in the context of their
Page 12 of 15
Naturphilosophie, their conception of nature as a whole, that the claims it makes

for the cognitive powers of art begin to make sense.
And so there you have it. With that diatribe I have made my last parry in this
tournament. My Rocinante is tired now, as I imagine my spectators are too. I quit
the field not knowing what favors Mathilde might care to bestow upon me.
Whether I or Frank deserves her blue flower I will leave the spectator to judge.
Notes:
(1) . Manfred Frank, Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen
Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 27, 65–66, 663–65, 715.
(2) . Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism,

1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Romantic
Imperative: The Concept of German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
(3) . See Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 16–17. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert has also taken issue
with my subsumption of the romantics under idealism in her Friedrich Schlegel
and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New
York, 2007).
(4) . Arthur Lovejoy, “On the Discriminations of Romanticism,” Proceedings of

the Modern Language Association 39 (1924), 229–53. Reprinted in Lovejoy,
Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Capricorn, 1960), 228–53.
(5) . We could, of course, extend the date beyond 1801. But I will leave that aside
here, for the purposes of a more precise comparison with the early romantics.
By 1801 the essentials of Schelling’s and Hegel’s objective or absolute idealism
were formed, and Schelling’s and Hegel’s works only expounded the main ideas
in more systematic detail. I will also leave aside the problem of applying the
term “idealism” solely to the period from Kant and Hegel. This is problematic
because it ignores Lotze and Trendelenburg, two of the most influential thinkers
of the nineteenth century in the idealist tradition.
(6) . Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule (Berlin: Gaertner, 1882); H. A. Korff,
Geist der Goethezeit (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1964), III, 244–52; and
Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1923), I, 220–33, esp. 221, 224, 226, 228.
(7) . Haym, Die romantische Schule, 332.
Page 13 of 15
(8) . I argue for this distinction in German Idealism, 349–74, 379–91, 418–21,
447–51, 491–505.
(9) . My interpretation of Schelling’s break with Fichte, which I cannot explain in

any detail here, is in my German Idealism, 469–505.
(10) . See Hegel, “Vorerinnerung,” Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen

Systems der Philsophie, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. K. Michel and E.
Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), II, 9–11.
(11) . Frank, Unendliche Annäherung, 27.
(12) . Ibid., 128, 133.
(13) . So I have argued in German Idealism, 4–6.
(14) . See his review of Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert’s Philosophical Foundations of

Early German Romanticism in Notre Dame Philosophical Review, 2004.12.09.
Http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23011-the-philosophical-foundation-of-early-german-
romanticism.
(15) . Frank, Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus, 19–26.
(16) . Ibid., 19, 21.
(17) . See Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre, in KA 18, 31, no. 134; 38, no. 209;
80, no. 606. Novalis held similar views. See his Allgemeine Brouillon, in NS 3,
382–4, no. 634; 252, no. 69; 382, no. 633; 429, no. 820, and Fragmente und
Studien, NS 3, 671, no. 611.
(18) . The Platonic heritage was stressed by Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism
(New York: Putnam, 1932) and Erwin Kirchner, Philosophie der Romantik (Jena:
Diederichs, 1906), 8–34.
(19) . Walzel, German Romanticism, 5, 8.
(20) . See my essay “Frühromantik and the Platonic Tradition,” in Romantic

Imperative, 56–72, esp. 67–72.
(21) . This is the view of Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of
Romantic Philosophy, 32, 34, 36, 38.
(22) . This conception of the idealist tradition goes back to a forgotten but
venerable source: Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling
(Leipzig: Reineicke, 1803). Fries shows how Fichte and Schelling adopt the
foundationalist program of Reinhold, and makes weighty objections against that
Page 14 of 15
program. He makes passing references to Hegel, who would soon become his
nemesis.
(23) . Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1989), 9–14.
(24) . See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990),
93–94. Gadamer says little about the romantics but sees them as part of
Schiller’s program of aesthetic education, which he thinks has subjectivized
aesthetics.
(25) . Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge
(26) . Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xviii. Cf. B xii, xiii.
(27) . AA 5, 204. Cf. 214.
(28) . Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, 38–39, 122–23, 129.
(29) . Such is the thesis of my Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism

from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Page 15 of 15
History, Succession, and German Romanticism

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Karl Ameriks
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0004

The three basic terms of the Athenaeum Fragments’ famous characterization of
romanticism as “progressive universal poetry” provides a useful framework for
defining a distinctively romantic conception of history, one that is all at once
political, philosophical, and aesthetic in a broadly religious sense. This chapter
argues that, especially for our late modern age, this early German romantic
conception has advantages over merely linear, circular, or chaotic conceptions.
The argument is illustrated by reference to the form and content of Hölderlin’s
work, especially one stanza of his poem “Celebration of Peace.” The influence of
Kant’s work on this aspect of Hölderlin’s thought is also emphasized.
Keywords: history, succession, religion, exemplary, Friedrich Schlegel, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J.

Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, Immanuel Kant
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to

reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with
philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and
prose, inspiration. and criticism.... The Romantic kind of poetry is still in
the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence.1
3.1. Three Old Views and a New One

Not least among the accomplishments of German romanticism2 is its leading role
in the advocacy of a major new option in the philosophical understanding of
history and the related issue of a historical understanding of philosophy.3 There
are only a few basic forms in which the relationship of history to philosophy has
tended to be conceived, the most familiar of which are the options of either a
Page 1 of 21
circular, linear, or chaotic shape.4 The romantics deserve special credit for
having made prominent a fourth basic option here, namely, that of an elliptical
path.5 The romantic notion of an elliptical path is often shorthand for the
thought of history as kind of gyre, or open-ended rising spiral, such that there is
directionality and progress in a multidimensional fashion, one that requires
repeatedly returning to one’s original place in a way that involves development
through off-center movements with more than one focal point.
This pattern combines elements of circularity, linearity, and eccentricity in an

original and influential way, one that begs to be elaborated in terms of (p.48)
the romantics’ famous call, quoted in the epigraph, for “universal progressive
poetry.” Although this phrase is well known in literary circles, its philosophical
significance still does not seem to have been fully appreciated, for its tripartite
structure not only ideally fits romanticism but also appears to capture, better
than the other basic options, the distinctive historical self-understanding of
much of late modernity. Once it is explicated in its full meaning—which I take to
be about writing in the broadest philosophical sense rather than “poetry” as a
limited literary genre—the tripartite structure of its defining phrase can be
argued to imply three corresponding kinds of basic advantages for the romantic
view.
Although key elements of the notion of an elliptical historical pattern can be

found in writings by highly influential earlier figures such as Lessing, Rousseau,
Herder, and Kant, these writers do not yet conceive the pattern in the fully
complex and distinctively open way featured in the best works of the romantics,
especially in their reflections on the significance of their own pivotal historical
era at the end of the eighteenth century. To illustrate this special kind of
openness, I will conclude by discussing a way in which the notion of universal
progressive poetry provides an especially appropriate rubric for appreciating a
key philosophical aspect of Friedrich Hölderlin’s work, and in particular the
conception of history expressed in major poems such as his Friedensfeier
(Celebration of Peace).
3.2. The Circular View: Simple and Complex

According to recent studies of mythology,6 a view characteristic of societies that
derive largely from the Southern Hemisphere, in contrast to the fundamental
orientation of the northern societies that have dominated “our history,” is that
human experience exhibits basically circular patterns, with essentially the same
kinds of customs and rituals repeating themselves at the center of daily life and
culture. Aspects of a kind of circular view can also be found in the North, and
often the view is associated with the worldviews of what is called “the ancient
world” (especially of Greece and Rome) before, or outside of, the traditions of
the Abrahamic religions.7 Nonetheless, the main works of the ancients, from
Gilgamesh on, are circular in a complex rather than simple way, for they stress
dramatic quest motifs, such as the founding of cities and the forward-looking
Page 2 of 21
project of overcoming outside challenges and philosophical quandaries—

although this is still not to say that they already possess the restless Faustian
dynamism of later European culture.
Leaving aside for specialists the factual question of which groups have in fact
been governed by which version of the view, my initial aim here is simply (p.49)
to characterize, through broad conceptual contrasts, the most basic feature of
what I mean by a circular view in general: Although a circular view allows
accumulation of expertise over time, which can be incorporated into the evolving
“second nature” of each successive generation, its defining presumption,
whether simple or complex, is that there are only refinements and no absolutely
fundamental historical developments in philosophical truth itself, especially with
respect to the central issue of what, in the eighteenth century, was called the
“vocation of humanity” (Die Bestimmung des Menschen).
Given this general characterization, one can regard, as a mere complex variation
of the circular view, views of history that include a stress on highly dramatic
quests of various far-ranging types (e.g., the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Republic) but
that still regard progress as largely a matter of reinstating central structures of
an original harmony. Such views can be found in the ancient Western societies
mentioned earlier, as well as in “organic” conceptions of society and history that
arise much later, such as Hegel’s mature notion of “ethical life” and “reason in
history.” Hegel is, of course, well known for his emphasis on the feature of
progress in Western civilization, not only in technological and economic-political
matters but also in terms of the appreciation of the fundamental notions of
philosophy itself. Hegel takes these notions to define not only the concrete
processes of nature, society, and history but also the basic understandings in
terms of which humanity’s “absolute spirit” eventually makes explicit this full
structure.8 Nonetheless, because Hegel’s ultimate position (on traditional
“schoolbook” readings) is that the pure system of his “logic” and related work
prefigures all the most basic forms of progress within human history, it still can
be said that his view on history is a circular one, albeit of a very complex rather
than simple type.9 The “absolute knowledge” of Hegel’s system can be taken, in
its content, as just a reflective formulation of what is implicit from the start
within reason’s “Idea” of a reconciled harmony of object and subject, and so,
despite the dramatic reality of an extensive sequence of quests and necessary
changes within the world of appearance, there remains an underlying and
unchanging philosophical order, one without any fundamental incompleteness.10
This is not to say that the monistic unfolding in time of what Hegel calls the
“absolute,” which is as much “subject” as “substance,” is a matter of a merely
analytic unpacking of isolated terms or entities. The main point, as Hegel insists,
is that, however complex this “development”11 appears to be, it constitutes a
system of reason that is not only necessary and eventually transparent, but also,
from the start, necessarily complete, and hence it has an eternal form that in
Page 3 of 21
essence preconditions its temporal instantiation. The transitions from era to era
are, to be sure, extraordinarily complex for Hegel, and they involve a necessary
dialectic of “determinate negation” that appears as an unpredictable (p.50)
process. But even though this process can be comprehended only in retrospect,
the main point of Hegel’s system is that in late modernity we finally can
retrospectively comprehend and be satisfied by what is, in a philosophical sense,
an in principle complete course of history. The dynamic complexity of lived
history is thus still consistent with a basically constant and reconciling picture of
humanity’s overall trajectory and its underlying logic. We have moved in three
steps: first, from a stage of relative immediacy, then through the dramatic
appearance of a complete sequence of forms of alienation, and finally into (the
beginning of) a stage of higher immediacy, with an essentially reconciling
harmony of “substance” and “reflection.”
3.3. The Linear View: Simple and Complex

In contrast to the relatively self-enclosed nature of both the simple and the
complex versions of the circular view of history, the linear view understands
human history as an ongoing process of striking new inputs to experience that
are more additive than restorative, and that essentially are generated from
contingent sources outside of what is in our original human nature or reason.
Simple versions of this kind of outward and forward-looking perspective can be
found in popular early strands of Enlightenment thinking, in Comtean positivism,
in the scientific pragmatism endemic to American thought, and in fully
naturalistic forms of Marxism. These views typically assume, in a deeply
optimistic way, that we happen to be set up in line with an encompassing outside
environment that, like a benevolent wave, will carry us along inexorably, as well
“cradled” natural beings heading toward a destined fulfillment of the race.12
A variant of this linear approach is the complex linear view of mainline versions
of Abrahamic religious traditions that are defined by the confident expectation of
a final phase of radical redemption that is supernaturally generated in a unique
way.13 The end phase that humanity moves toward on this view involves
something like the complexity of Hegel’s circular system insofar as it has as its
crucial precondition the drama of a sequence of dialectical stages within history
that are revolutionary in the limited sense of requiring a reversal of serious
previous shortcomings in our basic attitudes but not a denial of an original
teleological blueprint for existence on the whole. The traditional religious
version of this approach is linear and complex, however, insofar as it emphasizes
the nonnatural feature of absolute free choice in both human and divine agency.
The goal of history is therefore neither, as with strict Hegelianism (and its
complex circular view), metaphysically determined by the eternal necessities of
speculative logic, nor, as with strict naturalism (and its simple linear view), is it
naturally determined by givens of the external world that happen to (p.51)
fulfill us more and more by physical necessity. Instead, “the end of all things” is
Page 4 of 21
understood as a fortunate final phase that depends essentially on a complex

contingent convergence of absolutely free divine and human action.14
The actualization of this phase is conceived as a complex absolute “Faktum,” an

overarching arrangement that did not absolutely have to be set up by the unique
creative power or lived up to by lesser but volitionally independent created
powers. Here our future is understood not primarily as a matter of simply
receiving, adding, and rearranging goods (in a relatively mechanical way)
through the gifts of structures that are outside us, but instead as a partly
autonomous struggle that requires even more than a mere reversal of not being
satisfied or good enough earlier. History on this complex linear view requires
above all the thought of a single triumphant church marching along a strictly
orthodox line into a radically new world, one grounded in part on a human
nonnatural choice permanently to reverse the fact of a prior attachment to
radical evil and a rejection of an originally good free creation.15
3.4. The Chaotic View: Simple and Complex

The third basic conception of history is the chaotic view, which begins by taking
a critical attitude toward all accepted teleologies and can also be filled out by
distinguishing simple and complex variants. A simple chaotic view consists
merely in holding that, considered on the whole, human existence lacks rhyme
and reason. Even if this view does not necessarily go so far as to understand
value claims nihilistically or as mere projections, it does deny that our history
exhibits any deeply meaningful circular pattern, or any overall natural or
supernatural line of ascent. On the basis of readings of figures such as
Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, and Foucault, many relativist postmodernists
and antitheory theorists appear to be attracted to this chaotic view, as are many
nonoptimistic positivists as well.
The figures who became most famous by inspiring others to hold a simple
chaotic view of history tended themselves, however, to adopt a complex chaotic
position, one that eschews relativism, as well as nihilism and positivism, and that
adds the wrinkle of stressing that there are key eras, or compartments of life, in
which it is important to appreciate that very significant “developments” of
various overlooked kinds can be, and should be, uncovered. These developments
also involve decline, as in the “death” as well as “birth” of “tragedy,” or the
“event” of “presence” as well as of “being,” or the rise of “the clinic” as well as
of “the care of the self,” followed by a “pandemonium” of consequences. These
processes are thus taken to be limited stages that have no absolutely lasting
trajectory and still fail to show that human life as a whole is heading in a
particular direction with an increasingly positive (or clearly negative) value.
(p.52) 3.5. Romanticism Contra Circular, Linear, and Chaotic Views

Against the background of this characterization of the three traditional options,
it can be argued that the romantic view of history as universal progressive
Page 5 of 21
poetry offers an ideal combination of what is best in each of the three other
views. First, as universal, the romantic view picks up on the attractive broad
scope of the circular view, which consists in being especially open to regarding
the significance of human life as not limited to the circumstance of belonging to
any particular slice of space or time; wherever and whenever ordinary human
beings live, they all can participate in what is said to make life most meaningful.
This positive feature of open scope contrasts with both the linear view, which
can make life’s meaning appear to be largely an unfair accident of being exposed
to a particular limited tradition (salvation through local revelation, or a fully
secular but late-blossoming process), and also with the chaotic view, which, at
best, is either relativism or typically limited to an episodic and elitist view of
meaning. In contrast to the circular view, however, the romantic view has the
further, distinctively historical advantage that for it the universal significance of
human life is neither—as on the complex circular view—dependent on a highly
questionable teleology rooted in speculative logic, nor—as on the simple circular
view—regarded as a brute feature of nature’s recurrent patterns that has
nothing essentially to do with what is special about human history as a very
broadly extended project.
Second, as progressive, the romantic view picks up on the attractive optimistic

feature of the linear view, for it implies that not only is life meaningful, but it can
also become increasingly meaningful in a fundamental way through the efforts of
succeeding generations that connect with and retrospectively enhance the
efforts of the past. This positive feature of dynamic value contrasts both with the
circular view, which sees nothing essentially new in human life, and again with
the chaotic view, which is sensitive to novelty but does not have a highly positive
view of life as such. In contrast to the linear view, however, the romantic view
can have the further, distinctively historical advantage of thinking neither, in a
familiar simple way (as in crude versions of positivism), that history’s value is an
inevitable natural product of being given later bits of positive value to add on to
much inferior earlier life stages, nor, in a traditional complex way, that its value
depends on the millenarianism of a unique, and evidently supernaturally
arranged, final phase.
Third, as poetry, the romantic view, with its insistence on an open and unclear
future, picks up on the attractive methodological feature of the chaotic view, its
critical attitude in regard to straightforward traditional claims about a fully
established teleological structure to human life. The romantic view’s positive (p.
53) feature of a stress on humanity’s absolutely free16 capacity for creating
highly imaginative initiatives contrasts with the circular view, which overlooks
the value of this capacity, as well as with the linear view, which ultimately
understands progress in terms of externally generated and clearly conclusive
forms of satisfaction and thus discounts the growing uncertainties of late
modernity. That is, both the simple and complex versions of the linear view
neglect the special value of humanity’s ongoing struggle of unsure and
Page 6 of 21
unorthodox efforts toward inclusive continuity in a decentered world that is

increasingly secular and splintered but not merely scientific. Finally, in contrast
with the chaotic view, the romantic view has the distinctively historical
advantage of holding that each generation can introduce new layers of deep
genuine meaning, and that this meaning is part of a significant successive
structure in human existence as a whole, albeit a whole that has no
determinable final phase or even a guarantee of “approximation.”
3.6. Romanticism as Distinctively Positive

This triadic comparative outline of the possible overall superiority of the
romantic view has admittedly been presented in a very abbreviated way and
with many controversial presumptions; it is meant more as an initial sketch of a
new “system program” than as a direct argument. No doubt there may be more
sophisticated versions of the three other theories, and one might also worry, as
many have, that the romantic view has serious shortcomings of its own. One
might argue, for example, that the values that the view appeals to are not
genuine or fundamental. Or one might claim that even if the view could meet
these challenges, it still could be true that its values are not most appropriate
for understanding our actual history and may not even be realizable. That is,
even if the romantic approach turns out to be one that introduces appealing
prospects for an understanding of history’s distinctive value, especially given
our late modern sensibilities, it still could be true that all that we have evidence
for is a much more modest conception of how history proceeds, something closer
to the ever more popular chaotic view.
If this last problem is the only one that remains, however, then the romantics
could still at least deserve credit for having articulated a unique and relevantly
challenging positive conception of our historical situation, even if it may seem
overly optimistic to most secular intellectuals in our era. As Immanuel Kant and
William James argued, and as many contemporary antifoundationalists have
noted,17 there are important situations in which agents should not limit their
options to what is present in the form of evidence, for such a limitation can
undercut not only itself (since it is hardly clear that foundationalism’s own (p.
54) ground, as a principle, is evident) but also the unrefuted possibility of
achieving very significant goals. Moreover, because the romantics typically
present their work—and especially their philosophy of history—in various
“poetic” forms, it is clear from the start that they understand the argumentative
uncertainty of any global view. In particular, they see the need to present any
general position on history not as a demonstrated assertion but as an
imperative, a call to other free individuals to join with them in seeking to make
humanity’s future, despite its dim record and prospects, a process that is “in the
state of becoming ever more universal and progressive.”18
Page 7 of 21
3.7. Contra Misconceptions of Romanticism

A different kind of worry that one can have about this presentation of the
romantic view is that it still is not clear how well it fits what the romantics
actually hold. To meet this worry it is impossible to provide a survey here of the
entire romantic movement or even an in-depth study of one of its parts. For the
most part, however, I take myself to be working in concert with a reading of the
romantics that—even though it conflicts with stereotypes still present in many
philosophical quarters—is largely meant to reflect ideas that by now are
common currency in mainline literary interpretations.19 My aim is simply to
supplement these outstanding interpretations by articulating in the most general
philosophical terms how a specific romantic strand of thought in a creative
writer such as Hölderlin can help to illumine a new and significant position on
one of philosophy’s most difficult issues—namely, what, if anything, is the special
relation between writing of philosophical significance, especially in our late
modern era, and history as such, especially given what appears to be the recent
wandering shape of our historical path.
First, however, it is still necessary, in a general philosophical context, to spell out

some of the “common currency” of recent scholarship in order to ward off
preconceptions that continue to obstruct a full appreciation of the romantic
achievement. There is, for example, considerable confusion caused by the fact
that a movement called romanticism continued in many other countries and in
many other fields into the later nineteenth century, and that many examples of
this movement, including the (very different) later writing of key figures such as
Friedrich Schlegel, came be to be associated with reactionary doctrines and
chaotic subjectivism.
An instructive, unfortunate, and very influential effect of this peculiar

development is the fact that Nietzsche often speaks of “romanticism” as if it
were just a matter of the style of this late phase and always a sign of decadence.
It is important to realize that for the most part Nietzsche has later romantics (p.
55) and not the Early Jena circle in mind. He mysteriously never even deigns to
refer to Friedrich Schlegel, despite the fact that he himself studied for a while in
Bonn (where Schlegel’s illustrious brother August taught) and surely must have
known of Schlegel’s highly original early writings on the special value of “pre-
Socratic” Greek culture and of a deeply historical approach to philosophy and
writing in general.20 The main points in these early writings are in fact so close
to Nietzsche’s own early work on history, the Greeks, and philosophical
methodology that one is forced to hypothesize special repressive forces at work
in Nietzsche’s lack of reference to them, forces like those that may still be at
work today, keeping many readers from taking a direct and open-minded look at
the romantics. In particular, the later association of Schlegel with Catholicism
and related supposedly nonrigorous developments in philology probably play a
large role here. This development is a reminder of the fact that, just as with the
reception of Nietzsche’s own work, once the suggestion arises that a position
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manifests reactionary thought or willful subjectivism, it is very difficult to

remove the damage, no matter how unfair the accusation.
Similar points can be made about the influential tendency of strands of

Hegelianism that continue Hegel’s own vigorous campaign against romantic
writings, as if they must be tantamount to the espousal of social chaos and evil
itself. Here too, in the work of Hegel and his early followers, lingering insecure
worries in Protestant Germany about a new Counter-Reformation may continue
to play a significant role. Despite their prevalence, such concerns are especially
out of place for the main German romantic writings around the turn of the
century, and they certainly should not be directed at the work of figures such as
Hölderlin, or the early work of Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, which
constantly flirts with Spinozism and explicitly distances itself from Catholic and
Protestant orthodoxy.
3.8. Romanticism and Religion

There is a need to dwell on this issue because in the writings that define the
central era of romanticism, just as in practically all radical German thought
before the post-Hegelian period, some form of intense religious considerations
do in fact play a central role. Here it is important to keep in mind that the term
“religion” has a variety of very different senses, and in the context of advanced
German thought in this era it usually has a very general and nonsectarian
meaning. Thinkers in this group are generally very sympathetic with, rather than
opposed to, the Enlightenment, although they are opposed to various
mechanistic positions associated with the term “Enlightenment.” The general
tendency of the best-known Enlightenment movements in German-speaking
countries, (p.56) including Austria (consider Mozart as well as the early
Reinhold), is to focus on reforming religion rather than (as in the radical French
Enlightenment) destroying it. Philosophically, “religion” has a broad cosmic
meaning here, and basically it just signifies an absolutely serious emotional as
well as intellectual concern with life as a whole, in the broadest sense.21 It is
precisely in the name of religion itself that radical strands of thought—in figures
such as Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and others—make reactionary
religious institutions, determined by rigid authoritarian traditions, an object of
attack rather than a model to follow. Hence, to appreciate writers such as
Hölderlin in particular, in an honest and philosophical way, a typical
contemporary reader with a highly secular orientation needs to bracket allergic
reactions to the very notion of religion. One needs to be patient enough to see
that concepts used in the context of explaining transitions that are often
referred to in explicitly religious terms can also be employed in a broader way to
help make sense of the general notion of a universally progressive sequence of
historical and philosophical transitions. This point will be crucial in
understanding the general significance of works such as Hölderlin’s
Friedensfeier (see below, section 12).
Page 9 of 21
Precisely because it is explicitly universal and progressive, romanticism places a

special emphasis on paying attention to all of our past—a past that in fact is
largely a common religious heritage.22 This special openness to the past,
however, leads to another common charge against romanticism that needs to be
countered, namely, that it is basically nostalgic and aims primarily to return to,
or simply imitate, bygone eras rather than to face the challenge of living within
the apparently irreversible structures of modern life. It is understandable that
such charges arise, but they miss the special depth and complexity of the
romantic revolution, and its realization that the best way to move forward
effectively can lie in an innovative appropriation of the most powerful—because
longest enduring—forces in our past.
Because of the earlier pathbreaking work of figures such as Rousseau and

Herder, the romantics generally assume, without belaboring the point, that one
need not think of prior stages in human history as normatively primitive simply
because they are earlier. They also realize that one need not think—despite what
naive successors of Herder believe—that therefore all stages are on a par, let
alone what naive successors of Rousseau believe—that humanity’s first stages
are more pure, and even better, merely because of being earlier. The definitive
romantic attitude is neither relativism nor primitivism but instead a realization
that precisely those who are concerned with our universal progress as historical
beings need to be open to taking a fresh look not only at the full spatial extent of
the human race but also at its roots, its full temporal extent (hence, for example,
Schlegel’s early intensive study of Sanskrit). It is a basic romantic insight that it
is only through appreciating how thoroughly the great works of the past have
(p.57) shaped us, that later writers, as “exemplary” successors of that past,23
can create the most effective means for moving beyond imitation and toward
engendering a related but significantly new culture for the future.
3.9. The Problem of Succession

For highly gifted creative writers such as the romantics, this perspective is
relatively easy to arrive at because, like all great literary minds, they appreciate
the importance of ancient classical models, including scriptural writings. They
feel the full “burden of the past,” that is, the need constantly to read anew and
incorporate the true “spirit” of the best earlier writers so that one then has
enough strength to become an original successor, a model to inspire future
geniuses.24 This orientation toward the past can, of course, appear suspect to
philosophers still locked into the typical premise of the early modern era (that
continues into Kant’s work), namely, that philosophy is basically like exact
science and should build simply on the most recent findings of contemporary
thought without having to be sensitive to much earlier stages—just as it is
possible, for example, to learn modern geometry adequately without the labor of
going through Euclid’s work. This defining presumption of early modern
philosophy has had a long run, from Descartes and then through Kantianism and
the positivists of the mid-twentieth century, but now, just as in the romantic era,
Page 10 of 21
its presuppositions are being seriously questioned by all kinds of more

historically sensitive philosophers. Although it is true that some types of
philosophical discussion can be fruitfully carried out without direct reference to
writers from another era, the fact is that, outside of purely formal subareas,
most of the most interesting work in contemporary philosophy has for some time
been developed by figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Bernard
Williams, Richard Rorty, Michael Friedman, and Robert Brandom, as well as
many others in the field of ethics alone (e.g., Rawls, MacIntyre, Schneewind,
Darwall, Irwin) who have continued to carry out what can be called the
phenomenon of the “historical turn.”25
The original form of this turn has its origins in the mid-1780s, an era dominated
by the conflicting accounts offered by Herder, Reinhold, and Jacobi of the
interlocking trajectories of modern religion, science, and philosophy (after Kant,
Hume, and Spinoza), and then the reaction to these accounts by the young
seminarians of Tübingen—Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling—in their movement
toward a “system program” that would combine a “new physics” and “new
mythology” in an at once universal, progressive, and aesthetic philosophy of the
future. The main immediate complication in this era, from Reinhold through
Hegel, is the still influential thought that any philosophy that is genuinely
modern has to be thoroughly systematic and scientific in a sense that can (p.58)
supposedly correspond to and even outdo the power of the new mathematical
sciences.26 Only when the dominance of this presumption finally declines,
toward the end of the eighteenth century, and an alternative is sought for the
overambitious thought of making philosophy absolutely certain and systematic in
a quasi-mathematical sense,27 is the way cleared for the new antifoundationalist
conception of philosophy that the romantics embrace. On this conception,
philosophical writing is not antithetical to science, but it is liberated to be
distinctive by being historically argumentative in form, and thereby largely
interpretative and even poetic in a broad sense—although precisely not as a
matter of mere “artistic” expression or amusement.
3.10. Hölderlin’s Exemplary Romanticism

If, in the late modern age, after the ambiguous legacy of Kant’s Critical system
and the French Revolution, philosophy in general, as well as philosophy of
history in particular, can no longer convincingly ground or simply model itself on
natural science, how then can it best approach the phenomenon of development
in humanity’s basic ideas of itself? The most interesting reaction to this problem
is, I believe, to be found in Hölderlin’s writings, which are obsessed with the
phenomenon of historical transmission in culture. In Friedensfeier Hölderlin
introduces the thought that human beings are fundamentally participants in a
successive “Gespräch” that is broadly philosophical and political as well as
religious, and that involves loss through reflection as well as sustenance through
common experiences of mourning and celebration. He sees that the core
problem here, not only of philosophy of history but also of the distinctive nature
Page 11 of 21
of late modern writing and philosophy in general, has become a matter of

understanding the broadly argumentative successor relation between truly
exemplary writers—writers who introduce epoch-changing philosophical notions
that cannot be literally imitated in the precise way that defines the work of exact
scientists.
Hölderlin formulates his response to this problem in exceptionally dense letters

and prose reflections on the nature of writing and the course of modern
philosophy, as well as, most influentially, in numerous haunting poems with titles
such as Dichterberuf (The Poet’s Vocation) and Dichtermuth (The Poet’s
Courage). In its broadest terms, for anyone in Hölderlin’s general spatial and
temporal position the problem of writing historically can be nothing other than
the problem of making sense of, and courageously confronting, the upcoming
second major transition in “our” civilization. This transition is defined by a
movement that goes not, as before, from a universe of declining imperial pagan
culture to an era of nearly universal Christian culture, but from a modern (p.59)
universe of regionally divided exclusivist versions of the Abrahamic religions to
a late modern multicultural era, one in which no truly contemporary society can
assume the absolute dominance of any single form of religion, and thus the very
notion of a unified society is replaced by the pluralistic but not necessarily
chaotic thought of an “age in need.”28
It is in this spirit that Hölderlin writes to Schelling in 1799 and speaks of a

broadly religious29 “free demand for reciprocal effectiveness and harmonious
alternation,” and the need for a “humanistic journal” that “would be practically
poetic, then again also historically and philosophically instructive about poetry,
finally historically and philosophically instructive from the viewpoint of
humanity.”30 Note the systematic progression here in Hölderlin’s desperate call
(after he had been separated from his lover and was facing poverty, although he
had already written the novel Hyperion, the tragedy Empedocles, and many
significant poems) to his seminary friend for collaboration in instituting this new
forum, one that would move from a seemingly merely aesthetic concern (poetry)
to a philosophical (i.e., universal) concern with history, and then finally to a use
of this concern for the (progressive) sake of humanity. It is as if Hölderlin cannot
keep himself from explicitly reiterating the central conceptual structure of
romanticism that surfaces in the three key terms of Schlegel’s fragment no. 116.
At this time Hölderlin is on the verge of his greatest odes and hymns, although
unfortunately the prose record of his line of thought quickly becomes more and
more fragmentary. Its fundamentally cosmopolitan and inclusive direction
continues to reveal itself, however, in compressed form in documents such as a
letter to Böhlendorff, in which Hölderlin discusses his interest in Greece and
France and states that “in the progress of education (Bildung) the truly national
[the gifts of just one people or sect] will become the ever less attractive.”31
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3.11. Hölderlin’s Predecessors

One surprising but highly relevant model for beginning to think about major
transitions of this magnitude can be found in the extraordinary achievement of
Milton’s work. As recent research has shown, Milton had a considerable and
long-hidden effect on Kant’s thought and, at least indirectly, a significant
relation to Hölderlin’s as well.32 By harmoniously appropriating pagan as well as
biblical motifs, Milton’s major writings seek to accomplish for the early modern
Protestant realm what Dante’s Divine Comedy aims to provide for the medieval
Catholic world,33 namely, the impression that Christianity has a relevant
integrating significance for the whole course of history, that is, even before the
church was founded and into all of the future. On these points there are, (p.60)
as Michael Hamburger pointed out years ago, many striking direct parallels
between Milton and Hölderlin, such as the fact that the young Hölderlin aims to
unite nonscriptural and scriptural traditions by writing on both Hesiod and the
book of Proverbs, as well as (even more directly like Milton) on both Pindar and
the book of Revelation.34 These parallel interests are consistent with deep
differences in content, of course, given the contrast in eras. Milton is still
committed to a militant form of early modern religion, and it is no surprise that
he invokes Samson as a relevant hero, whereas Hölderlin, as a late modern, feels
a need to dwell on Empedocles (perhaps in part as a warning about the Jena
attitude of Fichte) and philosophy, and to worry about how increasingly
sophisticated abstract thought can lead to cultural dead ends. Instead of
pursuing these parallels further, I will conclude by simply drawing attention to
how one can use Schlegel’s tripartite definition of romanticism to begin to
understand works such as Hölderlin’s Friedensfeier as figuratively addressing
precisely the same kind of general philosophical-historical problem that works
such as Milton’s pose—namely, how, in the face of the enormous historical
diversity of modern culture in general, to proceed as a contemporary exemplary
writer who feels the need to unify and reform society by being all at once
intensely philosophical (universal), political (progressive), and broadly religious
(poetic).
3.12. Peaceful Procession

Hölderlin’s response to this challenge is to compose, on the eve of the hope of a
lasting European peace in his own embattled age, a hymn to a spirit, or more
precisely a procession of spirits, that may make possible true peace in general.
His Friedensfeier (1801) goes far beyond even Kant’s extraordinary vision (1795)
of an eventual instauration of “perpetual peace” through a complex reform of
international political structures, for Hölderlin (here and in related works such
as Brod und Wein, Patmos, and Andenken [Remembrance]) goes so far as to
display a way to tie together the whole sequence of pre-Christian gods, the era
of original Christianity, and the spirit of modernity and the ages to come. His key
strategy—similar to what Novalis, Schleiermacher, and others close to the Jena
group also propose—is to move religious and philosophical thinking away from
an insistence on celebrating (“naming”) only one system, or divinity, and toward
Page 13 of 21
a sensitivity for the multiplicity of connected forms that the “spirit” of true peace
appears to take as history proceeds. This pluralism is not a regression to
paganism or relativism but an attempt to enlarge the mainstream heritage of
Hölderlin’s own tradition, that is, to regard the spirit of Christianity as a fruitful
outgrowth of an ancient Greek setting with similar concerns (for example, in
aspects of the Dionysus cult), and as something that can be replanted in new
settings, albeit with increasing difficulty, in later ages.
(p.61) The key to identifying the “prince” of peace, that is, the figure awaited
and celebrated throughout the poem, is to avoid the exclusivist fallacy of
hypothesizing that it is simply Napolean, Jupiter, Jesus, the poet himself, or some
other particular figure such as Dionysus or Heracles. Instead, as Peter Szondi
has pointed out, one should note that Hölderlin uses a long sequence of varied
holy names, names that are not singular but rather descriptive of different
aspects of what we know as best in “spirit.”35 It thus can be argued that it is the
very succession of names, and naming processes, that is the subject of the
“celebration” of peace, and that Hölderlin’s own poem is intended, like the
multiple scriptures of old, to be but one stage in this process—and a reminder of
the importance of maintaining this kind of process as such.36 The poem
celebrates:
Der Allversammelnde, wo Himmlische nicht

Im Wunder offenbar, noch ungesehn im Wetter,
Wo aber bei Gesang gastfreundlich untereinander
In Chören gegenwärtig, eine heilige Zahl
Die Seeligen in jeglicher Weise
Beisammen sind.37
For Hölderlin, spirit dwells now neither in a pagan “thunderstorm” age (of mere
naturalism), nor in an orthodox “miracle” age (of mere supernaturalism),38 but
in a late modern age of “hymns” and gatherings for a struggling movement
toward universal progressivism. “All” are to be assembled in a celebrative
process in which they understand themselves as being “present” together
through writings that literally re-collect the past and help forge a “blessed”
future in a creatively extended tradition.
It is up to theologians to debate whether Hölderlin is a genuinely theological

writer, and if so, whether he is a heretic or a permissible member of their union.
Without getting into these issues, a historian of philosophy can propose that
Hölderlin’s work can be read not only as a serious attempt at an all-inclusive
kind of creative religious writing—like Milton’s and Dante’s—but also as an
exhibition of a general manner of thinking that is exemplary specifically for late
modern philosophy. His work provides a figurative model, in form as well as
content, for fusing transitions that bridge massively different conceptual
frameworks by providing an overall narrative with implicit argumentative
connections that lead from the distant past into the indefinite future. The key
Page 14 of 21
idea in Friedensfeier, that we need to see ourselves as an ongoing historical

“Gespräch,” is the guiding “form” for Hölderlin’s thought as a whole, just as it
implicitly is, in a detailed argumentative mode, for all works of productive
philosophical retrieval in late modern philosophy’s “historical turn”—such as in
MacIntyre’s turn to Aristotle, or Rawls’s turn to Kant. This idea is reiterated as
an organizing theme in Hölderlin’s many tributes to cities, rivers, and heroes as
sources of (p.62) our culture, and in his reference, for example, to the need to
construct “lightly built bridges” in Patmos, or to show how “that which happened
before, but hardly was felt / Only now is manifest” in...As on a Holiday. The
guiding “content” of Hölderlin’s work—which can also be found in late modern
philosophies such as MacIntyre’s and Rawls’s, whatever their other differences
—is the related thought that the very fulfillment of human nature (its
“Bestimmung” or “Beruf”) consists in an ongoing “homecoming,” one wherein,
from now on, our entire past should become a legacy increasingly “felt” in
progressive forms of “holy” or celebrative activity that can be shared universally
in a pluralistic future that is always “becoming.” (Hegel’s Phenomenology, read
in a spirit of “nonclosure,” can also be seen as in this sense a vibrant
philosophical successor of Hölderlin’s project—but it is not the only one.)
My own historical hypothesis is that Hölderlin was at least subliminally

influenced in Friedensfeier by a sequence of three scriptural passages that, as a
rigorously trained seminarian, he must have known are treated by Lutherans as
a triad highly relevant to the implications of understanding spiritual succession
after Pentecost, namely, Numbers 11: 4–6, 10–16, 24–29, Mark 9: 30, and James
5: 13–20.39 This scriptural sequence is instructive, quite apart from whatever
one’s theological views may be, because it shows how one can even draw on
some aspects of orthodox traditions in order to introduce the general notion of a
universally progressive and poetic, that is to say, creatively open, extension of a
tradition—precisely the point that is given shape (either as conceived literally as
an effect of “the spirit,” or just as promoting a strikingly similar message) in
works such as Friedensfeier. The hypothesis that Hölderlin’s work is motivated
by the general point of such scriptural passages, which dramatically encourage
openness to outsiders, is supported by his constant concern with providing
reminders of biblical motifs and preserving holy words, as well as the fact that,
in contexts quite apart from religion, he repeatedly focuses on the issue of a
procession of genial figures who inspire us with the task of encouraging new
“prophets,” ones who come from “outside the tent.” Hölderlin’s series of striking
poetic portraits of (relatively) nonreligious figures clearly has as its aim to
remind us that our late modern culture must develop itself through redefining its
philosophical relation to earlier innovative outsiders such as Empedocles,
Kepler, and Rousseau.40 Just as these revolutionary figures struggled to seek
successors for their work, so our own age is being reminded by Hölderlin of the
need to redefine itself by generating true successors of his own work, with new
conceptual frameworks that can be exemplary for the future.
Page 15 of 21
Hölderlin’s reminder has had a delayed but considerable effect, especially at a

literary level, in the work of Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and many others. It
remains true, however, that, unlike his contemporaries Reinhold, Schlegel, (p.
63) Hegel, and Schelling,41 Hölderlin does not provide an extended prose
narrative that fills out, in a broadly logical way, exactly how the spirit of
universal progressivism has passed from the key philosophical conceptions of
one paradigmatic perspective on to another. But he certainly leaves enough hints
for more prosaic minds to continue trying to spell out the implicit argumentative
details of his distinctive romantic understanding of “our” “Gespräch,” and its
procession of diverse writers creatively tending the “firm letter”42 of many
overlapping traditions.
Notes:
(1) . Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 116, in Philosophical
Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 31–32, a volume put together in Jena in 1798 as an act of “sym-
philosophy” by Schlegel and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). Italics added.
(2) . By “romanticism” I mean the period of early German romanticism that

blossomed primarily in Jena in the late 1790s, although this includes authors
associated with “classicism” and “idealism.”
(3) . See my Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Appropriation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
(4) . This classification contrasts somewhat with Kant’s distinction of three views
(“progressing,” “regressing,” and “standstill”) on the question of whether
“humankind is continually improving,” in The Contest of the Faculties (1798) (AA
8, 81).
(5) . This pattern is also treated by the romantics as an “eccentric path,” and as
highly relevant to individual life as well as history as a whole. See Charles
Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German
Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 141–
60. It is well known that the value of focusing on elliptical patterns was an
important astronomical insight of Johannes Kepler’s, but it is sometimes
forgotten how Kepler’s general courage to “think outside the box” in this
literally eccentric way made him a hero in Germany on a level with Copernicus
and Galileo. Kant compared his own work to Kepler’s breakthrough (AA 8, 18),
and Hölderlin, who, like Kepler, studied in Tübingen, wrote a noteworthy early
Page 16 of 21
poem in praise of the astronomer’s daring. For further philosophical implications

of the notion, see my Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012).
(6) . See the contrast between “Laurasian” and “Gondwana” mythologies in E. J.

Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (Oxford: Oxford
(7) . See e.g., René Girard, “A Christian conversion is never circular. It never
returns to its point of origin. It is open-ended.” “Conversion in Christianity and
Literature” (1988), in Mimesis & Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism,
1953–2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 266.
(8) . Hence the title of Robert Brandom’s neo-Hegelian volume, Making It

Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
(9) . There are, of course, more pragmatic readings of Hegel, especially by

contemporary interpreters such as Robert B. Pippin and Terry Pinkard.
Nonetheless, the schoolbook, or “end of history,” reading that I am invoking here
has had a huge influence.
(10) . The peculiarity of including a consideration of history in Hegel’s system of

philosophy as a science is noted in Eckart Förster, Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie:
Eine systematische Rekonstruktion (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2011),
chap. 12, “Hat die Philosophie eine Geschichte?”
(11) . In its original meaning “development” (Entwicklung) can signify mere

conceptual elucidation, as in the context of analytic judgments. See Kant, Jäsche
Logic (AA 9, 111 n.).
(12) . Here “natural” means explicable entirely by natural science in a strict

sense. The image of “cradling” (“uns wiegen lassen”), albeit with a somewhat
different sense, comes from Hölderlin’s poem Mnemosyne, discussed in Alice
Kuzniar, Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1987), 133.
(13) . For an enlightening recent Jewish interpretation of this tradition, see

Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge
(14) . Among the German idealists, broadly speaking, it is Kant who holds on
most firmly to this libertarian aspect of traditional religion. On divine
concurrence in his notion of the highest good, see e.g., notes from the lectures,
“Ethic Herder” (AA 27, 16). Among the romantics, Hölderlin most fully
appreciates this aspect of Kant’s doctrine of freedom. See his “On the Law of
Freedom” (1794) in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, ed.
Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 33f., and his
Page 17 of 21
letter to his brother, April 13, 1795, “what is most indispensable here is certainly
freedom of the will,” Essays and Letters, 127–28. Hölderlin also follows Kant,
who follows Rousseau, in attributing contemporary evil primarily to our giving in
to the inherited trappings of luxury and modern culture: “that which was the
general reason for the decline of all peoples, namely that their originality, their
own living nature succumbed to the positive forms, to the luxury which their
fathers had produced, that seems to be our fate as well, only on a larger scale—”
in “The Perspective from Which We Have to Look at Antiquity” (1799), Essays
and Letters, 39.
(15) . One can also add, of course, an account in which our future is taken to be
basically negative rather than positive (see above, note 4), but that is also a kind
of “progression.”
(16) . On Hölderlin’s grasp of Kant’s libertarian notion of absolute free choice,

see above, note 14. See also Hölderlin’s letter to Niethammer, February 24,
1796, “Philosophy is once again my almost exclusive occupation. I have taken
Kant and Reinhold and hope to collect and strengthen my spirit in this
element” (Essays and Letters, 131); and his letter to his brother, January 1,
1799, “Kant is the Moses of our nation who leads it out of Egyptian apathy into
the free, solitary desert [of the moral law]” (Essays and Letters, 137).
(17) . See Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
(18) . Cf. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political
Theology (New York: Verso, 2012), 251: “what is rather being called for is a
rigorous and activistic conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each
instant without guarantee or security.”
(19) . In this essay, I directly invoke classic studies by Peter Szondi, Ernst Behler,
Michael Hamburger, Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Charles Larmore, and Alice
Kuzniar; more recently I have also been influenced by Frederick Beiser, Richard
Eldridge, Karsten Harries, Jane Kneller, Elizabeth Millán, Fred Rush, and Eric
Santner. I am also indebted to very helpful comments by the editor of this
volume.
(20) . As is recounted in Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), August Wilhelm Schlegel
helped to make Friedrich’s early views on this topic very well known throughout
Germany.
(21) . See above note 18, and Simon Critchley’s recent effort to recapture “for
the left” a similar broad and somewhat romantic conception of religion for a
secular generation.
Page 18 of 21
(22) . See e.g., Reinhart Koselleck, “The Status of the Enlightenment in German
History,” in The Cultural Values of Europe, ed. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 253–64.
(23) . These terms come from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (§ 49);
their relevance to romanticism and contemporary philosophy in general is
discussed in my Kant’s Elliptical Path, chap. 15.
(24) . See Sanford Budick, Kant and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), which picks up on themes first emphasized in W. Jackson Bate, The
Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1970), and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford
(25) . See above, note 3.
(27) . This a point that Manfred Frank and others have documented in the wake
of the results of Dieter Henrich’s massive Jena research project. Manfred Frank
recounts this work in his contribution to this volume, chapter 1 above.
(28) . “in dürftiger Zeit,” from Brod und Wein.
(29) . See Hölderlin, “On Religion” (1797), which speaks of a “more than
mechanical interrelation, a higher destiny,” Essays and Letters, 90.
(30) . Hölderlin to Schelling, July 1799, in Essays and Letters, 146.
(31) . Hölderlin to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, December 4, 1801, in Essays and

Letters, 149.
(32) . Budick’s Kant and Milton (see above, notes 23 and 24) demonstrates the
many ways in which Kant’s philosophy is an attempt to thematize the problem of
succession as it occurs in Milton’s work. One can also argue that Kant’s own
work, and his theory of genius in particular, is meant to exemplify an
achievement of succession that can serve as a kind of model for later truly genial
philosophical writers—a challenge that the romantics immediately took up. See
my Kant’s Elliptical Path, chap. 13, “On the Extension of Kant’s Elliptical Path in
Hölderlin and Novalis.”
(33) . Cf. Schlegel’s explicit characterization of romanticism (which enlists

Goethe in the movement) as an attempt to succeed the giants of previous ages,
Dante and Milton: “The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be more
poetic; but the German Satan is more satanic; and to that extent one might say
that Satan is a German invention.” Athenaeum Fragments, no. 379, 77.
Understanding well his role as a major successor, it is no accident that Milton
Page 19 of 21
traveled to Dante’s and Galileo’s region of Italy—and that Dante earlier, in

cantos 26 of the Inferno and Purgatorio, links himself to Virgil and Homer’s
Odysseus.
(34) . Michael Hamburger, “The Sublime Art: Notes on Milton and Hölderlin,” in
Contraries: Studies in German Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 46.
(35) . Peter Szondi, Schriften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 332–33,

notes at least ten different designations in the poem: “Jüngling,” “dem
Donnerer,” “der Alllebendige,” “der Vater,” “Geist der Welt,” “Herrn der Zeit,”
“ein Gott [anders als Sterbliche]”, “der Meister,” “der stille Gott der Zeit,” and
“Fürst des Festes.”
(36) . In this way the poem can be read as a “Gottesdienst,” a literary substitute
for the career of an orthodox minister that Hölderlin felt he could not assume
within the establishment of his time.
(37) . “The all assembling, where heavenly beings are / Not manifest in miracles,
nor unseen in thunderstorms, / But where in hymns hospitably conjoined / And
present in choirs, a holy number, / The blessed in every way / Meet and
forgather.” Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael
Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1998), 215.
(38) . Given his close reading of Kant, it may be no accident that Hölderlin’s
conceptual contrast of these two inadequate options (“thunderstorms,”
“miracle”) echoes the contrast Kant draws between the two inadequate options
of “being veiled in obscurity” (in Dunkelheiten verhüllt) and “being in the
transcendent region” (im Überschwänglichen), and the fortunate alternative
(“present”) of what “I see before me” (ich sehe—vor mir); see the conclusion of
the Critique of Practical Reason, the sentence directly after Kant’s most famous
phrase, concerning the “starry heavens” and “the moral law” (AA 5, 161–62).
(39) . The book of Numbers speaks of seventy elders who, “when the spirit
rested upon them—prophesied. But they did not do so again.” At this point, when
two others “outside the tent,” Eldad and Medad, start prophesizing and one of
Moses’s own chosen assistants, Joshua, pleads for Moses to stop them, Moses’s
reply is: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were
prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” This point is taken to
be repeated and amplified in Mark. Here, after John says to Jesus, “Teacher, we
saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him,
because he was not following us,” the reply of Jesus is, “Do not stop him—
whoever is not against us is for us.” The general idea then appears again, in
James, which stresses that “whoever brings back a sinner from wandering—will
cover a multitude of sins.” New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha,
Page 20 of 21
Augsburg Fortress Press, 1992. It is striking that the passage from Mark is cited
in Kant’s Religion (AA 6, 84).
(41) . For a discussion of Schelling’s views on history as a version of the

romantic tradition, see my “History, Idealism, and Schelling,” Internationales
Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism
10 (forthcoming).
(42) . “vesten Buchstab,” from Patmos. The mention of “tending” should not be
taken to imply a merely retrospective project. The writer’s vocation is to use the
“letter” to lead humanity into the “Gesang” of the future, that is, a kind of poetic
existence in general. (My thanks to Martin Sticker for a reminder of the
importance of this point.) For a complementary theological discussion of
Hölderlin’s significance, see Cyril O’Regan, “Aesthetic Idealism and its relation
to theological formation: reception and critique,” in The Impact of Idealism. The
Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 4: Religion, ed. Nicholas Adams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 142–66, which draws on Jean-
Luc Marion’s perceptive study of Hölderlin’s poetry in The Idol and Distance:
Five Studies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 298–338.
Page 21 of 21
Romanticism and Language

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Michael N. Forster
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0005

A common misconception about the German romantics, that they were
theoretical lightweights, confronts an especially powerful counterexample in the
case of their views about language. Building on their Herder’s revolutionary
views about language—especially, his principles that thought is essentially
dependent on and bounded by language, that meanings/concepts consist in
word-usages, and that thoughts, concepts, and language vary profoundly
between periods, cultures, and even individuals—the leading romantics
Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel made vitally important new contributions
to the philosophy of language, linguistics, hermeneutics, and translation theory.
Keywords: German romanticism, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, philosophy of language, linguistics,

hermeneutics, translation theory, meaning, holism
One of the commonest misconceptions about German romanticism is that it

lacked intellectual sophistication and rigor. The leading German Romantics were
in fact anything but theoretical lightweights. One area in which this can be
clearly seen is that of their views about language. In this article, I will try to
provide a survey of those views that conveys something of their seriousness and
depth. For reasons of space, I will focus on Friedrich Schlegel and
Schleiermacher, with only occasional remarks on other important figures (in
particular, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, a sort of fellow
traveler of romanticism).1
Page 1 of 25
4.1. Philosophy of Language

The German Romantics’ philosophy of language sensu stricto is largely
borrowed from and very similar to Herder’s, but with one important exception.
Friedrich Schlegel in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808) and
Schleiermacher in his psychology lectures (1818–34) both take over the specific
naturalistic theory of the origin of language that Herder had developed in his
Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) (though Schlegel restricts it to only
the most important of two broad types of languages that he distinguishes,
namely “organic” languages rather than “mechanical” ones, and gives an
alternative naturalistic account of the latter).2 Schleiermacher also takes over
from Herder such important theses as that language is fundamentally social in
nature and that language is not merely added on to the mental processes that
human beings share with animals but instead infuses all human mental
processes, (p.69) lending them a distinctive character (for example, structuring
human beings’ sensory images in distinctive ways).
More importantly, Schlegel and Schleiermacher both take over a certain

powerful theory about the nature of thought, meaning (or conceptualization),
and language that Herder had developed (especially in his Fragments on Recent
German Literature [1767–68]). His theory consisted of three main doctrines:
(1) Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded by, language—that

is, one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what
one can express linguistically.
(2) Meanings or concepts are not the sorts of things, in principle
autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition
has equated them, for example, the referents involved, Platonic forms, or
subjective mental “ideas,” but instead—usages of words.
(3) Conceptualization is essentially bound up with (perceptual and
affective) sensation. More precisely, Herder espoused a quasi-empiricist
theory of concepts according to which sensation is the source and basis
of all our concepts, though we are also able to achieve something like
nonempirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions of empirical
ones—so that all of our concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one
way or another.
Friedrich Schlegel adopted versions of doctrines (1) and (2). For example, as
early as 1798–99 he writes that “every spirit has its word, the two are
inseparable”;3 in the Cologne lectures on philosophy from 1804 to 1806 he
connects reason intimately with language,4 and states that “each concept must
be a word”;5 and he opens the Cologne lectures on German language and
literature from 1807 by saying that language is fundamental to all human
activities because “one cannot think without words.”6 Similarly, in the Lectures
on the History of Literature (delivered in 1812, published in 1815), he says:
“What is there more completely characteristic of man or of greater importance
Page 2 of 25
to him than language? Reason alone excepted, and even she must perforce
employ the vehicle of language...Reason and language, thought and word,
are...essentially one.”7 In addition, while it is less clear that Friedrich espoused a
version of doctrine (3), it is at least clear that his brother August Wilhelm did.
For example, August Wilhelm says that “the sense of words is determined
according to the intuitions which people are in the habit of associating with
them; so that we are in constant danger of ascribing to the words of the Greek
poets a quite different meaning than they had for them and their audience, even
when we understand them grammatically as exactly as you please.”8
(p.70) Schleiermacher espoused versions of the three doctrines as well. Thus,

concerning (1), in his hermeneutics lectures (1805–33) and elsewhere he from
an early period adopted a radical version of the doctrine that claimed an
outright identity between thought and language.9 And while some of the
secondary literature has claimed that he eventually gave up this position, we still
find him in his psychology lectures from 1830 speaking of “the activity of
thought in its identity with language.”10 Concerning (2), he too adopts a view of
meanings that equates them—not with such items as referents, Platonic forms,
or subjective mental “ideas”—but with word-usages, or rules of word use. For
example, in the hermeneutics lectures he says that “the...meaning of a term is to
be derived from the unity of the word-sphere and from the rules governing the
presupposition of this unity.”11 Finally, concerning (3), in his psychology lectures
he argues that although thought and conceptualization are not reducible to
sensuous images, the latter are an essential foundation for the former. Similarly,
in his late hermeneutics lectures and elsewhere he is strongly attracted to
Kant’s theory of empirical schemata, according to which empirical concepts
consist in unconscious rules for the generation of sensuous images, and he
attempts to turn this theory into an account of the nature of all concepts.
Schlegel and Schleiermacher could be accused of making Herder’s original

theory cruder in certain ways.12 However, they also achieve at least one very
important refinement of it. This is the introduction of a form of holism. Like most
of the Enlightenment before him, Herder had normally given the impression that
languages are merely aggregates of particular words/concepts. By contrast,
Schlegel in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians develops a much more
holistic conception of language that holds that such particular items are only
possible in the context of a larger linguistic whole—a conception he expresses by
characterizing languages as “organisms” or “systems.”13 In addition, he
identifies as the most fundamental unifying principle of such linguistic
“organisms” their grammar.
Following Schlegel’s lead, Schleiermacher likewise adopts a holistic conception

of linguistic meaning—especially in his dialectics lectures (1811–34) and in “On
the Different Methods of Translation” (1813).14 His holism has at least three
distinguishable components: (a) Like Schlegel, he holds that a language’s
Page 3 of 25
grammatical system (e.g., its system of declensions) is partly constitutive of the

character of the concepts that are expressed within it. (b) He also holds that the
nature of any particular concept is in part defined by its relations to a “system of
concepts.” In this connection, he emphasizes in the dialectics lectures a
concept’s relations as a species-concept to superordinate genus-concepts,
relations as a genus-concept to subordinate species-concepts, and relations of
contrast to coordinate species-concepts falling under the same genus-concepts.
(p.71) However, he would probably include other types of conceptual
relationships here as well (e.g., those between “to work,” “worker,” and “a
work”). (c) As can be seen from a passage already quoted, he also espouses a
doctrine of “the unity of the word-sphere.” This doctrine in effect says that the
various specific senses that a single word will typically bear, and which will be
distinguished by any good dictionary entry (e.g., the different senses of
“impression” in “He made an impression in the clay,” “My impression is that he
is reluctant,” and “He made a big impression at the party”), always form a larger
semantic unity to which they each essentially belong (so that any loss, addition,
or alteration among them would entail an alteration in each of them, albeit
perhaps a subtle one).15
4.2. Linguistics
Friedrich Schlegel essentially founded the modern discipline of linguistics,
namely in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians. He did so on the basis of
the central Herderian doctrines in the philosophy of language just discussed, in
particular doctrines (1) and (2), together with two additional Herderian
doctrines:
(4) Herder had argued that human beings exhibit profound differences in
their modes of thought, concepts, and language, especially between
different historical periods and cultures, but even to some extent between
individuals within a single period and culture.16
(5) In light of doctrines (1) and (2), he had also argued that investigating
the differences in the characters of people’s languages can, and should,
serve as a primary and reliable means for discovering the differences in
their modes of thought and concepts.17
Schlegel takes over this whole set of Herderian doctrines in On the Language
and Wisdom of the Indians. Concerning doctrines (1) and (2), we already saw
evidence of his commitment to these in both earlier and later works. Concerning
doctrine (4), he had already written in the Philosophy of Philology (1797) of “the
immeasurable difference..., the quite distinctive nature of antiquity,”18 and a
similar insight into sharp cognitive differences remains fundamental to On the
Language and Wisdom of the Indians. Concerning doctrine (5), this is the
implicit foundation of his procedure in that work of undertaking an investigation
of the Sanskrit language in the first part as a prelude to then exploring Indian
thought and conceptualization in subsequent parts. Indeed, doctrine (5)
Page 4 of 25
constitutes the most important motive for the new science of linguistics that (p.
72) he begins to develop in the work: it is supposed to provide a reliable
window on people’s varying modes of thought and conceptualization.19
Schlegel’s own holism concerning language, his conception that languages are
“organisms,” and in particular that their fundamental unifying principle is their
grammar, is also fundamental to his project of founding linguistics in On the
Language and Wisdom of the Indians.
Building on all these materials, he develops the new discipline in the work
roughly as follows:
(a) Whereas the early Herder of the Treatise on the Origin of Language
had implied at one point that grammar is inessential to language in its
more original and natural forms, merely being a product of the late
theoretical oversophistication of grammarians,20 and at another point
(rather inconsistently) that grammar is basically the same across all
languages (with the exception of Chinese),21 the later Herder of the Ideas
for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784–91) had argued that
languages differ dramatically in their grammatical structures: in addition
to exhibiting rich variety in other ways, “in the structure [Bau] of
language, in the relation, the ordering, and the agreement of the parts
with each other, it is almost immeasurable.”22 Schlegel rejects the early
Herder’s position but embraces this later position of Herder’s, himself
arguing that grammars differ deeply in their character from one language
to another, thereby constituting deep differences in particular words/
concepts as well (which may also differ for more superficial reasons).23
(b) Schlegel consequently identifies “comparative grammar” (an
expression/concept that he virtually coined in On the Language and
Wisdom of the Indians)24 as the primary task of an empirical investigation
of languages.
(c) Besides the fundamental motive mentioned above of providing a
reliable window on the different modes of thought and concepts that
occur, an additional important motive behind this project of comparative
grammar that Schlegel emphasizes lies in his conviction that it promises
to shed more light on the genealogical relations between languages than
merely lexical comparisons can.25
(d) Schlegel himself begins the task of actually comparing different
grammars in an empirically careful way. In doing so, he introduces the
following broad typology: a contrast between, on the one hand, “organic,”
or highly inflected, languages, of which Sanskrit is his paradigmatic
example, and on the other hand, “mechanical,” or (p.73) uninflected,
languages, of which Chinese is his main example.26 He also demonstrates
the genealogical relations between the various Sanskritic (or as we would
Page 5 of 25
now call them, Indo-European) languages with greater insight and

accuracy than had ever been achieved before.27
(e) In addition (but much more questionably), he draws from this
comparison of grammars certain normative conclusions about the relative
merits of different languages as instruments of thought—in particular,
arguing for the superiority of highly inflected languages such as Sanskrit
over uninflected languages such as Chinese. His case for the superiority
of the former over the latter mainly rests on a claim that inflected
languages have a privileged connection with “awareness” (Besonnenheit),
or rationality. This part of his position is much more dubious than the
preceding parts, however—both factually and ethically.28
Friedrich Schlegel’s groundbreaking work quickly inspired a great wave of

important further work based on the same principles. This wave included Bopp’s
On the Conjugation System of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with That of
the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic Languages (1816), which focused on the
Indo-European languages and their grammars;29 Friedrich’s brother August
Wilhelm’s Sanskrit studies, and Observations on Provençal Language and
Literature (1818), which focused on the Romance languages and their
grammars; and Jakob Grimm’s German Grammar (1819), which focused on the
Germanic languages and their grammars. Friedrich Schlegel’s principles also
soon inspired the general linguistics of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which Humboldt
mainly developed in a series of public addresses and unpublished manuscripts
that he wrote during the 1820s and in his crowning work On the Diversity of
Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of
Mankind (1836).30
4.3. Hermeneutics
Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher also made vitally important contributions
to the development of both hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, and
the theory of translation.
Their theories in these areas build on ones that had already been developed by
Herder. Most fundamentally, they build on Herder’s doctrines (1)–(4). Doctrine
(4) poses a profound challenge to both interpretation and translation, and the
main task of all the theories in question is to cope with this challenge. (p.74)
Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s theories also fundamentally presuppose their
own new insight into the holistic nature of linguistic meaning, which exacerbates
the sorts of cognitive differences involved in (4), and hence adds to the difficulty
of interpretation and translation.
Schlegel and Schleiermacher began to develop their new theories of

interpretation and translation during the late 1790s, a time when they lived and
worked together in Berlin, in particular conceiving the joint project of
translating and commenting on the works of Plato (a project that Schlegel
Page 6 of 25
eventually gave up, but which Schleiermacher largely completed). As a result it

is often difficult to say which of the two men deserves the credit for specific
contributions in these areas. Because Schleiermacher developed his theories of
interpretation and translation in much more systematic and elaborate ways than
Schlegel, he has tended to receive most of the credit. But closer inspection
suggests that this is unjust to Schlegel, especially in the area of interpretation
theory. In this section I shall discuss their hermeneutics, or theory of
interpretation, in the next their theory of translation.
Let us begin with Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. Schleiermacher lectured on

this subject frequently between 1805 and 1833. The following are some of his
main principles:
(a) Hermeneutics is strictly the theory of understanding linguistic

communication—as contrasted, not equated, with explicating, applying,
or translating it.
(b) Hermeneutics should be a universal discipline—that is, one that
applies equally to both sacred and secular texts, to works on all subjects
matters, to oral as well as written language, to modern texts as well as
ancient, to works in one’s own language as well as works in foreign
languages, and so forth.
(c) In particular, the interpretation of sacred texts such as the Bible falls
within it—this must not rely on special principles, such as divine
inspiration (of either the author or the interpreter).
(d) Interpretation is in one way an easier task than has sometimes been
realized, in that an author’s thoughts and meanings at least cannot
transcend his linguistic competence (as, for example, Plato supposed).
(This is an application of doctrines (1) and (2).) But in another way it is a
much more difficult task than has usually been realized: contrary to a
common misconception that “understanding occurs as a matter of
course,” “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so
understanding must be willed and sought at every point.” (This is a
consequence of doctrine (4).)
(p.75) How, then, is it to be accomplished?
(e) Before interpretation proper can even begin, the interpreter must
acquire a good knowledge of the text’s historical context.31
(f) Interpretation always has two sides: one “linguistic,” the other
“psychological.” Linguistic interpretation’s basic task (which rests on
doctrine (2)) is to infer from the particular known uses of a word to the
rule that governs them, that is, to its usage, and thus to its meaning.
Psychological interpretation instead focuses on the author’s individual
psychology. Linguistic interpretation is mainly concerned with what is
Page 7 of 25
shared in a language; psychological interpretation with what is distinctive

to a particular author.
(g) Why does the interpreter need to complement linguistic interpretation
with psychological in this way? Schleiermacher implies several reasons.
First, a need to do so arises from doctrine (4) as it concerns individuals:
the linguistic and conceptual-intellectual distinctiveness of individuals.
This leads to the problem for linguistic interpretation that the actual uses
of words that are available to serve as evidence from which to infer an
author’s exact usages, or meanings, will generally be few in number and
poor in contextual variety. An appeal to the author’s psychology is
supposed to help solve this problem by providing additional clues.
Second, an appeal to the author’s psychology is also required in order to
resolve apparent ambiguities in linguistic meaning that arise in particular
contexts. Third, in order fully to understand a linguistic act one needs to
grasp not only its linguistic meaning but also what more recent authors
would call its “illocutionary” force or intention.
(h) Interpretation also requires two different methods: a “comparative”
method and a “divinatory” method. The “comparative” method is
essentially a method of plain induction. The “hypothetical” method is
essentially a method of tentative, fallible hypothesis based on but also
going well beyond the available empirical evidence.32 Schleiermacher
sees the former method as predominating on the linguistic side of
interpretation (where it takes the interpreter from the particular uses of a
word that are known to the rule for use that governs them all), the latter
method on the psychological side. Accordingly, in the hermeneutics
lectures he writes that divination is required in order to construct “a
complete image of a person from only scattered traces,” noting that “we
cannot be too careful in examining from every angle a picture that has
been sketched in such a hypothetical (p.76) fashion. We should accept it
only when we find no contradictions, and even then only provisionally.”33
(i) Interpretation should be a holistic activity. (This principle to some
extent rests on Schleiermacher’s semantic holism, but also goes far
beyond it.) In particular, any given part of a text needs to be interpreted
in light of the whole text to which it belongs, and both of them need to be
interpreted in light of the whole language in which they are written, their
historical context, a broader preexisting genre, the author’s whole
corpus, and the author’s overall psychology.
(j) Such holism introduces a pervasive circularity into interpretation. For,
ultimately, interpreting broader items of the sorts in question in its turn
depends on interpreting parts of texts. This circularity might seem
vicious. However, Schleiermacher denies that it is. Why? His solution is
not that all of these tasks can be accomplished simultaneously, for that is
beyond human cognitive capacities. Instead, it turns on the very plausible
thought that understanding is not an all-or-nothing matter but instead
Page 8 of 25
something that comes in degrees, so that it is possible to make progress

towards full understanding in a gradual way. For example, concerning the
relation between a part of a text and the whole text to which it belongs,
he recommends that one first read through and interpret each of the
parts of the text in turn as well as one can in order thereby to arrive at an
approximate overall interpretation of the text, and that one then apply
this approximate overall interpretation in order to refine one’s initial
interpretations of the parts, which in turn gives one an improved overall
interpretation, which can then be reapplied towards further refinement of
the interpretations of the parts, and so on indefinitely.
Up to this point, Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation is almost identical to

Herder’s, mainly just drawing together and systematizing ideas that were
already scattered through a number of Herder’s works. This continuity extends
well beyond doctrines (1)–(4). For example, the theory also owes to Herder its
two central moves (often wrongly thought to be original with Schleiermacher) of
complementing “linguistic” with “psychological” interpretation, and of
identifying “divination” as the predominant method of the latter.34 And both the
theory’s emphasis on the need for holism and its methodological solution to the
resulting problem of circularity come from Herder as well.35 Schleiermacher’s
theory does also contain a number of additional ideas that depart from Herder’s
in various ways. However, it is precisely here that it tends to become more
problematic.36
(p.77) Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of interpretation is largely similar to

Schleiermacher’s, only less systematically presented. However, it may well be
that he makes an even more important contribution than Schleiermacher. This is
in part due to a fact that has already been noted by some of the secondary
literature, namely that he largely anticipated and helped to generate
Schleiermacher’s theory.37 But it is even more due to the fact that he in addition
developed some vitally important ideas of his own that are not really to be found
in Schleiermacher (though they had again been anticipated by Herder to a
considerable extent). Let us consider five of these:
(a) The first idea—or rather, family of ideas—concerns genre, a crucially

important subject that Schleiermacher had almost ignored. Many of the
key insights in this area had already been achieved by Herder, in such
works as Shakespeare (1773) and This Too a Philosophy of History for the
Formation of Humanity (1774). His insights included the following: (i) The
correct identification of genre plays an essential role in the interpretation
of both literary and nonlinguistic art. (ii) Genres are radically mutable
over the course of history. (iii) An interpreter therefore often needs to
identify unfamiliar, newly invented, and sometimes even uniquely
instantiated genres. (iv) He also therefore often needs to resist a strong
temptation to misidentify a genre he encounters by falsely assimilating it
Page 9 of 25
to a superficially similar-looking genre from another time or place with

which he happens already to be more familiar (e.g., to misidentify the
genre of Shakespearean “tragedy” by falsely assimilating it to that of
ancient Greek “tragedy”). (v) Likewise, a critic often needs to identify an
unfamiliar, newly invented, or even uniquely instantiated genre if he is to
judge a work of literary or nonlinguistic art in terms of the genre-
purposes and genre-rules that it really aspires to realize rather than in
terms of ones that it does not, and he needs to resist strong temptations
to assume some more familiar genre and as a result evaluate the work in
terms of genre-purposes and genre-rules that it does not even aspire to
realize in the first place. (vi) The interpreter or critic consequently needs
to employ a painstaking empirical approach to the identification of genres
in order to identify them correctly. Friedrich Schlegel’s achievement in
this area largely just lay in the fact that he retained these vitally
important Herderian insights in his best thinking on the subject of
genre.38 (The same was true of his brother August Wilhelm.)
But Friedrich Schlegel (followed by his brother) in addition made two very
important new applications of these Herderian insights about genre. One of (p.
78) these concerned the interpretation of ancient Greek tragedy. Before
Friedrich Schlegel the understanding of Greek tragedy as a genre had been
dominated by Aristotle’s treatment of it in the Poetics, which had been
considered virtually sacrosanct not only by most French dramatists and critics
but also by their recent German opponents Lessing and Herder. With Friedrich
Schlegel, especially in History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans (1798),
there emerged for the first time—in light of his Herderian awareness of the
historical mutability of genres and of the dangers of assimilating one genre to
another, more familiar genre, together with a more scrupulous empirical
investigation of the surviving Greek tragedies themselves conducted in the spirit
of Herder’s methodological empiricism—a realization that Aristotle’s treatment
of Greek tragedy was in fact at least as much an obstacle to properly
understanding it as an aid. Among other things, Friedrich Schlegel saw that
Aristotle had falsely assimilated tragedy’s greatest fifth-century forms to later
forms of it that had become prevalent in his own day, and that largely as a result
of this he had misrepresented it in important respects, for example obscuring its
deeply religious-Dionysiac and civic-political nature. By breaking Aristotle’s
undue influence on the interpretation of Greek tragedy in this way, Friedrich
Schlegel (followed by his brother) initiated a deep rethinking of its nature that
subsequently continued with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and still continues
today (e.g., in the work of Vernant, Vidal-Nacquet, Goldhill, and Winkler).39
Another new application of Herder’s basic insights about genre concerned the
very birth of romanticism itself. For when the young Friedrich Schlegel in a
famous preface that he added to his On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795) in 1797
suddenly changed from an initial classicism concerning the distinction between
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“classical” and “interesting” (or “romantic”) poetry towards a recognition of the

equal legitimacy and value of the latter, thereby giving birth to his romanticism,
this change was largely the result of a sudden recognition on his part that the
historical shift from the former type of poetry to the latter was basically an
example of the sort of historical shift between different but equally well-defined
and legitimate genres that Herder had already discussed, and that this
precluded any simple valorization of the one at the expense of the other, in
particular any negative assessment of the one in terms of the standards of the
other (he had just reviewed a discussion of these very issues in Herder’s Letters
for the Advancement of Humanity in a review article from 1796).40
Finally, Friedrich Schlegel also made two further significant contributions

concerning genre. First, again in continuity with Herder but more emphatically,
he recognized that genres (e.g., tragedy) give birth to what theorists would
today call genre-modes (e.g., “tragic”), which may then qualify works in other
genres (for instance, one could plausibly characterize Thomas Hardy’s novels as
“tragic novels”). Second, he recognized that genres are sometimes (p.79)
systematically interdependent and interdefined. This sort of situation is fairly
obvious in certain cases, such as the case of parody. But, as Friedrich Schlegel
(and his brother) showed, there are also less obvious, more interesting cases—
for instance, ancient tragedy and comedy, which (unlike their modern
counterparts) are partly defined by their sharp exclusion of each other.
(b) A second important idea concerning interpretation that Schlegel

developed is the idea that texts sometimes express meanings and
thoughts, not explicitly in any of their parts, but instead implicitly
through their parts and the way in which these are put together to form a
whole. Thus he writes in Athenaeum Fragments (1798–1800), no. 111:
“The teachings that a novel hopes to instill must be of the sort that can be
communicated only as wholes, not demonstrated singly and not subject to
exhaustive analysis.” He applies this point not only to novels (e.g., to
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in On Goethe’s Meister [1798]), but
also to the philosophical texts of Spinoza and Fichte (in On Lessing
[1797/1801]), and to ancient literature. In the last of these connections,
he writes at Athenaeum Fragments, no. 325 (echoing a famous fragment
of Heraclitus): “But Apollo, who neither speaks nor keeps silent but
intimates, no longer is worshipped, and wherever a Muse shows herself,
people immediately want to carry her off to be cross-examined.”
(c) A third important contribution Schlegel made to hermeneutics
concerns the role of unconscious meanings and thoughts in texts, and
hence in their proper interpretation. The general idea that unconscious
mental processes occur already had a long history in German philosophy
by Schlegel’s day, and had indeed already been discussed in connection
with questions of authorship and interpretation by Herder in On the
Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778). However, it was
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above all Schlegel who developed this idea into a principle that the
interpreter must penetrate beyond an author’s conscious meanings and
thoughts to discover his unconscious ones as well. Thus he writes in On
Goethe’s Meister that “every excellent work...aims at more than it
knows”; and in Athenaeum Fragments, no. 401 that “in order to
understand someone who only partially understands himself, you first
have to understand him completely and better than he himself does.”
(d) A fourth important contribution Schlegel made to hermeneutics
concerns the presence of inconsistency and confusion in texts. The
important hermeneutic theorist Ernesti had already encouraged the
interpreter to attribute inconsistencies and other forms of confusion (p.
80) to profane texts when appropriate, and Herder had extended that
principle to sacred texts as well. Schlegel accepts Herder’s broader
version of the principle. But he also places even more emphasis on it and
develops it further, not only insisting that confusion is a common feature
of texts and should be recognized when it occurs, but also arguing that in
such cases the interpreter needs to seek to understand and explain it.
Thus he already writes in a note from 1797: “In order to understand
someone, one must first of all be cleverer than he, then just as clever, and
then also just as stupid. It is not enough that one understand the actual
sense of a confused work better than the author understood it. One must
also oneself be able to know, to characterize, and even construe the
confusion even down to its very principles.”41
(e) A fifth important contribution Schlegel made to hermeneutics
concerns the interpretation of nonlinguistic (or perhaps: “nonlinguistic”)
art—that is, painting, sculpture, architecture, instrumental music, and so
on. Herder had begun his career arguing in the early parts of the Critical
Forests (1769) that nonlinguistic art does not express meanings or
thoughts at all but is instead merely sensuous in nature. On such a view,
the question of interpreting it would not even arise. But Herder had
subsequently changed his mind about this, instead coming to recognize
that nonlinguistic art often does express meanings and thoughts, namely
(in order to stay consistent with doctrines (1) and (2)) ones that are
implicitly grounded in the artist’s language, and that it therefore does
need to be interpreted. This later position of Herder’s is far more
plausible. Schleiermacher is usually retrograde on this issue, and
therefore restricts hermeneutics to texts and discourse. But Schlegel
deserves great credit for taking over Herder’s later position and
developing it in some very insightful ways. In particular, he develops a
rich set of hermeneutic principles to guide the interpretation of
nonlinguistic art. Some of these principles are similar to the ones that he
espouses for interpreting linguistic texts, but others are distinctive to the
interpretation of nonlinguistic art, in particular principles concerning a
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certain sort of symbolism through which it conveys meanings and

thoughts.42
After Schlegel and Schleiermacher, the latter’s pupil August Boeckh, an eminent
classical philologist, recast Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in an even more
systematic and elaborate form in lectures that were eventually published
posthumously under the title Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological
(p.81) Sciences (1877). In the course of doing so he laudably restored genre to
the central place that it had received in the hermeneutics of Herder and
Schlegel. The combined influence of Herder’s, Schlegel’s, Schleiermacher’s, and
Boeckh’s treatments of hermeneutics secured for this tradition of hermeneutics
something very much like the status of the official interpretive methodology of
nineteenth-century Germany across such fields of research as biblical
scholarship, classical philology, history, and history of philosophy. The
extraordinary quality of that research constitutes eloquent testimony to its
value.
4.4. Theory of Translation

Especially in the Fragments on Recent German Literature, Herder had
developed a powerful new methodology of translation based on his doctrines (1)–
(4). He had recognized that doctrine (4) entails that when translation takes place
there will often be a deep gulf between the resources of the source language and
those of the target language. He had seen that this causes serious problems for
achieving semantic faithfulness and (in the case of poetry) musical faithfulness,
even to the point of making this strictly impossible and forcing the translator to
be satisfied with mere approximation. He had noted that because of the gulf in
question translation needs to compromise in one direction or the other, either
sacrificing the preexisting character of the source language or that of the target
language. He had argued the translator should err in the latter direction rather
than the former, first and foremost because this is necessary in order to
maximize semantic-musical faithfulness, but also because it promises to create
new semantic-musical resources in the target language. And he had advocated
two more specific techniques in such a spirit: first, “bending” preexisting word-
usages in the target language in order to approximate the word-usages, and
therefore the meanings, in the source language as closely as possible (this
technique rested on doctrine (2)); and second, striving to reproduce the musical
features of the source language as accurately as possible in the target language
(not only for musical reasons but also for semantic ones, the latter deriving in
part from doctrine (3)). This whole Herderian methodology of translation was
subsequently taken over and developed by Friedrich Schlegel (along with his
brother August Wilhelm) and Schleiermacher. Let us consider each of their
versions of it in turn.
Page 13 of 25
As has already been mentioned, when Schlegel moved to Berlin in 1797 and
befriended Schleiermacher there, they developed an ambitious joint project of
translating the works of Plato. Accordingly, some of Schlegel’s writings from
around this period are concerned with the theory of translation—especially, his
Philosophy of Philology (1797) and fragments from the late 1790s.43 In addition,
(p.82) his Cologne lectures on German language and literature from 1807
contain comments about meter and its reproduction in another language, while
shortly afterwards On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians likewise contains
a little theorizing about translation as well as some actual translations of
Sanskrit texts. From these materials it is possible to reconstruct the main lines
of his early theory of translation. It includes the following principles:
(a) A modern translator typically confronts the problem that an

intellectual gulf divides himself and his culture from an ancient author
and his: “the immeasurable difference..., the quite distinctive nature of
antiquity,” “the absolute difference between the ancient and the
modern.”44 This gulf consists first and foremost in conceptual
incommensurability, but also in a sharp divergence of metrical
principles.45
(b) This makes translation extremely difficult, even to the point of being
strictly speaking impossible: “Whether translations are possible is a
question no one has worried about.”46
(c) However, the proper response to this situation is not to despair, but
instead to regard the task of translation as one of endless approximation:
“Every translation is an indeterminate, infinite task.”47
(d) The translator who confronts an intellectual gulf of this sort faces a
choice between either attempting to reproduce the original meaning and
music of the source text faithfully or undertaking to transform them:
“Every translation is a transplanting or a transforming or both.”48
But how can translation of the former type be achieved?
(e) This requires that the translator possess hermeneutic (or

“philological”) expertise: “Translation is obviously something
[philological];”49 “Translation belongs entirely to philology, is a
thoroughly philological art.”50 Especially on the musical side, it also
requires that the translator be artistic.51
(f) In terms of specific approach, it requires that he modify the word-
usages and the music features of the target language in order to
approximate those of the source language as closely as possible. Thus
Schlegel already remarks in the Philosophy of Philology that “one should
translate in order to mold the modern languages classically.”52 And in On
the Language and Wisdom of the Indians he argues that in translations of
Sanskrit texts into German the German should “mold (p.83) itself” (sich
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anschmiegen) to the original Sanskrit and should attempt to reproduce

the meters found in the Sanskrit texts.53
(g) In addition to its primary virtue of reproducing the original text as
accurately as possible, this approach also has the virtue of enriching the
target language both conceptually and musically. Schlegel already implies
this when he says that “one should translate in order to mold the modern
languages classically.” He also makes the point in a more general form:
“Each translation is actually language-creation.”54
(h) This sort of translation elevates the translator to the rank of an artist:
“Only the translator is a linguistic artist.”55
Schleiermacher went on to develop a very similar theory of translation, but

much more elaborately. Schleiermacher was a masterful translator, whose
translations of Plato into German are still widely used and admired today, two
centuries after they were first done. His views about translation therefore come
with great prima facie authority. He explains his theory of translation mainly in
the classic essay On the Different Methods of Translation (1813). The following
are his most important theses:
(a) Translation proper (as opposed to mere imitation) is an extremely

difficult task. For it faces a number of serious challenges that only admit
of partial solution. The primary task of translation is to reproduce the
original meaning accurately, and this is itself a huge challenge. But there
are also additional tasks that compound the difficulty. For one thing, at
least in the case of poetry it is necessary to reproduce not only semantic
but also musical features of the original, such as meter and rhyme. This is
not only an aesthetic desideratum over and above translation’s primary
task of reproducing meaning, but also an essential part of the latter, both
because meters bear their own meanings (Schleiermacher’s friend
August Wilhelm Schlegel had especially emphasized this point) and
because the musical features of poetry serve as essential vehicles for the
precise expression of affective sensations and hence of meanings (Herder
had anticipated this point, which rested on a version of his doctrine (3)).
For another thing, in addition to reproducing a work’s meaning, a
translation should also convey where its author was being conceptually
conventional and where, by contrast, conceptually original—a task that
can at least be accomplished to a certain extent by using older vocabulary
from the target language in the former cases and newer vocabulary from
the target language in the latter cases. In addition to being intrinsically
difficult, both of these (p.84) secondary tasks will often stand in deep
tension with the primary task of finding the closest semantic fit, as well
as with each other. For example, it will often turn out that the target-word
that would best reproduce a rhyme or best reflect a concept’s vintage is
not the one that is closest in meaning to the source-word.
Page 15 of 25
(b) The central challenge for translation, though, lies in its primary task
of reproducing meaning accurately, and arises from the fact that
translation typically faces a conceptual gulf between the source language
and the target language (as they already exist). (This point is an
application of Herder’s doctrine (4).)
(c) Schleiermacher in particular notes the following complication that
arises here (one might call this the paradox of paraphrase): if, faced with
the task of translating an alien concept, a translator attempts to
reproduce its intension by reproducing its extension by means of an
elaborate paraphrase in his own language, he will generally find that, as
he gets closer to the original extension, he undermines the original
intension in other ways.
How, therefore, should translation proceed? The following points constitute the
core of Schleiermacher’s answer:
(d) Because of such challenges the translator needs to have real

interpretive-hermeneutic expertise and to be an “artist” if he is to cope
with the task of translation at all adequately.
(e) The conceptual gulf that poses the central challenge here might in
principle be tackled in one of two ways: either by bringing the author’s
linguistic-conceptual world closer to that of the reader of the translation
or by bringing the reader’s closer to the author’s. The former approach
had often been advocated and practiced (e.g., by Luther, who called it
Verdeutschung). However, Schleiermacher finds it unacceptable, above
all because it distorts the author’s meaning. He therefore champions the
alternative approach of bringing the reader towards the linguistic-
conceptual world of the author as the only acceptable approach.
But how can that possibly be accomplished?
(f) The key, according to Schleiermacher, lies in the plasticity of language.

Thanks to this plasticity, even if the usages of words, and hence the
concepts, expressed by the target language as it already exists are
incommensurable with the author’s, the translator (p.85) can “bend the
language of the translation as far possible towards that of the original in
order to communicate as far as possible an impression of the system of
concepts developed in it.”56 (This solution presupposes doctrine (2).)
(g) This approach requires that a particular word from the source
language normally be translated in a uniform way throughout the
translation instead of by switching back and forth between two or more
different ways of translating it in different contexts, as is usually done.
(h) It also inevitably results in translations that are less easy to read than
those that can be achieved by the competing approach because of
oddities that result. However, this is an acceptable price to pay given that
Page 16 of 25
the only alternative is a failure to convey the author’s meaning at all

accurately. Moreover, the oddities in question actually have a positive
value, in that they constantly remind the reader of the conceptual
unfamiliarity of the material being translated and of the “bending”
approach being employed.
(i) In order to work effectively this approach needs to be applied
consistently to large amounts of material, both so that the reader
becomes accustomed to it in a general way and so that he acquires
enough examples of a particular word’s unfamiliar usage in enough
different contexts to enable him to infer the unfamiliar rule for its use
that is involved.
(j) Even this optimal approach has severe limitations, though. In
particular, it will often be impossible to reproduce the holistic aspects of
meaning—the several related usages of a given word, the system of
related words/concepts to which it belongs, and the distinctive grammar
of the language. And because these holistic features are internal to a
word’s meaning, that will entail a shortfall in the communication of its
meaning by the translation. For this reason—together with such
additional reasons as those mentioned in (a)—even this optimal sort of
translation is bound to remain imperfect, only a poor second best to
reading the originals.
(k) It remains justified and important, however. This is true not only for
the obvious reason that people who cannot read the original languages
need translations, but also for the less obvious reason that this optimal
sort of translation through its “bending” approach and its reproduction of
musical features enriches both the conceptual and the musical resources
of the target language. Schleiermacher’s picture of translation (as indeed
of interpretation) is therefore that it is ultimately a matter of striving for
an ideal that is never fully (p.86) attainable, but striving for which
nonetheless remains important and valuable. (This is also a
characteristically Romantic model of the human condition more
generally.)
(l) Nor (Schleiermacher adds in answer to a worry that Herder had raised
in the Fragments) need it be feared that this enrichment will deprive the
target language of its authentic nature. For one thing, it will often be
confined to the sphere of translations. For another thing, when it is not so
confined and really conflicts with the nature of the target language, the
enrichments involved will soon wither from the language.
As in the case of Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation, not only doctrines

(1)–(4), but most of these doctrines about translation come from Herder
(especially from the Fragments). However, whereas, as we noted,
Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation tends to worsen Herder’s, his theory
of translation tends to refine Herder’s in some significant ways. Among the
Page 17 of 25
positions listed above, examples of this occur in (a), where the ideal of making
clear in a translation at which points an author is being conceptually
conventional and at which points conceptually original, and the strategy for
achieving this, are new; (c), where the paradox of paraphrase is original; (h),
where the point that the discomfort that the “bending” approach causes readers
actually serves positive functions is novel; (i), where the point that this approach
needs to be implemented on a large scale is new; (j), where the point that
semantic holism inevitably limits the success of such translations is original; and
(l), which plausibly contradicts Herder.57
The radical new methodology of translation developed by Herder, Friedrich

Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and others in their circle quickly became the
predominant methodology of translation in Germany, exercising an enormous
and beneficial influence there on both the theory and the practice of translation,
an influence that it continued to exercise well into the twentieth century (e.g., in
Benjamin, Buber, and Rosenzweig). Nor is its influence by any means confined to
the past or to Germany. For example, it remains the predominant influence on
the work of the two most important recent theorists of translation, Antoine
Berman in France and Lawrence Venuti in the United States, both of whom
continue its “foreignizing” approach.58
Notes:
(1) . For a more detailed treatment of some of the topics that follow, see my After
Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010) and German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to
Hegel and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
(2) . Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians can be found in KA
8. Schleiermacher’s psychology lectures can be found in FSSW 3/6.
(3) . KA 18, 289.
(4) . Friedrich Schlegels philosophische Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1804 bis
1806, ed. C. J. H. Windischmann (Bonn: Eduard Weber, 1846), 2:28–29, 223.
(5) . Ibid., 2:83.
(6) . KA 15, 2–3.
(7) . Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature (London: Bell and
Daldy, 1873), 6–7.
Page 18 of 25
(8) . See A. Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und

Aneignung (Zurich: Atlantis, 1969), 89. Cf. 69ff. on August Wilhelm’s closely
connected appropriation of Herder’s interpretive method of Einfühlung.
(9) . There are two main editions of the hermeneutics lectures, both of which are
available in English: Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. A. Bowie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Hermeneutics: The Handwritten
Manuscripts, ed. J. Duke and J. Forstman (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).
(10) . FSSW 3/6, 263.
(11) . Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, 50.
(12) . For example, whereas Herder’s version of doctrine (1) restricts itself to a
claim that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by linguistic
competence, Schleiermacher turns this into a principle of the outright identity of
thought with language, or with inner language. But such strong versions of the
doctrine turn out to be philosophically untenable—vulnerable to
counterexamples in which thought occurs without any corresponding (inner)
language use, and vice versa. Again, Schleiermacher’s late attraction to Kant’s
theory of empirical schematism turns out to be problematic. For Kant’s theory
implied a sharp dualism between concepts or meanings (conceived as purely
psychological) and word-usages, so that Schleiermacher’s espousal of it implies
the same, and hence conflicts with his commitment to doctrine (2).
(13) . Strictly speaking, he restricts this new conception to “organic,” i.e.,

inflected, languages, as opposed to “mechanical” ones.
(14) . A decent English translation of this essay by A. Lefevere from which I shall
quote in this article can be found in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. L. Wilson
(New York: Continuum, 1982). However, it should be noted that the translation is
not completely reliable, in particular because it omits an important long footnote
concerned with the translation of poetry.
(15) . Wilhelm von Humboldt is another figure, closely related to and strongly
influenced by the Romantics, who took over Herder’s philosophy of language
and developed it in the direction of holism. As we shall see, he was also a fellow
traveler of the Romantics in the areas of linguistics, hermeneutics, and
translation theory.
(16) . See, for example, “Von der Veränderung des Geschmacks” (On the Change
of Taste) (1766) in HW 1 and “Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung
der Menschheit” (This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of
Humanity) (1774) in HW 4.
Page 19 of 25
(17) . For example, he writes in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity) (1784–91): “The
finest essay on the history and the diverse character of the human
understanding and heart...would be a philosophical comparison of languages: for
a people’s understanding and character is imprinted in each of them” (HW 6,
353).
(18) . F. Schlegel, Philosophie der Philologie (Philosophy of Philology), in

“Friedrich Schlegels ‘Philosophie der Philologie’ mit einer Einleitung
herausgegeben von Josef Körner,” Logos 17 (1928), 16. Cf. 54: “absolute
difference.”
(19) . As E. Fiesel points out—Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik

(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1927), 215–24—this sort of rationale for the new
discipline, though predominant in Herder, Schlegel, and Humboldt, tended to
recede from nineteenth-century versions of the discipline after Humboldt
(arguably to the discipline’s great detriment).
(20) . HW 1, 762.
(21) . HW 1, 803.
(22) . HW 6, 353.
(23) . Schlegel’s emphasis on the striking differences between languages in fact

includes not only deep grammatical differences and more superficial verbal/
conceptual differences but also such intermediate differences as, for instance,
the fact that the Manchou language relies much more heavily on onomatopoeia
than other languages (KA 8, 167).
(24) . Strictly speaking, it had already been used by his brother August Wilhelm
in a review article from 1803.
(25) . Schlegel had some forerunners in this idea. See H. Gipper and P.
Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik
(Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1985), 22–26.
(26) . Concerning the latter type, Schlegel also cites Alexander von Humboldt’s
collection of Native American grammars and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s already
ongoing work on the Basque language (KA 8, 153–55).
(27) . In doing so, he builds on, and also credits, the work of Sir William Jones.
Cf. Gipper and Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie, 47–48.
(28) . It should be noted, though, that Schlegel was himself innocent of

ethnocentric motives here (his own ethical orientation was decidedly
cosmopolitan; indeed, one of the main purposes of his book was to show that
Page 20 of 25
Europe and Asia are “one large family,” as he actually put it), and that he took
considerable pains to try to forestall any inference from his normative ranking of
languages to an invidious ranking of peoples.
(29) . Bopp’s work follows Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians closely not only in its contents but even in its form (e.g., like Schlegel’s
work concluding with a set of translations).
(30) . Concerning this subsequent history, see also J. Trabant, Apeliotes oder der
Sinn der Sprache. Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachbild (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1986), 163; Gipper and Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie
(as well as other works by Gipper); H. Nüsse’s introduction to KA 8; and Fiesel,
Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik, 110ff.
(31) . The suggestion in some of the secondary literature that Schleiermacher

thinks such knowledge irrelevant to interpretation is absurd.
(32) . The widespread conception in the secondary literature (e.g., Dilthey and
Gadamer) that for Schleiermacher “divination” is a process of psychological self-
projection into texts is basically mistaken. Like Herder before him, because of
principle (4), he is rather concerned to discourage interpreters from assimilating
the outlooks of people they interpret to their own. For example, he writes in the
hermeneutics lectures: “Misunderstanding is either a consequence of hastiness
or of prejudice. The former is an isolated moment. The latter is a mistake which
lies deeper. It is the one-sided preference for what is close to an individual’s
circle of ideas and the rejection of what lies outside it. In this way one explains
in or explains out what is not present in the author [sic]” (Hermeneutics and
Criticism, 23).
(33) . Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, 207.
(34) . See especially Herder’s “Über Thomas Abbts Schriften” (On Thomas
Abbt’s Writings) (1768) in HW 2 and “Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der
menschlichen Seele” (On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul)
(1778) in HW 4.
(35) . See especially Herder’s “Die Kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik” (Critical
Forests) (1769) and This Too a Philosophy of History. (Note that holism as a
method of discovering meaning is quite different from holism as a thesis about
the very nature of meaning, i.e., the thesis that the Romantics were the first to
introduce. The former might indeed be based on the latter, at least in part, but it
need not be and was not yet in Herder. It is plausible, however, to hypothesize
that earlier commitments to the former by Herder and others made a significant
contribution to the eventual development of the latter by the Romantics.
Incidentally, a similar transformation of a merely epistemological thesis into a
stronger ontological one had already occurred previously concerning the
Page 21 of 25
connection between meaning and word-use: Ernesti had merely held that
investigating word-usage was the right way to discover meaning, but Herder had
then strengthened that position into a doctrine that meaning was word-usage.)
(36) . Two examples of this have already been mentioned in a previous note and
concern Schleiermacher’s specific formulations of doctrines (1) and (2), namely
his outright equation of thought with language and his adoption of Kant’s theory
of schematism. But there are further examples as well. One is the fact that
whereas for Herder principle (4) is only an empirically established rule of thumb,
Schleiermacher purports to give an a priori proof that conceptual-intellectual
and linguistic diversity occurs even at the level of individual people universally—
a proof that is not only very dubious in itself (both in its a priori status and in its
specific details), but also has the highly counterintuitive consequence (often
explicitly asserted by Schleiermacher) that, strictly speaking, no one ever fully
understands another person. Again, unlike Herder, Schleiermacher specifies
psychological interpretation more closely as a process of identifying, and tracing
the necessary development of, a single “seminal decision” (Keimentschluß) in
the author that was the source of his work and unfolded itself as the work in a
necessary fashion. But this too seems an unhelpful move. For how many works
are actually composed, and hence properly interpretable, in such a way (rather
than, say, involving a whole series of decisions, perhaps together with some
serendipity along the way)? Again, whereas Herder includes among the evidence
relevant to psychological interpretation both an author’s linguistic behavior and
his nonlinguistic behavior, Schleiermacher normally insists on a restriction to the
former. But this seems misguided (e.g., the Marquis de Sade’s recorded acts of
cruelty are surely no less relevant to establishing the sadistic side of his
psychology than his cruel statements). Again, whereas Herder rightly
emphasizes that the correct identification of genre plays an essential role in
interpretation, and that this is often extremely difficult due to variations in
genres that occur between historical periods, cultures, individuals, and
sometimes even different works by the same individual, Schleiermacher pays
little attention to this. Again, unlike Herder, who normally considers
interpretation and natural science to be similar activities, Schleiermacher
regards the central role that “divination,” or hypothesis, plays in interpretation
as a ground for sharply distinguishing interpretation from natural science, and
hence for classifying it as an art rather than a science. However, he should
instead have seen it as one good ground for judging them similar. (His mistake
here was caused by a false assumption that natural science works by plain
induction rather than by hypothesis.)
(37) . Josef Körner and Hermann Patsch have both made cases for Schlegel’s
importance for hermeneutics on these grounds. Their cases differ in details but
both essentially take the form of arguing—largely on the basis of the evidence
supplied by Schlegel’s Philosophy of Philology from 1797, a set of notes that
roughly coincided with the beginning of his relationship with Schleiermacher in
Page 22 of 25
Berlin—that Schlegel anticipated and influenced key moves in Schleiermacher’s

hermeneutics lectures (which Schleiermacher subsequently began to deliver in
1805). There is much truth in this argument. Schleiermacher clearly looked up
to Schlegel at this early period. And while it is often difficult to ascertain
intellectual priority between them with any certainty given the meagerness of
the available evidence and the fact that they cooperated in a spirit of “together-
philosophy” (Symphilosophie), several of the doctrines in Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics that Körner credits to Schlegel really do seem to have been more
originally Schlegel’s: in particular, the doctrines that the interpreter needs to
understand an author better than he understood himself; that it is important for
the interpreter to identify an author’s psychological development; that the
interpreter should interpret the parts of a text in light of the whole text; and that
the interpreter should reject philologia sacra. Moreover, the same is true of
several further doctrines that Patsch credits to Schlegel: in particular, the
doctrines that philology/hermeneutics is not merely a science but an art; that
hermeneutics and criticism are interdependent; and that divination plays an
essential role in criticism/hermeneutics. Indeed, the same seems to me true of
several additional doctrines as well: in particular, the doctrines that
interpretation often faces the problem of a deep intellectual difference dividing
the interpreter and his age from the author interpreted and his; that in
interpretation misunderstanding, rather than being the exception, is the rule;
and that, beyond the generic principle of identifying an author’s psychological
development, the interpreter of a text needs to identify, and trace the unfolding
of, an author’s “seminal decision” (Keimentschluß) (in Schleiermacher’s
terminology).
(38) . However, it should be noted here that there are also some contrary strands
in Friedrich Schlegel’s thinking about genre. These have been well explained,
but with misguided enthusiasm, by Peter Szondi.
(39) . For a fuller treatment of this subject, see my “Friedrich Schlegel’s

Hermeneutics,” in German Philosophy of Language, and especially my “The
German Romantic Re-thinking of Ancient Tragedy” (forthcoming).
(40) . For more on this subject, see my “Friedrich Schlegel” and “Friedrich
Schlegel’s Hermeneutics,” in German Philosophy of Language, and especially my
“Herders Beitrag zur Entstehung der Idee romantisch,” in Die Aktualität der
Romantik, ed. M. N. Forster and K. Vieweg (Berlin: LIT, 2012).
(41) . KA 18, 63. Cf. On Incomprehensibility (1800).
(42) . For Schlegel’s espousal and development of Herder’s later position, see
especially Athenaeum Fragments, no. 444; KA 4 (on painting), passim; Friedrich
Schlegel’s Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1804 bis 1806, 2:244–45; Lectures on the
Page 23 of 25
History of Literature, 190–91. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see
my “Friedrich Schlegel’s Hermeneutics.”
(43) . The latter can be found in KA 18.
(44) . Philosophy of Philology, 16, 28.
(45) . Concerning the latter, see the Cologne lectures on German language and
literature from 1807, at KA 15/2, 94–99.
(46) . Philosophy of Philology, 42.
(47) . Ibid.
(48) . KA 18, 204.
(49) . Ibid.
(51) . KA 18, 71.
(53) . KA 8, 324–25.
(54) . KA 18, 71.
(55) . Ibid. Cf. the Dialogue on Poetry (1800): “The translation of poets...has
become an art.”
(56) . On the Different Methods of Translation, 25.
(57) . Besides Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Boeckh, another important figure
from this period who was in broad agreement with Schleiermacher’s theories of
interpretation and translation is Wilhelm von Humboldt. For example,
concerning interpretation, like Schleiermacher, Humboldt argues in his Kawi
introduction of 1836 that not only nations but also individuals within nations are
always deeply different linguistically and conceptually-intellectually so that “all
understanding is always at the same time a misunderstanding.” And concerning
translation, he argues in the introduction to his translation of Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon (1816) for an approach to translation that is virtually identical to
Schleiermacher’s.
(58) . See esp. A. Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) and L.
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge,
1995).
Page 24 of 25
Page 25 of 25
Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Schleiermacher’s Idea of Bildung in the Landscape of Hegelian Thought
Kristin Gjesdal
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0006

Within the context of German idealism, the notion of Bildung is often led back to
G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This paper argues that an alternative
notion of Bildung is developed, a few years earlier, in the work of Friedrich
Schleiermacher. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel develop their notions of Bildung
with reference to Fichte’s philosophy. However, whereas Hegel’s understanding
of Bildung reflects his interest in the gradual self-understanding of humanity
(Spirit), Schleiermacher takes his point of departure in the diversity of
individuals within a given context of cultural and linguistic mediation; whereas
Hegel is committed to the idea that historical development will, at some point,
reach a point of culmination, Schleiermacher’s philosophy is driven by the notion
of education and self-understanding as an ongoing exercise. This chapter
suggests that both these notions of Bildung must be ascribed some value—within
the specific systematic framework in which they occur and with regard to a
wider philosophical discussion of Bildung as such. Only if we take into account
the romantic as well as the Hegelian understanding of Bildung can we arrive at
an adequate notion of Bildung.
Keywords: Schleiermacher, Hegel, Gadamer, Bildung, hermeneutics, tradition, individuality, style,

romantic aesthetics
It is a widespread assumption that early nineteenth-century philosophy

bifurcates into a romantic and a Hegelian camp. One the one hand, we have a
romantic turn to individuality, feeling, and immediacy, on the other Hegel’s focus
Page 1 of 19
on Bildung, historicity, and the sociality of reason. Countering Hegel’s hyperbolic

worries about romanticism, defenders of this paradigm often proceed by calling
for a reevaluation of individuality, aesthetics, and feeling—and, by implication,
art and literature, the domains where these aspects of subjectivity are expressed
and sheltered—and not by asking if this is what romantic philosophy is all about
in the first place.1
It is the aim of this paper to shed critical light on the notion that there is a
sharp, unbridgeable division between the romantics and Hegel or, more
precisely, between the emphasis on individuality and the commitment to
philosophy of Bildung, that is, education in and through culture. My point of
departure—my test case, as it were—is Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theory of
interpretation, a model that is often viewed as a proto-example of aesthetic-
romantic attitudes, be it taken as a point of criticism (Hegel and Gadamer) or as
an occasion for praise and laudation (Szondi, Ricoeur, Frank). In my view,
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is not about aesthetic feeling or a celebration of
style. His is a model that addresses meaning and thought as expressed in the
communal medium of language and thus views Bildung and understanding as
two sides of the same coin.2
(p.93) For Schleiermacher, language is always marked by individuality as well

as the cultural and symbolic resources of a given, historical era. Yet the living
individuality of a text and its insights tends to be stifled as it is integrated into
the dominant patterns of understanding. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics seeks
to shake up such hardened patterns of understanding. As such, it finds its form
as a critical theory of interpretation. Further, this critical theory is motivated by
a wish to keep tradition alive and dynamic—a self-renewing source of education
and Bildung.
From this point of view, the chief difference between Hegel and the romantics is
not that Hegel has a notion of Bildung and the romantics do not. In early
nineteenth-century philosophy, we do not encounter positions for or against
Bildung. Instead we face a set of alternative conceptions of Bildung, be it, with
Hegel, along the lines of a rational, continuous tradition, or, with
Schleiermacher, with the awareness that tradition carries with it the risk of
turning into a stifling interpretative scheme and is thus in need of revitalization
from the point of view of critical engagement with concrete, symbolic
expressions. This latter notion of Bildung complements Hegel’s model, and is, as
such, deserving of rehabilitation—be it within the field of interpretation studies
or within the larger, philosophical discourse of Bildung.
5.1. The Universality of Hermeneutics

Schleiermacher taught hermeneutics in the years between 1805 and 1833. Yet
he never produced a book-length study in this area. The available material
consists in part of lecture notes and student annotations. This has given rise to
Page 2 of 19
extensive discussion of the chronology of the texts as well as their thematic

organization.3 Interesting as it is, this debate must be put aside in order to allow
for a brief overview of Schleiermacher’s place within the hermeneutic tradition.4
What is the chief concern of Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation? How is
his contribution different from those of his predecessors? And why is his work
ascribed such an important role within the history of hermeneutics? The initial
answer to these questions is simple enough. Schleiermacher’s main idea, and
the source of his historical influence, is his universalization of hermeneutics.
What is implied by this formulation is less straightforward. There are at least
two aspects of Schleiermacher’s universalization-thesis: The first (a) relates to
the self-understanding of the humanities. The second (b) concerns the emphasis
on individuality. Each of these points must be spelled out in more detail. (a) It is
helpful to keep in mind that before Schleiermacher, philologically minded
theoreticians such as Friederich Ast, Johann August Ernesti, and Friedrich
August Wolf had seen hermeneutics as a tool for the study of certain academic
areas, in particular the study of temporally or culturally (p.94) distant texts
(the Bible and texts from classical antiquity being two examples).5
Schleiermacher, by contrast, insists that hermeneutics not only concerns the
untangling of old, knotty, or incomplete texts, but also deals with language use
across the board: past as well as present, culturally distant as well as near. In his
words, hermeneutics is “the art of understanding particularly the written
discourse of another person correctly” (HC 3).6
The significance of this turn should not be underestimated. With

Schleiermacher’s universalization thesis, hermeneutics is no longer viewed as an
aid to specific groups of scholars engaging in specific kinds of textual
explanation or exegesis (theology and classical studies).7 Hermeneutics now
emerges as a discourse of the epistemic conditions for reflected and
academically adequate interpretation as such. In this form, it shelters the
systematic self-reflection of the humanities, the domain of research in which the
scholar encounters the symbolic self-presentation of subjectivity in and through
history and culture. It is with reference to hermeneutics that the human sciences
justify and realize their scientific status.8
However, if hermeneutics is viewed as the epistemic self-reflection of the human

sciences (as anchored in the human capacity for symbolic expression), only one
humanistic discipline can outline its nature and principles, namely philosophy.
Other human sciences are limited to the study of specific areas of symbol
production and the application of interpretation theory within these areas.
Philosophy, by contrast, maps the conditions of possibility for understanding as
such. Hence, with Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is established as the general
methodology of the humanities, as an intellectual domain deserving of study in
its own right, and as an area to which philosophy has privileged access. Needless
to say, this move has gained approval in the philosophical camps. Even Hans-
Georg Gadamer, who often comes across as Schleiermacher’s harshest critic,
Page 3 of 19
welcomes this maneuver by quoting, as the epigram to the third part of Truth
and Method, Schleiermacher’s claim that “everything presupposed in
hermeneutics is but language.”9
(b) According to Schleiermacher, the universality of hermeneutics must be led

back to the fact that all language use, all symbolic expression, is marked by a
dimension of individuality. As he puts it, “Every person is on the one hand a
location in which a given language forms itself in an individual manner, on the
other their discourse can only be understood via the totality of language” (HC 8).
Hence, the force of Schleiermacher’s universality claim ultimately rests with the
plausibility of his turn to individuality. In this context, three further points will
need to be made.
With regard to Schleiermacher’s notion of individuality, the first thing that must
be noted is that it does not, within the context of his hermeneutics, refer to the
feelings or inner life of a particular person. It refers to a given use of language,
an aspect of our symbolic-expressive capacity (HC 10). As such, (p.95)
individuality serves as a generic concept that covers all aspects of language use
that cannot be understood solely with reference to a universal genre, rule,
concept, or grammatical grid. The literature of a certain period can emerge as
individual. The same applies to a constellation of writers that work together or
are being exposed to the same source of influence and thus share a certain
literary orientation. Further, a given language-user might be characterized by
reference to an individual style, gesture, or use of language that differs from
that of his or her peers. But there might also be differences within his or her
language-use that make it plausible to speak, in the case of a literary expression,
about a given author’s early as opposed to his or her late work. In this way,
individuality functions as an interpretative lens with different scopes and
adjustments.10
The second point that must be emphasized is that there is no opposition in

Schleiermacher’s model between creative-individual and ordinary or communal
uses of language. Individual use of language is not understood in contrast to but
as enabled by and enriching the shared symbolic resources of a given language
area. Individual language-use concerns the way that, at any point in time, a
given speaker, author, or group of such shapes the available linguistic resources
—how these resources are realized only from within or with reference to a given
point of view, a given outlook on the world, that is, from within the perspective
of a particular, human being (or group of such) with a particular history, cultural
context, and set of experiences (HC 91). For Schleiermacher, every individual is
unique and irreducible. Yet all symbolic expressions voice a shared world of
experience, events, and entities.
Page 4 of 19
Third, Schleiermacher’s notion of individuality shows how thought is always

articulated by a concrete individual. Every person represents, potentially, a
unique point of view, a particular perspective on the world. In some kinds of
discourse, Schleiermacher suggests, this uniqueness plays a comparatively
insignificant role. Scientific texts make up one such example. In other cases,
such as modern poetry, individuality is played up (HC 19, 64). Most discourse
finds itself situated somewhere in the middle. In engaging the infinite spectrum
of human expressivity, the reader, if attentive to the uniqueness of the author’s
point of view, may expand her horizon by, so to speak, allowing her imagination
to go visiting the outlook of another. For Schleiermacher, there is an epistemic
aspect of this expansion of one’s own horizon, though in his early work it is
ultimately pitched as an ethical enterprise, one that is related to the very
constitution of the self through the interplay between self and other.
5.2. Individuality Reconsidered

Schleiermacher’s notion of individuality, as discussed above, is not opposed to
the idea of a shared linguistic community but targets the way that language (p.
96) takes form when concretely applied. How, then, should the critical
interpreter proceed in order to get a grasp on the individual-universal aspect of
a given text or utterance? And, further, what exactly is gained or understood in
the act of understanding? Schleiermacher answers these questions by (a)
outlining his thoughts on the hermeneutic procedure and (b) discussing what
kind of meaning the interpreter is focusing on.
(a) Schleiermacher’s guidelines for interpretative work are obscured by his use
of technical terms and a somewhat inconsistent application of his chosen
vocabulary. He speaks about the need to proceed through a combination of
grammatical interpretation, geared towards the universal linguistic resources
available to the given language-user and his peers, and technical interpretation,
geared towards the individual application of the shared resources (HC 94).
However, sometimes Schleiermacher also talks about psychological
interpretation. Even though Schleiermacher wavers between these two terms, it
is fair to say that both designate the concrete use, and thus the realization, of
communal symbolic resources (and not an inner individual realm of
intentionality, emotions, and feelings).
These two aspects of understanding, grammatical and technical interpretation,

highlight different aspects of the text (the author as being shaped by his or her
culture and the author as he or she shapes her culture). Yet they serve as
general guidelines only. In encountering a given utterance, the interpreter
cannot a priori know whether the text in question requires an emphasis on
grammatical or technical interpretation. This is a matter that begs a certain
Gefühl, sensitivity, or hypothesis-making on the part of the interpreter.
Schleiermacher terms this hypothesis-making “divination” (HC 92–93). In a
typical scenario, the interpreter will have to start out, on the basis of the
Page 5 of 19
available text, with an interpretative hypothesis, measure it against the available

historical material (other texts by the same author, texts by his or her peers, the
larger cultural horizon), and then, if needed, revise her initial hypothesis.
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics thus includes a reference to the interplay
between divination, intuitive hypothesis-making, and comparison, that is,
historical-philological work (HC 93, see also HC 100). Just like technical and
grammatical interpretation, divination and comparison are mutually constituting
aspects of hermeneutics. Under ideal circumstances each should yield the same
result as the other. Yet the world of the interpreter is real, not ideal, and the
interpreter must move between hypothesis-formation (divination) and the
support or rejection of this hypothesis by reference to other works by the same
author, works written by his or her contemporaries, and other historical
circumstances (comparison).11 Schleiermacher views this as an infinite process
(HC 23). To grasp once and for all the one and only correct and irrefutable
meaning will always be beyond the reach of a finite, individual interpreter (HC
88).
(p.97) Does that, then, mean that Schleiermacher ditches the idea of correct
interpretation? Not necessarily. For Schleiermacher—and here he clearly
distinguishes himself from hermeneuticians of a more Heideggerian persuasion
—interpretations vary by degree of adequacy and correctness. The meaning of
the text does not, as in the case of Gadamer, rest with its being applied in ever
new contexts of understanding.12 Interpretations are not simply different, they
are also more or less plausible when assessed in light of their purported claim to
validity. The idea of correct interpretation serves as a point of orientation, a
regulative idea, lending the interpreter purpose, direction, and motivation.13 A
correct interpretation would be one in which the historical situatedness of the
interpreter is quelled, suspended, or otherwise put out of play. However, in
Schleiermacher’s understanding, the interpreter is always already individualized
and situated in history. A neutral interpretative “point of nowhere” is not within
reach. Interpretation is, by definition, fallible and subject to constant revision.
Precisely because interpretation is fallible and subject to constant revision, is it
crucial that the interpreter distinguish between the activity of understanding, on
the one hand, and the application of the insights she arrives at, on the other. If
the distinction between interpretation and application of the meaning (truth or
insight) of the text collapses, there would be no way that the interpreter could
make the encounter with a text from a culturally or temporally distant context
challenge her own prejudices and beliefs.14
In my view, this is one of the most important insights of Schleiermacher’s

hermeneutics. Only by acknowledging how the interpreter challenges her
outlook through the encounter with the points of view of an other can we see
how Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, while clearly responding to an
epistemological problem, is also driven by a strong and underlying ethical
motivation circling around the notion of mutual recognition. This is a point that,
Page 6 of 19
in equal measures, has been overlooked by Schleiermacher’s critics (who accuse

him of centering in on an aesthetic notion of individuality) and his defenders (to
the extent that they celebrate his notion of style for its own sake). So much
about Schleiermacher’s procedure or method of interpretation.
(b) What, then, is understood in and through a successful interpretation (an

interpretation that strikes the right balance between technical and grammatical
analysis)? This question has received little attention in the scholarship. Again,
this may be due to the relative consensus about Schleiermacher’s interest in
style.15 Another reason may be that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics has been
read as a transcendentally oriented theory, that is, a contribution that brings to
light the enabling conditions for understanding and thus conducts, as it were, a
Copernican turn away from the textual material to the methodological tools or
procedures of the interpreter. However, the question of how understanding is
possible is not, (p.98) in Schleiermacher’s work, detached from the question of
what is understood. Quite to the contrary, the two are closely related.
Schleiermacher’s reflection on the object of understanding—what the
interpreter is getting at, the meaning of the text—is rather abstract in nature (as
it has to be, given his wish to cover symbolic expression and understanding
across cultures, ages, and subjective dispositions). In this context, two aspects of
Schleiermacher’s theory of meaning must be singled out for further discussion:
first, his insistence on the intersubjective dimension of meaning, and, second,
his analysis of the distinction between primary and secondary thoughts.
First, Schleiermacher claims that understanding presupposes the interpreter’s

familiarity with the subject matter discussed in the text. In the context of
reconceptualizing Schleiermacher’s notion of individuality, this point is
significant. In the hermeneutic process, the interpreter, taking into account the
perspectives of technical and grammatical analysis, is not intentionally directed
towards the feelings of another or the style of the text, but towards the issue,
topic, problem, or subject matter addressed. As he aspires to clarify the
conditions of possibility for validity in understanding (overlapping, in his view,
with the conditions of possibility for understanding as such), Schleiermacher
centers on the kind of interpretation that is directed towards thought, as it is
given shape by and expressed through language. By definition, language is
ascribed an intersubjective dimension. According to Schleiermacher, “Speech is
the mediation of the communal nature of thought” (HC 7). Hermeneutics is thus
made possible by a shared orientation towards a given idea or subject matter
and seeks to bring this to the level of full, reflective awareness. As
Schleiermacher elaborates, “Every act of understanding is the inversion of a
speech-act, during which the thought which was the basis of the speech must
become conscious” (HC 7). If understanding presupposes a shared orientation
towards that which is understood, the reflective interpreter seeks to grasp how a
given expression, being shaped by its time and culture, sheds light on a
particular problem or subject matter.16 At stake is an orientation towards a
Page 7 of 19
mutual understanding of a given subject matter, problem, or issue as seen or

experienced by another concrete, historical human being.
Second, Schleiermacher elaborates this point by introducing a distinction

between primary and secondary thoughts (thoughts that are crucial and
thoughts that are merely facilitating the exposition of the main arguments,
ideas, or intuitions). This distinction is needed to help the interpreter hone in on
central claims or ideas and bracket that which is peripheral. In his account, the
distinction between primary and secondary thoughts sometimes requires a
laborious and cognitively uncertain process of interpretation. Neither in relating
to a text from a geographically or temporally distant culture, nor in relating to
language use that is closer to the interpreter’s own symbolic practice, does (p.
99) there exist an absolutely certain way to determine whether or not the
interpreter has arrived at the central thoughts of a given text.
Whether a text is close to or distant from the horizon of the interpreter, there is
always a risk that the interpreter hypostatizes thoughts that are peripheral to
the concerns of the author (and possibly more congenial to the interpreter’s
horizon of interpretation), and, as a consequence, allows the interpretation to be
colored by prejudices. By referring to historical context or other works by the
same author, the interpreter can support his or her interpretation or point out
how a given reading of a text misrepresents its meaning or is lacking in
justification. A positive and concluding justification of a given account of the
relationship between primary and secondary thoughts cannot, however, be
provided. As such, these terms do not present a methodological device that
guarantees the successful outcome of interpretation, but, again, only a heuristic
guideline that grants direction to the process of understanding.17
Summing up the discussion so far, it is clear that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics

does not represent a hypostatization of aesthetic individuality, but is built on the
notion of language as historical and concretely used (this was the point made in
section 1 above). Further, hermeneutic activity, in his work, is not geared
towards feeling, intention, or psychology, but towards the thought-content of the
utterance (as argued in section 2). Together, these points indicate how
Schleiermacher’s orientation towards individuality transcends the scope of a
merely literary or broader stylistic analysis and that it, as such, can, in principle,
contribute to a theory of Bildung.
5.3. Critique and Tradition

The purpose of my reinterpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is not
simply to avoid an aestheticizing reading of the romantic theory of
interpretation, but also to enable a reading of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics
that situates it within his larger turn to Bildung. In my view, it is unfortunate
that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is often read in isolation, and that, to the
extent that it is discussed in the context of his broader philosophical
Page 8 of 19
engagement, it is usually his Dialectics that is brought in.18 Schleiermacher’s

work in dialectics is no doubt important.19 However, a one-sided emphasis on his
dialectics may easily lead to a bias in favor of the epistemological aspects of
hermeneutics and, as a consequence, an overlooking of the social and ethical
motivation that drives his philosophy as a whole.
I have already mentioned that present readers of Schleiermacher only have

access to a fragmented version of his hermeneutic lectures. In the existing
editions of the text, Schleiermacher lays out the basic principles of
hermeneutics, but he does not say much about why it matters so much that we
understand other (p.100) human beings or the texts of the past. It is an open
question whether or not such reflections—reflections on the relevance of
hermeneutics—were ever included in the lectures. In the existing version of the
lectures, Schleiermacher focuses more on the principles of hermeneutics (What
does it mean to say that I understand a text or spoken language? What do I
understand when I understand a text?) than the question of its relevance and
motivation (Why is it worthwhile engaging in hermeneutic activity in the first
place?). Thus, in order to address the relevance of hermeneutics, we need to
move from Schleiermacher’s reflections on interpretation proper to the broader
context of his work. Only in this way is it possible to see how Schleiermacher’s
philosophy can help us overcome the notion of the opposing paradigms of Hegel
and romantic thought. Two points prove central in this context: (a)
Schleiermacher’s critique of tradition and (b) his understanding of the self and
its interpreting relationship to others.
(a) In the secondary literature, little attention has been paid to Schleiermacher’s
notion of tradition. One reason for this oversight might be that his reflection on
tradition emerges out of his early theological writings, which, in turn, have often
been isolated from his more technical hermeneutical work. Particularly
important in this context is On Religion, a work in which Schleiermacher
discusses the challenges of a tradition that no longer appears alive and worthy
of real, intellectual engagement.20
Schleiermacher addresses his fellow philosophers’ denouncement of religion,

that is, their self-proclaimed status as “cultured despisers” of religion (thus On
Religion is significantly subtitled Speeches to its Cultural Despisers).21 With
their knowledge of the tradition and its canonical texts, the cultured despisers
believe that they are familiar with the Christian scriptures and, by implication,
know exactly what they are rejecting when rejecting Christian faith and practice.
Schleiermacher, by contrast, argues that the central texts of the Christian
religion have been caught in a deadlock of interpretative stagnation.
Generations of readers abide by the predominant doctrines of understanding.
Generations of readers think they know what these texts are about. A consensus
of interpretation is gradually brought about, the consensus hardens, and
eventually it is virtually impossible to read the texts of tradition independently of
Page 9 of 19
the lens provided by the established paradigm. In this way, religion is subject to
a barren uniformity (OR 108). We face dead letters (OR 108, see also OR 85 and
91), not a disclosure of philosophical, theological, or existential meaning.
Interpretation is reduced to a scholastic quibbling, a hermeneutic lethargy that
Schleiermacher deems the sign of a new barbarism (OR 151). Schleiermacher
draws from this that what the despisers of religion really despise, though they
themselves may not know it, is the passive mediation of older texts. The
despisers of religion conflate the meaning that a dominant interpretative
tradition has ascribed to a given text with the meaning of the text as such.
(p.101) In On Religion, Schleiermacher stages a contrast between stifling

textual exegesis and true religious feeling, which is expressed in the intuition of
the universe as a whole.22 In the hermeneutics lectures, by contrast, he asks
how the meaning of ancient texts, including the cornerstones of the Christian
religion, can be resuscitated by hermeneutic work.23 The assumed presumption
is, again, that the philosopher, theologian, or humanist starts out with a text or
body of texts whose meaning has been handed down through generations and
centuries of scholarship that, eventually, turns into prejudice and dead
doctrines. Schleiermacher encourages us not to take for granted the traditional
interpretation of these texts. We think we understand, but the challenge for the
hermeneutician is critically and reflectively to ask whether his or her presumed
understanding is adequate or merely prejudicial. On passively assuming
familiarity with a given text or body of literature, the interpreter risks
confirming and cementing misunderstanding rather than avoiding it. In
Schleiermacher’s view, this is why we need a critical and reflective
hermeneutics; this is why we, for all its technical and scholastic distinctions,
need a standard or checklist with reference to which we can assess and reflect
on the validity of our interpretative endeavors.
(b) In the hermeneutics lectures, Schleiermacher draws attention to this point

when he discusses the special cases of ancient scientific and ethical texts (which
also exemplifies his point about primary and secondary thought). Given his
background in classical Greek philosophy, Schleiermacher is concerned with the
difficulties that potentially arise when the interpreter deals with texts from a
scientific or ethical paradigm other than her own. As Schleiermacher puts it,
“Revolutions in the area of natural science and ethics have produced new
systems and rejected old ones” (HC 65). As a consequence of this, the
interpreter, when dealing with older texts, cannot appeal to the criteria or
guidelines of contemporary science, ethics, or models of thought.
Schleiermacher begs caution when moving between the paradigm or mindset of
the present period and that of the text. He advises that in such an interpretative
situation it is easy to mistake key thoughts and ideas (primary thoughts) for
peripheral ones (secondary thoughts) and vice versa. Schleiermacher further
counsels that it would be a mistake at this point to try “immediately to compare
details in the new system with details in the preceding system” (HC 65), that is,
Page 10 of 19
to read old texts in light of or as providing answers to contemporary concerns

and questions. The relationship between the whole and the parts, between
primary and secondary thought, “is different in every whole” (HC 65). Through
the circular movement between a hypothesis about the meaning of the text as a
whole and a reading of the whole in light of its various parts, argumentative
steps, and supporting material (from a larger textual corpus, to chapters,
sections, and (p.102) down to the level of the single sentence, the smallest
hermeneutic unit), the interpreter must attempt to ferret out the intrinsic
structure and organization of the individual expression at stake. It is within this
wider hermeneutic context—that of facing a tradition we think we know, but
which may prove to be the results of prejudice and doctrine—that
Schleiermacher’s concrete guidelines for interpretation finds philosophical
meaning.
In focusing on ancient scientific and ethical texts, Schleiermacher’s point is not

to argue that these texts constitute a special hermeneutic subgroup. The
particular cases of old scientific and ethical texts are expressive of a global risk,
namely that the interpreter allows her present-day views, her prejudices or
horizon of understanding, to skew her reading. Thus Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics draws a distinction between, on the one hand, the tacit everyday
understanding that serves as a basis for the interpreter and his or her
prereflected relation to tradition and, on the other, a critical understanding that
seeks systematically to question the legitimacy of existing patterns of
interpretation. The real hermeneutic problem typically occurs when the
interpreter is confident that he or she understands and thus fails to question the
limits of his or her preconceptions. The allure of prejudices is not only that they
thematically guide the interpreter’s reading of a given text, but also that they
have him or her look for confirmation of his or her own interpretative hypothesis
rather than critically reflecting on its validity. As finite beings, we tend to
reconstruct meaning in light of what appears plausible from our own point of
view, rather than questioning whether our own point of view is adequate or
hermeneutically helpful. An obvious example, taken from Schleiermacher’s own
time, is the way that Winckelmann, Hegel, and a whole generation of German
philosophers of art would follow their predecessors in emphasizing the
whiteness of ancient Greek sculpture, claiming that the remaining traces of
paint were the result of medieval vandalism (thus barring the possibility that the
marble had been painted from the very beginning).
Facing this predicament, as it is baked into the dialectics of tradition itself,

Schleiermacher’s point is not that we should carry with us a whole arsenal of
hermeneutic doctrines in order to make sense of everyday utterances in our own
language. What he suggests, rather, is that the critical hermeneutician, when
striving to avoid misunderstanding, must anchor her interpretative hypothesis in
a reflected point of view, a point of view that can be discursively accounted for
and justified.24 In order to do so, the interpreter needs a theory, a set of
Page 11 of 19
directions and guidelines by reference to which it is possible for him or her to

reflect on and critique his or her preconception of a given text, utterance, or
subject area. To provide such directions and guidelines is the mission of
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics.
(p.103) 5.4. Selfhood and Sociality

Why, then, does it matter that the interpreter reaches a more adequate
understanding of the text, that he or she is able, critically and reflectively, to
break through petrified patterns of understanding? Again this question must be
answered with reference to Schleiermacher’s broader philosophical program.
His notion of selfhood is particularly important in this context. For if we are to
argue, as I wish to do in this article, that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, with
its critical turn to tradition, can serve to undermine the perceived dichotomy
between romanticism and philosophy of Bildung, it needs to be shown that
understanding, by his lights, is not simply a matter of getting an objectivized
tradition “right,” but that the interpreter’s being situated in history and tradition
interferes, at a much deeper level, with his or her self-understanding.
As far as his theological writings go, Schleiermacher’s philosophy of selfhood

(and, ultimately, self-understanding) has been read in light of his notion of
absolute dependency.25 Against the Fichtean turn to an I that, at a
transcendental level, posits itself as absolutely self-positing, thus ensuring the
noumenal freedom of subjectivity, Schleiermacher, in The Christian Faith (1830–
31), argues that the I, though furnished with a capacity for freedom, is not
responsible for or the author of its own being (as free). That is, the I must
understand itself as both constituted and constituting, both dependent and
free.26 The freedom of subjectivity is expressed through the structuring capacity
of discursive reasoning. The feeling I, however, experiences itself as dependent
on a nonsubjective world, a dimension of being that enables the exercise of
spontaneity and the capacity to create the order and structure that experience
presupposes.
However, Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependency and his idea of the

linguistic mediation of thought is balanced by an account of how the self—finite
and dependent—realizes itself in free interaction with other selves. There are
traces of this kind of thinking in Schleiermacher’s Dialectics, in which the
contemplation of another individual’s point of view is ascribed a fundamental
epistemic importance. Yet this aspect of his theory is most clearly laid out in an
earlier, unfinished text, Essay on a Theory of Social Behavior, from 1799 (that is,
the same year as the publication of On Religion).
Articulating the dos and don’ts of a free social life, Schleiermacher’s Essay on a
Theory of Social Behavior has been read as a philosophical defense of the
romantic salon.27 Schleiermacher, indeed, was a regular in the Berlin salons at
the time and was seen, even by his contemporaries, as the philosopher who had
Page 12 of 19
theorized its dynamic of free sociality.28 However, Schleiermacher’s text is not

simply a historical documentation of the spirit of the salon, but also a complex
(p.104) philosophical contribution to a debate initiated by another aspect of
Fichte’s philosophy, namely his theory of intersubjective recognition.29
The individual, for Schleiermacher, is determined as unique and representing an

irreducible point of view, a particular realization of humanity. In
Schleiermacher’s own words: “As a finite being, every individual has his or her
definitive sphere in which he or she alone can think and act and thus also impart
him or herself” (ESB 160). Hence Schleiermacher calls for a sociality that is not
based on abstract identification, but on a kind of community that allows
individuals to encounter each other freely, a sociality that is not justified with
reference to external, unifying aims but is a goal in itself (ESB 154, 157). Such a
sociality is based on reciprocal contribution and respect for difference. It is
based, in short, on individual diversity, on identity in difference and not in spite
of it. This is a sociality that encourages a free play of feeling and thought in the
individual, but also a free interaction among individuals (ESB 158–59).30
Showing off or underplaying one’s own individuality threatens such sociality
(ESB 158). Schleiermacher’s idealized notion of enlightened sociality aims to
create relationships based on mutual respect and acknowledgment. As a
regulative ideal, as a goal towards which we ought to strive, such a sociality
would involve nothing less than an ongoing education in humanity (ESB 154). As
Schleiermacher puts it, all manifestations of humanity will become known, one
after the other (ESB 154).
Now, if the manifestations of humanity, understood as the maximum of possible

outlooks or viewpoints on the world, are gradually to be revealed, the capacity to
understand—and the quest for self-critique and reflection on limiting prejudices
—moves to the very center of philosophy. It is at one and the same time
expressive of an epistemological commitment that has to do with a finite being’s
ability to expand its own horizon of understanding and knowledge, and an ethical
commitment having to do with the fact that such understanding is based on a
will to recognize the other as a somebody whose perspective might be as valid as
my own. Disagreement is only possible to the extent that the interlocutor is
recognized as a rational agent and as defending a position worth taking
seriously. Only through such recognition, ethical and epistemological, can the
individual gain education in culture, that is, Bildung.
Understood in this way, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is not, as his critics as

well as his defenders have often suggested, a theory of aesthetic individuality or
style. It is, rather, a theory that reflects the finality of reason in the sense that
each individual, in his or her epistemic endeavors and ethical orientations, is
situated in a given historical culture. One way that the individual, as a finite
historical being, can reflect on this culture and try to keep it alive and
expanding, is by encountering symbolic expressions from temporally or
Page 13 of 19
culturally distant contexts of origins. But in facilitating such encounters, the

interpreter needs, as (p.105) a regulative ideal or a practical-hermeneutic
maxim, a normative set of guidelines in light of which he or she can reflect on
and critique his or her prejudices so as to allow the other to speak as a possible
other and thus as somebody who can, potentially, challenge the outlook or view
of the interpreter him- or herself. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is an effort to
discuss and take seriously the idea of such a critical-dialogical interaction.
5.5. Conclusion
Against the background of such a reading, the notion of a bifurcation of
nineteenth-century thought into the clearly marked-off constellations of the
romantics and Hegel will have to be questioned. As represented by
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, the romantic project does itself entail a notion
of tradition and the individual’s formation in and through engagement with the
past.31 This, however, does not imply that Schleiermacher (or, for that sake,
romanticism more broadly) and Hegel represent the same view. What it does
imply, though, is that rather than pitching Hegel’s relation to the romantics in
light of a contrast between aesthetic individuality and Bildung, we should take
these models to represent two different responses to one and the same problem:
the interrelation between selfhood and historicity, criticism and prejudice in
tradition, that is captured in the nineteenth-century turn to Bildung in the first
place. When viewed in this light, the contrast between the romantics and Hegel
is not a matter of being for or against Bildung, historicity, or a notion of the self
as intersubjectively meditated. From Schleiermacher’s point of view, such a
contrast would make no sense: as a meaning-producing agent, the self is always
already situated within a context of tradition—that is, a shared space of action
and meaning. Hence the problem—ethically as well as epistemologically
speaking—is how to keep tradition, as a space of understanding, open, dynamic,
and achieving a balanced relationship between preservation and criticism.
Understood in this way, Hegel and Schleiermacher present two different ways of
thinking about Bildung: on the one hand, an emphasis on the continuity and
intrinsic rationality of tradition (as a space of possible meaning), on the other, a
stressing of the constitutive importance of a plurality of different historical and
individual perspectives that constantly transcend and challenge the synthesis of
tradition.
As such, Schleiermacher’s understanding of Bildung deserves to be revisited. His

is a theory that seeks to unify a notion of Bildung with a hermeneutic model that
is committed to the diversity of individual outlooks. Further, it is
Schleiermacher’s achievement to show that the commitment to a reflective
standard or method in interpretation is not opposed to a turn to Bildung, but,
rather, a condition of possibility for it. Only when the interpreter critically and
(p.106) reflectively evaluates his or her own prejudices, only when a given
historical expression is situated within its own horizon of meaning, can it
challenge, and possibly also expand, the horizon of the interpreter. Finally,
Page 14 of 19
Schleiermacher does not take as his point of departure the notion of a unifying
and totalizing tradition. For Schleiermacher, tradition is a condition of possibility
for understanding. However, tradition is also a field in which prejudices and
systematically distorted beliefs can be bolstered and handed down. For him,
hermeneutics is committed to a consideration of individual points of view, an
acknowledgment of the diversity of standpoints and the need for a gradually
expanding understanding of the world. This is in my view where
Schleiermacher’s philosophy should be located—in the very intersection
between nineteenth-century philosophy of Bildung and interpretation theory
more broadly conceived.
Notes:
(1) . For Hegel’s criticism, see for instance Hegel, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and
Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 506–10. For a
study of the complexity of Hegel’s relationship to romanticism, see Otto
Pöggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik (Bonn: Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität,
1956 [dissertation]).
(2) . This is an aspect of Schleiermacher’s philosophy that is left out in Manfred

Frank’s study. While Frank gets beyond Szondi’s efforts to read Schleiermacher
as a modernist philosopher avant la lettre, his chief motivation is to show that
Schleiermacher’s work anticipates insights later to be associated with what he
terms existential-ontological and semological-structuralistic approaches to
literature. See Peter Szondi, “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics Today,” On Textual
Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 97. For Frank’s reading, see Das
individuelle Allgemeine. Textstrukturierung und Textinterpretation nach
Schleiermacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 13 and 23.
(3) . See Wolfgang Virmond, “Neue Textgrundlagen zu Schleiermachers früher

Hermeneutik. Prolegomena zur kritischen Edition.” In Kurt-Victor Selge et. al.
eds., Schleiermacher-Archiv, vol. 1, part 2, Internationaler
Schleiermacherkongreß 1984 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 575–590.
(4) . For a more detailed discussion of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics (and its

reception), see my Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 155–219.
(5) . Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, trans. and ed.

Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. Further
references to this work will be abbreviated HC, followed by page number. See
Page 15 of 19
also Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen. Gründzüge einer Geschichte der

hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B.
Mohr, 1926–33), 31–82 and Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics,
trans. Martha Woodmansee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94–
109.
(6) . It should be added that Schleiermacher’s claim that he is the first to

articulate a universal hermeneutics is exaggerated and betrays either a lack of
knowledge of the hermeneutic tradition or a wish to stand forth as original in
this respect. For a discussion of this point, see Werner Alexander, Hermeneutica
Generalis. Zur Konzeption und Entwicklung der allgemeinen Verstehenslehre im
17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: M&P, Verlag für Wissenschaft und
Forschung, 1993), 3–5.
(7) . Paul Ricoeur emphasizes this dimension of Schleiermacher’s notion of

universal hermeneutics in “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics,” The Monist 60, no.
2 (1977), 183–84.
(8) . Dilthey, in particular, views this as the main achievement of

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s
Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics, trans.
Theodore Nordenhaug, in Selected Works, vol. 4, Hermeneutics and the Study of
History, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 132–229.
(9) . Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003), 381.
(10) . Thus Schleiermacher even sees language, as originating in speech-acts, as

“an individual in relation to others” (HC 10).
(11) . Thus Schleiermacher also contrasts divination to a historical method (HC

23).
(12) . See Truth and Method, 307–11.
(13) . As Schleiermacher puts it, “nobody can be satisfied with simple non-
understanding” (HC 29).
(14) . Whereas Gadamer views interpretation and application as two sides of the
same coin, Schleiermacher insists that the hermeneutician may encounter texts
that can be understood (i.e., they can be seen as coherent, meaningful, and a
rational response to a given problem), yet their meaning cannot be applied (if,
say, the problem to which the text responds is no longer recognized as relevant).
Further, he keeps open the possibility that a text, in its approach to a given
subject matter, problem, or issue, can put into perspective, possibly also
question, the way in which a problem or issue is typically addressed within the
Page 16 of 19
culture of the interpreter. Again this requires, for Schleiermacher, a distinction

between interpretation (addressing the meaning of the text) and application
(addressing the question how it can help the interpreter better understand a
given subject matter).
(15) . Yet “style” in his work is defined as “individuality of presentation” (HC 95),
thus implying that something is presented in the first place.
(16) . Thought, however, is not reduced to propositional content, but includes the
free play of poetry (HC 64).
(17) . This mirrors the limits of grammatical and technical interpretation. As

Schleiermacher puts it, both grammatical and technical interpretation “can only
be reached by approximation” (HC 96).
(18) . This is particularly clear in the work of Manfred Frank. Not only does
Frank draw on Schleiermacher’s dialectics in Das individuelle Allgemeine, but he
also published a version of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics that is supported
with excerpts from the dialectic lectures as well as his late ethics. Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). Two exceptions to this tendency are Christian Berner,
La philosophie de Schleiermacher. Herméneutique. Dialectique. Ethique (Paris:
Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995) and Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik.
Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1995).
(19) . Schleiermacher makes this point himself when he argues for “The
dependence of both [hermeneutics and rhetoric] on dialectics” (HC 7).
(20) . As already Dilthey makes clear, this is in line with the broader orientation
of Lutherian theology.
(21) . Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers,

trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Further
references to this work will be abbreviated OR, followed by page number.
(22) . Indeed, in Schleiermacher’s judgment, this puts hermeneutics on a par

with philosophy: “If you put yourself on the highest standpoint of metaphysics
and morals, you will find that both have the same object as religion, namely, the
universe and the relationship of humanity to it” (OR 97).
(23) . Thus, in the hermeneutics lectures, no other text gets more attention than
the Bible and the question as to how the Bible can and should best be
understood. These discussions are ample; for an example, see HC 15–20.
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(24) . Gadamer is in other words wrong in viewing Schleiermacher’s

hermeneutics as a universalization of misunderstanding (Truth and Method,
179–80, 184–85, 190–91). Schleiermacher does not claim that misunderstanding,
de facto, is universal, but that no utterance, in principle, is safe from
misunderstanding. Hence critical hermeneutics must approach all utterances in
the same, reflected way. As he puts it, “The business of hermeneutics should not
only begin where understanding is uncertain, but with the first beginning of the
enterprise of wanting to understand an utterance” (HC 228).
(25) . See for example Frank’s reading in Das individuelle Allgemeine, 91–94.
(26) . As Schleiermacher puts it, “In every self-consciousness there are two
elements, which we might call respectively a self-caused element (ein
Sichselbstsetzen) and a non-self-caused element (ein
Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben).” Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,
ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. D. M. Baille et al. (London: T&T
Clark, 1999), 13.
(27) . Friedrich Schleiermacher, Essay on a Theory of Social Behavior, trans.

Peter Foley in Peter Foley, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Essay on a Theory of
Social Behavior” (1799) (Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 153–76.
Further references to this work will be abbreviated ESB, followed by page
number.
(28) . See Hannah Arendt, “Berlin Salon,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954

(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 57–66.
(29) . For a discussion of this point, see Andreas Arndt, “Geselligkeit und
Gesellschaft. Die Geburt der Dialektik aus dem Geist der Konversation in
Schleiermachers ‘Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens,’” in Salons
der Romantik. Beiträge eines Wiepersdorfer Kolloquiums zu Theorie und
Geschichte des Salons, ed. Hartwig Schultz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997),
45–61.
(30) . At this point, Schleiermacher goes beyond Schiller, whose 1795 letters on
aesthetic education address the free play between the different aspects of
humanity, but not the interplay between different individuals.
(31) . My focus on Schleiermacher should not be taken to indicate that he is the

only romantic philosopher contributing to the area of hermeneutics. For a study
of romantic hermeneutics more broadly speaking, see Reinhold Rieger,
Interpretation und Wissen. Zur philosophischen Begründung der Hermeneutik
bei Friedrich Schleiermacher und ihrem geschichtlichen Hintergrund,
Schleiermacher-Archiv, vol. 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988).
Page 18 of 19
Page 19 of 19
Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

What We Can Learn from Early German Romanticism
Jane Kneller
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0007

This paper describes the model of sociability developed by the early German
romantics with the aim of showing its relevance to academic discourses aiming
to be more diverse and inclusive. The paper begins by linking the early German
romantics’ conception of “symphilosophizing” to the art of “reciprocal
communication” hinted at by Kant at the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment” and to the transformation of academic discourse in Jena during that
period. It discusses the ways in which the work of three of the central figures of
early German romanticism—Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich
Schleiermacher—developed Kant’s notion of a “sociability that befits our
humanity” by in effect socializing Kant’s account of genius, giving rise to a
theory of genial conversation that is still worthy of study and emulation.
Keywords: early German romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Kant, aesthetic
ideas, sociability
At the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” Kant gestures towards the
possibility of a society that creatively engages intellectual, moral ideas with
natural human feeling to construct a truly human sociability. He defines
“humanity” as the combination of two universal capacities, namely “the feeling
of participation, and the ability to communicate universally one’s inmost self,”
and goes on to say that the realization of these capacities “constitutes the
sociability that befits our humanity.” Such a society would develop the “art of
reciprocal communication” that would discover “the mean between higher
Page 1 of 17
culture and an undemanding nature,” fully developing taste into “the universal
human sense” (AA 5, 355–56). This possibility is merely suggested by Kant here,
but the gesture is important for expressing Kant’s recognition that the capacity
that underlies what the eighteenth century called “taste,” namely, aesthetic
reflective judgment, is a cognitive condition of social communication necessary
for the construction of a higher form of human sociability. This “social”
sociability, deliberately and progressively constructed, stands in sharp contrast
to Kant’s hypothetical “unsocial” sociability that drives humanity to better its
own condition without regard to (and often in spite of) individual human
choices.1
In what follows I will argue that the early German romantics took up the project
of deliberately constructing this sort of social sociability by experimenting with
and theorizing new forms of social discourse that balanced expressions of high
culture on the one hand, and the unpretentious originality of ordinary human
nature on the other. That is to say, using Kant’s idiom, the early German
romantic movement aimed to create new modes of participatory feeling and (p.
111) self-expression that pushed the art of reciprocal philosophical
communication to new, higher levels. This essay will examine the methods of
philosophizing undertaken by the early German romantics in the 1790s,
concluding with an examination of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s attempt to
summarize and generalize romantic philosophical practice into a “theory of
human sociable conduct.”
6.1. Sociability in Early German Romanticism

It is perhaps the collective character of this early manifestation of Romanticism
in Germany which most conspicuously distinguishes it from all other Romantic
movements in Europe.2
[The ideal of the seminar] was reflected quite clearly... in certain of the
literary works that emerged at Jena just at that time [in 1798]... it was
precisely the coincidence of the rudimentary form of the seminar, the
familiar model of the Platonic dialogue, and the lively exchange of the
social setting that contributed in a typically Romantic interaction to the
first true realization of the academic seminar.3
In his work on the institutions of German romanticism, Theodore Ziolkowski

stresses the importance of what he calls “the educational ideal” and the “ideal of
the seminar” in the writings of the early romantics in Jena and Berlin. He
describes this ideal as it developed at the University of Jena between 1785 and
1795, out of the context of poor state funding, a rough and rebellious student
body, and, in the early 1790s in Jena, a chaotic period in the aftermath of the
French Revolution during which students clashed often and violently with
government militias. Low faculty salaries and a reputation for an uncouth and
demanding student body made recruitment and retention of prestigious faculty
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difficult, forcing administrative authorities to recruit younger, cheaper faculty,

and to put up with their new ideas in order to retain them. Hiring the likes of
Friedrich Schiller (who taught history there) and then Johann Gottlieb Fichte
brought drama and moral zeal to the lecture halls of Jena, and, Ziolkowski
argues, Jena became a magnet for young intellectuals attracted by the
opportunity to remake the university into a “locus for the intellectual excitement
of the era.”4 Kantianism had already taken firm hold in Jena by the 1790s thanks
to K. L. Reinhold’s impassioned and extremely popular lectures. Schiller’s first
lectures in 1789 at Jena were blockbusters, beginning with a call to students to
study world history disinterestedly, not for professional gain but for the sake of
knowledge itself. Fichte’s public lectures on the ethics of the scholar also
elevated the calling of the academic to a moral as well as an intellectual one,
arguing that the role of student-scholar required recognition that their academic
(p.112) abilities and privileged situation within the university brings with it
greater social responsibility. As Ziolkowski puts it:
This was a heady message for the students of Jena, who saw themselves
challenged by the compelling moral presence of the age not merely to lift
themselves out of the mire of brutishness that had hitherto characterized
their university but also to prepare themselves to be the teachers, the
educators, and even the priests of mankind.5
What Ziolkowski calls the “Jena mode of discourse” that took hold among the
circle of romantic philosopher poets in the 1790s was indebted, he argues, to
this new “discourse of the academy” in a historical moment of genuine scholarly
communication led by a succession of gifted professors at the University of
Jena:6 Early German romanticism is thus to be distinguished from other
“romanticisms” by its use of academic genres such as the lecture, the persuasive
public speech, and the dialogue: “In sum, the modes of discourse preferred by
the Jena Romantics show the pronounced influence of the lecture hall and the
seminar room—places ideally suited to the kind of Symphilosophieren of which
Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and their contemporaries so often spoke.”7
Given the sense that attaches to the term “academic” in our own time, it may
seem very odd to suggest that the early German romantic style, which is
anything but dry and pedantic, was an emulation of academic discourse. The
point, however, is that these academic forms were being reinvented during the
1790s in Jena. The “heady” messages of these enthusiastic academic voices
turned dusty intellectual discourse into a bright, impassioned call for social and
moral progress. In the crucible of the French revolutionary era the creativity and
moral enthusiasm of “academics” like Schiller and Fichte in Jena transformed
the old institutions. Kant’s call for a new form of reciprocal communication was
already being put into practice at the time Kant wrote it, and indeed by some of
the most gifted minds of the time. When in their lectures, seminars, and
speeches Schiller and Fichte urged their students to become a part of their
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academic discourse, and when they expressed to their students their own view
that individuals shared universal interests in the continuing progress of history,
these new academics were in effect carrying out Kant’s call for the construction
of a reciprocal communication based on feelings of participation and the
universalization of the individual’s innermost self.
It is no wonder that their students—the next generation of poets, critics, and

philosophers—were fired up and inspired to carry this transformation even
further, into critical, poetic, and philosophical masterpieces. What is remarkable
about the early romantics’ embrace of academic social responsibility was that
they held sociable conduct up as a model also for their criticism, poetry, (p.113)
and philosophy. Sociability was woven into the very practice and processes of
their scholarly and artistic disciplines: They managed, for a brief time at least, to
turn what had traditionally been solitary academic tasks into a shared social
project. Ernst Behler sums it up well: the early German romanticism that
manifested itself in Jena was distinguished first and foremost by its “collective
character.” Their greatest contributions were written in and through the attempt
to construct in their midst a version of the sociability that Kant had said “befits
our humanity.”
6.2. Schlegel and Novalis: Symphilosophy

In a remarkable experiment in what Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, referring to
their own collaboration, called “symphilosophizing,” early German romanticism
practiced the “art of reciprocal communication” among a group that for that
historical period in Europe was surprisingly diverse in class, ethnicity, and
gender. In the salons of Berlin attended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit, and Ludwig Tieck, among others, as well as in
meetings in the home of August and Carolina Schlegel (Friedrich’s brother and
sister-in-law) in Jena, the sort of intimate and sympathetic philosophical
conversation Kant hoped for in the critique of aesthetic reflective judgment
actually took place.8
From the very start the early German romantics were captivated by the
problems and promise of aesthetic reflective dialogue. Touched by social
changes in their midst and abroad, and challenged to shoulder their share of
social responsibility and carry it into the dawn of a new century, their project
was social to the core. Like Kant they saw the need to include the cultural and
aesthetic claims of individuals from different social and historical backgrounds,
but for the early German romantics this variety of perspectives became the very
form and substance of their entire enterprise: In full recognition of the problem
of the incommensurability of subjects’ positions, they nevertheless
enthusiastically embraced the project of giving voice to a chorus, and a chaos, of
multiple perspectives. Their writings and discourses aimed at maximizing
mutual understanding without minimizing discordant notes, and even provoked
them (e.g., Schlegel’s exquisitely ironic “On Incomprehensibility”). They
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addressed the problem of how subjective experience and the inner life of the
individual can ever “get outside itself” (e.g., Novalis’ Fichte and Kant studies
and his Novices of Sais), and they returned again and again to the larger issue of
how a society or social group with members from different vocations, religious
backgrounds, and genders can find common ground through self-expression
(Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry, Schleiermacher’s Speeches on religion and his
Theory of Sociable Conduct).
(p.114) To see this, a brief discussion of some of these exemplary pieces

written during the pinnacle of the early German romantics’ creative productivity
(1798–99) is in order. The kernel of many of the texts of the Jena circle was
contained in the journal published between 1798 and 1800 by Friedrich and
August Wilhelm Schlegel, the Athenäum. This journal was truly “the axis of
Romantic aesthetics,” containing much, if not “almost everything” that was
central to the early German romantic movement.9 It was also novel in its
inclusion of a variety of literary forms including reviews, short essays, speeches,
and poetry, and most notably, collections of fragments—a literary form brought
to new heights by Friedrich Schlegel. The final volume closed with an essay
addressing a frequent criticism of the Athenäum aimed especially at the
fragments, namely the charge of incomprehensibility. Schlegel’s reply, “On
Incomprehensibility,” is a model of romantic irony that circles around and plays
with the problem of communication between reader and writer. Playful and
sarcastic, by turns self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, at once jocular and
serious, Schlegel challenges his critics to get off their high horse and take
themselves less seriously, in part by modeling how that is done in the essay
itself. But it is also a deadly serious argumentative performance illustrating his
conviction that art and philosophy must begin and end where we find ourselves,
in medias res, together with his view, famously articulated in an early fragment
in the Athenäum, that romantic poetry is philosophic, sociable, and aims to make
society more “poetic” in this sense as well:
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to

reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with
philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and
prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature;
and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize
with and fill and saturate the forms of art with the pulsations of humor. It
embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art,
containing within themselves still further systems, to the sigh, the kiss that
the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song.... The romantic kind of
poetry is still in the state of becoming; that in fact is its real essence: that
it should forever be becoming and never be perfected... in a certain sense
all poetry is or should be romantic.
(KA 2, 182–83)10
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Poetry (Poesie) is universal because it aims at an ideal that is itself never fully
articulable and thus “incomprehensible.” It is progressive because it never gives
up attempting to comprehend and be comprehensible, that is, it aims constantly
to better communicate itself to others, both present and future. Schlegel
describes how in response to the charge of incomprehensibility he had initially
resolved to (p.115)
have a talk about this matter with my reader, and then create before his
eyes—in spite of him as it were—another new reader to my own liking: yes,
even to deduce him if need be. I meant it quite seriously... I wanted for
once to be really thorough and go through the whole series of my essays,
admit their frequent lack of success with complete frankness, and so
gradually lead the reader to being similarly frank and straightforward with
himself.
(KA 2, 363–64; Firchow, 260)
Schlegel continues describing how he had hoped to show the reader, in the
clearest terms, how incomprehension is “relative” to each individual and that the
highest form of incomprehension occurs precisely in the arts and sciences,
where the aim is total clarity of comprehension. But this confession artfully
shades off into a mock encomium to the recent discovery (by Kant) of a “real
language” and to the “critical age” he lives in, in which “everything is going to
be criticized except the age itself” and in which, in the newly dawning
millennium “humanity will at last rise up in a mass and learn to read.” Elizabeth
Millán Zaibert sums up the piece, and Schlegel’s use of irony, nicely:
Irony is a sort of play that reveals the limitations of a view of reality that
presumed to have the last word. With the use of romantic irony, Schlegel
showed that there was no last word. And once we give up a last word,
aesthetic methods become sensible alternatives to the methods of
mathematics and the natural sciences.11
One of the aesthetic methods prized by the early romantics was the dialogue
form, and here again Schlegel provides a model of the romantic mode of
discourse that fused philosophy and poetry in an attempt to make them “lively
and sociable” and to make “life and society poetical.” In his introduction to the
Dialogue on Poetry, modeled upon the many actual conversations of the early
romantics, Schlegel insists upon the social nature of poetry: it “befriends and
binds with unseverable ties the hearts of all those who love it” no matter how
much at odds they otherwise may be “in their own lives” (KA 2, 284–87).12
Poetry is expansive by nature and true poetry exists when one seeks to expand
one’s poetry to increasingly incorporate the work of others. Aware that one will
always return to oneself, poetry requires “reaching out time and again beyond
oneself to find the complement of one’s innermost being in the depths of
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another”: “The play of communication and approaching [others] is the business

and the force of life: absolute perfection exists only in death.” What constitutes
progress in Schlegel’s expansive “poetry” is not its becoming more and more
true, or “real” but rather when it tries to connect its own particularity to all
other poetry by finding “the center point, through communication with those (p.
116) who have found their [poetry] from a different side, in a different way.”
Schlegel asserts that the poet is “a sociable being” and then leads into the
Dialogue with the promise to present a “many-sided” conversation that is
intended to set against one another quite divergent opinions, each of them
capable of shedding new light upon the infinite spirit of poetry from an
individual standpoint, each of them striving to penetrate from a different angle
into the real heart of the matter (KA 2, 286; Behler and Struc, 55).
The fact that the “real heart of the matter” is no more comprehensible than a
“real language” in no way hinders, and in fact is precisely what drives, the
romantic project to attempt to get to it. The goal is the striving—that is, the
striving for an increasingly expansive poetry that “approximates the loftiest
possibility of [poetry] on earth” through reciprocal communication leading to the
discovery of multiple views to be incorporated into one’s own.
Before turning to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s contribution to a romantic theory

of sociable conduct, it is important to briefly mention the contribution that
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) made to this core element of early German
romanticism. Novalis’s close friendship with Friedrich Schlegel and their
commitment to “fuse” their accounts of poetry and philosophy in the process of
Symphilosophieren makes it difficult to separate their views. But Novalis’s
extensive notes and comments upon Fichte’s early lectures at Jena, as well as
notes and comments on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, lend his account of
sociability a decidedly metaphysical aspect that is not nearly as prominent in
Friedrich Schlegel’s work from this period. His keen interest in Fichte’s work
attests to Novalis’s fascination with the nature of the self, or the “inner world” of
the “I.” His collected notes on Fichte focus largely on the question of self-
cognition and self-awareness and do not deal much with social communication,
but the philosophical underpinnings of his views on sociability are clear in
passages that echo and improvise upon Fichtean themes: For instance, that
philosophy begins with the “I” of self-awareness (“Philosophy is limited strictly
to the determinate modification of consciousness”), but that self-consciousness
itself requires an “other” (“The human being is as much Not-I as I”) (NS 2, 268,
nos. 559, 561, 562).13 He notes that modern philosophers “have limited
[philosophy] to the thinking of a ground of representations and sensations, in
short to the alteration of the subject,” but ends his massive study of Fichte with
the enigmatic blurring of the individual/species distinction (NS 2, 272, no. 567;
Kneller, 169):
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On humanity. Its pure complete development must first be in the art of the
individual—and only then pass over to the great masses of people and then
the species. To what extent is the species an individual?
(NS 2, 271, no. 567; 296, no. 667; Kneller, 169; 194)
(p.117) This fundamental interplay of the inner self with the outer world—
especially with other “selves”—becomes a trope in Novalis’s maturing
philosophical and literary work. In his studies of Kant he muses that philosophy
includes treating the sciences (die Wissenschaften) both scientifically and
poetically, and raises the question whether the poetic is not perhaps identical to
the practical, in the sense of being a specification of it. He worries about
whether there are means other than mere sense perception for “getting outside
ourselves and reaching other beings” (NS 2, 390). One of his last literary efforts,
the Novices of Sais, makes clear that for Novalis, the answer to these
metaphysical questions about the nature of the subject is that it is essentially
social, and specifically it is most itself when it is “in love” with other human
beings. The work depicts many “interpersonal” exchanges with nonsubject
selves (plants, rocks, the ocean) in which “both types of perception [feeling and
thinking] gain: the outer world becomes transparent and the inner world
becomes varied and meaningful” (NS 1, 71–109).14 But a crucial “fairy tale” told
by one of the novices underscores Novalis’s commitment to the primacy of the
social: a young man journeys to the veiled statue of a woman said to be “the
mother of things,” but the story ends not, as in Schiller’s poem, with the death of
the seeker from despair induced by what he had unveiled, but with the young
seeker of knowledge lifting the veil to discover once again the lover, and
eventually the family, friends, and community he had earlier spurned in his quest
for knowledge. This extraordinary little story of the fantastic journey culminating
in everyday life is typically early romantic, and in its portrayal of fundamental
human wisdom as rooted in community with others, it encapsulates a
fundamental principle of early romanticism.
6.3. Schleiermacher: Towards a Theory of Sociable Conduct

The most direct record of the romantic social-dialogic experiment, however, is
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s attempt to theorize a romantic ideal of sociable
conduct in ordinary (nonacademic) discourse. This work on sociability
represents the social cooperative turn of early romanticism at its most intense,
and is very closely tied to the views of both Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. What
follows is a sketch of this unfinished essay by Schleiermacher during the period
of his life and work in which he was most closely tied to the Jena romantics.
In January and February of 1799 the first two installments of Schleiermacher’s

Essay on a Theory of Sociable Behavior were published anonymously in the
Berlin Archive of the Age and its Taste (Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres
Geschmackes). The final installments were never finished,15 but the first
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sections (p.118) yield a fascinating glimpse into the world of the Berlin salons
of which he and his close friend Friedrich Schlegel were both active. The Essay
illustrates the centrality of the very idea of social reflective activity for early
romantic philosophy, picking up the thread of Kant’s comment at the end of the
“Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” about the need for developing a “sociability
that befits our humanity.” Schleiermacher begins with the claim that free
sociability is a “higher goal of humanity”: “free sociability, neither fettered nor
determined by any external end, is demanded vociferously by all educated
people as one of their primary and most cherished needs” (KGA 165; Foley, 153).
He elaborates by pointing out that people’s jobs (their “civil life”) and their home
life take up so much time and energy, that their sphere of “mental activity” is
increasingly narrowed and their perspectives and activities become increasingly
one-sided. Thus he says, the higher aim of free and unfettered conversation with
others is to expose us to the widest possible variety of perspectives:
There must be a state that... enables an individual’s sphere to be

intersected as variously as possible so that each of one’s own points of
limitation will afford a view into a different and strange world. In such a
manner, all manifestations of humanity will become known, one after the
other, and the most alien temperaments and relationships can also become
familiar and similarly intimate to that individual. This objective is realized
by rational people engaging in mutual self-education when they freely keep
company.
(KGA 165; Foley, 153)
Schleiermacher, echoing Kant’s language of a kingdom of ends, continues by

characterizing free sociability as a moral end “realized by rational people” when
they set aside self-interested ends and transport themselves into an intellectual
world in which they act as a member:
Only here, owing to the inherent lack of civil authority, everyone must be
their own legislator and must see to it that the common good sustains no
damage. All improvement must proceed from this principle and can only
really be brought about by every individual adjusting his or her behavior in
accordance with that common goal.
(KGA 166; Foley, 154)
There is an important difference, however: This romantic society is real and its
members are there not only intellectually but in the flesh. They conduct
themselves freely with an eye to the good of the society and also “in accordance
with [their] inclinations” (KGA 165; Foley, 154). Both individuality and pleasure
in the activity of social reflection are a part of this embodied, aesthetic realm of
ends. Because these societies are made of real people, Schleiermacher (p.119)
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is acutely aware of the difficulties of setting up and sustaining them. Still, his
own experiences in the salons of Berlin convinced him that, if only he can root
this account solidly within common human nature, some systematic account of
how they must be formed and conducted is possible. Thus he describes the free
society as a construct for which guidelines may be set out in theory, beginning
with the “view that free sociability [is] a natural tendency that cannot be
circumvented” and “the point of departure will be merely the initial concept of
sociability that is available of its own accord in every person” (KGA 168; Foley,
156). Since free sociability is naturally sought for its own sake, the continuous
and uninterrupted free activity of all the individuals involved in forming and
maintaining these societies is also desirable in itself. Furthermore, “If we
analyze the concept of free sociability of society in its truest sense,”
Schleiermacher says, then “we find that several people should affect each other
and that this affecting is by no means permitted to be one-sided” (KGA 169;
Foley, 157–58). To this end the distinctive character of such societies is one of
reciprocity, that is, the free and equal participation of each member aimed at
“nothing but the free play of thoughts and feelings by means of which all
members excite and animate one another” (KGA 170; Foley, 159).
Because societies are made up of participating individuals they will each have
their own special character, and yet certain rules apply to them all. First, all
communication must be reciprocal (form) and second, what is communicated
should be an expression from and about each individual.16 Since individuals are
of a variety of types unique to every group, Schleiermacher says, “Each society
has its own outline and profile: whosoever fails to contribute to creating this; or
whosoever does not know how to remain within the confines of this, is as good
as not there for this society” (KGA 170; Foley, 159). Hence a third rule applies,
namely that individual members must limit their activity to what will not
undermine the society as a whole. To avoid the formation of exclusionary groups,
“Nothing should be evoked that does not belong to the communal sphere of
all” (KGA 171; Foley, 160). This creates another problem, namely that for the
individual to limit herself is to fail to express her unique individual self to the
society. Societies are easily destroyed by self-centered members, but self-
deprecating team players are just as destructive because they do not contribute
their own, unique share. Alternating between the two types of contribution (of
self-aggrandizing and self-effacing) is no solution, Schleiermacher says: “the
one-sidedness is not avoided by doubling it” (KGA 172–73; Foley, 61–63). Thus a
major problem for free sociability is that of figuring out how to contribute one’s
individuality completely and at the same time to fully participate in the
character of the society.
Schleiermacher’s proposed solution is to resolve the tension by recognizing two

senses in which my individuality can be limited: in “manner” and in what (p.
120) he calls “tone,” that is, subject matter. My manner (how I handle and
convey the subject matter) is my own and can be freely expressed without
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destroying the character of the society, whereas the character of the society is
set by its subject matter (“tone”), which ought to be limited. Schleiermacher also
gives guidelines for delineating the subject matter: It is to be determined by a
kind of sensitive, reflective equilibriation on the part of all the members,
between the poles of each individual’s own interests and the intersection of
those interests that are common to all. Beginning from each side and reflectively
balancing our concerns, we “seek to determine the sphere of the society
between the given limits with ever increasing precision,” he says. Ideally then,
every contribution of every individual fully establishes the society’s tone and
character while at the same time allowing each participant to express him- or
herself fully in a unique individual manner. Schleiermacher does not worry about
a domineering person or subgroup hijacking the conversation: “To hold one’s
disagreeable qualities within bounds is the task of the others, and they will
surely attend to that” (KGA 175; Foley, 165).
On Schleiermacher’s final analysis, in the freely sociable society, “All social

statements must consequently have a double tendency, a double meaning as it
were”:
This meaning should be one that I should like to call the common
denominator and is related directly to maintenance [of the society’s
character]... and another, as it were, a higher one that is thrown out with
some uncertainty to see if someone will pick up on it and pursue the
intimations it contains.
(KGA 181; Foley, 165)
The ways in which this can be carried out, he says, are practically uncountable,
and the doubling of purpose in every individual’s statements lends itself to
insinuation, banter, irony, and parody, all of which, so long as they are not
directed against another individual absent or present, are fine ways of moving
the social interactions to a high point. The Essay ends with a caution: “it is in the
nature of a theory and does not really require explicit evincing that the ideas
presented here are ideals that practice is only meant to approach” (KGA 181–82;
Foley, 173).
Two comments on this theory should be stressed. First, the final description
clearly owes much not only to the actual sociability of the meetings of the Berlin
salons and the Jena sessions that Schlegel and Novalis dubbed
“symphilosophizing,” but it also portrays the romantic program defined by
Novalis, namely that of romanticizing, carrying an activity in two directions at
once, elevating and lowering, making the ordinary extraordinary and the
extraordinary common (NS 2, 545, no. 105). By placing this poetic demand in
the setting of a social gathering (p.121) of individuals, Schleiermacher
personalizes Novalis’s definition and brings into relief the element most
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commonly associated with this movement, namely the importance of human

social intimacy, not merely abstracted but also realized.
Second, although there are elements of Schiller, of Fichte, and of other

influences at work in the Essay,17 there is also clearly much of Kant in this
account, and not simply in the use of Kantian ethical conceptions. Whether
intended or not, the Essay is redolent of Kant’s aesthetics. In fact, it is in many
respects no more or less than a detailed, social instantiation of Kant’s views of
the free play that takes place in judgments of taste. I want to conclude by
pressing this point a bit further, turning to one particularly interesting
connection between Schleiermacher’s notion of free sociable reflection and a
key notion in Kant’s account of artistic genius, namely, the aesthetic idea.
6.4. Socializing Genius in Early German Romanticism

In making this connection I am not arguing that Schleiermacher’s project is
intended as a response to Kant’s aesthetics, although there can be no doubt that
he is using Kant’s moral theory with explicit intent when he employs the
language of maxims of action and the ethical commonwealth model in the
Essay.18
Still, even at the height of their antiestablishment moods, the revolutionary

young romantics could never dismiss Kant. Novalis is clear that Kant’s
Copernican turn is simply to be taken as a given, and in the Berlin lectures A. W.
Schlegel is at pains to comment upon and criticize Kant’s theory of imagination
and genius. His Vienna lectures of 1808 mention Kant’s aesthetics in a
recommendation to Schlegel’s “brilliant audience of both sexes” to read Kant’s
section on the sublime for a nearly perfect account of the philosophical
underpinnings of tragedy (nearly perfect because, he says, Kant appears to have
lacked much acquaintance with ancient tragedy). In truth, no account of the
development of romantic aesthetics could entirely ignore Kant’s views on this
subject.
Schleiermacher, who was working on a review of Kant’s Anthropology at the

same time he worked on the Essay, would thus not have ignored Kant’s
aesthetics entirely. Kant’s Anthropology contains a few sections of distilled
lecture material on genius, which ends with the famous three maxims of
judgment including the command that in communication with others, one should
put oneself in their place, like the “liberals” who “accommodate themselves to
the concepts of others” (AA 7, sec. 59, 228). Moreover, the fact that
Schleiermacher describes his theoretical project in the Essay as aiming “to
construct sociable life as a work of art” and not just a “beautiful fantasy”
suggests Kant’s distinction between (p.122) art objects, which have a final
purpose or intent, and the free beauty of nature, whose purposiveness is always
merely a regulative background assumption.
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Perhaps most striking, however, is the parallel between Schleiermacher’s

account of a sociable society and Kant’s notion of genius, laid out in much
greater detail in the third Critique in terms of a newly introduced notion of
aesthetic ideas. Kant’s analysis in section 49, “On the powers of the mind that
constitute genius,” begins with a discussion of particular interest in this context,
of what he calls “spirit [Geist] in an aesthetic sense”:
Of certain products that are expected to reveal themselves at least in part

to be fine art, we say that they have no spirit, even though we find nothing
to censure in them as far as taste is concerned. A poem may be quite nice
and elegant and yet have no spirit. A story may be precise and orderly and
yet have no spirit. An oration may be both thorough and graceful and yet
have no spirit. Many conversations are entertaining, but they have no
spirit. Even about some woman we will say that she is pretty,
communicative, and polite, but that she has no spirit.
(AA 5, 313)
Schleiermacher aims this same criticism at social discourse that stifles

individual contributions. He worries about the conversational “emptiness” and
“paltry insipidness” of societies that require the individual to stifle contributions
that might in any way rock the conversational boat. By adopting a maxim that
sets decorum above all else, they hold that “Whatever meets the eye beyond this
middle average is unseemly and would require sanding down like rough edges”
and hence,
All idiosyncrasies would have to be suppressed.... This [false] maxim [to

avoid saying anything outside common limits] completely suspends the
final goal of society and strives toward that emptiness that is complained
about the most frequently in the highest and the finest circles.
(KGA 173; Foley, 162)
In Kant’s terms, what such conversations lack is aesthetic spirit, where “spirit”
is defined as “the animating principle in the mind” (AA 5, 313).
Kant immediately delves into a deeper cognitive analysis of what is going on in

the most elevated and ‘spirited” minds, namely that in the mind of the genius.
“Spirit” or this “animating principle is nothing but the ability to exhibit aesthetic
ideas,”
and by an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which

prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever,
(p.123) i.e., no determinate concept, can be adequate, so that no
language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.
(AA 5, 313)
Page 13 of 17
So the animating principle, or “spirit” in the mind that constitutes genius, is

identified with creative imagination, which takes a given concept and freely
connects it
with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that

stands for a determinate concept can be found for it. Hence [the resulting
aesthetic idea] is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the
thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our
cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere
letters, with spirit.
(AA 5, 316)
Genius then, is the ability to discover and express aesthetic ideas, and
Schleiermacher’s theory of sociable conduct is the functional, intersubjective
equivalent of Kant’s “inner” subjective account of genius. For Schleiermacher,
Kant’s account of the inner state of the subject—the mind of the genius—is writ
large in the sociable (romantic) “society,” that is, an assemblage of individuals
whose sole purpose in gathering is to discover their social capacity (their
humanity) and to further it in free, reciprocal dialogue. Their only purpose is the
regulative one of creating a society that is an expression of the union of their
multiple individualities and their shared social community. Each member
expresses her views in her own “manner,” leaving her professional standing, her
class and family standing, and so on, aside (except to the extent that it will
manifest itself in the manner of her expression). In Kant’s terms, her expressions
together with all the others, serve to constitute a “multiplicity of partial
presentations,” and these serve to enlarge but not determine the “given
concept.” In Schleiermacher’s terms, her contributions along with the others
serve to maintain and entertain (unterhalten) the whole group and at the same
time to elevate the subject of the conversation, and human sociability itself.
Put another way, on Schleiermacher’s social model the partial representations in

the mind of Kant’s genius become the individual members’ contributions to the
conversation. It is as if he took the complexities of the Kantian notion of
imaginative creative functioning and instantiated them in a network of individual
thinking, sensing, and feeling human beings who are drawn together by a
natural urge to communicate ever more intimately. Because they are
undertaking conversation for the sake of communication itself, such
conversations never end with a “determinate” concept. No final answer to a
problem, and no definitive, final explanation of an issue, will be uncovered or
constructed (p.124) by it. But that is of course not the point, any more than it
is the job of artistic genius to categorize objects or determine their goodness.
The point is rather to discover and express new ideas. It is the expansion of its
own abilities and the enlargement of given concepts that is at issue for genius on
Kant’s account and so too for Schleiermacher’s social model. To be sure, the
Page 14 of 17
point of the romantic society is free play and the disinterested pleasure that this
freedom brings its members, but this social reflective freedom also serves a
larger purpose insofar as it discovers and creates enlarged philosophical
perspectives and new ways of looking at old concepts.
In his interpretive account of the Essay, Peter Foley argues that the role of the
salons in Berlin was extremely important in shaping Schleiermacher’s model of
sociability: the Berlin salons of Henrietta Herz, Rahel Levin, and other were
diverse not only in gender and religious ethnicity but also in professional
occupations and in degree and kind of education. At their best they were largely
successful experiments in cross-cultural understanding and intellectual
discovery. Schleiermacher is quite clear that a multiplicity of such societies is
possible and desirable, and that each must formulate its own tone, and find its
own equilibrium. Like Kant’s genius, the successful sociable society cannot
formulate the rules by which it operates in such a way that others can clone that
success simply by following these rules. Creative free societies can serve as
exemplars for other would-be societies, just as genius can give examples to other
budding genius. Genius must create itself from its own inner resources, just as a
successful society must create itself through the particular individuals that
constitute it. In short, based on his own experience in the romantic mode of
discourse, Schleiermacher was able to sketch in some detail an ideal of an
egalitarian society that values individual difference—indeed, requires it—in the
process of constructing a unique discursive community.
In sum, Schleiermacher and his romantic cohort provided working models of a

kind of intellectual sociability that is relevant even now. Insofar as Kant’s
aesthetic theory provided a cognitive model for imaginative creativity, he did
more than merely hint at the possibility of a new form of aesthetic reflective
sociability—he laid the groundwork for it. But it took a generation of bold
academics who were willing to publicly call for academic social and moral
responsibility to inspire their “freely sociable” young followers to experiment
with and socialize genius in art and philosophy. As an intellectual movement, the
early German romantics were remarkable for letting these sociable discursive
practices drive their literary, critical, and philosophical endeavors.
Contemporary academics should recognize and applaud the role that the literary
and philosophical figures of the 1790s in Jena played in sparking this movement.
However brief this historical moment, it deserves our attention and respect, and
should challenge us to recreate the pluralistic academic and social discursive
practices of early (p.125) German romanticism in an even more expansive and
inclusive way appropriate to our time.
Page 15 of 17
Notes:
(1) . Kant introduces this hypothesis in his “Idea for a Universal History from a
Cosmopolitan Point of View” published in 1784. AA 8, 15–31.
(2) . Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, introduction to their edition of Friedrich
Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (hereafter Behler and
Struc) (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 4.
(3) . Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1990), 267–68.
(4) . Ibid., 237.
(5) . Ibid., 245.
(6) . Ibid., 254.
(7) . Ibid., 255–56.
(8) . For an extended discussion of the philosophically substantial role played by

the women in the circle, see my contribution titled “Feminism” in the Oxford
Handbook to German Idealism, ed. Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
(9) . Behler, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel, 4. Behler claims that it contained

“almost everything of importance written in those years by the earlier German
Romanticists.”
(10) . For English translation, see Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and the
Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (hereafter Firchow) (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1971), 31–32.
(11) . Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of

Romantic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 168.
Her summary of this essay is an insightful and useful account of Schlegel’s
underlying, antidogmatic philosophical commitments.
(12) . Friedrich Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie”; for the English translation,
see Behler and Struc, 53–55.
(13) . Novalis, Fichte-Studien; for the English translation, see Novalis, Fichte
Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (hereafter Kneller) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 166.
(14) . Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs; for the English translation, see The Novices of Sais,
trans. Ralph Manheim, with sixty drawings by Paul Klee (New York: Curt
Valentin, 1949), 77.
Page 16 of 17
(15) . The Essay’s authorship was only determined in the early twentieth century.
The reasons for its being abandoned include the fact that Schleiermacher found
himself finishing it in social isolation, and that he was working on several other
projects at the time. See Peter Foley’s Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Essay on a
Theory of Sociable Behavior” (1799): A Contextual Interpretation (Lewiston:
Edwin Mellon Press, 2006), 125ff. References to Schleiermacher’s Essay in what
follows are to KGA volume 12, followed by the pagination in Peter Foley’s
translation (hereafter Foley), included in his book.
(16) . Schleiermacher refers to it as “communicating what is mine” (KGA 170;

Foley, 15).
(17) . See Foley’s commentary, 1–151.
(18) . In general, although Kant’s influence on the romantics was clearly

important to their ethical and political philosophical development, it is less clear
that his aesthetic theory had much of a direct influence, and such influence as it
did have appears to have been largely negative. (See Richard Crouter’s
introduction to Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured
Despisers, edited by Richard Crouter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996], xix, n 26). A. W. Schlegel criticizes it in his lectures on literature and art
in Berlin 1801–2. His brother Friedrich, as Ernst Behler points out, “settled his
differences with Kant” primarily by ignoring him and developing his own views
on art and imagination (Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 77). Novalis studied Kant
again, after his intense engagement with Fichte’s philosophy in 1795, but his
study seems to have been limited to the first and second Critiques. Crouter
points out that Schleiermacher is said to have owned a copy of the Critique of
Judgment, but argues that he seemed not to have read it, based on a dismissive
remark he made that Kant’s third Critique contained only “incidental” mention of
art. See Günter Meckenstock, ed., Schleiermachers Bibliothek (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1993), 210. (Given the romantic’s central focus on art, however, this
doesn’t strike me as proof that Schleiermacher never read it. It could be exactly
what Schleiermacher thought, having skimmed or even read the book cover to
cover, since by the romantic’s standards, there was much less time devoted to
discussions of art than they would have liked to see.)
Page 17 of 17
“Doch Sehnend Stehst/Am Ufer Du” (“But Longing You Stand on the Shore”)

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
“Doch Sehnend Stehst/Am Ufer Du” (“But

Longing You Stand on the Shore”)
Hölderlin, Philosophy, Subjectivity, and Finitude
Richard Eldridge
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0008

This essay first surveys Hölderlin’s mature philosophical sense of the human
subject as caught ineluctably between abstract reflection and concrete
receptivity, and it contrasts that sense briefly with the stances of Kant, Schiller,
and Hegel. It then traces the consequences of this sense for Hölderlin’s
poetology, and it concludes by showing how both this philosophical sense and
this poetology are enacted in Hölderlin’s late, major fragment “Rousseau.”
Keywords: absolute, reflection, receptivity, drives, poetology, Rousseau
7.1.
As the name of the discipline implies, philosophy is centrally concerned not
simply with knowledge alone, but with wisdom or with the problem of
orientation or with the achievement of a life of felt and reasonable
meaningfulness. In strongly traditional societies, this problem may not arise, or
solutions to it may be held in place as what is simply to be done, without diverse
paths or possibilities of reflection on them significantly presenting themselves.
Within modern social economies, marked in contrast by technological
development and strongly divided labor, things are much less settled, in ways
that can provoke both anxiety and reflection. But how is reflection then to
develop fruitfully? If it is significantly abstract overall, then it threatens both to
lose touch with concrete life practices and in doing so to turn either emptily
escapist or dogmatically tyrannical. Yet if it lingers entirely in the concrete, then
Page 1 of 19
it threatens to fail to resolve anxieties and to challenge social and practical

fractures that are already in place. In the face of this dilemma, reflection seems
both impossible and necessary.
Writing roughly between 1795 and 1815 in the wake of emerging secularization
and showing a strong consciousness of social life as both fractured (p.130) and
unavoidable, a number of writers whom we now class as Romantic—pre-
eminently Hölderlin and Wordsworth, Goethe in his lyric poetry, and Blake and
Coleridge—developed a kind of practice of philosophy by other means. Swerving
between abstract reflection and concrete description and between rationalism
and empiricism, they developed strong senses of human subjects as bound to a
temporality that is not discernibly plotted and yet with which one can (so they
suggested) at times come to terms. They accept neither human fatedness to life
within unintelligible and impersonal processes alone nor fantasies of either
escape or full control of the conditions of life, so that “romanticism” becomes a
name for philosophy done, the problem of orientation addressed, otherwise than
only in abstract distantiation from the ordinary. Its images of coming to maturity,
even if imperfectly and without dogmatism and final closure, stand as models
that are distinctly relevant to our thinking about maturity and orientation in life,
given a modern social economy that we significantly share with them.1 Attention
to their strongly temporalized thought and writing can help alert us both to how
philosophy and poetry may be entangled with one another in relation to certain
central problems of modern human life and to possibilities of maturity that we
might otherwise fail to notice or articulate.
7.2.
It is well known that Hölderlin’s mature poetry is significantly motivated by his
sense, developing out of his criticism of Fichte, of the self-occlusion of the
Absolute. As in German idealism generally, “the Absolute” names that which is
not dependent on anything else and simply is––a self-determining whole that
includes all of nature and human life. Contra Fichte, Hölderlin argues, “If I say:
‘I am I, [then] the subject (“I”) and the object (“I) are not united in such a way
that no separation could be performed without violating the essence of what is
to be separated; on the contrary, the I is only possible by means of this
separation of the I from the I.”2 Ignoring the mistaken treatment of the is of
identity as the is of predication, the argument is straightforward and compelling.
Being a subject—that which we primarily refer to by means of “I”—implies
apperceptive unity; that is, it implies at least the possibility of coming to be
explicitly aware of the contents of one’s consciousness as the contents of one’s
consciousness. Any thing that lacked this capacity could not properly be called a
subject. But this capacity in turns implies the ability, as it were, to separate
oneself from oneself, in particular to focus on the contents of one’s
consciousness as not essential to what one is. I am thinking of a dog, say, but I
could be thinking instead (and sometimes do think instead) of a cup of coffee.
Hence neither of these contents is itself essential to my identity as a subject. But
Page 2 of 19
for the Absolute, in contrast, everything is essential. That is, it is not subject-like.
And hence, further, we, as (p.131) finite subjects are separated, cast out, from
this original, all-embracing unity of Being as such. Insofar as we do possess a
consciousness that is both apperceptively unified and discursive (such that we
are able to form judgments), we are “outside” a more original, inclusive unity,
able to attend to this or that, but never simply bound within the flow of the
whole. Our status as subjects is marked, as Hölderlin puts it, by an “arche-
separation,” an Ur-theilung.3 Both reflection and we as subjects capable of
reflection are somehow within the Absolute, but also separated from its
continuous self-development, not essential to it.
It is not immediately clear how much of this argument is sound or what its
implications are. It might well be conceded that the Absolute—supposing to
begin with that we find much use for a concept of the whole of Being—is not
itself subject-like or reflective or apperceptively unified in the way that we are as
finite subjects. But why should that thought imply the further thought that we,
as finite subjects, are somehow exterior to it, separated or cast out from it?
Here Hölderlin is best taken as registering an experienced sense of exteriority, of

absence of orientation, and of the capacity for reflection as a set of undischarged
burdens that have roots that are all at once religious, biographical,
sociohistorical, and anthropologico-developmental. In religious terms, an
understanding of the Absolute as non-subject-like and self-enclosed already
registers a sense of the collapse or unavailability of any narrative of God’s
providence. In his 1785 Briefe über die Lehre Spinozas that initiated the
Pantheism Controversy, Jacobi had already associated Spinozism with
materialism and atheism, and this association was well known to Hölderlin and
his Tübingen circle during his student years. A Spinozist Absolute is, therefore,
marked as a nonprovidential, non-Christian Absolute for Hölderlin.
Biographically, Hölderlin experienced a continuing series of failures to settle into

a permanent position. From 1793, when he left Tübingen, to 1802, he held a
series of tutorships in private families at Waltershausen, Frankfurt, Hauptwil
(Switzerland), and Bordeaux (France), retaining only one of them for more than
four months. The exception—January 1796 to September 1798 in the household
of the Gontards in Frankfurt—was marked by an intense and disastrous love
affair with Suzette Gontard, the much younger wife of his banker employer.
Following his dismissal from this post, Hölderlin managed a number of
clandestine meetings with Suzette up until her death in June 1802. After 1802,
following his return from Bordeaux in a precarious mental condition, Hölderlin
lived primarily in Homburg with an official salary as court librarian, but no real
duties, until his removal to a Tübingen asylum in 1806 and final years in the care
of Ernst Zimmer from 1807 to 1843. This unstable itinerary shows a marked lack
of any unifying narrative or sense of continuing orientation. Improvised
arrangements are made hurriedly, and they do not last long. Sociohistorically,
Page 3 of 19
Hölderlin’s career is marked by his refusal to take up the post (p.132) of a

village pastor for which he had been trained at Tübingen. Not much else was
open to him other than a position as a private tutor. Hölderlin was neither noble
nor rich enough to enter court life, nor was either the university or the market
economy yet fully open to an ambitious young man with primarily theological
training. Hence Hölderlin’s drift, though exacerbated by his mental instability, is
not untypical of the rootlessness of a young male member of an emerging
humanistically educated class who lacked definite social prospects. Finally,
anthropologico-developmentally, it is, after all, a mystery how anyone comes to
be a subject with discursively structured consciousness. This development into a
life of explicit claim-making, norm-mongering, and reflectiveness does not
happen with other animals. How, then, do we move from the dependent infants
we initially are into being the active makers of judgments we come to be? Surely
training, initiation into language, and the attentions of others play important
roles in this development, but how, and to what purpose? A sense of rootlessness
or undirectedness might well arise for anyone in light of this course of
development, and on Hölderlin’s part this sense can only have been exacerbated
by his religious, biographical, and modern sociohistorical experiences.
Independent of argument, then, about exclusion from a Spinozist Absolute,

Hölderlin’s sense of exteriority to Being as such is, to put it mildly,
overdetermined. Whether or not there is a proof of the exteriority of reflective
consciousness to being, Hölderlin nonetheless powerfully thematizes an
experience of exteriority and difficulty of orientation. Or, as he puts it, there is “a
universal contradiction within man... between the striving for the absolute and
the striving for restriction.”4 We seek, that is, to achieve mastery or appropriate
orientation by means of philosophical knowledge of the whole of Being and our
place in it, and we also find ourselves driven to throw off the burden of reflective
consciousness and to accept limitation and naturalness. As Terry Pinkard
usefully explicates the point, the founding thought of both German idealism and
German romanticism, initiated by Hölderlin, is that “it is the way in which we
hold such oppositions together that characterizes our agency.... We always begin
with a ‘certainty’ about where we are––with a practical, pre-reflective implicit
grasp of what counts as vouching for our judgments, our practices, our
valuations... and we then come to ask whether that ‘certainty’ has any ‘truth’ in
light of the kinds of skepticism that open up as that form of ‘certainty’ subjects
itself to its own internal tests.”5 Hegel’s wager is that this prereflective
“certainty” is already implicitly conceptual and that that conceptual commitment
can be made explicit, tested, and revised until we arrive at stable enough
orientation. Hölderlin’s particular honesty and courage—his openness to
continuing skepticism—is instead to hold that both striving for a reflective
understanding of appropriate orientation and openness to sudden, abrupt,
uncontrolled limitation (whether via reversal or via the absorptive sweep of love,
Page 4 of 19
beauty, and (p.133) passion) persist always in tension with one another, with no
standing resolution and only moments of relative balance.6
The result in Hölderlin’s writing, both theoretical and poetic, that enacts this
tension is a kind of back-and-forth movement between distantiated, abstract
theorizing and immersive, absorptive dwelling in perception and feeling as
given. In the mode of abstract theorizing, he seeks the “true profundity” of
“complete knowledge of the parts that we must found and combine into one, and
deep knowledge of that which founds and comprehends, piercing to the farthest
end of knowledge.”7 Without fundamental knowledge of one’s place in the whole,
there is neither dignity nor actively maintained orientation. In more optimistic
Fichtean moments, Hölderlin suggests that “he who truly acts according to the
whole is by himself thereby more consecrated to peace and more disposed to
esteem the individual.”8 This implies that action according to the whole is
possible and hence that the wages of reflection on the whole that issues in
appropriate action need not be only distantiation and alienation. Likewise, in a
1797 letter to Schiller, Hölderlin argues that abstract reflection, shying from life
into thought, while difficult, is also both natural and fruitful.
I now regard the metaphysical mood as a kind of virginity of spirit, and I

believe that shyness in the face of the material, however unnatural it is in
itself, is nonetheless very natural at a certain period of life, and that it is
for a time beneficial, just as all flights out of determinate relations are,
since they check the power in oneself and make the spendthrift youthful
life thrifty, for just so long, until its now ripe exuberance drives it to divide
and distribute itself [sich zu theilen] in relation to manifold objects... I
believe also... that the Idea is prior to the Concept, just as the tendency is
prior to the (determinate, regular) act. I regard Reason [die Vernunft] as
the beginning of the understanding [der Verstand], and if the good will
hesitates and has to exert itself in order to form a useful intention, so do I
find this just as characteristic for human nature in general as it is
characteristic for Hamlet, for whom it is so difficult to do something for the
sake of the single end of avenging his father.9
Here, however, the optimism, while present, is substantially more moderated.

Instead of giving up philosophy as fruitless, as Schiller had urged him to do,
Hölderlin defends metaphysics and abstract reflection as appropriate for a
certain period of time at a certain stage of life. It as it were helps us to gather
and collect our powers, thence to use them appropriately, rather than wasting
them in heapish series of unreflective, ill-considered actions. But as the
concluding reference to Hamlet suggests, it may nonetheless be far from
straightforward to translate the fruits of reason into specific action.
Page 5 of 19
(p.134) In recoil, then, from a life of abstract reflection that produces as much
continuing anxiety as direction, Hölderlin also celebrates the fact that the “airy
spirits [Luftgeister] with metaphysical wings”10 have left him, thus enabling
greater peace in freedom from reflection. Persistent thinking about orientation,
without fixed and stable results, yields only restlessness; without receptivity,
there is no composure. Something must come from without, in order to inform
and give content to thinking. Thought alone is unable to generate determinate
objects. “When I think an object as possible, then I only repeat the previously
existent consciousness by means of which it is actual. There is for us no
thinkable possibility that was not at one time actuality.”11 As Violetta Waibel
usefully comments, “Hölderlin seems not simply to negate principles and a priori
moments of thinking, but rather to regard them as forms of abstraction that are
not thinkable independently and without being bound to concrete states of
affairs.”12 Broadly speaking, as Waibel also notes, a suspicion of abstract
thinking on Hölderlin’s part is a continuing point of contact between his
poetological writings and the skepticism of Jacobi. Both Jacobi and Hölderlin, as
Waibel puts it, give primacy to “existential orientation in the world
[Befindlichkeit in der Welt]” and so “assign to anthropology...a precedence over
a philosophical mode of explanation that threatens to become an intellectual end
in itself.”13 This suspicion of abstract thinking is further reinforced by
Hölderlin’s reading of Plato, especially of the Symposium, where love (eros) is
presented as a force of attraction to concrete things that is co-primordial with
the emergence of consciousness itself. Or in Hölderlin’s own formulation:
As our original infinite essence became suffering for the first time and as
our free, full power felt its first limits, as poverty mated with exuberance,
then there was love. Ask yourself: when was that? Plato says: on the day
that Aphrodite was born. Thus just then, when the beautiful world began
for us, when we came to consciousness, then we became finite.14
This condensed parable of the emergence of finite consciousness shows it as

always already marked by concrete attraction to finite, beautiful, given objects
of attention. Hölderlin’s sense that human consciousness is always so marked
leads him, as Thomas Pfau puts it, to develop a “neo-Platonist project of
overcoming the sensible/intelligible dualism without relegating the concrete,
individual intuition to a mere ancillary function.”15 Moreover, as Pfau goes on,
“Hölderlin does not simply stabilize this convergence of intuition and the
intelligible in an ontological sense either; for its occurrence, linked to the
creative imagination, is ‘accidental,’ that is, cannot be freely grounded as a
necessity.”16 That is to say, while developmentally discursive consciousness
begins as always already bound up with experiences of intense felt attractions to
natural, more or (p.135) less maternal, presences, the recurrence of such
intensities of attraction at later stages is hostage to fortune. Within the orbit of
this Neoplatonic anthropology that sees thought as bound up with eros,
Hölderlin in contrast to idealism shifts, as Pfau puts it, “from a notion of
Page 6 of 19
intuition as Anschauung to intuition as analeptic Ahndung.”17 (“Ahndung” is

Hölderlin’s archaic Swabian spelling of Ahnung—presentiment, foreshadowing,
or intuitiveness. “Analeptic” indicates that such a presentiment is animating or
restorative.) That is to say, orientation in life is achieved, if it is achieved at all,
only through an unpredictable, restorative moment of receptivity that furnishes
content to a desire that aims to reachieve the intensities of attraction
characteristic of early childhood. That such experiences of animated receptivity
are essentially occasioned and accidental thus calls into question the very
possibility of getting a grip on one’s life according to abstract principles
generated in reflection. In Pfau’s formulation, “it poses a serious challenge to
the possibility of an integral subjectivity, that is, to the continuity of a ‘self’ as
such.”18
And yet Hölderlin does not quite abandon reason and reflection altogether. He
continues to see the pursuit of autonomy and self-command, grounded in
rational reflection and expressed in adherence to principles, as also part of
man’s higher than merely animal nature. Unlike other animals, we are, as both
burdened and gifted with reflection, anticipation, and memory, open to “infinite
satisfaction, ...provided that [man’s] activity is of the right kind, is not too far-
reaching for him, for his strength and skill, that he is not too restless, too
undetermined nor, on the other hand, too anxious, too restricted, too
controlled.”19 As the unresolved two directions of mutual qualification in this
passage show—we must be determined, resolute, in charge of what we do, but
not too much; and we must be receptive, open, and ready to accept what
happens but not too much20 ––Hölderlin develops a philosophical anthropology
that combines elements from Kant, empiricism, and what would become
Hegelianism, but that also differs strikingly from each of them. As in Kant, the
exercise of reason and reflection to generate a moral law matters as a
fundamental aspect of our dignity, but in contrast with Kant this exercise cannot
take place on its own, apart from intense experiences of attraction. As in
empiricism, receptive sense-experience is an essential source of content for
orientation in life, but in contrast with empiricism sense-experience is not simply
dispositive, and it is available not continuously, but only intermittently, in
moments of intense attraction to a concrete object, person, or scene. As in
Hegel, there is prereflective orientation to the world that can be to some extent
articulated, but in contrast with Hegel the relevant articulation that yields
orientation is itself temporary, strongly temporalized, and bound up more with
erotic attractions, embodiment, and openness to natural beauty than with
participation in public life.
(p.136) Given, then, Hölderlin’s continuing intense and intensely ambivalent,

competing attractions to both active, reflective, abstract theorizing and
immersive, absorptive dwelling in perceptions and relationships, it is no surprise
that he is unable to follow Schiller’s (all too autobiographical) advice to him that
he should “flee philosophical material wherever possible; it is the most thankless
Page 7 of 19
of all, and the best powers are often consumed in fruitless wrestling with it.
Remain closer to the world of the senses so that you will be less in danger either
of losing sobriety [Nüchternhheit] in rapture [Begeisterung] or of straying into a
contrived [gekünstelt] expression.”21 For Schiller, philosophy and abstract
reflection could and should be left behind, as Schiller indeed abandoned them
and returned to drama after the period of his intense absorption in Kantianism
from 1793 to 1795. In contrast, instead of turning away from philosophy and to
poetry as a separate and distinct practice, Hölderlin takes up the task of
incorporating alternations between moments of abstract reflection and moments
of intense absorption into a self-developing poetic whole. As he comments in a
1799 letter to his brother,
Poetry unites men not, I say, in the manner of play; it unites them, namely,
when it is genuine and functions [wirkt] genuinely––with all the manifold
suffering, happiness, striving, hoping and fearing, with all the opinions and
errors, all the virtues and ideas, with everything great and small, that is
among them—as a living, thousandfold divided [gegliedert] heartfelt [innig]
whole.22
The consequence in the poetry of the bearing of this task is that poetry remains
internally related to philosophy, as it is oriented around what Hölderlin calls
transitions (Wechsel) in mood, where the transitions themselves are marked by
the same sort of difficulty and abruptness that mark their occurrence in daily
life. Or as Hölderlin puts it to his brother, “I cannot easily find my way out of
reasoning [Raisonnement] and into poetry, and vice versa....Perhaps only a few
people will have as much difficulty with the transition [Übergang] from one
mood to another as I do.”23
The result is a difficult poetry more continuously of open, even abrupt, transition
than of completed doctrinal closure. As Waibel usefully puts it, Hölderlin’s
concept—decisive for his poetry—of reciprocal determination
(Wechselbestimming) of moods must be understood in the framework of a theory
of drives. One concept at the same time determines its opposite, so that both
stand in a relation of reciprocal determination. Something must stand opposed
to the I that is infinite in itself—either an object or alternatively a world of
objectivity—in order for it to feel and cognize. In the same way, a striving toward
the infinite, that is, a striving to realize ideas, is also unthinkable, (p.137)
without a simultaneous striving toward limitation, that is, toward an actual
recognition of the conditioned character of existence.24
Neither drive—neither the drive toward selfhood and fully autonomous activity
in self-sustaining abstract thinking, nor the drive toward receptivity to and
absorption in the finite—can properly be denied, abandoned, or avoided. Or as
Hölderlin puts it in a prose fragment of the metrical version of Hyperion, “we
cannot deny the drive to free ourselves, to ennoble ourselves, to progress into
Page 8 of 19
the infinite. That would be animalistic. But we can also not deny the drive to be
determined, to be receptive; that would not be human.”25 Since both drives
remain present and undeniable, with neither being sacrificed to the other and
with no possibility of their stable integration, the result, as Waibel puts it, of “the
thought-figure of reciprocal determination” is “a metaphysics of the finite” that
continuously accepts and embraces “the possibility of reversal.”26
Within the poetry that enacts this sense of the subject always open to the
possibility of reversal, it is necessary, always, “to bear the momentarily
incomplete.”27 “Real effectiveness” requires neither too much mingling of self-
determining, ennobling, reflective activity with sensuousness, receptivity, and
the ordinary nor too much isolation from them.28 Instead of simply reaching a
doctrinal conclusion, and instead of maintaining itself either in the sphere of
pure reflective activity or in the sphere of the registering of the sensuously
given, the successful poem must instead work through reflective-rational activity
in relation to experience of a sensuously given object. The proper thematic
subject matter of poetry in general is thus, one might say, not a given object, but
rather an object as-it-is-experienced-by-a-subject-prompted-to-feeling-and-
reflection in relation to it. In close proximity to the Wordsworthian thought that
it is “the feeling [and associated reflection] therein developed [that] gives
importance to the [given] action and situation, and not the action and situation
to the feeling,”29 self-recognition is possible only by attending to and working
through relations between subject activity and determinate objects. As Waibel
summarizes the point, for Hölderlin
Self-knowledge can only grasp the determinations of human existence

when it reaches out beyond a merely formal self-relation. This self-
knowledge must withdraw itself from the aporias of either taking itself to
be completely graspable through its own activity—which would produce
only a completely reflective but thereby dead unity—or preserving an
original liveliness [of experience], but thereby being unable to grasp
completely either the determination of humanity or the determination of
poetic composition [Dichtung]. Self-knowledge arises in a living manner,
according to Hölderlin, when the subject freely chooses an object through
which it recognizes itself.30
(p.138) Self-knowledge is achieved, therefore, through an essentially temporal

course of development of modulated thoughts and feelings in relation to a given
object of experience. A narration of the course of its achievement—the only way
to render its content—will consist essentially of four successive stages or
registers of experience that are reflected in the poem:
(1) An initiating, felt, unarticulated total impression of an object, scene,

or incident
Page 9 of 19
(2) The weakening of this initial receptive impression through reflection

and the division of the objects presented in the total impression into
opposed yet interrelated parts
(3) The maintaining of the identity of the subject as a locus of active
attentiveness in relation to the development of the poetic material in
moving from 1 to 2
(4) The achievement in writing of complete internal relatedness of 1, 2,
and 3 in a constructed sequence of modulations from beginning (initial
total receptiveness––1) to middle (conditioned but active subject
activity––2 and 3) to end (modulated expressiveness of the good-enough
stability of the subject thus achieved across varying moments of thought
and receptivity—4).31
The successful poem that begins in 1, moves through 2 and 3, and completes
itself constructively in 4 is thus itself an achievement of a good-enough self-unity
despite the omnipresent fact of reversals of subject activity by sensuous
givenness and of sensuous givenness by subject activity. Hence the underlying
thought that is embodied in successful Hölderlinian lyric poetry is that “Es war
doch so schön”32 ––it was all so beautiful anyway. In its registering, expressing,
and enacting of the play of opposed drives, the successful lyric poem is an
acknowledgment of the fundamental circumstances of human life as a life of
conditioned subject activity open to reversals. It is, hence, not the abandonment
of philosophy and reflective activity in favor of poetry, but instead their situation
as conditioned within the context of ongoing human life.
7.3.
Thematically and formally, Hölderlin’s poetic practice that situates philosophical
reflection within the course of life develops out of a number of earlier
experimentations in theme and form. His earliest poems, such as his early
Tübingen hymns, alternate between sentimental expressiveness of a subjective
mood in the style of Klopstock (as in “The Oaks” and “To the Aether”) and a
more objectively celebratory mode derived from Schiller (as in “Hymn to the
Goddess of (p.139) Harmony” and “Hymn to Immortality”). Significantly,
however, already these early hymns display a certain awkwardness in stance, as
though the standpoint for what is either to be worshipped or objectively
celebrated were not entirely secure.33 During his Frankfurt period from January
1796 to September 1798, Hölderlin produced a number of Diotima poems,
inspired by Suzette Gontard, as well as nature poems and shorter, epigrammatic
odes.34 A sharper sense of the difficulties of maintaining an enthusiastic or a
celebratory stance and voice, a sense that is evident also in the contemporary
correspondence and theoretical writings, then seems to develop during the
composition of Hyperion in the period from 1794 to 1797, perhaps influenced by
the difficulties of his clandestine relations with Suzette/Diotima. As Hölderlin
famously writes in the preface to the penultimate version of the novel,
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We all run through an eccentric path [eine exzentrische Bahn], and there is
no other way possible from childhood to completion [Vollendung].
Blissful unity, Being in the unique sense of the word, is lost for us and we
had to lose it if we are to strive after it and achieve it.
...We have fallen out with nature, and what was once (as we believe) One is
now in conflict with itself, and mastery and servitude alternate on both
sides. It often seems to us as if the world were everything and we nothing,
but often too as if we were everything and the world nothing.
...But neither our knowledge nor our action can attain in any period of our
existence to that point at which all conflict ceases, where All is one; the
determinate line can be united with the indeterminate only through an
infinite approximation [in unendlicher Annäherung].35
Here the subject position is markedly and unresolvedly unstable. Conflict is

endemic between the human subject standing out from blissful immersion in the
whole and the whole within which that subject’s activity should be but cannot be
harmoniously resolved. As a result, nothing can be simply and unreservedly
praised or celebrated; no doctrine is available to stabilize and justify the stance
of the subject who would praise, but who remains caught within alternations
between excess, merely subjective enthusiasm (“as if we were everything and
the world nothing”) and quiescent, merely passive absorption (“as if the world
were everything and we nothing”).
The result of this sense of the subject position as always already bound up in
conflict is a poetry of loss and finitude that tracks and expresses this plight of
the subject without resolving it. It narrates arcs of motion through moments of
absorption in the given that are always liable to be ruptured by reflection and
moments of reflection, power, and insight that are always liable to be ruptured
by a returning, attractive but recalcitrant given. Rather than announcing (p.
140) a doctrine achieved, whether conciliatory or despairing, it moves in fits
and starts, halted by this moment of perception, then regaining an energy of
compositional onwardness in registering it, then faltering again as the energy
cannot be sustained in any single continuing direction. That is, the major poetry
enacts an effort together with its foundering. It tracks and locates the place of
the human subject as a being capable of self-initiated attention, reflection, and
thought within a whole that it should know, but cannot, and within which it
should be at peace, but cannot be. It is neither within philosophy nor outside it,
but is rather marked internally by both philosophy and its foundering, just as we
live neither continuously within reflectiveness nor altogether outside it, neither
altogether at home nor altogether as nomads.
Page 11 of 19
7.4.
Among Hölderlin’s major poems, the substantial but still incomplete
“Rousseau” (1800) is especially clear thematically in illustrating Hölderlin’s
mature sense of the problem for the human subject of living simultaneously
within the necessity of reflection and the impossibility of completing it. It is in
part a reworking into an alcaic ode of the slightly earlier asclepic ode “To the
Germans.” (Its opening line is line 1 of strophe 11 of “To the Germans.”) Its
general project is simultaneously to praise Rousseau’s exemplary achieved
subjectivity while also describing its limitations, thus avoiding any triumphalist
doctrinalism. Rousseau, as Hölderlin sees him, bears up, one might say, under
the burden of a subjectivity given over both to visionary reflection on new
possibilities of more meaningful human life and to their standing
incompleteness. Hölderlin had read Rousseau’s The Social Contract in 1791. As
one of the so-called uncouth Jacobins, Hölderlin planted a Liberty Tree in a
meadow near the Tübingen seminary on Bastille Day, 1793, an act that provoked
Duke Karl Eugen to place the group under surveillance. While in Jena in
September 1795, Hölderlin planned to draft a new educational program modeled
on Rousseau’s Emile and Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.36 Noting that Rousseau’s
name is the first name of a modern writer that appears on a list of writers on
whom Hölderlin planned to write for his projected journal Iduna, Stanley
Corngold remarks that Rousseau “represents Hölderlin’s first leap of thought to
modern writing; he constitutes Hölderlin’s frame for his grasp of literary
modernity.”37 Commenting on the appearances of Rousseau in “The
Rhine” (1801), Paul de Man notes that Rousseau is, for Hölderlin,
paradigmatically the one who exercises the distinctive powers of a human
subject in using language: “Rousseau, as in the ode that bears his name, appears
above all as the man of language: he listens (l. 143) he speaks (l. 144), he gives
language (l. 146), and song (l. 165).”38 Richard Unger describes Rousseau (p.
141) as functioning as a precursor figure and uncanny double for Hölderlin
himself. “Rousseau’s “strangeness” for Hölderlin is...the uncanniness a poet
must experience in another man who ultimately projects his own destiny.
Paradoxically, Hölderlin views Rousseau, a writer of prose, as the man who most
clearly anticipates the poetic fulfillment he himself desires.”39
Both the destiny of the modern human subject as the bearer of language and
reflectiveness and the sort of qualified poetic fulfillment that is possible for such
a subject are then projected onto Rousseau in the poem “Rousseau,” and the
itinerary of the bearing of that destiny and of the achievement of that qualified
fulfillment is tracked narratively. The poem consists of ten strophes, with the
first four in strict alcaic metric patterns (lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 beats with a
regular pattern of stresses) and the last six in uncompleted approximations to
the alcaic. The first line of the seventh strophe includes an unfilled in past
participle prefix (“ge”), marking it as uncompleted. The last line of the tenth and
final strophe is a nonstandard, more abrupt seven-beat line that lends an air of
Page 12 of 19
conclusion to the fragment, despite its ending as a fragment with a comma

rather than a full stop. First in German and then in Nick Hoff’s English
translation, it reads as follows:
Rousseau
Wie eng begränzt ist unsere Tageszeit.

Du warst und sahst und stauntest, schon Abend ists.
Nun schlafe, wo unendlich ferne
Ziehen vorüber die Völkerjahre.
Und mancher sieht über die eigene Zeit

Ihm zeigt ein Gott ins Freie, doch sehnend stehst
Am Ufer du, ein Aergerniß den
Deinen, ein Schatten, und liebst sie nimmer.
Und jene, die du nennst, die Verheißenen,

Wo sind die Neuen, daß du an Freundeshand
Erwarmst, wo nahn sie, daß du einmal
Einsame Rede, vernehmlich seiest?
Klanglos ist, armer Mann, in der Halle dir,

Und gleich den Unbegrabenen, irrest du
Unstät und suchest Ruh und niemand
Weiß den beschiedenen Weg zu weisen.
Sei denn zufrieden! der Baum entwächst

Dem heimathlichen Boden, aber es sinken ihm
Die liebenden, die jugendlichen
Arme, und trauernd neigt er sein Haupt.
(p.142) Des Lebens Überfluß, das Unendliche,

Das um ihn und dämmert, er faßt es nie.
Doch lebts in ihm und gegenwärtig,
Wärmend und wirkend, die Frucht entquillt ihm.
Du hast gelebt! ge auch dir, auch dir

Erfreut die ferne Sonne dein Haupt,
Und Stralen aus der schönen Zeit, es
Habe die Boten dein Herz gefunden.
Vernommen hast du sie verstanden die Sprache der Fremdlinge,

Gedeutet ihre Seele! Dem Sehnenden war
Genug der Wink, und Winke sind
Von Alters her die Sprache der Götter.
Und wunderbar, als hätte von Anbeginn

Des Menschen Geist, das Werden und Wirken all,
Des Lebens alte Weise schon erfahren
Kennt er im ersten Zeichen Vollendetes schon,

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Und fliegt, der kühne Geist, wie Adler den

Gewittern, weissagend seinen
Kommenden Göttern, voraus.
How limited the time of our day.

You were and saw and marveled, it’s evening already.
So sleep now, where infinitely far
The years of the nations drift overhead.
And some see past their own time,

A god has shown them the open, but longing
You stand on the shore, a scandal to your kin,
A shade, and you no longer love them,
And those you name, the new and inspired ones,

Where are they to warm you with their
Friendly hands, and where do they approach so that you,
Lonely speech, might one day be heard?
The halls, poor man, give no echo,

And like the unburied dead you wander
Unsettled and look for rest, and no one can
Show you the determined path.
So content yourself with this! the tree outgrows

Its native soil, but its loving
Youthful boughs droop down,
And it bows its crown in mourning.
(p.143) The overflow of life, the infinite,

That around him, dawning, he never grasps it.
Yet it lives in him, and, all the while,
Warming and effective, the fruit springs forth from him.
You have lived! The distant sun ed you too

And gladdens too your head,
And rays from a better time,
The messengers have found your heart.
You perceived, you understood the language of strangers,

Interpreted their soul! The hint sufficed
The longing one, and hints have long
Been the language of the gods.
And wondrous, as if from the outset the human spirit

Had experienced all that would be born and made manifest,
The ancient way of life
In the first signs he sees their completion

And, emboldened with this insight, flying like an eagle
Ahead of the storm, he prophesies
Page 14 of 19
The coming of his gods.40
The plot of the fragment divides into roughly three parts. Strophes 1–4 describe
Rousseau’s alienation from and outsiderliness to his contemporaries and his
failure to win an audience for his writing. Strophes 2–8.2 describe a kind of
consolation available to Rousseau in having lived and produced something
anyway. Strophes 8.2–10 offer generalizations about the stance of anyone who
might be moved to flights of vision and composition.
Part I begins with a generalization that emphasizes the general fact of human
finitude, without specific reference to Rousseau. Rousseau then appears as the
second-person, past-tense addressee in line 2, where he is described as having
been, having seen, and having been astounded by things. But that time of vision
is past. The years pass by, as though their passing were the natural course of
things, without occasioning any particular pain. In the second strophe, however,
Rousseau is particularly marked as someone who stands out against his time, on
the shores of something different, an annoyance or scandal to his kin and a
shadow who is unable to love them. The third and fourth strophes then reinforce
and deepen this outsiderliness, as those to whom he has called do not appear, so
that Rousseau himself, metonymized as “lonely speech” (Einsame Rede), stands
alone, without being heard, without echo or reception, hence unreceived, like
the unburied, and given over to inconstancy, restlessness, and errancy, without
any allotted path to follow. Far from treating Rousseau as a successful and
confident prophet, the master thought in these (p.144) first four strophes is of
Rousseau in his reflective visionariness and hopes for more meaningful life as
inherently outside the common and barred from any terms of reception.
The main pivot of the poem then comes in the first line of strophe 5, as the
speaker offers Rousseau a kind of consolation or at least a command to be
satisfied anyway, inasmuch as the tree that outgrows its ground nonetheless
remains connected to it, casting its branches downward. So too might Rousseau,
mourning, remain in contact with the people who fail to receive him. And so too,
though he is unable successfully to grasp or understand it in order to master it,
might there remain a life or power in him that produces something, as the tree
produces its fruit unknowingly. One who accepts this consolation will then have
lived and written anyway and so stood within a movement of life that
nonetheless cannot be understood and mastered. Thus in writing Rousseau will
have written for those who are yet to come, even if this writing remains less the
purveying of a doctrine than a felt interpretation of the soul or life energy that
they are to actualize expressively in a new life of autonomy blended with love.
Rousseau himself then remains in the position of the one who is longing (“dem
Sehnenden”), not the one who confidently knows and guides.
Page 15 of 19
What Rousseau has then achieved—a felt, expressive, but indeterminate

response in words to a difficult, fragmented condition coupled with a visionary
but indeterminate hope for a better one––is then generalized as characteristic of
anyone who is longing for life otherwise. Such a one may be responsive to hints
(“Winke”), as if, subjunctively (“hätte”) the ground plot and purpose of human
life were determinately available to reflection and poetic vision, even though
they are not or not fully. What remains as possible is then to fly over the land
and life of the people, discerning signs and anticipating their fulfillment, but still
only prophesying what remains yet to come.
And this very movement that is ascribed to Rousseau—a movement from

problematic, visionary outsider, to locus of the expression of life and power that
are not discursively grasped, to a renewed, qualified ability to live and move
anyway—this movement is itself completed in the poem, as Hölderlin / the
speaker moves from awed captivation with Rousseau’s visionary strangeness
and untimeliness to a larger sense that strangeness and uncanniness as such
may be both aspects of and expressible within a wider movement of life itself.
Reflection and speech are, therefore, possible for a finite, human subject within
life, even when the terms of that life are not open to full, discursive,
philosophical understanding. Sustaining and developing this thought through
the course of the poem composed in relation to Rousseau as an object of both
absorption and reflection amounts, then, to a kind of temporalized self-
knowledge, or a kind of Romantic philosophy in the absence of systematic
philosophy, that takes both human powers of reflection and human finitude
seriously.
Notes:
(1) . For an extended argument in support of this characterization of
romanticism, see Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 1–28, 102–23, and 229–45.
(2) . Friedrich Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being,” in Hölderlin, Essays and Letters
on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1988), 37–38; emphasis added.
(3) . Ibid., 37, where “arche-separation” translates “Urtheilung”; HSW 4/1, 216.
(4) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 121, To his Brother,” June 2, 1796, in HSW 4/1, 133.
(5) . Terry Pinkard, “Subjects, Objects, and Normativity: What Is It Like to Be an

Agent?” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus / International
Yearbook of German Idealism 1 (2003): 201–219; here: 202, 206.
Page 16 of 19
(6) . This is a master theme of Dieter Henrich’s epochal work on Hölderlin, as in

Henrich’s observation that for Hölderlin “Conscious life is at once shaped and
unbalanced by the basic conflicting tendencies orienting it. And the formative
process of life aims at finding a balance and harmony amidst this strife, in which
no one tendency is entirely suppressed or denied in its own right.” Dieter
Henrich, “Hölderlin in Jena,” in The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays
on Hölderlin, trans. Taylor Carman, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 112; emphasis added. For a reading of Hölderlin in
relation to the persisting “truth of skepticism” (as characterized by Stanley
Cavell) and focusing on Hölderlin’s deliberately ambiguous, formal poetic
response to this situation, see Eldridge, “Cavell and Hölderlin on Human
Immigrancy,” in The Persistence of Romanticism, 229–45. For a masterful
reading of how this sense of tension inhabits Hölderlin’s theoretical texts,
especially his essay “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit,” followed by a
reading of Hölderlin’s “The Ages of Life” (“Lebensalter”), see Hannah Vandegrift
Eldridge, “The Influence of Anxiety: Poetology as Symptom,” German Quarterly
86, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 443–62.
(7) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 121, To his Brother,” in Essays and Letters on Theory,
133.
(8) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 219, To his Brother,” HSW 4/1, 419; my translation.
(9) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 144, To Schiller,” HSW 4/1, 249; my translation.
(10) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 128, To Hegel,” HSW 4/1, 222; my translation.
(11) . Hölderlin, “Urtheil und Sein,” in HSW 4/1, 216; my translation.
(12) . Violetta Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 1794–1800 (Paderborn: Schöningh,

2000), 102; my translation.
(13) . Ibid., 104.
(14) . Hölderlin, Hyperion: Die metrische Fassung, HSW 3, 192; my translation.
(15) . Thomas Pfau, “Critical Introduction,” in Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on

Theory, 9.
(16) . Ibid., 16.
(17) . Ibid., 28.
(18) . Ibid., 18.
(19) . Hölderlin, “On Religion,” in Essays and Letters on Theory, 90.
Page 17 of 19
(20) . See Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge’s remarks about a similar ambivalence

and structure of unresolved qualification in Hölderlin’s Essay “On the
Operations of the Poetic Spirit,” in “The Influence of Anxiety.”
(21) . Friedrich Schiller, “Letter no. 28, To Hölderlin,” in HSW 7/1, 46; my
translation.
(22) . Hölderlin, “Letter no. 172, To his Brother,” in HSW 4/1, 306; my
translation.
(23) . Ibid. 305; my translation.
(24) . Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 132; my translation.
(25) . Hölderlin, Hyperion: Die metrische Fassung, in HSW 3, 194; my

translation.
(27) . Hölderlin, “Reflection,” in Essays and Letters on Theory, 46.
(28) . Ibid., 48.
(29) . Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Wordsworth, Selected Poems

and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 448.
(31) . Compare Ibid., 349.
(32) . This line, appearing in both the Song of the Tower Warden in Goethe’s
Faust and as the last line of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, is taken by Herbert
Marcuse as the formula, as it were, of successful art, art that achieves “the
reconciliation which...catharsis offers [that] also preserves the irreconcileable.”
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), 59.
(33) . See Richard Unger’s summary of the earliest work in Hölderlin’s Major
Poetry: The Dialectics of Unity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975),
11–20.
(34) . Ibid., 29.
(35) . Hölderlin, Hyperion: Die vorletzte Fassung, in HSW 3, 326; trans. Richard
Unger in Ibid., 22–23, 25, supplemented by my translation.
(36) . The biographical information in this paragraph about Hölderlin’s relations

to Rousseau comes from David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 20, 397; Eric Santner, “Chronology,” in Hölderlin, Hyperion and
Page 18 of 19
Selected Poems (New York: Continuum, 2002), xi, and Scott J. Thompson,
“Friedrich Hölderlin: A Chronology of His Life,” http://www.wbenjamin.org/
hoelderlin_chron.html.
(37) . Stanley Corngold, “Implications of an Influence: On Hölderlin’s Reception

of Rousseau,” in Romantic Poetry, vol. 7, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2002), 474.
(38) . Paul de Man, “The Image of Rousseau in the Poetry of Hölderlin,” in de

Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984),
40.
(39) . Unger, Holderlin’s Major Poetry, 138.
(40) . HSW 2/1, 12–13; Hölderlin, Odes and Elegies, trans. Nick Hoff
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 89, 91.
Page 19 of 19
On the Defense of Literary Value

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

From Early German Romanticism to Analytic Philosophy of Literature
Brady Bowman
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0009

Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the
cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that
German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation
between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of
skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary
value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive
priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This
tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and
defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.
Keywords: Beauty and truth, cognitive value of literature, Erklären versus Verstehen, German
idealism, German romanticism, literature and philosophy, literature and science, nonpropositional
cognition, philosophy of literature, value of the humanities
8.1. The Crisis of Literary Value and Its Origins

The value of what we have come to call literature has, in one way or another,
always been in question. Plato’s criticism of poetry as a morally dubious and
metaphysically derivative representation of reality introduced a suspicion that
continues to haunt our relationship to literature today: the suspicion that a mode
of representation that is paradigmatically fictional cannot in principle convey
knowledge, reveal truth, and hence cannot be taken with the full measure of
seriousness.1 Although Plato’s suspicion has hardly impeded the production and
appreciation of literature during the intervening millennia, defenders of literary
value would be overly sanguine to conclude that it is powerless to influence the
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cultural and institutional fate of literature. Since the inception of literary studies
as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, the maintenance of the
literary heritage in scholarly editions, the cultivation of literary sensibility in the
next generation of readers and writers, even the transmission of practical know-
how and the support of literary artists have increasingly been entrusted to our
university systems—despite some authors’ scorn for academia and the
“academic poetry” created there. As we know, these institutions are sensitive to
a variety of political, social, and economic pressures. In this context, the
humanities generally and literary studies in particular are vulnerable.
(p.148) The notion of modern, as opposed to classical or biblical, philology is a

child of romanticism, as is the Humboldtian conception of the modern research
university. Roughly contemporaneous with the creation of modern literary
scholarship as an academic discipline, however, occurs the integration of the
exact sciences into the regular university curriculum, and it is these fields that
today have achieved ascendency as the paradigmatically scientific disciplines.
(Notably, the term “scientist” was coined, at the instigation of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, by William Whewell, the man who proposed and oversaw the
introduction of the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge; it replaced the older
term “natural philosopher,” which until then had enjoyed exclusive currency.)2 It
is here that Plato’s charge against poetry reveals its abiding power, dramatic
shifts in modern metaphysics notwithstanding: For despite the pretensions of
mid-twentieth-century structuralism, the study of literature is clearly not a
science. Its subject is not a natural kind marked out by intrinsic properties;3 it
possesses no uncontested methods of research; it uncovers no laws; it
contributes in no way to humanity’s technological empowerment; and it
produces no demonstrably objective results.4 The legacy of Plato’s charge that
poetry is constitutionally incapable of transmitting knowledge makes
contemporary literary studies especially vulnerable in the setting of the modern,
technologically driven university.
This child of German romanticism thus exists today both as a key institution in
the production and reception of literature and in a state of more or less
permanent crisis.5 That this should be so is partly the consequence of the
ambivalent fortunes of romanticism itself. Jena romanticism was a remarkably
unified movement in literature, philosophy, and—importantly—in the post-
Newtonian natural sciences of chemistry and electromagnetism that held out
prospects of bridging the gap between physics and organic life and even the life
of the mind.6 It sought to go beyond the mechanistic paradigm of scientific
explanation that rendered both the natural existence of freedom and the
phenomenon of life—the two most intimate components of human self-
understanding—virtually inexplicable, drawing a veil between our lived
experience and its ultimate grounding in the real. Romantic science and
philosophy of nature strove to establish a new paradigm of understanding that
could unify the basic forces of matter with the fact of organic life and the
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existence of an autonomous human mind, whose highest expressions are to be

found in religion, philosophy, and art. Thus Schelling’s Darstellung meines
Systems (1801) concludes with the promise to continue, in a future installment,
with the “construction of the ideal series” of the intellectual faculties and their
categories from organic nature, all the way to the “construction of the absolute
center of gravity in which, as the two highest expressions of indifference, truth
and beauty, coincide” (HKA 1/10, 211).7
(p.149) Art in general and poetry in particular were thus accorded supreme
status in the romantic hierarchy of human cognition.8 Recall Schelling’s famous
remarks at the close of his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800):
For the philosopher... art is supreme, for it opens to him the holiest of
holies, where that which is separated in nature and history, and which can
never be united either in life and action or in thought, burns as though in a
single flame in eternal and primordial unity.... Just as in the childhood of
the sciences philosophy was born of poetry and nurtured by it, so too,
when these are brought to perfection, they will all flow back like diverse
rivers into the single ocean of poetry from which they first arose.
(HKA 1/3, 628–29)9
I will soon return to this quintessentially romantic motif of poetry’s status as

both origin and consummation of science. And as I will point out, the romantic
legacy has never ceased to exercise its influence on philosophy throughout the
twentieth century and into the present. Yet despite its far-reaching cultural
ramifications and its role in shaping the modern university, we must also
concede that the romantic revolution achieved at best only partial success.
Neither the structures of organic life nor those of self-consciousness have come
to supplant inorganic forces as the paradigmatic objects of science:
contemporary debates on the very coherence of nonreductive physicalism in the
philosophy of mind show the extent to which the romantic revolution failed to
transform the common sense of the scientific community.10 In its contemporary
form, the question of the value of literature, literary experience, and literary
criticism is at least in part a symptom of this broader failure of the romantic
revolution.
Nevertheless, the Frühromantik continues to offer resources for addressing this

ongoing crisis in literary studies. Romanticism offers a powerful and unified
vision of literature as an unceasing and open-ended project of cultural
formation, of Kulturschaffen in the literal sense of creating the site of human
meaning, the place of authentic human reconciliation with the world.11 This
project requires that we rethink literature as situated at a level both prior to the
(recurring) genesis of individual sciences and higher than what those sciences,
left purely to themselves, could ever tell us about the nature of the world they
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serve to reveal. As an integral dimension of this project, however, philosophical

romanticism requires that we narrow the scope of what truth and knowledge, as
such, may legitimately claim to offer, while broadening our understanding of
cognitive value to include modes of understanding irreducible to the
propositional variety in which the sciences, as we now understand them,
exclusively trade. These resources, properly understood, continue to offer
efficacious and philosophically responsible means for addressing the value crisis
in literary studies.12
(p.150) 8.2. The Leveling of the Distinction Between Literature and

Truth-Seeking Discourse, or How Not to Save Literature
Talk of “narrowing the scope of what truth and knowledge may claim to offer”
requires further specification, particularly in the context of Jena romanticism
and its relation to philosophy and the sciences. For there is more than one way
of giving a critical romanticist account of the nature and scope of discursive,
propositional knowledge and of literature’s role in relation to it. Let me begin
discussion with what I consider to be a less felicitous appropriation of early
romanticism. It has been most visible in the tradition of a certain skepticism
regarding philosophical foundations, rational closure, and reason’s ability to
liberate humanity from the alienated and existentially precarious situation into
which our technologically oriented culture has plunged us. Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, with their profound distrust of reason and the
value of truth, inaugurate this strain of romanticism, developing it with
unrivaled virtuosity. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and the vision of
egocentric sovereignty inherent in the metaphysics of subjectivity can be seen to
have been anticipated by the insights of Fichte and Hölderlin.13 Poststructuralist
critiques of the subject, systematic closure, and the self-transparency of reason
clearly have important sources in romanticism, partly by way of Heidegger’s
seminal thought. Adorno’s critique of the “logic of identity” and his alternative
conception of a “logic of disintegration” also stand in this tradition.14 The early
Wittgenstein, too, whose admiration for Schopenhauer and Goethe is well
known, is rehearsing a romantic gesture when in the Tractatus he concludes
“that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life
have still not been touched at all.”15
The methodological assumptions and critical strategies underlying this tradition

of romantic skepticism can to some extent be traced back to Friedrich Schlegel.
His cultivation of the fragment, his emphasis on the open-ended unfolding of
thought over against the search for first principles and systematic completeness,
his celebration of the irony inscribed in (necessarily antinomial) attempts to give
propositional expression to the absolute—these are the most conspicuous
features of a sublime defeatism that has worked irresistible charms time and
again over the course of the last century. Simon Critchley exemplifies this view
when he writes, “Jena Romanticism is rooted in the acute self-consciousness of
its unworking or failure, the exploration of the lack of final synthesis in a
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continual process of self-creation and destruction and the quasi dialectics of wit
and irony.”16
From Schlegel through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Adorno, and

Derrida, there has existed a strain of thinkers who have both practiced (p.151)
and preached the unity of philosophy and literature first declared by the early
romantics.17As Nietzsche famously argues in Truth and Lie in a Non-moral
Sense, truth itself is a poetic fiction—“a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms,
and anthropomorphisms.”18 If this is so, then literature is an achievement
situated along the same continuum as mathematics, physics, and philosophy;
indeed, in its open and exuberant fabrication of worlds, literature is situated
closer to the origin of “truth” than either science or philosophy, since these
falsely lay claim to a special epistemic dignity merely by virtue of their resting
on metaphors so entrenched as to appear to be unalterable features of reality.19
Thus does the Platonic charge dissolve into air: There are no truths but those the
poet wittingly or unwittingly fabricates and philosophy itself is a branch of
imaginative fiction. Plato’s charge, viewed thus, is at once accurate and empty.
Nietzsche’s claim, as put into practice by poststructuralist theoreticians,

provoked sharp reactions from those who sought to defend the specific nature
and status of truth-seeking discourse like philosophy and the sciences, polarizing
debate throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In my view, the most tenable position is
that taken by those who, like Manfred Frank and Gottfried Gabriel, have argued
that intensely poetic and rigorously discursive uses of language play mutually
irreducible and complementary roles in grounding and guiding our cognitive
access to the world.20 Moreover, no favor has been done to literature and
literary studies by urging the identity of poetry with philosophy and the
sciences. For as others have pointed out, that position seeks to rebut Plato’s
charge not by promoting literature to the status of the truth-seeking disciplines,
but by demoting the latter to the status of “mere” fictions.21 This is no more than
a tu quoque argument, and to the extent that it succeeds at all, it hardly shows
why human resources should be devoted either to literary fictions or to
philosophical “fictions” if neither has real cognitive value.
The aestheticist-constructivest legacy of Jena romanticism therefore appears

counterproductive when it comes to giving positive arguments for the value of
literature. However, there are other streams within early romanticism more
broadly construed and these hold resources for making a stronger case for the
cognitive value of literature.
8.3. Complementarity, Priority, Fulfillment: A Competing Romantic View of

the Relation between Poetry and Science
Manfred Frank and Gottfried Gabriel have argued that literature and truth-
seeking practices like philosophy and the sciences are irreducibly
complementary to each other (the complementarity thesis).22 Both Frank and
Page 5 of 18
John (p.152) Gibson have furthermore argued that nondiscursive forms are in
important ways more basic and hence prior to discursive thought (the priority
thesis).23 And Gibson further suggests that literary cognition is in fact the proper
fulfillment of discursive knowledge (the fulfillment thesis). In this section I will
argue, first, that the best defense of the complementarity thesis must be
mounted by way of the much stronger priority and fulfillment theses. My second
point is that the strong claims of priority and fulfillment put forward in recent
analytic philosophy of literature have an important source in Jena romanticism
and that renewed consideration of romantic thought can help in formulating a
contemporary philosophy of cultural value along the lines of the fulfillment
thesis.
A striking feature of Jena romanticism is its aesthetic and literary cognitivism.

One need only recall Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,
Hölderlin’s late hymns, or the idea of a “new mythology of reason” in the so-
called ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.24 What I want to
underscore, however, is a conception of art and poetry as complementary to the
discursively oriented endeavors of philosophy and science. Schelling’s notion of
art as the “organon” of philosophy provides the most striking instance of this:
He does not intend an instrumental relation in which art would subserve the
discursive formulation of truths it can only suggest; on the contrary, art bears
immediate and certain witness to a unity that cannot in principle be formulated
discursively, yet which forms the content and orienting goal of philosophic and
scientific inquiry.25
Such a notion of complementarity between the aesthetic and the discursive can
help orient debates about the relation of literature and philosophy. As Manfred
Frank writes, an important function of literary art is to open what he calls a
“space of intelligibility...that must be there already in order that propositions can
take their place within it.”26 Hence, as he argues against Habermas, it would be
misguided to argue against the poststructuralist leveling of the distinction
between literature and philosophy by insisting on an unbridgeable gulf between
“world-disclosure” on the one hand and “truth-committed argumentation” on the
other.27
This same point has recently been pressed by philosophers in the analytic
tradition. In his 2007 book Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson argues
that the activity of literature “enjoys a certain priority to the search for truth and
knowledge, at least, and perhaps only, in this respect: before we can query the
truth of a vision of our way in the world, we must first have the vision itself. That
is, what makes possible the search for truth is a prior cultural accomplishment:
the construction of varying ways of taking our world to be.”28
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Gibson makes no explicit reference to romanticism. However, two philosophers

upon whose work he bases his argument provide the missing link to romantic
thought: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell.29 I mentioned (p.153)
Wittgenstein’s well-known admiration for Schopenhauer and Goethe above;
Manfred Frank has pointed out affinities between Wittgenstein’s early
philosophy and the thought of Novalis, while Jonas Maatsch has traced Novalis’s
encyclopedism and Wittgenstein’s conception of an übersichtliche Darstellung to
Goethe as the common methodological source.30 In the case of Stanley Cavell,
there is an openly avowed line of influence linking his thought back through
Emerson and Coleridge to Kant and the early romantics.31 Thus it is hardly a
coincidence that specifically romantic doctrines resurface in Gibson’s thought.
Cavell broadens the conception of cognition to include, in addition to knowledge

in the strict sense of justified true belief, what he calls acknowledgment.32 This
concept of acknowledgment as the fulfillment of knowledge may be the most
important contemporary development of the romantic legacy. Without this
differentiation within the broader sphere of cognition, the complementarity
thesis can neither be rigorously formulated nor combined with the idea that
aesthetic experience positively completes the work of the sciences—a thesis
close to the heart of Jena romanticism.
Why is Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment so crucial to a rigorous formulation

of the complementarity thesis? If we grasp aesthetic experience as providing a
certain kind of knowledge, then we immediately face unanswerable objections:
For one, literature engages in none of the practices of argument, research,
experimentation, weighing of counterexamples, and so on, that constitute the
truth-seeking disciplines; nor is literature sensitive to contradictions among the
visions presented in various works of literature: we are not constrained to
choose between Pride and Prejudice and Naked Lunch as we are constrained to
choose between, say, Galen and Harvey on the circulation of blood.33 Rather,
literary works assume that their readers already know about what is being
presented between their covers, discounting the odd fact that could as easily be
gleaned from standard works of reference: If you do not already know guilt,
remorse, and repentance before you crack the first page of Crime and
Punishment, you will hardly understand the book’s central themes, much less
make your first acquaintance with them there, for such acquaintance is a
presupposition of identifying those very themes.34 And this remains true even in
those cases in which the psychological, ethical, and cultural content of the work
is bound up with a way of life and thereby a set of concepts that the reader may
not possess. As Cora Diamond has argued, the conceptual losses we may suffer
as a culture can render us speechless in regard to our interests and experiences,
and thus alienate us from them, preventing us from being able to acknowledge
how it is with us; but such losses “have not actually changed us into human
beings limited to the interests and experiences and moral possibilities we can
express in our depleted vocabulary.”35 What, therefore, literature can make
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available for expression and thus for acknowledgment is not a new (p.154) fact
or experience, but a conceptual space that we already inhabit yet without having
an explicit consciousness and mastery of the concepts proper to it.36 But if this is
right, then to assume that literature seeks to convey knowledge and that it is
such knowledge that is complementary to that of more overtly truth-seeking
disciplines, is to be confronted with the apparent cognitive triviality of
literature.37
Following Gibson, we can see how Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment allows us

to understand literature as a form of cognitive access to the world that is both
intimately related to and at once distinct from knowledge—a form of access that
is, in Cavell’s words, more than mere knowledge.38 The concept broadens the
cognitive space to include something beyond truth and knowledge, namely our
understanding of the ways that truths themselves matter, how they cohere
within the tightly woven yet open texture of human forms of life and locate them
within a world that, in the exclusively truth-seeking perspective, we are
constantly on the verge of losing. Literature is complementary to philosophy and
the sciences precisely to the extent that literature and the imaginative
achievement for which it stands are both prior to discursive knowledge and its
fulfillment.
Once this difference is formulated in terms that do not confuse the

complementary natures of their respective cognitive contributions, the cultural
Vollendungscharakter of the aesthetico-literary emerges. Not only is literature
prior to knowing; it also marks the cultural achievement of (re)integrating
knowledge into the life of culture and thus perfecting that knowledge in the only
sense in which the essentially infinite task of modern science ever can be
perfected: in beauty.39 Thus, just as there must be a sense in which the
conceptual spaces in which we act and carry out our world-directed inquiries
must precede, shape, and be already implicit in our actions and inquiries, so too
is there a sense in which those same conceptual spaces can be explicitly
displayed to us through works of literary imagination. To quote Gibson once
again, “literature records not [only] the first but the final word in our culture’s
awareness of its world, the word that effectively concludes the story we have to
offer of the nature of our world as we experience it and find ourselves within
it.”40
A statement like that is about as close as a twenty-first-century analytic

philosopher is likely to get to Schiller’s and Schelling’s celebration of poetry as
the alpha and omega of human knowledge—and it is very close indeed. The
finality of the aesthetic is of course not a temporal finality. We can usefully
contrast it with the project of scientific knowing that is incapable in principle of
completion: the best a scientific theory can reasonably hope for is to pave the
way toward deeper insights into nature that, eventually, will render the earlier
theory obsolete. Whatever value such a theory may have, it is inseparable from
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reference to further work to come.41 By contrast, art facilitates an experience of

(p.155) beauty and, as such, an experience of perfection. The work of art is
therefore essentially complete; it gives all in all wherever it is present in the
least.42 The finality of art is therefore not an object of anticipation, nor does it
imply closure in a fixed and obligatory canon of works. As Schopenhauer says:
“Art is everywhere at its goal.”43
8.4. Conclusion: Romantic Unity—Hopeless Nostalgia or Present Task?

So what have I tried to show? For one, the early romantic legacy is ambivalent.
Neither romantic irony (in its more extreme forms) nor the identification of
philosophy with literature exhausts the possibilities of romantic thought, and
neither offers resources for defending the value of literature. Even supposing
that our truth-seeking practices may be permanently compromised by our
limited points of view, the contingent nature of discovery, and even by features
of reality that necessarily elude human comprehension, so that the intelligibility
we manage to produce is, finally, just that—our product, our fiction—this
“fact” (if it can be called that) still would not warrant the leveling of the
distinction between our truth-seeking practices and the practice of literature.44
For precisely this reason, however, we must recognize both that literature does
not impart knowledge and that knowledge is not the only cognitive game in
town. Yet in arguing for the complementarity of literature and philosophy, we are
also constrained to argue that literature’s imaginative achievement is both prior
to and the fulfillment of discursive knowledge.
Second, I have insisted that this idea, too, is part of the romantic legacy, and
that we find it explicitly stated by romantic thinkers in a manner that is
thoroughly compatible with scientific realism. This strain of romantic thought
offers important resources for defending the value of literature and literary
studies in the context of the post-Humboldtian university. Early romanticism
brought modern literary scholarship to the academy and it still harbors powerful
arguments for why it should remain there.
Third, I have tried to show how the two different strains of romantic philosophy
of literature have shaped twentieth-century thought, and that the
complementarist strain in particular is re-emerging in some contemporary
analytic philosophy of literature. The sphere of cognition is not defined solely by
truth, nor is rational discourse confined to the propositionally “sayable”—this
insight is accessible from either side of the analytic-continental split; to explore
its ramifications is the privilege of neither.
Literature is the ongoing creation of a universal yet multiple imagination of our

single world. There is, of course, a romantic spirit of alienation that holds (p.
156) such unity to be illusory and its evocation to be nostalgia. Schiller’s bitter
laudation of the gods of Greece is of that spirit, as are some of Hölderlin’s
odes.45 However, the greatest of Hölderlin’s mature poems (for example, late
Page 9 of 18
odes such as Dichtermut and Blödigkeit or the elegy Brot und Wein) go beyond
resignation and nostalgia; they evince a faith in the power of the literary
imagination to reveal, transfigure, and create an authentic second nature in
which the human can after all be at home. It is the same faith evinced in the
passage from Schelling quoted above, where he says that, in art, “that which is
separated in nature and history...burns as though in a single flame in eternal and
primordial unity.” The absence of such unity in our primary experience of nature
—and the alienation, skepticism, and nihilism that form our response to that
absence—do not tell against its reality. Rather, it is the imperative of culture to
create a second nature in which the human is at home in a more than human
world. And that, as the romantics teach us, is the work of poetry.
Notes:
(1) . It might be objected that in the case of ancient Greece, the status of
literature especially as embodied in Homer was authoritative, and that the case
of Greece may not be singular: So the value of literature would not always have
been in question. Indeed, in its strongest form, the “priority thesis” I will argue
for below states that art, science, and religion all originally spring from
literature (“poetry”) as their source. This again implies a state of affairs in which
the value of literature would not have been in question. We ought, however, to
distinguish between what we have come to call literature and the related
practices and institutions prior to the acceleration of cultural differentiation that
renders religion, art, science, and poetry into distinct realms of cultural
endeavor. Socratic philosophy represents a crucial moment in the history of this
process of differentiation in the West, and it is no coincidence that a
fundamental critique of the authority and value of poetry is its concomitant. I
acknowledge, however, that Plato’s accomplishments as a writer indicate that
his attitude toward literature must surely have been more complex than his
explicit critique of poetry would seem to allow.
(2) . On Whewell’s relationship to English romanticism and on his philosophy of

science more generally, see Richard R. Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell,
Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
(3) . See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy

of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), chap. 1; “Philosophy as/
and/of Literature,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York:
Columbia University Press 1984), 135–62.
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(4) . Insistence on the nonscientific character of literary studies does not entail
commitment to the dichotomy of “two cultures”—one scientific, one humanistic
—whose basic incompatibility is ensured by the psychological distinction of two
opposed modes of cognition, Erklären versus Verstehen.
(5) . For the formation of German philology and literary scholarship as an

academic discipline in Germany, see Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp,
eds., Wissenschaft und Nation. Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der
deutschen Literaturwissenschaft (Munich: Fink 1991), as well as their book
Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler
1994). Michael J. Hofstetter investigates the influence of German romanticism on
the British university in The Romantic Idea of a University: England and
Germany 1770–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2001). For the (slightly later)
American scene, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1989). Eloquent testimony to the crisis of
value that has taken hold of modern literary studies is borne by a recent issue of
the PMLA (117, no. 3 [2002]: 487–521), in which numerous representatives of
the field show themselves flummoxed by the question, “Why major in Literature?
What we say to our students.” For a critical response to that discussion see
Gregory Jusdanis (“Two Cheers for Aesthetic Autonomy,” in Cultural Critique 61
[2005]: 22–54), who situates the present crisis in an “anti-aesthetic” strand of
twentieth-century literary theory and seeks remedies in renewed engagement
with the German romantic theory of aesthetic autonomy.
(6) . For a recent discussion of romantic Naturphilosophie and its seminal role in
the early scientific investigation of electrochemistry and electromagnetism and
its influence on the work Ørsted and others, see Michael Friedman, “Kant—
Naturphilosophie—Electromagnetism,” in Hans Christian Ørsted and the
Romantic Legacy in Science: Ideas, Disciplines, Practices, ed. Robert Brian,
Robert Cohen, and Ole Knudsen (Dordrecht: Springer 2007), 135–58.
(7) . Schelling follows up on his promise in the dialogue Bruno oder über das
göttliche und natürliche Princip der Dinge (HKA 1/11) and in his 1802/3 lectures
on the philosophy of art (HKA 2/6) (thanks to Dalia Nassar for pointing this out).
Cf. Hölderlin’s letter no. 179 to his brother (June 4, 1799), in HSW 6, 329. On
the character of romantic science and its institutional framework in Jena see
Paul Ziche and Olaf Breidbach, eds., Naturwissenschaften um 1800.
Wissenschaftskultur in Jena-Weimar (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger
2001); see also Ziche “Naturforschung in Jena zur Zeit Hegels. Materialien zum
Hintergrund der spekulativen Naturphilosophie,” Hegel-Studien 32 (1997): 9–40,
and Ziche, “Gehört das Ich zur Natur? Geistige und organische Natur in
Schellings Naturphilosophie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 108 (2001): 41–57.
Page 11 of 18
(8) . In this paper I do not distinguish systematically between the terms “poetry”
and “literature.” The romantics themselves preferred to speak of
“poetry” (Dichtung, Poesie) and would presumably have balked at identifying it
with the broader category of Literatur (or Litteratur, as it was then commonly
spelled) encompassing the totality of published writing. But “poetry” in
contemporary English is more narrowly and thus misleadingly associated with
verse than the romantics’ term Dichtung or Poesie, and in the present context
my use of “literature” to cover roughly the same range of phenomena seems
unlikely to cause confusion or prompt unwanted associations with other uses of
the term, e.g., as used when speaking of “the literature” on a given subject.
(9) . Unless otherwise indicated, here and in the following all translations from
German editions are my own. Schelling’s words obviously echo Schiller’s
philosophical ode, Die Künstler (1789), which makes similar claims for the prior
role of art and poetry in the generation of the sciences and for poetry’s role as
the culminating point of unity of completed science. See Schillers Werke.
Nationalausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943ff.), vol. 1, 201–
14, especially the concluding strophe and its image of differentiation and
reintegration: “Wie sich in sieben milden Strahlen / Der weiße Schimmer lieblich
bricht, / Wie sieben Regenbogenstrahlen / Zerrinnen in das weiße Licht...so
fließt in einen Bund der Wahrheit / In einen Strom des Lichts zurück! [As into
seven gentle rays / the white luster gently breaks, / as seven rainbow beams
dissolve / returning into lustrous white..., so too shall you flow back into a single
bond of truth / a single stream of light].” These same lines are echoed by
Hölderlin in Hyperion, see HSW 3, 81.
(10) . Perhaps the decisive word in these debates has been spoken by Jaegwon
Kim, who contests the very coherence of nonreductive physicalism as an
explanatory project: see his Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-
Body Problem and Mental Causation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), esp. 89–121.
See also his earlier paper “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of
Reduction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 1–26,
reprinted in Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The biological paradigm has come to
guide teleo-functional approaches in the philosophy of mind (see especially Ruth
Millikan, Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories [Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1984] and Language: A Biological Model [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005]), but the basic philosophical case for organic life being a necessary
condition of mindedness has not yet been convincingly made (pace John S.
Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992]).
(11) . Cf. Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 7–21, 84–97.
Page 12 of 18
(12) . The central concern of this paper thus converges with recent discussions
in epistemology about the value of knowledge, particularly with a position such
as the one taken by Jonathan Kvanvig, who argues that epistemic value does not
reside in truth per se (though truth remains a necessary condition of
knowledge), but in understanding; see The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit
of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I suggest that
in its most comprehensive form, such understanding is the work of literature.
(13) . See for example Martin Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in

Vorträge und Aufsätze, 10th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), 67–96. Manfred
Frank argues that Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity is based on a
misperception of Fichte’s understanding of what he calls “the I” (with reference
to Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht [Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1967] and “Hölderlin über Urteil und Seyn: Eine Studie zur
Entstehungsgeschichte des Idealismus,” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 14 [1965–66], 73–
96). See Was ist Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984),
248–56. An inverse point is made by Eckart Förster, who notes critically that
Heidegger borrowed from Fichte “the insight that the proposition ‘I am’
expresses an utterly different kind of being than any existential proposition
about a thing or state of affairs,” but that Heidegger fails to acknowledge the
source. See The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 163.
(14) . Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp

1975), 148ff.. Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics can itself be construed as a
radicalization of the romantic dialectics we find in F. Schlegel and the early
Schleiermacher, as Andreas Arndt has pointed out (Dialektik und Reflexion. Zur
Rekonstruktion des Vernunftbegriffs [Hamburg: Meiner, 1994], 269ff.) Strictly
speaking, it is Sartre’s conception of dialectics that Arndt identifies as a
radicalization of elements from romantic dialectics, but it is clear that when he
turns on the same page to a discussion of Adorno, describing his negative
dialectics as a “Freisetzung” of the Sartrean conception, he is attributing the
same lineage to Adorno’s thought. Adorno’s poetico-methodological homage to
Hölderlin in the essay Parataxis (in Noten zur Literatur [Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1981], 447–94) is also significant in the way it places “das Moment
des Zerfallenden [the moment of disintegration]” in Hölderlin’s language in
relation to what Adorno sees as the “romantic” aspect of Hölderlin’s poetry, its
“objectivism” (478).
(15) . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge,

2001), 6.52; cf. 6.522.
(16) . Simon Critchley, “Cavell’s ‘Romanticism’ and Cavell’s Romanticism,” in

Russell B. Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 37–54, here 42. Charles Larmore addresses the
Page 13 of 18
excesses both of a one-sidedly aestheticist interpretation of Frühromantik and of

a defeatist, Schopenhauerian understanding of its restlessness as Weltschmerz,
and construes romantic irony instead as delicately poised between these
extremes (cf. Larmore, Romantic Legacy, 76–83).
(17) . Cf. for example Novalis: “The perfected form of the sciences must be
poetic” (NS 2, 527, no. 17); “Every science becomes poetry [Poesie]—after
becoming philosophy” (NS 3, 396, no. 684; cf. the letter to A. W. Schlegel from
Dec. 12, 1794, NS 4, 252). We find similar dicta in the Athenaeum: “The highest
philosophy...would become poetry [Poesie] again” (KA 2, 216, no. 304). The
intimate proximity of literature and philosophy is manifest in the case of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. On Wittgenstein’s conception of the unity of
philosophy and poetry, see Manfred Frank, “Wittgensteins Gang in die
Dichtung,” in Wittgenstein. Literat und Philosoph (Pfullingen: Neske, 1989), esp.
60ff. Derrida’s texts Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond (1980) are the most sustained instances of his synthesis of literary and
philosophical language. The cases of Adorno and (late) Heidegger are complex.
On the one hand, both emphasize the specific difference and complementarity of
literature and philosophy (cf. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie [Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1973], 191, 197, 392, 519; Heidegger, “Was heißt Denken?” in
Vorträge und Aufsätze, 132). On the other hand, both also explicitly break with
discursive forms of language and develop their thoughts in close dialogue with
works of poetry and art: as Heidegger says about his interpretation of Hölderlin:
“In thinking, it is almost as though one were participating in the creation of the
poem [Das Denken ist fast wie ein Mitdichten]” (“Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken,’”
in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 2/52 [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1982], 55). Adorno describes the compositional idea according to which his
(unfinished) Aesthetic Theory was to be organized in terms close to those he
uses in his interpretation of Hölderlin; he contrasts it with the linearity of
argumentation from premises (cf. Ästhetische Theorie, 541); on the literary form
of Adorno’s philosophical writing see Gerhard Richter, “Aesthetic Theory and
Nonpropositional Content in Adorno,” New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006):
119–35; for a comparison of Adorno and Wittgenstein, also see Gottfried Gabriel,
Zwischen Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnisformen von Dichtung, Philosophie und
Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), esp. 47ff.
(18) . Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn,”

in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1975), vol. 1, 880.
(19) . Derrida offers a sustained treatment of this idea in “White Mythology:

Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985), 207–72.
Page 14 of 18
(20) . Though they start from diverse standpoints, both Manfred Frank (Stil in
der Philosophie [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992]) and Gottfried Gabriel (“Literarische
Form und nicht-Propositionale Erkenntnis in der Philosophie,” in Gottfried
Gabriel and Christiane Schildknecht, Literarische Formen der Philosophie
[Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990], 1–25) arrive at similar conclusions regarding the
complementary relation between philosophy and literature.
(21) . Cf. Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophizing Literature,” in The Philosophical

Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 167–69;
cf. John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2007), 39–49.
(22) . Cf. Frank, Stil in der Philosophie and Gabriel, Zwischen Logik und
Literatur.
(23) . See also Christiane Schildknecht, Sense and Self. Perspectives on

Nonpropositionality (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2002); cf. her article “‘Ein
seltsam wunderbarer Anstrich’? Nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis und ihre
Darstellungsformen,” in Brady Bowman, ed., Darstellung und Erkenntnis:
Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen
Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant (Paderborn: Mentis-Verlag, 2007), 31–43.
(24) . On Hölderlin see especially Helmut Hühn, “Bilder des Lebendigen. Zur
Erkenntnisfunktion der dichterischen ‘Mythe’ im Werk Hölderlins,” in Bowman,
Darstellung und Erkenntnis, 117–133. See also Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im
Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1992). Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel have each variously been claimed as the
true author of the fragment that has come to be known as “the oldest system
program of German idealism.” The only undisputed fact is that it is in Hegel’s
handwriting. The fragment itself and a number of influential articles on its
authorship and significance are to be found in Christoph Jamme and Hans
Schneider, eds., Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des
deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). For a critical
discussion of the scholarship on the fragment see Frank-Peter Hansen, Das
älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. Rezeptionsgeschichte und
Interpretation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989). For a more recent overview with
further bibliographical references see Walter Jaeschke, Hegel-Handbuch
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 76–80.
(25) . This conception of art and poetry as bearing essentially upon the same
objects and concerns as science (and philosophy) is a constant in early romantic
thought that is still discernible in Hegel’s later lectures on aesthetics. Adorno’s
thesis that art both supersedes the “logic of identity” and demands philosophical
interpretation in the discursive medium constituted by that very logic is an
equally obvious scion of romanticism (cf. Aesthetische Theorie, 193ff.).
Page 15 of 18
(26) . Frank, Stil in der Philosophie, 72.
(27) . Cf. Frank, Stil in der Philosophie, 84.
(28) . Fiction and the Weave of Life, 144. See also the essays in John Gibson,
Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci, eds., A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction,
Narrative, and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2007).
(29) . Cf. Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, chapters 2.2 and 3.3.
(30) . See Hans-Johann Glock, “Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein,” in Christopher

Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 422–58. Frank’s extensive discussion of
Wittgenstein’s affinities with the thinkers of early romanticism is contained in
Manfred Frank and Gianfranco Soldati, Wittgenstein. Literat und Philosoph
(Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1989), 7–72; cf. Stil in der Philosophie, 86–115. On the
methodological tradition linking Goethe, Novalis, and Wittgenstein see Jonas
Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme.” Frühromantische
Wissensordnungen im Kontext (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2007).
(31) . Cavell’s engagement with the romantic tradition is of course most obvious
in the book In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), but it is present in his other work
as well. The legacy of romanticism is also present indirectly by way of Cavell’s
formative engagement with Wittgenstein. For a recent discussion see Simon
Critchley, “Cavell’s Romanticism and Cavell’s ‘Romanticism.’” See also Keren
Gorodeisky’s contribution to this volume, chapter 9 below.
(32) . See (among other texts) Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in
Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002),
238–66.
(33) . These points are made forcefully (though somewhat simplistically) by

Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics
32, no. 3 (1992): 191–200. A more balanced argument for rejecting the notion
that it is constitutive of literature to produce and transmit knowledge is provided
by Peter Lamarque, “Learning from Literature,” in Gibson et al., A Sense of the
World, 13–23.
(34) . Cf. Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 81–99.
(35) . Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics 98, no. 2 (1988): 255–77,
here: 263.
(36) . Tyler Burge has suggested that Frege makes room for a distinction
between the sense of an expression and a subject’s conscious grasp of that sense
(“Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning,” in Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on
Page 16 of 18
Frege [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], 242–69, esp. 252–57): the full
and precise sense of an expression may transcend the subject’s actual, conscious
grasp of that sense in any number of ways, even though the sense contributes to
the structure and individuality of the subject’s mind. So even the most
competent speakers of a language, those who grasp the linguistic meaning of the
expressions in their language most thoroughly, may fail to understand the
deeper rationale that underlies their deployment of a concept. I have something
similar in mind here, although in the present context I would like to de-
emphasize the more austerely rationalist and Platonist elements of the Frege-
Burge conception and emphasize rather the notion of historically emergent
conceptual spaces that shape how we think and speak without wholly coinciding
with the actual thought and speech of individuals. (A detailed attempt to extend
Burge’s account beyond formal sciences such as logic and mathematics has been
undertaken by James Higginbotham, “Conceptual Competence,” Philosophical
Issues 9 [1998]: 149–62.) Although Burge himself plausibly charges ordinary
language philosophy with blindness toward the relevant distinction in Frege
(“Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning,” 269), it seems to me that Cavell’s
richer understanding of ordinary language philosophy gets some purchase on
the same territory that Burge is interested in. In asking “what we should say
when,” we are not merely clarifying— on dubious authority— linguistic meaning,
but a structure of reality itself that cuts across the fact-value distinction: cf.
Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? Updated
Edition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 1–43, esp. 18–22; cf.
Burge, “Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning,” 258, 261). The upshot is that
we can and in fact often do inhabit a conceptual space that is constitutive of our
actual thoughts without our for that reason necessarily counting as possessing a
mastery of the relevant concepts.
(37) . This observation requires a certain disambiguation of the complementarist

view as espoused by Gottfried Gabriel. Gabriel understands literature as a
nonpropositional mode of Erkenntnis that complements the propositional mode
of Erkenntnis exemplified by scientific knowledge. Everything depends here on
how we understand Erkenntnis: Are we to take it in its rather more processual
meaning as the activity of cognition? If so, then cognition taken thus is
sufficiently distinct from knowledge and belief (since belief plays a role in, but
does not exhaust the nature of, cognition) that we may safely extricate such
nonpropositional cognition from the threat of triviality. However, if we
understand Erkenntnis to mean knowledge, the implication either of triviality or
of a lack of cognitive seriousness becomes ineluctable.
(38) . Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? 192.
(39) . Truth, then (pace Keats), is not beauty, but neither is it more than beauty
in the emphatic sense I’m using the term here. As Kant was the first to
recognize, beauty is the immediate experience of that space of intelligibility in
Page 17 of 18
which science arises and which it strives—infinitely—to fill out with a system of
truths.
(40) . Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 120.
(41) . On the infinity of the scientific task and the impossibility of individual
human satisfaction that implies, see Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The
Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 1–31.
(42) . I am here postulating an inner connection between art, beauty, and

perfection that is sure to be controversial, though it is essentially a restatement
of the classical conception of beauty as inhering in the harmony of the parts and
the whole to which they belong. The limited space of the present essay does not
allow for adequate discussion.
(43) . Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Werke in fünf
Bänden, ed. Ludger Lütkehaus (Zurich: Haffmans, 2006), vol. 1, 252.
(44) . For a convincing discussion of this point see Gibson, Fiction and the Weave
of Life, 147–57.
(45) . Cf. for example An die Natur (1795), in Friedrich Hölderlin, HSW 1, 198–
200.
Page 18 of 18
“No Poetry, No Reality”

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction, and Reality
Keren Gorodeisky
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0010

Friedrich Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are notoriously baffling.
They are often regarded as outlandish, or “poetically exaggerated” statements,
since they are taken to suggest that there is no difference between poetry and
reality or to express the view that there is no way out of linguistic and poetic
constructions. In this chapter, I argue that Schlegel’s remarks should instead be
understood as philosophical observations about a genuine confusion in
theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction and reality. I claim that
this confused understanding of the distinction (1) is best appreciated by tracing
the affinities between Schlegel’s and the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical
projects, and that it (2) is not an object of the past, but a picture that is still
shaping a contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics.
Keywords: Friedrich Schlegel, Wittgenstein, poetry, fiction, reality, feeling, ordinary
[Criticism] exhibit[s] the relations of literature—not to “life,” as something

contrasted to literature, but to all other activities, which together with
literature, are the components of life.
—T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
9.1. Introduction
Friedrich Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are notoriously baffling:
Page 1 of 26
No poetry, no reality.... There is, despite all the senses, no external world
without imagination... all things disclose themselves to the magic wand of
feeling alone.1
Whoever conceives of poetry or philosophy as individuals has a feeling for

them.2
In [romantic poetry] there is no regard for the difference between

appearance [Schein] and truth [Wahrheit].3
Everything that rests on the opposition between appearance and reality...

is not purely poetic.4
What should one say about these observations? Perhaps that they are outlandish
and eccentric? “Who in his right mind would argue publicly that (p.164) reality
rests on poetry, on a mere fiction? The speaker must be a madman, one who has
lost all sense for the difference between what is real and what is merely a
figment of the imagination.” Or one might say that, rather than philosophical
observations, Schlegel’s remarks are merely “poetically exaggerated”
reflections.5
Yet another person might claim that these observations manifest a lack of
mastery of our language. “The concept “poetry” and the concept “reality,” this
respondent may say, “have precise semantics, and very clear criteria of
application. Schlegel has clearly not mastered those concepts.”
I take all these responses to be mistaken. Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and
reality are not merely outlandish or eccentric, but deeply revealing about a
prevalent confusion in theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction
and reality.6 Rather than mere poetic exaggerations, I believe that Schlegel’s
pronouncements are philosophical observations that respond to a genuine
confusion, a confusion that led him to express, time and again, what initially
looks like eccentric views about poetry and reality.7 The confusion at stake is
expressed by the last envisioned response to his remarks. The response of the
so-called semanticist presupposes mistakenly that the distinction between
“fiction” and “reality” is fixed “once and for all” by a criterion, which is
determined prior to any application of those concepts. Our imagined semanticist,
and, I think, some contemporary philosophers of art, assume that the distinction
between fiction and reality is and must be fixed independently of the ordinary
practices of using the terms “fiction” and “reality” to mean something in specific
situations.
I argue that we should understand Schlegel’s knotty remarks about poetry and
reality as addressing this assumption. I propose that we think of them as
forming a kind of “transcendental criticism,” to borrow Kant’s label for his
diagnosis of, and challenge to, what he takes to be a “natural and inevitable
Page 2 of 26
illusion” of the human mind.8 Since the assumption I just mentioned shapes a
line of thought in contemporary aesthetics, Schlegel’s concern with this illusion
is as relevant today as it was in his day.
We can begin to see the depth of Schlegel’s concern by first tracing some
affinities between his thought and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. This
should not be too surprising. The surface similarities between Wittgenstein’s
remarks in Philosophical Investigations and in the aphorisms collected in Culture
and Value, and the pronouncements in Schlegel’s writings are nothing short of
remarkable. Here is a very limited sample:
1. One should really do philosophy only as poetry.9
Poetry and philosophy should be united.10
(p.165) 2. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither

explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is
nothing to explain.11
The main thing [in philosophy] is to know something and to say it. The
attempt to prove or even to explain it is quite superfluous in most cases....
There is doubtless more difficulty in stating something than in explaining
it.12
3. The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders.///13The

aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of
their simplicity and familiarity.... We fail to be struck by what, once seen, is
most striking and most powerful.14
Whoever knows this cannot be reminded often enough that he knows it. All
of the highest truths of every kind are altogether trivial; and for this very
reason nothing is more necessary than to express them ever anew... so that
it will not be forgotten that they are still there.15
4. One might also give the name “philosophy” to what is possible before all
new discoveries and inventions. /// If one tried to advance theses in
philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone
would agree to them.16
To those who knew it already, philosophy of course brings nothing new; but
only through it does it become knowledge and thereby assume a new
form.17
I quote Stanley Cavell’s description of his pairings of quotes as a commentary on

my own pairings: “In each case the first member of the pair is from
Wittgenstein, the second is...either from Friedrich or from August Wilhelm
Schlegel....That these figures take the preoccupations of Wittgenstein’s
Page 3 of 26
sensibility deep into...German Romanticism fits my sense of his continuing the

Romantic’s response to the psychic threat of skepticism.”18 Although a handful
of scholars pointed to certain parallels between the German romantics and
Wittgenstein’s late philosophy,19 Cavell is probably the only one20 to have
acknowledged the depth of the legacy of the early German romantics in
Wittgenstein, or the Wittgensteinian spirit of the early German romantics.21
The task of this paper is to advance what Cavell has only started on this front,
with the aim of shedding light on Schlegel’s response to skepticism and to
traditional philosophy, on his concept “wit,” and, above all, on the way we
should, following him, approach a family of concepts—“poetry” or “fiction,”
“reality,” and “feeling.” For that purpose, section 2 explores the affinities
between the Schlegelian spirit and the Wittgensteinian spirit, and section 3
explains how these commonalities, when applied to a confusion about poetry and
reality, shed light on the remarks that open the paper.
(p.166) 9.2. The Schlegelean and the Wittgensteinian Spirit

In addition to affinities between the content and the form of Schlegel’s mature
project and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, their respective philosophical
methods reveal a related “spirit.”
Wittgenstein described the methods of his late philosophical writings as closely

related to methods in aesthetics.22 That Schlegel’s methods are analogous to
methods in aesthetics is not news. I am convinced that those methods also
resemble Wittgenstein’s methods in some important respects, and that they are
so similar because both Wittgenstein and Schlegel understand traditional
philosophy and skepticism in a closely related manner.23
Why should philosophy proceed, as it were, “aesthetically”? Here is how G. E.

Moore remembers Wittgenstein’s reflection on that matter:
Reasons, he said, in Aesthetics, are “of the nature of further descriptions”:

e.g., you can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing
him lots of different pieces by Brahms, or by comparing him with a
contemporary author; and all that Aesthetics does is “to draw your
attention to a thing,” to “place things side by side.”... And he said that the
same sort of “reasons” were given not only in Ethics, but also in
Philosophy.24
Schlegel and Wittgenstein belong to a tradition, which suspects that the

identification of aesthetic reasons and general rules is unfaithful to the practice
of aesthetic appreciation.25 For aesthetic communication does not aim to achieve
agreement in opinions or beliefs about the work at stake,26 but at allowing
another to share the critic’s love for (or dissatisfaction with) the work for being
beautiful (or ugly) in this or that particular way. But to permit another to share
the critic’s vision, appreciation, and love for this particular work, the critic must
Page 4 of 26
allow her interlocutor to see the particular aspects that make it powerful in the
way that they do. The critic must enable her interlocutor to stand to the work in
a relation that allows her to see in it what the critic sees in it, and to feel for it
what the critic feels for it.
Wittgenstein suggests that this aim requires that we align the work we love with
other works that are similar to it, and dissimilar from it in revealing ways: works
by the same artist, works belonging to the same genre, or to the same historical
period.27 Schlegel seems to agree. We should not expect philosophy, he argues,
to give us an absolute, a priori definition of art, but we can, and perhaps should
expect it to help us “order the given artistic experiences and the existing artistic
principles...and raise the appreciation of art, extend it with the help of a
thoroughly learned history of art.”28 Nor can we answer “the simplest and most
immediate questions...without the deepest consideration and (p.167) the most
erudite history of art.”29 You understand “Sapphic poems” only when you
compare them with Petrarch’s and with Horatian poems.30 And the comparison
of different works, particularly a historical comparison, is, for Schlegel, the
essence of criticism.31
Wittgenstein takes a similar method of comparison to be necessary in philosophy

too. “It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our
words.”32 Instead, the ordinary uses of words (“language-games”) that he invites
us to observe and imagine are “set up as objects of comparison which are meant
to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but
also of dissimilarities.”33
It is all too tempting to misinterpret Wittgenstein on this point. One might think
that he pursues philosophy by comparing different ways we use words because
he believes that “meaning is use,” a slogan often associated with PI §43. This
may well be true, depending on how we read §43. I read this passage as
suggesting neither that understanding the meaning of a word or a sentence
requires a pragmatic analysis over and above a semantics and syntax,34 nor that
the meaning of a word is determined simply by a certain context.35 Rather,
according to Wittgenstein, we cannot understand the meaning of a word or a
sentence in isolation from the particular way(s) the word or the sentence can be
used to mean something specific on a particular occasion. In order to grasp the
meaning of a word we need to remind ourselves, to imagine or observe, how it
can be used by someone to mean something specific.
What motivates Wittgenstein to align meaning and use in this way is not a wish
to guide our understanding, but a concern about a prevalent confusion about
meaning, which Cavell calls “an illusion of meaning.” A person is under this
illusion when he “imagines himself to be saying something when he is not, to
have discovered something, when he has not.”36 What happens when a person
Page 5 of 26
“hallucinates what he or she means;”37 What happens when, as Wittgenstein

puts it, she uses her words “outside of a language-game?”
Usually, when a person is under this illusion she fails to use the words in a way
that grants them their necessary connections to some other words and human
practices. I might speak outside of a language-game if, for instance, I say, “Only I
know my feelings” in a way that is detached from any specific situation in which
it can make sense (independently, for example, of any anger I might feel toward
someone, perhaps my therapist, or my mother, for ascribing to me certain
feelings that I either don’t believe I have, or am not willing or capable of
ascribing to myself). I use this sentence outside of a language-game if, detached
from any such practice in which it naturally makes sense, I use it to mean (I
imagine that it means) that the feelings of another are accessible to no one other
than the feeling person.
(p.168) We might also speak outside of a language-game if we try to use words

to mean both what they ordinarily mean, and something “special,” “unordinary.”
This double use is characteristic of the skeptic’s talk—both the skeptic who
doubts the existence of the external world, and the skeptic who doubts our
knowledge of other minds.38 The plight of the skeptic is this: her inability to
mean what she says is internal to her way of using the words she is using.39 The
success of the skeptic40 depends on her using words both in the ordinary way
and in a technical way. On the one hand, the skeptic must use her words in a
“special” way if her words are to gain the kind of generality she needs. Only if
the expression, “Only I know what I feel” is severed from any specific ordinary
context of uttering it to express anger about some infringement of privacy, about
an imposition of feelings that we are unwilling to accept, and so on, can the
skeptic claim that it has a “general reach,” or that it implies a theory about the
metaphysical nature of all feelings (“private”), and about the epistemic
impossibility (of any person) to know other minds. On the other hand, the skeptic
must also insist that she uses her words in the way in which they are ordinarily
used, if she is to be justified in claiming that what she has “discovered” (the
nature of feelings and of knowledge) “conflicts” with our everyday
understanding of feelings and knowledge. Otherwise, the skeptic cannot achieve
her aim of pulling the rug out from under what we usually say and believe.
Properly responding to the skeptic requires that we enable her to see that
putting the question the way she does—as both ordinary and special—puts her
own question into question.
So Wittgenstein uses “an aesthetic method” in philosophy—he reminds us of

what we ordinarily say and do, by way of aligning different uses as “objects of
comparison”—because he believes that, especially as philosophers, we are prone
to be subject to an illusion about the way we use our words, and about the
meaning of our words.41 The illusions and misunderstandings that Wittgenstein
is concerned with cannot be refuted by a counterargument, or by a proof or a
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rule that shows the necessary, systematic, and fixed nature of language and
meaning. “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an
engine idling, not when it is doing work.”42 This kind of confusion can be
resolved only by reminding the speakers who use language indolently how
language actually works, how it must work if it is to do any work.43
Such a work of reminders has to be of a special kind because of the great “urge
to misunderstand,” because of the tendency to be bewitched by the workings of
our language, and because “the aspects of things that are most important for
us,” particularly, those that allow words to mean, “are hidden because of their
simplicity and familiarity....The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike man
at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to
be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.”44
(p.169) One way of allowing the most familiar to be striking is to compare a

certain use of words with other imagined and real uses until it attains “complete
clarity.”45 But once this complete clarity is achieved, “philosophical problems
should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one...that gives philosophy
peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into
question.”46 The only resolution of skepticism is its dissolution by means of
disillusionment.47
You may think that Schlegel can in no way be viewed as responding to the
skeptic, either in a “Wittgensteinian” or in any other way. And you might think
so because you believe that Schlegel himself is a skeptic. Schlegel undoubtedly
doubts the possibility of absolute foundations48—in a spirit similar to
Wittgenstein’s doubt about the existence of an absolute, fixed system of rules as
the foundation of language. And he questions the possibility of an absolute
comprehension of the world—just as Wittgenstein believes that explanations
“come to an end.”49
But in spite of these “doubts,” neither Wittgenstein nor Schlegel is a (traditional)

skeptic, surely not a skeptic about the traditional objects of skepticism. Both of
them take skepticism very seriously, but take it seriously because they view it as
confused in ways that represent some of the prevalent confusions of traditional
philosophy itself. Schlegel’s understanding of skepticism resembles
Wittgenstein’s: he also recognizes the power of a certain philosophical use of
words to lead us astray,50 and holds that a “corrupt manner in which language is
used” can easily lead to mistaken systematizing enterprises.51 And Schlegel
seems also to share Wittgenstein’s understanding of our great urge to
misunderstand the workings of language:
I wanted to point out that words often understand themselves better than
do those who use them, wanted to draw attention to the fact that there
must be secret societies among philosophical words, words that, like a host
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of spirits sprung forth too early, confuse everything, and exert invisible
force of the world spirit even on those who do not wish to acknowledge
them.... I had to think in terms of a popular medium, in order to bond
chemically this holy, delicate, fleeting, airy, fragrant, and as it were
imponderable thought. Otherwise, how severely might this thought have
been misunderstood, since it is only through its well-understood use an end
could be put to all the understandable misunderstanding?52
That Schlegel is not a skeptic, but a subtle critic of skepticism who challenges it
by employing some of Wittgenstein’s later terms of criticism is supported by his
following observations: “Eclecticism and Skepticism lead to Mysticism, the abyss
into which everything sinks.”53 But abyssal as skepticism may be, no (p.170)
counterargument can silence it. Properly responding to the skeptic requires that
we allow her to see the incoherence internal to her own position:
The three positions [eclecticism, skepticism, and mysticism] not only

mutually reciprocally annihilate each other, but each also destroys itself. It
is a foregone conclusion that the consistent skeptic must end in remaining
silent and ceasing to think, and thus finally equals zero. He would also
have to cease refuting because he refutes himself, or else he would have to
realize that he can only refute what is refutable.54
This self-contradiction is not externally imposed on the skeptical position, but

generated by the position’s internal instability: “The mystic is freer than the
skeptic and the empiricist; he begets his contradiction. The others allow their
contradictions to be dictated to them.”55 And the source of this instability lies in
the skeptic’s use of words—her use of a “special language,” which she tries to
(indeed, must) deny if skepticism is to get off the ground: “All three—the
skeptics, the empiricists, and the mystics—have their own languages and yet all
three protest against jargon.”56
You might think that even if this is a plausible reconstruction of Schlegel’s

approach to skepticism, this is only another indication that he is nonetheless a
kind of skeptic—the kind of skeptic who doubts the representational power of
philosophical language. Azade Seyhan writes: “For Friedrich Schlegel...irony
points to the failure of philosophy to represent the infinite adequately.”57 This is
undoubtedly true. But the literature that emphasizes the romantic ironic
recognition of the limitations of philosophical language tends to undermine
important nuances. Schlegel repudiates neither reason nor philosophical
language as such. Nor does he merely remind philosophers of the limitations of
this language as philosophical language. Alert as he is to different uses of
language, Schlegel calls on us to be cautious about a certain use of philosophical
language, governed by an illusory picture of language, philosophy, and
rationality (i.e., the picture of these three as grounded in absolute foundations,
or as unlimited manners of cognizing and articulating the Absolute).58 Though
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suspicious and critical of this use (or misuse) of philosophical language, he also
reminds us that we can do philosophy in a different spirit, positively, not only
negatively by pointing to philosophy’s limitations: “Wouldn’t it be worthwhile
trying now to introduce the concept of the positive into philosophy as well?”59
As tempting as the picture of philosophy that often drives us to transcend the

limitation of language and reason may be, we can avoid its pitfalls, while still
using philosophical language. For, though limited, philosophical language also
has an inherent potential, a potential embodied in its necessary reliance on the
ordinary use of language. Since language as we ordinarily use it is teeming with
(p.171) (positive) possibilities that philosophy can legitimately and correctly
use for achieving its (philosophy’s) own aims, the first task we must undertake, if
we are to direct philosophy back from its illusory path to a meaningful pursuit, is
to remind ourselves of our ordinary use of words.
Schlegel’s antidote to the illusory use of language is reflected by his style of

writing. Not unlike Wittgenstein, Schlegel chooses a dialogical and
conversational style (he writes fragments that communicate with fragments
written by others, fragments that embody the voice of an opposing interlocutor,
and a dialogue).60 Like Wittgenstein’s dialogical voice, Schlegel’s approach
allows him to respond to a host of confused interlocutors. He claims that when
philosophy is done properly it is done as “symphilosophy” between two
interlocutory voices, and that symphilosophy is, fundamentally, intrapersonal—a
recasting of two voices internal to the self:
If in communicating a thought, one fluctuates between absolute

comprehension and absolute incomprehension, then this process might
already be termed a philosophical friendship. For it’s no different with
ourselves. Is the life of a thinking human being anything else than a
continuous inner symphilosophy?61
Both Schlegel and Wittgenstein suggest that the “urge to misunderstand,” and
misuse words is neither rare, nor exclusive to the skeptic. A skeptical voice, “the
skeptic in oneself,”62 inheres in all of us. We are all prone to certain confusions
and illusions that affect our use of words. The “voice of temptation” is as much a
part of each self as the “voice of correction.”63
Wittgenstein aims to “correct” the part of us that gave in to temptation by

inviting us to observe and imagine how we ordinarily use words. Schlegel uses a
related philosophical approach. He also invites us, I think, to observe and
imagine how we use certain words, and make certain distinctions, and how those
distinctions express what we can and cannot do with those words. For example,
he calls on us to resist the attempt to define art überhaupt, but instead to
reconstruct it before our eyes through a detailed analysis and comparison of
works.64 Instead of talking about writing as such, or about the writer, we should
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distinguish between different kinds of writers, for example, between the analytic
writer and the synthetic writer.65 To understand suicide, we need to remind
ourselves in what circumstances we call it an action, and in what circumstances
we call it an accident, and what we must mean when we say that it is wrong.66
Reminding ourselves of the distinction between folly and madness has both
philosophical and political consequences.67 And to understand the novel, the
best we can do is to compare Shakespeare with Boccaccio, the two of them with
Cervantes, and all of them with a detailed reading of Goethe. Above all, in a
Wittgensteinian spirit, (p.172) Schlegel claims that philosophy can teach us
nothing new. And yet only through philosophy do we come to know, to be
reminded of and become familiar with, what it teaches us—what we have always
already “known.”68
Schlegel takes up this “work of reminders” also, I believe, by reviving the power
of wit, a power that he regards as profoundly philosophical: “Even philosophy
has blossoms. That is, its thoughts; but one can never decide if one should call
them witty or beautiful.”69 Wit does not have the special power of reminding us
of what we are already familiar with but for the most part fail to notice simply
because, as a matter of fact, it is a figure of speech that is used in ordinary
conversation. Wit’s special force lies in its characteristic way of behaving. For it
is wit that, through humor and surprise, often startles us, challenges what we
take for granted, and, by so doing, allows us to look at our life and words from a
fresh perspective, and thus to see, as if for the first time, what we are already
familiar with.70 The meaning of “a witty idea which is enigmatic to the point of
needing to be solved should be immediately and completely clear as soon as it’s
been hit upon.”71 Once achieving complete clarity, Schlegelian wit dissolves
(rather than directly solves) the problem it was meant to address. For like
philosophy, wit “brings us nothing new”—it only puts us in touch with what we
are already familiar with by showing it in a new light. Through the surprising
power of wit, the ordinary becomes for the first time an object of awareness and
knowledge.72 And so, “imagination and wit are everything to you!”73
Schlegel’s witty remarks function similarly to Wittgenstein’s grammatical

remarks. And their success is gauged in similar ways. A grammatical
investigation is successful if an interlocutor can use the philosopher’s reminding
summons to test herself, if the interlocutor can accept the invitation to share
words and world.74 For Schlegel too, the mark of a good, successful
philosophical approach, “the criterion of authentic philosophy,” is not its
“applicability,” but “communicability.”75 One of the “universally valid and
fundamental laws of written communication” is that “one should really be able to
communicate it and share it with somebody, not simply express oneself.
Otherwise it would be wiser to keep silent.”76 Wittgenstein’s and Schlegel’s
ways of comparing different circumstances in which we ordinarily use the words
that the philosopher also aims to use is not a way to defend common sense in an
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antiskeptical way, or to refute traditional philosophy. Their appeal to the

ordinary is a solicitation of agreement, an invitation to share their world.
9.3. Poetry and Reality

The remarks at the opening of this chapter should also be read as what I call
“witty” or “grammatical” remarks.77 They are meant to remind us of the ways in
which we ordinarily approach the distinction between reality and fiction, (p.
173) and what we say when we ordinarily speak about our feelings for fictional
works and for “real” situations and people.78 I suspect that Schlegel uses those
reflections on poetry, reality, and feeling as reminders of that sort because he
recognizes a few related tendencies in theoretical considerations of (1) the
distinction between poetry and reality, and (2) the distinction between our
feelings for poetic works (and the fictional characters in them), and our feelings
for our fellow human beings, and “real life” circumstances.
Different as these two distinctions are, Schlegel’s remarks suggest that the
prevalent theoretical approaches to both of these distinctions are based on a
shared confused picture: Schlegel points to a tendency, manifest primarily in
philosophy and literary criticism, to think that poetry and reality, as well as our
feelings for the former and our feelings for the latter, are distinguished once and
for all by a fixed criterion, which is determined independently of our life with
these terms.
I take this prevalent approach to the distinction between the real and the
fictional to be structurally analogous (but by no means identical) to the skeptic’s
approach that I described above. And for that reason, I regard both of them as
calling for a similar response. This is what I mean: The skeptical doubt about the
existence of the external world, on the one hand, and the confusion about reality
and fiction, on the other, are not similar in content. I do not claim that the latter
raises a question about our epistemic capacity to tell reality from fiction, or that
it challenges our capacity to ever know that what we experience is real rather
than fictional. Nor do I claim that the philosophers whose views are shaped by
this confusion are searching, like the external world skeptic, for some
experiential “marks and features”79 to distinguish reality from fiction. But the
assumption that governs their confusion is analogous to the one that governs the
skeptical confusion, and the source of the two is a misunderstanding about
meaning.
The confusion at stake in this paper is guided by the mistaken belief that every
judgment in which we apply certain concepts is essentially underdetermined if
the judgment is not grounded in a stable determination of these concepts prior
to their applications. In short, this picture is based on a misunderstanding of the
way language works. One might be prone to this confusion because of an
inclination to think that language is based on an absolute foundation. But
Schlegel suggests that viewing language in this manner expresses “a fad for the
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absolute [die Liebhaberei fürs Absolute],” from which we must find “a way
out,”80 just as we must overcome the urge to ground philosophy in absolute
foundations.81 Because this approach to fiction and reality is grounded in a
misunderstanding of the meanings of words, and their necessary relation to
ordinary language, the proper response to it is not a refutation, but the response
that I take Schlegel to offer—a response that allows his interlocutor to recognize
for herself how words acquire their meanings when we use them ordinarily.
(p.174) It seems that Schlegel found a variant of this attitude towards poetry
and reality to be the picture that he himself, the early Schlegel, had been captive
by a few years before he wrote the statements that open this chapter. The
remarks about poetry and reality, from his so-called mid to late period, starting
approximately in 1797,82 may be designed to challenge the picture that had
shaped the early Schlegel’s faith in the absolute distinction between reality and
poetry. They challenge, particularly, his early belief that, in its perfected mode
(exhibited in the works of antiquity), poetry is “an utterly peculiar activity of the
human mind; it is distinguished from every other activity by eternal boundaries
[because it is the expression of] an eternal human objective...that is only
indirectly connected to man.”83 Schlegel uses the remarks quoted at the opening
of this chapter in part to take issue with the faith in the possibility of an
objective science that could irrevocably distinguish the “real”—the everyday life
of ordinary men and women who live in actual, empirical surroundings—from
the absolutely objective, pure, and self-sufficient realm of poetry and art, the
embodiment of the “ideal.” Proclaiming that without poetry there is no reality,
that the distinction between reality and appearance is not poetical, and that “life
and society should become poetic”84 may be a way of raising a question about
the assumption that “there [is] more than one world”85—the real world and the
world presented by the art of fiction—a self-sufficient, “isolated,” ideal world,
which is only “indirectly [mittelbar] related to man.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the picture of poetry and reality that I take Schlegel’s
remarks to address does not shape only his early view, but also a contemporary
debate in aesthetics: the debate about whether the emotions we feel for fictions
are real and rational. Before I introduce this debate, two qualifications are in
order. First, I do not claim that Schlegel had in mind this contemporary debate
in aesthetics. And yet, I suspect, both that he was responding to a related
illusory picture, the one that shaped his early thought, and that his reflections
on poetry and reality include resources for clearing away the confusion in the
contemporary literature about fiction. Due to limitations of space, in this paper I
merely gesture towards the way in which these resources can address the
contemporary discussion. Second, I do not argue that the parties to this debate
presuppose, like the early Schlegel, that “poetry” and “reality” (in their terms,
“fiction” and “reality”) are two distinct “domains” or “worlds.” But I do think
that a central line in this debate presupposes that our emotional responses to
fiction and our emotional responses to “real” situations and individuals are
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distinguished by means of a single criterion, which is determined in isolation

from the ways in which we ordinarily engage with fictions and with “real life,”
and from the criteria that these engagements give rise to. Although this
confusion and the confusion of the early Schlegel are distinct, I think that they
share an understanding (well, a misunderstanding) of the meaning of words as
(p.175) determined a priori, all by itself, independently of what we do and mean
when we use language.
How does this confusion enter into the contemporary literature? In taking for
granted that an emotion can be “real” only if it involves a belief in the existence
of its object,86 some parties to this debate assume that what is “real” and what is
“fictional” (what is merely part of a game of make-believe, to use the terms that
Kendall Walton contributed to this debate) is already determined, independently
of what we actually do and say when we are engaged with “real” people, and
with fictions, and the criteria we use when engaged in such ways.87 For
example, Walton holds that we do not “really” feel, say, pity and pain for Anna
Karenina, but feel them only as part of a “make-believe” game because “real”
emotions always require a belief in the existence of the objects of those
emotions.88 Walton thus assumes that the distinction between “real” and
“fictional” emotions is set independently of any language-game.89
In contrast to this line of thought, Schlegel’s reflections on poetry and reality in

his mid to late period suggest that the distinction between poetry and reality
should not be regarded as obvious. There are reasons not to take it for granted,
but to explore its nature, just as there are reasons to explore and question the
“Greek separation of all things into the divine and the human...the Roman
dualism of At Home and At War. And the modern [distinction between] the world
of the present and the world of the hereafter, as if there were more than one
world.”90
Why is it not to be taken for granted? For one, poetry and reality do not seem to
be distinguished in the same way that ordinary objects, like tables, trees, or
birds, are distinguished. If someone says, “This is a goldfinch,” it is reasonable
in certain circumstances to ask him how he knows that it is a goldfinch and not a
goldcrest. If such a doubt arises, the speaker, if he knows what he is talking
about, can easily pacify the doubt. “I know that it is a goldfinch because, though
goldfinches and goldcrests both have a red head, there are no goldcrests in
those areas,” or “Goldcrests have pinkish-red head, but goldfinches have wine-
red heads.” No matter how “alike” goldfinches and goldcrests are, there are
clear “marks and features” that distinguish the one from the other, marks and
features that we can come to know if we receive the right kind of training, and if
we are situated properly. It is questionable whether there are similar marks and
features to distinguish the fictional from the real, if any doubt arises. What can I
possibly answer Betsy, my neighbor, if she asks me how I know that the
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neighborhood we live in is real, rather than the setting of a novel? For her to ask
that question would bespeak a misunderstanding of the nature of the distinction.
As much as it differs from the distinction between goldfinches and goldcrests,

the distinction between fiction and reality also importantly differs from (p.176)
the distinction between mere appearance and reality, between what is not real
and what is real, or between a real goldfinch and a decoy91 (as well as between
dreaming and waking life, the distinction that interests the external world
skeptic). For what is fictional, poetry, is (or should be) at least as real as our
“real life”: “Works whose ideal doesn’t have as much living reality and, as it
were, personality for the artist as does his mistress or his friend are best left
unwritten. At any rate, they do not become works of art.”92 Schlegel also
reminds us that our “real,” everyday life often presents itself to us as a work of
fiction: “Even in life...the common often makes a very romantic and pleasant
appearance.”93 And poetry itself, he claims, functions more often then not in
nothing other than our everyday reality: “It is a permanent feature of the highest
poetry to appear in holy wrath and express its full power even in the strangest
material, that is, everyday reality.”94
By making these and other remarks, Schlegel suggests that whether what we do,
undergo, or encounter is real or fictional can be determined only in light of our
language-games with fiction—only in light of what we ordinarily do or don’t do
when we are engaged with fictions, for those language-games alone embody the
criteria of what can and cannot count as either fiction or reality. Schlegel
proposes that any effort to use the terms “real” and “fictional”95 as if their
meaning is determined in isolation from the particular practices in which
specific speakers use them could only result in our failing to mean what we say.
Just as the activity of modern poetry lacks “a firm basis,”96 but depends instead
on the activity of each individual poet, so too what counts as “poetry” and what
counts as “reality” lacks a “firm basis,” but depends instead on particular uses of
the terms.
But this does not imply that the meaning of our concepts is arbitrary, subjectivist
or even merely conventional. Schlegel claims that even though modern poetry
has no “firm basis” other than the creative talent of individual poets, it is not
merely arbitrary, or “idealist”—it is not the expression only of the ideals, or the
mind, of the particular poets who create it, as contrasted with reality. Rather,
modern poetry does not only facilitate genuine realism, a true expression of the
reality in which modern poets live, but it also constitutes “the harmony of the
ideal and the real.”97 Similarly, even though meaning is not determined once and
for all, independently of what we mean when we use words in particular
situations, it is not arbitrary, subjectivist, or conventional. Cavell writes, “I am
trying to bring out...that any form of life and every concept integral to it has an
indefinite number of instances and directions of projection; and that this
variation is not arbitrary. Both the ‘outer’ variance and the ‘inner’ constancy are
Page 14 of 26
necessary if a concept is to accomplish its tasks.”98 Even if our concepts and

words are infinitely open to revision, even if they are so plastic as to allow
infinite yet unidentified instances to fall under them, what would fall under (p.
177) any concept is not arbitrary or subjective. Unless a certain object or
context invites the application of an existing concept, which has not yet been
applied to this object or context, the application would not be legitimate.
Properly using our words requires that we be attuned to those contexts that
allow them to be projected onto and those that do not. Being ungrounded in any
list of necessary and sufficient rules or conditions, and being, essentially, an
intersubjective activity of particular speakers does not prevent language, our
language, from being normatively grounded rather than arbitrary.
Notice that Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are not to be read as a
refutation of the philosopher who is subject to the confused picture about fiction
and reality that I am attempting to flesh out in this section. Instead, he invites
his interlocutor to share his own world, a world that is made perspicuous, is
animated and maintained by the fictional works we are engaged with as much as
it is animated and maintained by the “real” people we interact with.99 And he
invites the interlocutor (and us, his readers) to do so by reminding us that seeing
how the words “poetry,” “reality,” and “feeling” acquire their meaning, and
recognize the criteria for applying them in different situations only requires that
we observe the ordinary practices of reading and appreciating, of meeting
friends to engage in a “lively discussion about a new play”100 and so on.
Instead of offering a counterargument, Schlegel wishes to remind anyone who is

prone to the confusion about poetry and reality how people use, in ordinary
circumstances, the terms, which the philosopher also attempts to use. This is
what I take Schlegel to be doing when he asks, “Is there an art worthy of the
name if it does not have the power to bind the spirit of love with its magic word,
to make the spirit of love follow and obey it?”101 The question whether the
emotions we feel for fictional characters and narrative are “real” seems to lose
its hold on us when we remind ourselves that we hardly ever call a work an
artwork, let alone a great work of art, if we do not take it to inspire “the spirit of
love,” if we do not take it both to be capable of moving its audience, and to merit
the audience’s love and admiration. What sense does it make to insist that
whatever we feel for fictional characters cannot be “real” but a “quasi-emotion”
because we believe that those characters do not “really” exist, if one of the
primary ways we have for determining what counts as fictional works is to gauge
whether they merit feelings of sympathy, love or admiration?
Schlegel writes, “The first principle in love is to have a sense for one another,
and the highest principle, faith in each other.”102 Rather than a belief in the
existence of the beloved—the requirement of real feelings for anything according
to the contemporary aestheticians I mentioned above—the requirement for real
love is a sense for, and faith in the other. That is what we seem to demand of real
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love, and perhaps other emotions, at least in many circumstances. The sorrow I
feel for Anna, then, might not be real if, for example, I think that she (p.178)
deserves her dismal end, or if I think that she brought it on herself. My sorrow is
not real, in other words, if I have no faith in her decisions and actions. This
means that there are criteria for distinguishing “real” emotions from “unreal”
ones (where the latter refers to faked or insincere emotions). But these criteria
are part of the ordinary grammar of the concepts of these emotions, part of the
life surrounding our emotional lives. They are not determined independently of
the ways in which we usually respond to, behave around, and talk about our
emotional lives, and they suggest that our emotions for fictions often count as
real. Assuming that whether our emotions for fictions are “real” depends solely
on whether they involve a belief in the existence of their objects ignores the
variety of criteria that we ordinarily use to determine whether an emotion is
real. Indeed, sometimes we must conclude that an appearance of emotion is not
real, but only a mere appearance, because it does not involve such a belief. But
Walton’s assumption ignores the fact that, for the most part, whether or not a
seeming emotion is real, apparent, or only a part of a make-believe game does
not depend on the existence of such a belief, but on a host of other criteria.103
When the declaration “no poetry, nor reality” opens a remark about the
necessity of feeling for properly responding to actual individual human beings
and to the world as such, it cannot mean that there is no difference between
poetry and reality.104 Instead of reading this passage as obliterating the
distinction, or as suggesting that there is no way out of poetic and linguistic
constructions, it would be more natural to read it as proposing that we learn
how to properly respond to our fellow human beings (and to the “external world”
of which we are a part), when we become attuned to poetry, and, at the same
time, we learn how to properly respond to poetry, when we learn how to be
responsive to our fellow human beings, and to the world as such. “Whoever
conceives of poetry or philosophy as individuals has a feeling for them.”105
Writing about poetry or fiction philosophically, which drives us to draw absolute

boundaries between art, as belonging to an “ideal” world, and life as belonging
to the “real” world, or to ask whether the sorrow and pity we feel for, say, Anna
Karenina is real, often leads us astray from, and renders us oblivious to, the way
we ordinarily use these words. The way we use these words philosophically is
often entangled with a fantasy that they are independent of what we say and
mean when we utter them. This is why leading these “words back from their
metaphysical to their everyday use [auf ihre alltägliche Verwendung]” is not an
easy task.106 Acknowledging the “highest truths,” the most basic and ordinary
structures of care and concern, which allow our words to have the meanings
they have, not independently of us, but insofar as we mean them in the ways that
we do, is particularly exacting when we do philosophy. But as exacting as it may
be, the grammatical or witty investigation of words is worth the effort. For it not
only brings out the emptiness of so much of our (p.179) philosophical use of
Page 16 of 26
words, but also our investments in the practices to which our words belong, and
the different concerns, cares, and commitments embodied in our ordinary use of
them. As J. L. Austin puts it, “Our common stock of words embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have
found worth making.”107 Rather than wishing to obliterate the distinction
between poetry and reality, or to suggest that “art...does not need to point
beyond itself,”108 when making the remarks that open the paper, and many
others that relate to them, Schlegel meant to remind us of how intimate we are
with the fictions we read (and hear, and behold, and experience) on an everyday
basis, and to invite us to feel this intimacy for ourselves.
Notes:
(1) . Athenaeum Fragments in KA 2, 227, no. 350.
(2) . Athenaeum Fragments, KA 2, 24, no. 414.
(3) . Dialogue on Poetry, KA 2, 334.
(4) . Fragments on Literature and Poetry, KA 16, 97, no. 146.
(5) . This is a paraphrase of the epithet that Rudolph Haym ascribed to Novalis,
when he called him a “poetically exaggerated Fichte.” See, Die romantische
Schule (Berlin: Gaertner, 1882), 332.
(6) . Schlegel, of course, speaks about “poetry” and “reality,” never about
“fiction” and “reality.” However, I think that in those specific remarks about
poetry and reality, he uses “poetry” to refer to what we today call “fictional”—
that which is constructed by the creative imagination; that which belongs to,
occurs in, or is a feature of a work of fiction. Therefore, I take it to be legitimate
to regard those remarks as concerning a confusion in the way we think about the
distinction between what we today would call, not “reality” and “poetry,” but
“reality” and “fiction.” Accordingly, when I speak of this confusion in sections 1
and 3, I will interchangeably speak about it as a confusion about “reality,” and
“poetry” and as a confusion about “reality” and “fiction.”
Page 17 of 26
(7) . In an earlier paper, I argued that Schlegel’s romantic imperative, the

demand to treat ordinary life and philosophy as if they were art, is not the result
of any alleged form of poetic enthusiasm. Schlegel urges us to live and pursue
philosophy aesthetically, in a manner that is isomorphic to the way we
appreciate and pursue the arts, because he believes that this is the only way we
could properly respond to another form of confusion that troubled him: the form
of skepticism he found in Jacobi’s nihilism. See Keren Gorodeisky,
“(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel’s Romantic Imperative as a Response
to Nihilism,” Inquiry 54, no. 6 (2011): 567–90.
(8) . Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A297/B353.
(9) . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in

collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980). Hereafter CV.
(10) . Critical Fragments, KA 2, 161, no. 115. Hereafter, CF.
(11) . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M.

Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), §126. Hereafter PI.
(13) . This symbol stands for Wittgenstein’s differently numbered remarks.
(14) . PI, §127 and §129 respectively.
(15) . On Incomprehensibility, KA 2, 366.
(16) . PI, §§126–28.
(17) . Athenaeum Fragments, KA 2, 207–8, no. 252. Compare also Wittgenstein,

PI §132 with Athenaeum Fragments KA 2, 177, no. 82, and the introduction to
Dialogue on Poetry; CV, 36 and Athenaeum Fragments, KA 2, 208–9, no. 255.
(18) . Stanley Cavell, “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” in The

Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London:
Routledge, 2004), 31.
(19) . Fredrick Beiser, for instance, points to the commitments to

antifoundationalism, historicity, and hermeneutics, as shared by the German
romantics and Wittgenstein. See The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early
German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.
(20) . Richard Eldridge’s work is a valuable exception to this rule. In his different
writings, Eldridge pursues and develops the romantic legacy in Wittgenstein’s
thought. However, Eldridge focuses on Hölderlin and Wordsworth. See mainly,
Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago:
Page 18 of 26
University of Chicago Press, 1997), and The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays

in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See also his contribution to this volume, chapter 7.
(21) . By no means do I want to claim that Schlegel was motivated by the same
kind of considerations that motivated the late Wittgenstein, or that they
understood traditional philosophy in exactly the same way. Nor do I claim that
Schlegel anticipated Wittgenstein. I argue only that reading Schlegel with
Wittgenstein in mind, as approaching certain philosophical tendencies in a
similar spirit, can help to explain much that is obscure in Schlegel’s writings.
(22) . Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge

(23) . Again, by no means do I argue that Schlegel’s and Wittgenstein’s

approaches are similar in every respect. There are obviously important
differences between their projects. However, due to a lack of space, I will not
discuss either the differences or their implications in this paper.
(24) . G. E. Moore, Philosophical Papers (London: Allen and Unwin; New York:
Macmillan, 1959), 315.
(25) . E.g., “The critics are always talking about rules, but where are the rules
that are really poetic and applicable for all works of art and not merely
grammatical, metrical, logical?” (Schlegel, Fragments on Literature and Poetry,
KA 16, 108, no. 286).
(26) . Cf. The aim of interpreting a rule and of understanding the meaning of a
word is, according to Wittgenstein, “not an agreement in opinions but in form of
life” (PI, §241).
(27) . Cf. Stanley Cavell, “Austin at Criticism,” in Must We Mean What We Say,
104.
(28) . CF, KA 2, 163, no. 123.
(29) . CF, KA 2, 149, no. 21.
(30) . CF, KA 2, 162, no. 119.
(31) . Schlegel speaks here about a comparison of works that could “reconstruct
[a work’s] course and its structure [as well as] its inner history” (“The Essence
of Criticism,” in Lessing’s Thoughts and Opinions, KA 3, 60).
(32) . PI, §133.
(33) . PI, §130.
Page 19 of 26
(34) . On that, see James Conant, “Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein,” Harvard

Review of Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2005), 51–65.
(35) . Often, the context of an utterance can be determined only by

understanding the meaning of the words uttered. See Timothy Gould, Hearing
Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998).
(36) . Cavell, Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 221.
(37) . Ibid. See mainly in the Claim of Reason, Part I, chap. 8, 191–243.
(38) . Here I follow Cavell’s revealing diagnosis in “The Availability of

Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? 60–61.
(39) . It is part, you may also say, of her confusion about the way language
works.
(40) . This is equally true of the success of her traditional opponent, the
antiskeptic, or as Cavell calls him following Kant, the dogmatist. See, Cavell,
Claim of Reason, 46, and Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A viii.
(41) . “Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation

sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstanding away.
Misunderstandings concerning the use of words” (PI, §90); “A main source of our
failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our
words” (PI, §122).
(42) . PI, §132.
(43) . “[Philosophical problems] are solved, rather, by looking into the workings
of our language...in such a way as to make us recognize those workings; in
despite of an urge to misunderstand them....Philosophy is a battle against the
bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (PI, §109).
(44) . PI, §129.
(45) . Another way (or perhaps the same way, or at least a way that is
structurally akin to the first) is to read literature, fiction, to engage with the
practice that has long been associated with the capacity to defamiliarize the
familiar.
(46) . PI, §133
(47) . What I am trying to suggest here, following Cavell, is that Wittgenstein’s

later philosophy is animated by the threat of skepticism (and related confusions).
Nevertheless, his late work cannot be taken as a direct response to the skeptic—
Page 20 of 26
a response that elicits the kind of criteria that are supposed to establish the
existence of objects, or the knowledge of other minds with certainty. Rather,
Wittgenstein’s appeal to the ordinary is meant as an invitation, a summons,
addressed to the interlocutor, to share with him the ordinary world we all
inhabit.
(48) . See mainly, Concerning the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, KA 16, 3–14,
nos. 1–125; The Spirit of the Science of Knowledge (1797–98), KA 13, 31–39, nos.
126–227; and Beilage I and Beilage II, KA 18, 505–16, 517–21. For detailed
discussions of Schlegel’s criticism of absolute foundations, see Manfred Frank,
Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, and
Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
(49) . PI §1. In addition to questioning the role of general rules and principles in
art criticism, Schlegel writes, “Principles are to life what instructions written by
the cabinet are for the general in battle” (Athenaeum Fragments, KA 2, 178, no.
85). And he famously claims, in a fragment that echoes one of Wittgenstein later
remarks, “it is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and not to have one. It
must therefore have to decide to unite the two” (Athenaeum Fragments, KA 2,
173, no. 53). Cf. “Above all, someone attempting the description lacks any
system. The systems that occur to him are inadequate, and he seems suddenly to
himself in a wilderness instead of the well laid out garden that he knew so
well” (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M.
Anscombe and G. H. von Wright [Oxford: Blackwell, 1980], vol. 1, §557).
(50) . On Incomprehensibility, KA 2, 364.
(52) . On Incomprehensibility, KA 2, 364 [my italics].
(53) . Philosophical Fragments, KA 18, 3, no. 4.
(54) . Philosophical Fragments, KA 18, 4, no. 6. Cf. “The self-destruction of the

three logical maladies must be seen in relation to their self-creation” (KA 18, 4,
no. 7).
(56) . Philosophical Fragments, KA 18, 5, no. 15. Notice too that Schlegel, like
Cavell, does not regard skepticism as opposed to dogmatism. Skepticism and
dogmatism are two sides of the same coin—two philosophical moods that are
grounded in the same confused picture: “As opposed to criticism, the three
Page 21 of 26
positions may be called dogmatism” (KA 18, 5, no. 10; cf. no. 83. Cf. Cavell,
Claim of Reason, 46).
(57) . Azade Seyhan, “What Is Romanticism, and Where Did It Come From?” in
Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17.
(58) . E.g., Blüthenstaub, KA 2, 164, no. 3, Concerning the Theory of Scientific

Knowledge, KA, 18, 3–14 nos. 1–125; The Spirit of the Science of Knowledge
(1797–98), KA 13, 31–39, nos. 126–227; and Beilage I and Beilage II, KA 18, 505–
16, 517–21. Schlegel argues that experience in general must be constrained by
some “limit” in Concerning the Theory of Scientific Knowledge.
(60) . “The present dialogue...is intended to set against one another quite
divergent opinions, each of them capable of shedding new light upon the infinite
spirit of poetry from an individual standpoint, each of them striving to penetrate
from a different angle into the real heart of the matter. It was my interest in this
many-sidedness that made me resolve to communicate publicly things that I had
observed in a circle of friends” (Dialogue on Poetry, KA 2, 286).
(61) . Blüthenstaub, KA 2, 164, no. 2.
(62) . Cavell, Claim of Reason, 47.
(63) . Cavell, “Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean

What We Say? 71.
(64) . Eg., CF, KA 2, 162, no. 121, and 163, no. 123.
(65) . CF, KA 2, 161, no. 112.
(70) . CF, KA 2, 150, no. 34, and A KA 2, 171, no. 37.
(72) . Cf. “It was wit, not logic, that was the ‘highest principle of knowledge,’ and
the ‘principle scientific inventiveness’, since Schlegel took it to be a mode
Page 22 of 26
through which flashes of insight are communicated” (Hans Eichner, Friedrich

Schlegel [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970]), p. 47.
(73) . Ideas, KA 2, 9, no. 9.
(74) . What I mean to stress is that Wittgenstein’s grammatical method and

Schlegel’s “witty” approach are not gauged by means of what we actually say
and do. When the so-called ordinary language philosopher says, “We say XXX,”
he does not invite his skeptical interlocutor to test this claim in light of what we
actually, empirically say, so that if one of us says something different, the claim
is invalid, or lacking in force. Neither the methods of the late Wittgenstein, nor
Schlegel’s methods are empiricist, as Cavell emphasizes, above all at the end of
“Aesthetic Problems,” and as Schlegel stresses in his criticism of empiricism in
Philosophical Fragments. They are tested instead by their capacity to bring
about agreement.
(76) . CF, KA 2, 158, no. 98.
(77) . Even though I read those remarks in a Wittgensteinian spirit, I will not
introduce Wittgenstein’s own treatment of the distinction between fiction and
reality, nor compare it with Schlegel’s. For an instructive treatment of
Wittgenstein on this topic, see David Schalkwyk, “Fiction as ‘Grammatical’
Investigation: A Wittgensteinian Account,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 53, no. 3 (1995): 287–98; and his Literature and the Touch of the Real
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).
(78) . See note 6 for the justification for my use of “poetry” and “fiction”
interchangeably in this section.
(79) . I borrow this expression from Thompson Clarke’s magisterial treatment of

skepticism in his “The Legacy of Skepticism,” Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 20
(1972): 754–69, esp. 768.
(81) . This picture of the relation between fiction and reality might also be
motivated by some kind of fear—we might worry that everything we know to be
real will turn out to be “unreal” in some way, if reality is not absolutely
distinguished from what is “merely fictional,” an invented “figment of the
imagination.” We seem to worry that if the real and the fictional are not
irrevocably distinguished and separated as two independent and self-sufficient
realms, we might not be real to ourselves, we might not be.
Page 23 of 26
(82) . For this distinction of Schlegel’s career into different periods, see, for
example, Arthur Lovejoy, “Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism,” in
Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Putnam, 1963): 207–27; Eichner,
Friedrich Schlegel; Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am
Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1991); Frank, Unendliche Annäherung; and Beiser, “Friedrich Schlegel: The
Mysterious Romantic,” in The Romantic Imperative.
(83) . On the Study of Greek Poetry, KA 1, 266–67.
(86) . E.g., “Pity, worry about, hate, and envy are such that one cannot have
them without believing that their objects exist, just as one cannot fear something
without believing that it threatens them” (Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,”
Journal of Philosophy 75 [1978]: 21 n. 15).
(87) . Walton’s other two relevant texts on the topic are Mimesis as Make-
Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990), and “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On
Being Moved by Fiction,” in Emotion and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue
Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37–49. For other philosophers,
who, like Walton, adopt what is known in the literature as the “Pretense
Theory” (the theory that holds that we have “quasi-emotional” responses to
fiction), see, for example, Susan Feagin, “Imagining Emotions and Appreciating
Fiction,” in Emotion and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Save Laver (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–62, and Gregory Currie, The Nature of
Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Richard Moran has
articulated one of the best criticisms of this line of thought to date in his “The
Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” Philosophical Review 103, no. 1 (1994):
75–106.
(88) . Walton does not deny that we do feel something for fictional characters.
But he denies that what we feel is of the same kind as “real” emotions—what we
feel for real people (for example, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 247, and
“Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime,” 38).
(89) . The plight of this line of thought is analogous to the plight of the skeptic as
I discussed it above. In order for their argument to get off the ground, the
philosophers I just described must use the terms “fictional” and “real” both in
the way we ordinarily use them, and in a special, “unordinary” way. For example,
if Walton’s argument is to work, if it is to conflict with what we ordinarily think
and say about whatever we feel when we read a novel, or watch a film—as
Walton suggests that it does—Walton must use the term “real” as we ordinarily
Page 24 of 26
use it. Otherwise, there would not be any conflict between what Walton claims to
discover about our emotions, and the way most of us think and speak about our
emotions. However, in order to establish the claim that no one ever feels “real”
feelings for fictions, as Walton holds, he must also use the term “real” in a
special, nonordinary way. For Walton holds that what is “real” is determined
once and for all, as if “by language itself,” independently of what we mean by the
term when we use language, and that what he has discovered holds for every
and any feeling we might have for fiction. None of those feelings, on Walton’s
view, can be real. This use of the terms departs from our ordinary use of it. And
so, in order for the argument to work, Walton has to use those terms in two
conflicting ways.
(91) . For Cavell’s instructive discussion of this distinction, and his claim that
there are no criteria for distinguishing the real from the unreal, see The Claim of
Reason, 49–64.
(93) . Dialogue on Poetry, KA 2, 288–89.
(95) . Again, by “fictional” I do not mean “fictitious,” or “unreal,” but that which
belongs to, occurs in, or is a feature of a work of fiction.
(97) . Ibid., 315. In the same work, Schlegel also suggests that confessions—the
expression of a subject—can be more “realistic” than the novels, for example, of
Richardson, which are standardly considered to be quintessentially realistic
because of their attention to, and description of details of everyday experience
(KA 2, 337–38).
(98) . Cavell, Claim of Reason, 185.
(99) . This animation might rest on the work of the imagination, as a (cognitive)
capacity that reveals reality, not simply fantasy. More would have to say about
this capacity in an elaboration on this paper.
(100) . Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, KA 2, 287.
Page 25 of 26
(103) . Compare with the different though related idea that Moran uses to
challenge Walton’s view: “It is unlikely that the various responses we classify
with the emotions form anything like a natural-kind.... For this reason it is
unlikely that there could even in principle be a general problem of fictional
emotions” (“Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” 81).
(104) . This is the full fragment: “No poetry, no reality. Just as there is, despite
all the senses, no external world without imagination, so too there is no spiritual
world without feeling, no matter how much sense there is. Whoever only has
sense can perceive no human being, but only what is human: all things disclose
themselves to the magic wand of feeling alone. It fixes people and seizes them;
like the eye, it looks on without being conscious of its own mathematical
operation.”
(106) . PI, §116. On that, compare also Schlegel, On Incomprehensibility, KA 2,

366; compare with PI, §89.
(107) . J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson

and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 182–83.
(108) . Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Hegel

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 53.
Page 26 of 26
The Simplicity of the Sublime

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

A New Picturing of Nature in Caspar David Friedrich
Laure Cahen-Maurel
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0011

After Hegel’s famous philosophical dismissal of the sublime for its inadequacy,
and in a postmodern age deprived of theological doctrines, there is increasing
evidence for the relevance of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscape
painting for contemporary artists who seek to continue the tradition of the
sublime. However, before inquiring into the problem of the current relevance of
romanticism, this paper asks an apparently simpler question: Is there such a
thing as a Friedrichian sublime, and if yes, what exactly is it? The first difficulty
faced by commentators when dealing with his painting is to distinguish the
sublime in Friedrich from the Kantian sublime without eliminating the category
altogether. In order to answer this question the chapter investigates the role
assigned to the sublime by Friedrich himself as stated in his principal text and in
relation to his paintings.
Keywords: Caspar David Friedrich, painting, sublime, veiling, Rückenfigur, imagination, Kant, Novalis,
Anish Kapoor
I take my inheritance to be Caspar David Friedrich—you know, that kind of

Romantic tradition of the sublime and deep space that is a moment of
wonder.
—Anish Kapoor1
Page 1 of 16
10.1. Introduction
It has been almost forty years since the art historian Robert Rosenblum in his
book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko
traced the origin of abstract expressionism in post–World War II America to the
vast and barren seascape of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1810).2
Indeed, according to Rosenblum, it is simply a matter of removing the figure of
the monk from Friedrich’s painting to arrive at the colored rectangles of
Rothko’s Green on Blue (1956), which hover above one another on a
monochrome background.3 Thus, Friedrich’s treatment of pictorial space may be
seen as an early formulation of what the artist Barnett Newman would later
consider to be the newfound dominance of the United States over Europe in art,
and which subsequently became known as the “American sublime.” More
recently, in the early twenty-first century, and with a keen awareness of history,
the British sculptor Anish Kapoor has attempted to restore a metaphysical (p.
187) function to art with his explorations of space at the intersection of
painting, sculpture, and architecture. As we shall see, Kapoor directly situates
his work in the artistic tradition of Caspar David Friedrich, reimagining the
latter’s Sea of Ice (1824) in a monumental installation entitled Svayambh (2007).
In short, from the formal standpoint of art history and artistic creation there is
not only a sublime grandeur but something progressive and even visionary about
this landscape painting that makes Friedrich one of the most celebrated and
studied artists of romantic art today.
From the more philosophical point of view of the content, many commentators
think that the romantic sublime is above all embodied in Friedrich’s painting
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Here a solitary figure, painted with his
back to us, stands on a rocky elevation, contemplating a grandiose high
mountain landscape extending into the distance. Yet it might be objected that
the wanderer’s somewhat artificial and theatrical pose should be labeled more
“kitsch” than sublime, and served an overtly political agenda. Accordingly,
instead of conveying a visionary sublimity Friedrich’s art would then partake in
the regressive idea of landscape painting as an expression of the “German soul,”
which pertains to a darker form of patriotic and nationalistic kitsch.
Furthermore, the philosophical analysis of his paintings still has not been able to
provide a convincing answer to the question whether one can conceptually apply
the Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the sublime to Friedrich’s
landscapes, as well as reconciling the experience of the sublime with the
religious vocation of his art. In this regard a number of commentators of
Friedrich maintain that the category of the sublime has no relevance at all for
his Weltanschauung.4
The purpose of this paper is threefold. It proposes to answer this latter

theoretical question by reconstructing the painter’s own views on the sublime as
found in his principal text. Next, it intends to explore the figurative means that
enabled Friedrich to produce the sublime in his paintings. After this attempt at a
Page 2 of 16
conceptual and pictorial understanding, conclusions will then be drawn

regarding the relevance of Friedrich’s artistic practice for contemporary art. I
argue that the sublime has a special and critical role for Friedrich, that it cannot
be equated with Kant’s concept of the sublime, and that its originality is best
understood in conjunction with Novalis’s definition of “romanticizing.”
10.2. A Controversial Question

German romanticism is traditionally considered as providing an “artistic”
continuation of the problem of the sublime that had been philosophically
elaborated by Kant with regard to the aesthetic experience of nature. Even more
(p.188) than the ugly, and far from simply being its superlative, the sublime
according to Kant is conceptually opposed to the beautiful; and strictly speaking
it is not objectively in nature itself. As analyzed in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment (1790), the sublime brings to light a limit that is both “mathematical”
and “dynamic,” that is, theoretical and practical, concerning the capacity of the
human being to directly access whatever surpasses the sensible world. More
specifically, the Kantian sublime is the designation for that experience of
attaining a limit when the imagination as a power of intuitive presentation is
confronted with the supersensible or metaphysical—the realm par excellence of
reason and the unlimited. Thus, in the aesthetic experience of nature, nature as
the idea of the absolute whole surpasses the limits of our degree of
comprehension in one intuition, and this surpassing of the idea of the world with
respect to the power of representation causes us initially some distress, a feeling
of displeasure on account of the inhibition of our vital forces. This conflicting
relationship between reason and imagination is what radically separates (in
essence and not in degree) the sublime and the beautiful. For the latter is only
the source of a feeling of pleasure due to a harmonious accord between the
imagination and the understanding when contemplating the sensible forms of
nature. If Kant considers the feeling of the sublime negatively from the point of
view of sensibility, then its specific positivity (that would make it the dominant
category of philosophical aesthetics up until Hegel) is to be found in the fact that
the emotion of the sublime enlarges our manner of thinking from sensibility to
the ideas of reason. It opens up (aesthetically, i.e., subjectively) the human mind
to a consciousness of itself and accustoms us to think our rational nature and
moral determination. We perhaps find ourselves thinking the latter even more in
the “dynamic sublime,” which is defined by Kant as the experience of our
physical finitude when faced with the fury of nature as pure force.
Page 3 of 16
Even though the romantic sublime is not a new subject for research, the debate
over the sublime in the philosophical reception of Caspar David Friedrich is still
far from settled. The controversy about the applicability of the concept of the
sublime to his paintings cannot be ignored, since it raises a substantial question
of principle. Three main interpretative tendencies may be singled out.
1. First, it is the notion of infinity that seems fundamental to many

commentators: Friedrich’s art of painting visually gives the spectator the
impression of this “absolutely large” that constitutes the “mathematical
sublime” in Kant and highlights by contrast the smallness of all aesthetic
comprehension and (in a more “dynamic” regard) our own existential
smallness.5 An often-cited example here is the Monk by the Sea, in which
the sky occupies three-quarters of the composition and where the
absence of elements framing the (p.189) perspective gives in addition
the impression of a lateral infinite extension such as that found in a
panoramic view. Moreover, the figure of the monk himself is much smaller
and virtually vanishes in this space compared to the relatively imposing
figure of the wanderer in the foreground of the Wanderer above the Sea
of Fog. Along with this infinity of space Friedrich’s paintings exhibit
emptiness, that is the surpassing of the form, the formlessness of the
absolutely large, as opposed to formal perfection in the case of the
beautiful. According to these commentators, over and beyond the
disappearance of all representation the art of Friedrich also shows the
inadequacy of all representation, for it has the formal peculiarity of
creating some kind of perceptual inconsistency within the representation
itself.6 This internal distortion underlines the limits of the imagination in
its attempt to reabsorb the world into an image, and thus is supposed to
illustrate the Kantian thesis that the absolute whole as an idea of reason
is unpresentable in intuition.
2. To respond to these arguments, a second camp of interpreters points
out that one can only speak of the sublime in the Kantian sense provided
that there is a reference to morality.7 A feeling or an intuition that implies
the idea of the infinite is not in itself sublime. There has to be the thought
of my own rationality that overcomes my natural determination. But this
rational attitude in the horizon of a social and political community tends
to disappear as soon as we enter the religious world of Friedrich’s art.
For the second camp, the sublime therefore disappears from Friedrich’s
paintings to become the beautiful. In philosophical terms this is not the
Kantian concept of the beautiful but the Platonic or Neoplatonic idea of
beauty, that is, a mathematical or geometrical beauty in which the
sensible forms take part in the ideality of the pure forms transcending
being.
3. Besides this antinomy between the Kantian sublime and Platonic or
Neoplatonic beauty dominating the literature, certain specialists of
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philosophical romanticism have attempted to follow a third interpretative

path. Briefly put, this view employs the concept of chaos in the sense of
Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling to propose an immanently romantic
reading of the sublime in Caspar David Friedrich.8
Manfred Frank’s work on German romantic philosophy does not specifically

address the question of the sublime. Recently, however, Frank published a text
on Caspar David Friedrich entitled “‘Religionslose Kathedralen im ewigen
Winter’—Der Moderne Caspar David Friedrich im frühromantischen (p.190)
Kontext.”9 Although he does not explicitly examine the artist’s conception of the
sublime, Frank outlines a continuity between Friedrich’s Sea of Ice and the
series of vast empty evening skies among his paintings and the skepticism of the
early German romantics. Accordingly, Frank argues that Friedrich’s works
convey a loss of the sacred and ultimately underscore the failure of the
Frühromantik project of a new mythology. If we extend this thesis to the more
specific question of the sublime, Frank’s interpretation of Friedrich’s intentions
as skeptical with regard to the reconciliation of art and religion in real history
renders the sublime in Friedrich nothing more than the Kantian negative
Darstellung, that is, the presentation ex negativo of the absolute in its
transcendence—in an abstract empty sky. Here the presentation of the
metaphysical always starts from the infinite gap between the finite and the
infinite. In the same vein, and using the language of J.-F. Lyotard, one could say
that not only is there disenchantment and loss of belief in Friedrich, but also
nostalgia or melancholy, which bears the weight of the sublime insofar as the
artist takes a certain pleasure in the loss and in the absence.10
I believe that Manfred Frank is correct in stressing the modernity of Friedrich’s

art, and his thesis stands in sharp contrast to Reinhard Brandt’s interpretation
of it in terms of a Neoplatonic anagogy (the extraction of our souls as spectators
from this world and their guidance into the next).11 But the debate will not be
able to be settled unless one broadens the discussion beyond the confines of a
strictly Kantian reading to consider other interpretative possibilities. Moreover,
all the above interpretations either fail to take into account the actual writings
and views of Caspar David Friedrich, or if they do take them into account, they
do not really take them seriously. In contrast, I maintain that a careful
examination of Friedrich’s texts can be especially fruitful for the question of the
sublime, for the simple reason that they articulate its status and significance for
the romantic painter himself.
10.3. The Divine, Natural, and Artistic Sublime

In this section I will principally appeal to Friedrich’s main manuscript:
Äußerungen bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung von Gemählden von größtentheils
noch lebenden und unlängst verstorbenen Künstlern [Considerations while
contemplating a collection of paintings by artists who are for most part still
living or recently deceased].12 The work is similar to an art salon review insofar
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as it is a critical report on an exhibition of contemporary artists from the

Dresden Kunstverein (the Dresden art association). Friedrich wrote the
Considerations around 1830, but it was only published in its entirety
posthumously, with minor selections from it already appearing one year after his
death (p.191) in 1840. In it Friedrich revealed his own views on the art of the
younger generation of German painters. This was the period of the Nazarenes—
a group of artists gathered in Rome—who sought their inspiration in early
Renaissance styles and religious subject matters. It was also the time when the
colorists of the Düsseldorf school of landscape painting were just starting to
emerge, who painted nature or reality devoid of all idealization. Friedrich’s
Considerations is a collection of fragments of one hundred pages in length; if
one wanted to draw parallels, its form is similar to Caroline and August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s dialogue from 1799 Die Gemählde [The Paintings], which describes
and comments on a number of paintings at the Dresden Art Gallery, or the 1810
Empfindungen [Sensations] of Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, a text
that imagines the impressions of different spectators passing before Friedrich’s
own Monk by the Sea.
Although the Considerations does not provide a systematic exposition of the

sublime—the artist was not a theorist—we nevertheless find a brief but key
discussion of its specific character. It is found in a passage where Friedrich
seeks to partly discredit art critics who demand that true artists should choose
“significant” topics. In the context of this reflection, Friedrich asks of a
particular artist: “Surely he does not lack a feeling for the sublime in nature?”13
This question is followed by a definition of what is called the sublime (das
Erhabene), and where Friedrich states that the traditionally preferred examples
of the sublime—on which the Kantian interpretation especially draws—are not
the only possible examples:
Because surely we mean [by “sublime”] that the choice of the subject
matter has the ability to more deeply and intimately seize (ergreifen) and
captivate (fesseln) the spectator. Of course, everything in nature is
significant and grand, beautiful and noble, but some of it is more
significant, appropriate, and evocative for presenting in a picture than
others. For depicting the most beautiful and the highest and what seizes us
the most would obviously be the task of the true artist. And I do not
necessarily mean here towering mountains or endless abysses.14
First, far from conveying the notorious philosophical aesthetics of the sublime as
opposed to the beautiful in the tradition of Burke and Kant, the term “sublime”
in this passage amounts to an appreciative hyperbole, that is, to a superlative of
the beautiful. It is also clear from this passage that Friedrich understands the
artistic sublime in terms of its aesthetic (pathetic or emotive) impact: the artistic
sublime is what produces the most powerful effect. One could call this an
extremely banal and limited notion of the sublime, for to produce an effect is of
Page 6 of 16
course the goal of all art. However, as we shall see, it is (p.192) precisely this
accentuation of the effect that constitutes a true aesthetics here, and not just a
hyperbolic appreciation. In the academic neoclassical tradition, represented
notably by Goethe, the highest aesthetic scope or impact of a work of art
depends on the intrinsic dignity of its subject matter. Natural objects do not
contain any idea or ideal. Ordinary everyday objects are generally only viewed
according to their physical or visual aspect, and occasionally perhaps as objects
capable of stimulating an emotion in us, but one that is itself ordinary. In order
to become a significant element and to develop the greatest possible aesthetic
range (or the highest affective power), the object of an artistic representation
must be an ideal object that the artist cannot merely find given in experience.15
For Friedrich, in contrast, all reality is significant a priori. In his writings the
term “significant” (bedeutsam) should indeed be taken literally, that is, in its
primary meaning as signification (Bedeutung): it designates something that is “a
sign for something else,” something that refers to another thing that is exterior
to itself; in other words, something transcending it. Thus, a thing becomes a sign
by having a relation to another thing. In metaphysical painting, a concrete and
ordinary object of the sensible world may become significant, evocative, or
important as soon as it is understood or put into relation with something
abstract, invisible, and immaterial—in short, with something spiritual. This is the
core of Friedrich’s religious conception of the world: the incarnation, the word
made flesh, or the New Testament as the epoch of sensible mediation. It should
not be forgotten that the romantic painter was brought up in the pietistic faith
and imagination; he believed in the Incarnation of God in the body of the Son
and in the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is precisely this union of the divine
logos and sensible flesh in the incarnation that the Tetschen Altarpiece (1808)
celebrates, a landmark painting considered to be a manifesto of his pictorial
conception.
Therefore, in Friedrich’s view of landscape painting—as the artistic

representation of nature as divine creation—it does not matter if the represented
object is an “elevated” or “trivial” object. This hierarchy does not hold anymore.
What is critical, however, concerns the human relationship to divine creation in
the sense where the human being is no longer in a direct relation to the latter
and has moved away from the original fullness of its meaning. In Friedrich’s
eyes this is where art comes into play, for art is entrusted with the possibility of
retrieving the original meaning by furnishing the necessary mediation between
man and that transcendent object surpassing man: the natural sublime—the
natural world as an infinite cosmic order (e.g., the sky, the sea, and the shore,
which in the Monk by the Sea cannot be contemplated as totalities)—or, what
amounts to the same thing, the divine sublime, because the world is viewed from
the perspective of divine creation.
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(p.193) “Art serves as a mediator between nature and man. The archetype
(Urbild) is too large and too sublime to be grasped by the masses. Its reflection
(Abbild)—the work of man—is much more accessible to the weak.”16
Consequently, the artistic sublime is a means for this stated goal of art. Its
concrete description in the earlier passage indicates that the artistic sublime is
the concept that most directly deals with the interiority of the subject. It is not a
question of any kind of pathos or sentimentality but of the spiritual strength of
the affect that is able to move the soul powerfully, “deeply,” and “intimately.”
That is to say, the artistic sublime pertains to art’s active virtue of strengthening
the relation between the created and the Creator by means of a more direct
feeling, experienced in the interiority as the meeting point of two worlds, the
corporal and the spiritual, the sensible and the intelligible. In other words, in the
strict sense Friedrich conceives the artistic sublime as the religious efficacy of
art.
10.4. Scale, Opacity, Transparency: The Sublime in Caspar David

Friedrich’s Paintings
Let us now look at the figurative treatment of this rather uncomplicated notion
of the sublime. So far we have seen that sublime grandeur is not related to the
status of the subjects but to the intensity of effect attached to the subject, and
that the intense effect of the painting does not merely rely upon visually
impressive hyperbolic grandeur. Indeed, the point that Caspar David Friedrich
most emphasizes is the figurative simplicity of the sublime: “And I do not
necessarily mean here towering mountains or endless abysses”; and a little later
in the same text: “This does not imply at all that it must necessarily be some
kind of special region, e.g., a large Swiss mountain or the boundless sea; but a
simple wheat field would suffice, or even a simpler object, but one that is still
dignified.”17 Hence, in painting his metaphysical landscapes Friedrich accepts
the risk of appearing rudimentary. Trees, rocks, deserted seashores, a “simple
wheat field,” “or even a simpler object,” such as the sandbanks of the Elbe
riverbed northwest of Dresden under evening skies as illustrated in the Large
Enclosure (1832)—all of these are signifiers available to the artist for a new
picturing of nature, and he is humble enough to be content with them.
However, what exactly determines the greater or lesser strength of these

paintings? The purely quantitative and geometrical components of the image
(that is to say, the spatial structures of size, scale, and plans) cannot be the sole
vehicle of the sublime. If the sublime is understood as what pathetically
reinforces the significant beauty of nature and makes us become aware of it,
then the figuration or image requires an additional qualitative element. This is
its (p.194) perceptual dimension that is related to both visibility and time. In
order to create an ever deeper intensity of feeling in the intimate sphere of the
subject (its interiority) and not solely at the physical level of sensation, Friedrich
employs two main devices (among others): a sublime of scale where scale is not
Page 8 of 16
merely a quantitative estimation of magnitude; and a sublime that plays on the

double modality of visibility—either transparency or opacity. For it should be
noted that the topic of vision is twofold in Friedrich: it is outer and inner vision.
First, and although it is initially a quantitative component, it is clear that scale is

crucial for landscape painting, for it has to re-establish the original distance
between things, the proportion between the infinite and the finite, the large and
the small, the divine and the human. But true grandeur, in Friedrich’s eyes, is
not modeled on the character of bodies that can be quantitatively measured. Nor
is it a question of perspectival order, that is, of a physical-optical translation of
the world onto the canvas. True grandeur resides rather in a certain emotional
upswing or uplift of a mind that is troubled by perceptual confinement and
hence seeks to enlarge its horizon. Far from consigning landscape painting to
the reproduction of a given space, Friedrich defines it as the creation of space in
a work. In his Considerations the romantic painter criticizes contemporary
naturalistic landscape painting precisely because of its tendency to compress
space onto the canvas. This manner of painting fails to grasp the cosmic scale of
the world (its infinite space), with the result that one of the greatest examples of
the sublime—the unlimited and unbounded sea—becomes distorted and turned
into its opposite:
What modern landscape painters have seen in an arc of 100 degrees in

nature, they pitilessly compress together into an angle of 45 degrees.
Hence, what was separated in nature in large spatial intervals becomes
presented here in compact spaces; the eye is overcrowded and
oversaturated, and it makes an adverse and alarming impression on the
spectator. And it is always the element of water that loses out—the sea
becomes a puddle.18
In contrast, the successful artist gives us the impression of unlimited space

within the limited surface of the canvas:
This painting is large; and yet we wish it were larger still. For the sublimity
in the conception of the subject matter has been experienced in all its
greatness and requires an even larger extension in space. Therefore, it is
always praiseworthy for a painting to say we wish it were even larger.19
Thus, Friedrich’s use of the sublime of scale as creation of space on the canvas
breaks with the oversaturation of the gaze caused by naturalistic landscapes. It
seeks to liberate both space and the gaze of the spectator to allow her (p.195)
to experience the distance between things. This explains the dilation and the
emptiness in many of Friedrich’s landscapes, which were rarely painted in large
formats.
Page 9 of 16
The second method is more concerned with the two modalities of visibility:
transparency and opacity. A number of the romantic artist’s paintings admit us
into the presence of an inner, spiritual, and dreamlike vision—one could say, into
the transparency of the sublime. We immediately enter into the fictive space of
the image, for it creates an effect of direct confrontation with nature by
suspending the illusion of distance found in classical forms of representation due
to an unobstructed foreground. Nevertheless, opacity still remains the general
rule of the sublime, and this is necessary for it to play the full role assigned to it,
that is, to capture our attention and penetrate ever deeper into the living sphere
of our interiority. There are numerous modalities of this opacity for outer
physical sight in Friedrich’s paintings. But the most sublime of all these
deployments of opacity is the veiling principle of mist or fog. Let us quote again
the words of the romantic painter in his Considerations:
When a region is covered with fog it seems larger and more sublime; like
the appearance of a young woman covered with a veil, it heightens the
imagination and raises expectations. The eye and the imagination are more
attracted by misty distances than by what is closely and clearly seen.20
These lines might be read in light of the problem of the veiling and unveiling of
nature. From antiquity up to the Enlightenment, Mother Nature was frequently
personified under the guise of the goddess Isis-Artemis. Allegorically
represented as hidden behind a veil covering her face, she was inaccessible to
the gaze of mere mortals. In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, the image
of the veiled Isis goes hand in hand with a respect for the mysteries of nature,
inspired by that “most sublime” inscription on the goddess’s temple prohibiting
the lifting of her veil.21 In The Disciples of Sais, the romantic poet Novalis also
prefers the Orphic poet’s respectful attitude towards nature over the
Promethean attitude of modern science, yet advocates surmounting the
interdiction on lifting her veil. One can only do this by going beyond the limits
set by Kantian criticism, that is to say, by overcoming the limits of human
finitude: “According to that inscription, if it is true that no mortal has lifted the
veil, then we will just have to try to become immortal. Whoever does not wish to
lift it, is no true disciple of Sais.”22 In the paintings of Friedrich, fog is a natural
or material veil that is no longer merely an allegory of the secrets of nature and
their inaccessibility to mortals. Fog, moreover, does not simply impede our sight
and generate respect that keeps us at a distance from nature. It attracts our
sight. In the same way as the veiled body of a woman might excite the desire to
see it unveiled, fog stirs our imagination and the wish to see more by
penetrating the opacity.
(p.196) Friedrich’s painting entitled Fog (1807) perfectly illustrates this point:
in its extreme figurative simplicity it awakens our desire to see the fog-
enshrouded three-masted sailboat that is behind the rowing boat in the
foreground, then to see the distant shore behind the sailboat, and then again
Page 10 of 16
perhaps to glimpse the horizon behind the distant shore. Of course, this desire is
not awakened in “those whose imagination is too poor to see in fog anything
other than gray.”23 This accentuation of desire defines the Friedrichian sublime;
it requires a certain attitude or state of mind on the part of the spectator, and
stimulates an inner dynamic response to the painting. Here Friedrich is strongly
opposed to an art of illusion, because the latter merely passively dazzles the
viewer, and precludes her from actively exercising this intimate activity or
appropriation of what the painting shows.
10.5. Anish Kapoor: Doing Away with the Mediation in the Friedrichian
Sublime?
In this concluding section I would like to draw attention to Anish Kapoor’s
reinterpretation of Friedrich’s Sea of Ice (1824), which, along with the Monk by
the Sea and the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is considered by commentators
to be one of the best examples of the sublime in Friedrich. The Kantian concept
of a “dynamic” and terrifying sublime is frequently applied to the Sea of Ice,
though it is precisely this painting that provides the clearest illustration of what
makes Friedrich’s art of the sublime radically different from the Kantian
analysis.
At first glance this painting, also known as The Wreck of Hope, seems to be a
narrative motif—a shipwreck—inspired by a real-life expedition to the North Pole
in 1819–1820. Yet an image emerges here in which the sublime experience no
longer resides in the tension of Kant’s “dynamic sublime” that is characteristic
of catastrophe paintings. From a Kantian perspective the resolution of this
tension involves human practical rationality. In contrast to this, Friedrich’s
painting carries out a kind of refocusing on nature. Swallowed by ice, the ship
itself is barely visible, whereas the stacked blocks of ice physically dominate the
center of the composition. Or more precisely, the image shows the fragmentation
of a ship whose debris mingles with natural forms. But this painting is even
more unique and troubling if one recalls that all human landmarks do not in fact
entirely disappear. The work involves the presence of a perceptive subject, yet
one that is not depicted. The image unfolds under this gaze and gives it a more
intimate nuance. For what strikes one above all in this painting is the impression
of silence and stillness—it almost emanates a sense of tranquility. The sublime
experience resides in a quiet and oneiric vision of a natural time, a cosmic and
archaic time that is opposed to the time of history and action, a (p.197) natural
time in its fundamental processes: the solidification of water into ice, or the
petrifaction of the ice in the foreground that gradually takes on the color of
stone. This elementary matter is marked and borne by the temporality of its
becoming. Yet it is a slow, infinitesimal movement that borders upon immobility,
if not upon eternity—the movement of a sea of ice.
Page 11 of 16
Anish Kapoor has perceptively grasped all of this. The British sculptor freely
admits that his work draws its fundamental inspiration from the intrinsic aspect
of a dreamlike sublime in the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.
Kapoor declares he is “a painter working as a sculptor.” For he creates “mental
sculptures” that are no longer simply the embodiment of a real, tangible space,
but presuppose and demand an act of inhabiting a space through one’s viewing,
similar to Friedrich’s sublime of scale as a magnified space. Kapoor has made
architectural scale into a principle of his sculptures, often creating site-specific
work that acquires its own dimensions by developing in the site. This is the case
of the gigantic installation Svayambh, first conceived for the Musée des Beaux-
Arts of Nantes in France in 2007, and then exhibited at Munich’s Haus der
Kunst, which is in part a reinterpretation of the sublime vision of an archaic
nature in Friedrich’s Sea of Ice. Svayambh—a Sanskrit word meaning “born by
itself”—is a massive block of red wax moving almost imperceptibly on hidden
rails through the museum building along its west-east axis. The coming and
going of the block with the slowness of an infinitesimal movement that is almost
reduced to immobility, like the movement of a sea of ice, generates an
impression of primal and potentially infinite extension. The matter of the
sculpture is shaped through infinite duration and space itself; the original object
is seemingly endlessly reworked, carved, planed down by passing through the
arched door frames, leaving red traces on their immaculate white color as if the
block were slightly larger than the frames—or, as if the building were, so to
speak, swallowing the block. Viewed as a self-generating system, as an
uncreated or autonomous form that creates itself and whose origin is
immemorial, it is no longer historical.
Kapoor’s work, however, gives a different treatment of the sublime: “I think the
real subject for me, if there is one, is the sublime....It’s this whole notion of
somehow trying to shorten the distance of sublime experience....If one is looking
at a Friedrich painting of a figure looking at the sunset, then one is having one’s
reverie in terms of their experience....It is my wish to make that distance shorter
so that the reverie is direct. You’re not watching someone else do it; you’re
compelled to do it yourself.”24 That is to say, Kapoor aims at doing away with one
of the very emblems of Caspar David Friedrich’s art: the Rückenfigur—the figure
with its back turned to the viewer—like in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
It is important to understand that this specific motif, which is stereotypically

associated with romanticism, and even with kitsch, is itself related to the (p.
198) figurative treatment of the sublime in Friedrich. On the one hand, the
immobile Rückenfigur highlights an attitude of contemplation. But on the other
hand, it is just one more mode of opacity, in addition to fog and other techniques
that we have already listed above. For not only is the figure of the wanderer
preventing us as spectators from seeing a part of the landscape, but he is also
anonymous: the Rückenfigur does away with the face. As for its effect, the
Rückenfigur is therefore disconcerting. But it is precisely through this effect that
Page 12 of 16
the figure deploys its positive function. It institutes a form of reflexivity in which
we oscillate between two modes of contemplation, between the outer eye and
the inner eye. We are forced to “go back” in ourselves, to use our “inner eye” to
imagine the entire landscape that we wish we could see, because we are unable
to externally project ourselves into the view.
Thus, when Kapoor intends to “shorten the distance of sublime experience” “so
that the reverie is direct” and “you’re compelled to do it yourself,” he is perhaps
unaware that Friedrich has constructed this mediation precisely to compel us to
do it ourselves. For the natural (or divine) sublime is what we absolutely cannot
experience without an artistic mediation. Or to put it in Novalis’s words: the
Friedrichian sublime resides in a “qualitative potentialization,”25 in which our
sight is elevated to an inner vision, a vision of the purely spiritual and
transcendent principle of nature. And in line with Novalis’s definition of
romanticism, the “qualitative potentialization” of sight by means of a veiling
principle may also be inverted. Here the mystical becomes known through a
process of lowering or “logarhythmizing,” and the imagination concentrates on
the finite or the ordinary, such as a “simple wheat field.” For Friedrich and the
romantics at least, this is the only possible way to “shorten the distance of
sublime experience.”26
10.6. Conclusion
As we have seen, there is a threefold sublime in Caspar David Friedrich: a
divine, natural, and artistic sublime. To be sure, his art of landscape painting
strives to make the excess of the cosmic and divine sublime become perceptible
within the framed space of a canvas. And certainly, it aims at uplifting the spirit
of the spectator. But if one remains at an interpretation of Friedrich’s painting in
terms of the Kantian sublime, one fails to understand how his view of the
sublime cannot be reduced to one of hyperbolic grandeur exceeding the form.
Furthermore, if one only emphasizes the transcendence, the distance and
incommensurability between the divine cosmic order and the human order, one
overlooks the goal of the artistic sublime. The latter seeks to stir the spectator’s
emotive and imaginative participation and to reduce the distance between (p.
199) these two orders. While the Kantian sublime expresses a radical dualism
and tension between the sensible and the intelligible, in the religious
perspective of Friedrich’s art the material and the spiritual differ but are not
opposed. They are complementary rather than antagonistic, and the whole point
of his painting is to make us associate and not separate them. Hence, claims that
the experience of the sublime cannot be reconciled with the religious vocation of
Friedrich’s paintings, or that only the beautiful is at stake in his work, fail to
grasp that their religious vocation actually depends on the sublime.
Why should we care about Friedrich’s views? It might be argued that an art that
addresses the soul and aims at a recognition of the sacred is now historically
dated. But without seeking to abolish the historical distance between his epoch
Page 13 of 16
and ours, Friedrich’s views offer artistic perspectives that are still relevant for
contemporary artists and theoreticians of art: a use of scale to liberate space,
perceptual opacity to stimulate both our outer and inner sight, and, above all, as
Anish Kapoor has attempted to do in the wake of minimalism, a simplification of
the work of art. All of which constitutes the simplicity of the sublime in the
works of that “metaphysician with the brush,”27 Caspar David Friedrich.
Notes:
(1) . Anish Kapoor, “‘I Don’t Know Where I’m Going,’“interview with Alastair
Sooke, The Telegraph, September 26, 2006, online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
culture/art/3655568/I-dont-know-where-Im-going.html.
(2) . I am grateful to Dalia Nassar for her helpful comments on an earlier version
of this text.
(3) . See Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic
Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 10f.
(4) . See especially Werner Busch, Caspar David Friedrich. Ästhetik und Religion
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 64f. Busch dismisses all interpretation of Friedrich’s
paintings as being in line with an aesthetics of the sublime by proclaiming the
sublime as “postreligious.” See too Johannes Grave, Caspar David Friedrich und
die Theorie des Erhabenen (Weimar: VDG-Verlag, 2001); Grave focuses his
analysis on the Sea of Ice and maintains that in this painting Friedrich is
ironically working against the philosophical conception of the sublime
elaborated by Kant and Schiller.
(5) . See among others Hilmar Frank, Aussichten ins Unermessliche (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2004), 99–100; Eliane Escoubas, “La tragédie du paysage:
Caspar David Friedrich,” in L’espace pictural (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011, 1st
ed. 1995), 69–90. Elsewhere Escoubas has argued for the “simplicity” of the
Kantian sublime, drawing on a quotation from the “General Remark” to § 29 of
the Critique of the Power of Judgment where Kant writes “Simplicity
(purposiveness without art) is so to speak the style of nature in the sublime,”
meaning that the context of the sublime is nature in its primitive purity devoid of
all artifice. See Eliane Escoubas, “Kant or the Simplicity of the Sublime,” in Of
the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jean-François Courtine, trans. Jeffrey S.
Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 55–70. Here I will try
to show that the notion of “simplicity” is even more present in the Friedrichian
sublime.
(6) . See for example Brad Prager, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,”
Art History 25 (2002): 68–86.
Page 14 of 16
(7) . See in particular Reinhard Brandt, “Zur Metamorphose der Kantischen

Philosophie in der Romantik. Rhapsodische Anmerkungen,” in Kunst und Wissen.
Beziehungen zwischen Ästhetik und Erkenntnistheorie im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert, ed. Astrid Bauereisen, Stephan Pabst, and Achim Vesper
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 85–101; and “Caspar David
Friedrich. Landschaftsmalerei als Seelenführung,” in Kunst und Religion. Ein
kontroverses Verhältnis, ed. Markus Kleinert (Mainz: Chorus, 2010), 31–55.
(8) . See for example Olivier Schefer, Résonances du romantisme (Brussels: La

Lettre volée, 2005), 74f.
(9) . Manfred Frank, “‘Religionslose Kathedralen im ewigen Winter’—Der

Moderne Caspar David Friedrich im frühromantischen Kontext,” in Szenen des
Heiligen, ed. Cai Werntgen (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2011), 112–60. I am thankful to
Manfred Frank for providing me with a manuscript version of his talk prior to its
publication.
(10) . Cf. Judith Norman, “The Work of Art in German Romanticism,” in

Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of
German Idealism 6 (2008): 72.
(11) . See note 6 above.
(12) . Caspar David Friedrich, “Äußerungen bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung

von Gemählden von größtentheils noch lebenden und unlängst verstorbenen
Künstlern,” Kritische Edition der Schriften des Künstlers und seiner Zeitzeugen,
ed. Gerhard Eimer in collaboration with Günther Rath (Frankfurt am Main:
Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 1999).
(13) . Friedrich, Äußerungen, 53. In the original German: “Ein Gefühl für das
Erhabene in der Natur fehlt es ihm doch wohl gewiß nicht?”
(14) . Friedrich, Äußerungen, 54.
(15) . Cf. Goethe, Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst (Zurich: Artemis
Verlag, 1961–66), vol. 13, 122–25. According to Goethe, the inherent dignity of
the subject matter is what we absolutely cannot know without the artistic
idealization that reveals it or brings it to light. This dignity relates to the
timeless essence of the object, an idea that the artist forms through an intimate
knowledge of nature. He should not regress into the fantastic, but move beyond
the given sensible phenomena to the timeless idea.
Page 15 of 16
(21) . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 49, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 194.
(22) . Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, NS 1, 82.
(24) . Rainer Crone and Alexandra Von Stosch, Anish Kapoor (London: Prestel,
2008), 27–28.
(25) . Novalis, Vorarbeiten (1798), NS 2, 545.
(26) . For a more detailed analysis of the romantic notion of potentialization and
the relationship between Caspar David Friedrich and Novalis, see my L’art de
romantiser le monde. Caspar David Friedrich et la philosophie romantique, PhD
thesis, Universität München/Université Paris IV, October 2013.
(27) . According to an expression of Per Daniel Atterbom, in Reisebilder aus dem

romantischen Deutschland. Jugenderinnerungen eines romantischen Dichters
und Kunstgelehrten aus den Jahren 1817 bis 1819 (Berlin, 1867; reprint
Stuttgart: Steingrüben, 1970), 102.
Page 16 of 16
The New Mythology

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
The New Mythology

Romanticism between Religion and Humanism
Bruce Matthews
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0012

Romanticism sought a new mythology to transform the fragmented echoes of the
Enlightenment into a symphonic age of scientific knowledge, Bildung, and
political freedom that would sanction the normative values for the future. Yet the
difficulties that so concerned the romantics are still with us, chief of which is the
damage we do to our natural environment. In 1804 Schelling warned that
modern thought would inevitably lead to “the annihilation of nature,” and
advanced as an alternative an organic form of philosophy whose mythology of
nature offers the utopian potential and emancipatory power capable of perhaps
liberating an engaged hope from its current bondage to our contemporary
ideology of resigned irony that emasculates transformative political action.
Keywords: new mythology, humanism, romanticism, religion, Schelling, Manfred Frank, Frederick
Beiser
Romanticism sought to create a new mythology capable of transforming the

fragmented echoes of the Enlightenment into a symphonic age of scientific
knowledge, Bildung, and political freedom. Uniting the discordant notes of
reason and sensuous nature into a symbolic narrative of hope, this new
mythology would beget a “new religion” that, unlike its predecessors, would be
one that joins hands with humanism to create ideas whose aesthetic power
would sanction the new normative values of this coming age. Such was the
intoxicating vision advanced in the inadequately named, but perfectly mystifying
“Oldest System Program of German Idealism.” As Frederick Beiser concludes in
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The New Mythology
The Romantic Imperative, due to the fact that this proposed marriage of
religion’s divine necessities and the freedoms of humanism was never
consummated, “the problems that so troubled the romantics...are still with us.”1
Perhaps the most serious of these problems is that of our relationship to the
natural world—a problem whose consequences are far from academic. As
Manfred Frank has repeatedly warned, to surrender our subjectivity and free
will to the deterministic vocabulary of the natural sciences will not only
undermine the personal accountability that supports moral action, but it will also
lead to a “political fatalism” that will destroy the legitimacy of society’s defining
institutions.2
But nowhere is the problem of our inability to create new values more real than
in a problem the romantics also found so troubling, namely the damage and
destruction we are doing to nature. No one saw this inevitable crisis more
clearly than the young Schelling, who warned in 1804 that the course of (p.
203) modern philosophy, left to its own inner logic would lead to “the
annihilation of nature” (SW 1/5, 274).
Accepting this warning as collateral, I would like us to extend to Schelling’s

thought a line of credit to support a brief examination of how he diagnoses and
treats this now most threatening pathology of modern consciousness. For as I
hope to show, the organic form of philosophy offered us by this most enigmatic
member of the Jena Circle not only dissolves what Beiser calls “the paradox of
romantic metaphysics,” but the resources he prescribes also suggest a new
mythology of nature whose utopian potential may, both in formal and substantive
terms, provide the emancipatory power capable of liberating an engaged hope
from its bondage to the ideology of irony that currently emasculates
transformative political action.
In The Romantic Imperative, Beiser examines how the romantic thinkers

grappled with the unavoidable difficulties generated by their attempts to
integrate the dissonant dualities of discursivity, be they of idealism and realism,
freedom and necessity, criticism and dogmatism, or, more succinctly, Fichte and
Spinoza. His penetrating account of how Herder’s organic framework was
effectively used to negotiate this integration of opposing forces succeeds in
achieving his own stated goal of restoring “the organic...to its rightful place...in
romantic thinking” (RI 133). Herder rejects a mechanistic nature in favor of an
organic nature characterized by interactive creative forces, in which humans
play the essential role of seeking purpose and creating meaning. In his seminal
Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Herder argues that the
developmental dynamic of organic processes more adequately accounts for the
order of both the natural world and human experience, be it of the individual or
of long-standing cultural traditions. The principles of his philosophy are thus the
“organic forces” that animate the physical and spiritual, making themselves
manifest in the latter through the currents of “tradition” (HW 6, 180). In a deft
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move of intellectual judo, Herder explained these organic forces as grounding

the oppositional centrifugal and centripetal forces of Newton’s theory of gravity.
Thus Newton’s ideas become proof not of a mechanistic universe, but rather of a
cosmos fundamentally betraying the self-organizing logic of living order; after
all, what other example do we have in nature of a system capable of generating
movement through the integration of active and passive forces? As such, these
organic forces emerge as the DNA of an autogenetic ratio, whose interaction
drives the development of nature and history, while preserving nature’s
necessity and history’s freedom. Herder achieves this integration through the
use of the concept of reciprocal causation, which, its proponents claimed, best
articulated the systematic integration of opposition demonstrated by an
organism’s capacity to be both cause and effect of itself. Herder captures this
self-organizing dynamic in humanity through Leibniz’s (p.204) apperceptio,
translating this term as “recognition” (Anerkennung), which he posits as
humanity’s power for free self-determination: “No longer an infallible machine in
the hands of nature, he becomes himself the purpose and aim of the work” (HW
1, 110). This intentional iteration of the forces of self-organization creates the
social being of humanity engaged in the ongoing process of creating our own
unique meanings as well as our communities’ cultures and traditions. The telos
of life is not to sate our appetites but to achieve self-realization. The resulting
organic universe is thus fundamentally monistic, in that any dualism we throw at
it can be transformed into a continuum of degrees of self-organization. Thus do
the laws of material nature and customs of human traditions become two
quantitatively different manifestations of the “organic forces” that animate our
world. Schelling, who cites Herder repeatedly in his Magistar of 1792, captures
this monistic continuum of self-organization when he writes that inanimate
matter is but unconscious mind, whereas mind is matter that has become
conscious of itself (HKA 1/1, 183). Betraying his Platonic roots, Herder’s
philosophy bets that the unity of experience trumps the Cartesian fixation on
certainty in supplying the most comprehensive, and thus truest, starting point
for making sense of our existence. Taking aim at his former mentor Kant, Herder
counters his Cartesian insistence that duality is the condition of all metaphysics,
since, according to Kant, only the noetic realm of res cogitans and its certain
knowledge can supply the universality and necessity of truth required by
philosophy. For Herder, however, if our world of nature and human history is at
the end of the day one world, there can be no such unbridgeable divide between
the noumenal and the concrete firstness of sensual nature. Rather, these two
fields of our existence stand in reciprocal interaction, as mutually dependent
members of this self-organizing unity we call our world. As is evident in the
phenomenon of global warming, the realm of nature and human activity form an
indissoluble and inescapable unity. And just as we are free to continue living in
denial of the consequences of these actions, we are not free from suffering the
inevitable consequences of our actions. Within a unified world such as Herder’s,
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freedom itself appears only when accompanied by the necessities of our

existence.
It is on this very point of integrating freedom and necessity that Beiser contends
that the romantics’ use of Herder’s strategy fails to successfully overcome the
paradox of romantic metaphysics, since the romantics’ allegiance to Spinoza’s
naturalism necessitates their abandonment of Fichte’s “radical freedom,” and
with this, the surrender of autonomous political engagement to the
heterogeneous forces of traditional religion. This follows as a consequence of
Fichte’s understanding of radical freedom as spontaneity (Selbsttätigkeit) and
self-positing that “excludes determination by natural causes” of the material
world, and thus “presupposes the noumenal-phenomenal dualism” (RI 151). (p.
205) According to Beiser, Fichte’s account of freedom is radical on two counts.
First, because it advances a self whose only essence is to create itself through
the freedom of self-positing. Second, due to its total freedom from the material
world, it has the power to transform that material world into a “completely
rational world through infinite striving” (RI 171). Given this power of the self
over the not-self of nature, the self does not need to break out of its subjective
confines to integrate with the objective world, since its imperative is to remake
the objective world so that it conforms to the rational order of the subject. Of
course, “the romantics reject” this account of the self and the purpose of its
radical freedom (RI 151). Due to their allegiance to Spinoza’s naturalism, they
hold that since “everything is simply a mode of God,” and “God acts from the
necessity of his nature,” then human agency is actually divine agency, thereby
undercutting any claim to autonomous action (RI 185). The degree to which the
romantics abandon freedom falls short of Spinoza’s fatalism, but only barely,
since it is the optimistic form of fatalism—quietism—that is Beiser’s concluding
characterization of the romantics’ position (RI 151), a position, it must be added,
that he, following Heine and Marx, equates with a “reactionary” and thus
conservative religion that is directly at odds with the “progressive and liberal”
humanism that Fichte’s radical freedom supports (RI 174). And it is precisely
this problem of the irreconcilable demands of religion and humanism that so
troubles Beiser, since we are far from achieving a successful integration of these
opposing forces, so that the challenges presented by the paradox of romantic
metaphysics “are still with us” (RI 151).
Schelling, I submit, might not recognize his philosophy in Beiser’s portrayal of

romantic metaphysics. While he would certainly applaud the rehabilitation of an
organic way of thinking and of Herder’s thought in general, Schelling might find
it odd that Beiser never quotes his words—or any of the other romantics—when
presenting his account of their attempted synthesis of Spinoza and Fichte via
Herder, and when he does cite Schelling, he refers to “early notebooks and
fragments” in which one finds the “the romantic project for such a synthesis” (RI
177). Yet far from a fragment or notebook, the work cited in a footnote is
Schelling’s symphonic System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), in which he
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argues precisely the opposite of the position attributed to him by Beiser. Far
from contending that God’s nature determines humanity’s actions, Schelling
argues here for an organic, reciprocal relationship between God and humanity,
in which both are “co-poets” (Mitdichter) of our history (SW 1/3, 602). In fact,
both parties are so necessary to this collaborative process that if “our own
freedom” in creating our part were denied, “even...[God] himself would not
be” (SW 1/3, 602). Far from being a puppet of a deity, the existence of the divine
himself somehow depends on humanity’s freedom as we actively participate in
composing the poem of our history. In Schelling’s (p.206) words here, it seems
humans are indeed determined by God’s nature, but this nature is to live, create,
and be free. Thus when it is suggested that for the romantics “everything is
simply a mode of God,” and that “God acts from the necessity of his nature,” and
if this divine nature is to be alive and thus free, then far from undercutting
autonomous action, both God and humanity act from the necessity of their
nature as free beings (RI 185). Torturing Sartre’s words, we might say that
according to Schelling, as a mode of a living God, we are by this very necessity
of God’s nature condemned to be free. Beiser’s misreading of Schelling is all too
common, due to the almost default allegiance to a Kantian and Fichtean idea of
radical freedom that, in its Cartesian insistence on an almost gnostic-like
detachment from the natural world, reveals itself to be in fact the very antithesis
of Schelling’s conception of an organic freedom that, embedded in the fabric of
nature itself, frames his programmatic claim made in his Naturrecht (1796) that
life itself is the schema of freedom (SW 1/1, 249).
This claim demonstrates the degree to which Schelling invested our embodied
world with what he considered to be the divine presence of freedom. Consistent
with the philosophical theology of his upbringing, he maintained that our
conscious life is best understood through the same dynamic of self-manifestation
as that of God. Just after leaving the Stift, he asks in 1797 if he may borrow his
father’s dissertation on Leibniz’s theory of monads, written when Schelling Sr.
was a student in Tübingen under the supervision of Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–
1790), who, besides Wolff, was one of the most influential interpreters of
Leibniz’s philosophy, as well as a highly original thinker in his own right.3 In this
dissertation, with which the young Schelling was obviously quite familiar,
Schelling Sr. engaged Ploucquet’s own theory of monads, wherein the “Ich
(egoitas)” is a “self-manifestation (manifestatio sui),” which arises out of the
“reciprocal community (commercium)” of the Ich and the “Nicht-Ichheit” (“Non-
egoitas”).4 The significant dynamic at work here is that of our living self-
consciousness as the activity of a commercium, of a Wechselwirkung of an Ich
and a nicht-Ich, which in its incessant activity betrays the generative forces
offered through Plouquet’s idea of the divine self-manifestation.5 And it is
precisely this integrative dynamic that Schelling uses in the Naturrecht to argue
that the moral law and its “causality of freedom reveals itself through physical
causality” of living, self-conscious beings. The young Schelling pulls this off
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employing Kant’s own categories more consistently than their author, exploiting
Kant’s use of the same relational category and its logical form of disjunction to
resolve the antinomy of freedom and the reciprocal interaction that drives
organic life. Setting the noumenal and phenomenal into the same type of
interdependent feedback loop as that of an organic system’s part to whole,
Schelling takes as his starting point the only organic system where we are
identical with (p.207) the thing in itself, namely the self as a living being,
which, as the point of union between the intelligible and the sensual, “must unite
within itself autonomy and heteronomy” (SW 1/1, 248). That is, there must be a
form of causality that unites both of these in a phenomenon that is both relative
and absolute, obeys the laws of nature, and yet is also in principle, because of its
autonomous power, incapable of ever being exhaustively accounted for.
Schelling’s position here is clear: “This causality is life.—Life is autonomy in
appearance, is the schema of freedom, to the degree that it reveals itself in
nature” (SW 1/1, 249).
By integrating the causalities of freedom and necessity through an organic

causality of life, Schelling rejects the limits Kant places on our use of the
Bildungstrieb of nature’s nisus formativus, by refusing to accept Kant’s almost
dogmatic claim that the integrative point of the intelligible and sensible must
remain an “inexplicable” mystery, like the “supersensible substrate of
nature” (AA 5, ix, 194). Far from being an otherworldly transcendent mystery,
freedom is instead at work in varying degrees in the formative power of
organization that, as Schelling writes in the Weltseele, when applied to “a theory
of evolution” opens up a “path of possible explanation” that must be pursued
scientifically (SW 1/2, 529). To understand our world and experience through the
synchronic boundaries of a dual-plane metaphysics, with its accompanying
mysteries of compatibilism and preestablished harmonies, not only fails to do
justice to our experience, but places too great a limit on our investigation and
understanding of nature. Schelling’s alternative is a genetic method of
philosophy driven by the generative interplay of these opposing forces of an
expansive freedom and contractive necessity, understood as two parts of the
whole of our self-organizing world. Thus, paradoxically perhaps, since “I am
necessarily a living being” (SW 1/1, 249), I am necessarily free as long as I live.
The structural move Schelling makes here inverts Kant’s architectonic, setting
the dynamic categories of nature before those of mathematics. This inversion
brings with it a host of systematic consequences. Perhaps the most notable
makes the self-organizing dynamic of the organic foundational, and therewith
sets the inexponible category of Wechselwirkung and Gemeinschaft as the
primary category for understanding our world. The heart of this multivalent
intersection of opposing causal forces betrays a chaotic rhythm, whose
indeterminability finds each opposing yet complementary force superimposed in
the other, each entangled in dynamic interaction as both cause and effect of the
other. Kant recognizes this irreducibly nonmechanistic factor of reciprocal
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causation when, due to its resistance to being reduced to a series, he excludes

this inexponible concept from the synthesis of the unconditioned (KrV A414/
B441). Inverting Kant, Schelling begins with this inexponible causal dynamic in
which the linear relation of cause to effect is replaced by the reciprocal and thus
simultaneous relations of causes determined by their effects. In articulating the
(p.208) disjunctive dynamic of how the opposing forces of cause and effect
reciprocally determine one another, this category of self-organization suggests
an organic system that, unlike a mechanistic system, holds open, by necessity,
the possibility of its progressive development. This follows from his transcription
of Newton’s expansive and contractive forces into the Platonic pairing of the
limited and unlimited, a move that justifies positing the expansive force as
unlimited, thereby just slightly tipping the scale, providing the dynamic
asymmetry required to catalyze and sustain progression. Within this frame,
Schelling conceptualizes the possibility of new and original actions, resulting in
what he calls the “individualization of matter” and the “dynamic evolution” of
nature (SW 1/2, 520). Extended to encompass the system of our universe,
Schelling sees its powers of self-organization, its power to be “both cause and
effect of itself” (SW 1/2, 40), as indicating the possibility of articulating a
freedom that does not depend on the noumenal-phenomenal divide. Instead, due
to the stochastic dynamic of the iterative causality indicative of Wechselwirkung,
all of nature “manifests the appearance of freedom,” no matter how faint and
seemingly chaotic (SW 1/5, 527).
Animating Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles, Schelling argues that “[e]ven

within the same type, nature knows of a certain unmistakable freedom, which
maintains a certain leeway for differentiation...so that no individual is ever
absolutely equal to another” (SW 1/10, 378). By positing this low-level freedom
in nature as a type of chaotic force that propels the evolutionary differentiation
of life, Schelling generates the conceptual resources required to integrate
freedom and necessity into a unified account of nature, in which both intertwine
in an organic, and thus partially chaotic, process of self-differentiation that
generates increasingly complex iterative systems. At some point a threshold of
complexity is passed and human consciousness emerges, demonstrating how
“the dynamic interaction of opposed yet complementary forces [lies] not only at
the basis of matter, but of thinking as well” (SW 1/2, 360). Because of this,
because our cosmos is animated and sustained by this disjunctive identity of
oppositional forces, the principles that inform our thought are homologous with
the principles that animate our world:
These same principles are necessarily those of the sum total of nature and
thus ultimately of the All itself, and according to these [principles] we
would like to develop, as it were, symbolically in matter the entirety of the
inner driving power of the universe and the highest Grundsätze of
philosophy itself.
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(SW 1/2, 360)
These principles of which Schelling here writes are those that animate “the most
sublime science,” whose goal can only be “to present...the actuality, (p.209) the
presence, the living Da-sein of God in the entirety and particularity of all things,”
since as the power of life itself, “everything lives in him” (SW 1/2, 376).
Given this account of Schelling, and accepting his Naturphilosophie as the only
source for a systematic account of romantic naturalism, I would have to modify
Beiser’s claim that the romantics shared Spinoza’s position that “everything is
simply a mode of God” to read instead that “everything is animated by the
organizing principles of the divine life.” Consequently, Beiser’s claim that “God
acts from the necessity of his nature” asserts nothing more than God’s nature is
life, which, according to Schelling, is the first predicate attributable to him. This
is a position that not only deflates Beiser’s claim that the romantics sacrificed
their autonomy on the altar of naturalism, but more importantly, it is a new
position that informs a way of thinking an organic philosophy that moves beyond
the debilitating limits imposed by the dualism required by Fichte’s radical
freedom.
Refusing to begin with the certainty of the ego, Schelling begins with the
inexponible unity of life as an organic system, whose organizing principles
inform and animate its development. Given this interconnectedness of nature, of
matter and mind being driven by the same principles of growth, we become
faced with the prospect of what Schelling termed our conscientia, or
Mitwissenschaft with nature. Refusing to accept the terms of “the skeptical
problems that motivated Cartesian epistemology”—in Beiser’s words, problems
such as “how do we know that there is a nature or history beyond
consciousness?” (RI 132)–Schelling reframes modernity’s epistemological
obsessions in accordance with the reciprocal dynamic of self-organizing systems
and our status as an organ of knowing within this system. From this standpoint
he contends that we can explain why we are capable of knowing with “direct
certainty” that “there are things beyond us,” even though this knowledge “refers
to something quite different and opposed to us” (SW 1/3, 343). We are capable of
knowing that which shows itself to be other than we are because we are “of this
world,” having been created through the very same dynamic organization that
has brought our entire cosmos into being. What precedes and thus unifies
knowing subject and known object is this underlying order of organic nature that
bonds us with the phenomenal world in which we live. Our power to appreciate
“the unfathomable intentionality, the unbelievable naiveté of nature in the
achievement of its purposes,” points to “the view of a true inner history of
nature” in “whose formation humanity can look into as into that of a related
being” (SW 1/10, 378; SW 1/10, 381). Most clearly demonstrated by the works of
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the scientific and artistic genius, our function in the autoepistemic structure of
nature is that of an organ whereby nature comes to know herself.
From this embedded standpoint within creation Schelling’s critique of the

“dualism” that is a “necessary phenomenon of the modern world” becomes (p.
210) clear (SW 1/5, 273). Initiated by Descartes, formulated by Kant, and
perfected by Fichte, modernity’s subject denies the objective reality and intrinsic
value of nature, since as “a product of the I,” the world of nature becomes
nothing more than a “Gedankending” to be posited by the thinking subject
“when needed” (SW 1/5, 110). This devaluation of sensuous nature has its roots
in modernity’s promotion of the thinking subject to the rank of the absolute, in
an inflation of the cogito that leads to the deification of the human subject at the
subsequent cost of what Schelling presciently calls the “annihilation of nature”:
Descartes, who through the cogito ergo sum gave philosophy its first
orientation to subjectivity, and whose introduction of philosophy (in his
Meditations) is in fact identical with the later grounding of philosophy in
idealism, could not yet present the orientations entirely separated—
subjectivity and objectivity do not yet appear completely divided. But his
real intention, his true idea of God, the world, and the soul he articulated
more clearly in his physics than through his philosophy. In the
comprehensive spirit of Descartes, his philosophy permitted the
annihilation of nature, which the idealism of the above mentioned form
[Fichte’s] extols, just as truly and factually as it actually was in his physics.
(SW 1/5, 274)
No longer the primary reality of our being, nature becomes something

derivative, dependent for its being on the thinking subject. As the sole arbiter of
what is real in our world, the modern subject defines reality as the self-certainty
of the cogito, understood as its own reflective knowledge of self. Yet if what is
real and true can only be that which corresponds to this reflective self-certainty,
and can only be articulated through the predicates of discursive thought, then
the thinking of the unity of nature becomes impossible. The “living band” of a
transitive being, which as natura naturans connects humanity with nature, is
thereby dissolved into the discrete moments of logos, of the relata of subject and
predicate (SW 1/7, 100). Once this dissection has occurred, and we begin
philosophy with the certitude of the disembodied self, we find it impossible to
find the same quality of certitude in knowing the things of the embodied world;
an epistemological quandary that leads to questions that some still find
philosophically important, such as “how do we know that there is a nature
beyond our consciousness?” (RI 132).
Capturing the absurdities of solipsism with admirable precision, Schelling

argues that if one begins with the dualism of a Fichte, and accepts the
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disembodied cogito as determinative, then “all knowledge” derived from this

principle will remain trapped within an “insoluble circle” of its own fabrication,
with the result that the thinking subject, pressed up against the conceptual lens
of its own making, can only look out at the world of sensuous nature as if (p.
211) it, the cogito, “did not also belong to the world” (SW 1/6, 144). This was
precisely the point Schelling repeatedly attempted to get Fichte to understand in
their last exchange of letters. Briefly, Schelling begins with a “Subject = Object”
more original than Fichte’s philosophizing subject, writing that the opposition
between real and ideal does not lie in the self, “but in something higher,” namely
in an “objective...producing self” that “in this, its own producing, is itself
nothing other than nature” (HKA 3/1, 295).6 This is the organic unity of nature
that, in preceding the disjunctive interaction of the opposing powers of the real
(limiting) and the ideal (unlimited), is the organic root of our conscientia with
nature.7 Fichte could not accept that the powers of our cogito were
manifestations of nature’s power, insisting instead that Schelling, in arguing
such a position, was himself guilty of the worst sort of circular reasoning, since
any rational order or pattern we discern in nature has been put there by the
philosophizing subject. This was, however, a line of argument that proved
Schelling’s point that Fichte was himself trapped within an “insoluble circle” of
his own making, forever alienated from the world of sensuous nature as if it, his
cogito, “did not also belong to the world.” It was as if Fichte’s philosophy was so
wedded to the methodical order of the philosophizing subject’s own reflected
image that it dealt “with the world of lived experience just as a surgeon who
promises to cure your ailing leg by amputating it.”8 But even then, once
philosophy surgically removes the opaque firstness of real experience, it only
finds itself trapped within the prison of its own success, unable to break free to
become an engaged force in transforming the world.
Beyond the obvious, yet unfortunately too often overlooked fact that in
destroying nature we harm ourselves, we can see that implicit in Schelling’s
critique of Descartes and Fichte’s treatment of nature is the demand to extend
Kant’s kingdom of ends to all the kingdoms of nature. This follows clearly from
his critique of the alienated subject of modernity, who values the gifts of nature
only if they can be transformed into “beautiful houses and proper furniture” or
“tools and household goods,” since it is only then that “as a tool of his lust and
desire” that the world of nature takes on meaning and value (SW 1/7, 111, 114).
Cutting straight to the heart of modernity’s early capitalist ambitions, Schelling
demand that we stop exploiting nature by making it subservient to our
immediate “economic-teleological ends” as if it had no inherent value in itself
(SW 1/7, 17). Consistent with his contention that “the highest speculative
concepts” must always be “simultaneously the most profound ethical concepts,”
the making absolute of the knowing cogito initiates an inversion of the ego’s
relationship to the physical world it inhabits, whereby the ego claims the right to
remake the world in its own image (SW 2/3, 67). No longer subject to acts of
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The New Mythology
nature, the modern subject can, emboldened by humanity’s advances in the

experimental sciences, as Kant put it, “constrain” and “compel” nature to make
her subject to (p.212) its needs (KrV B xiii). Fichte announces such a course of
Beherrschung in his Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), declaring his intent to
“invade the external world,” where “I will be lord of Nature, and she shall be my
servant. I will influence her according to the measure of my capacity, but she
shall have no influence over me” (GA 1/6, 209f.). In Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift,
it is precisely this “exaltation of the self-will” that Schelling blames for
destroying “the divine measure and balance” of the “nexus of living forces” of
nature, which he argues sustain its continued health and productivity, flowing
“together into one God-filled world” (SW 1/7, 365; SW 1/2, 377). Because of this
sacred status, nature has inherent value for Schelling, resulting in his position
that humanity’s ordained role in creation is not one of subsumption and
domination, but of reciprocity and stewardship, in which we engage as “co-
poets” with this God-filled world, working together to create a culture capable of
sustaining the balanced growth and development of all forms of life.9
The course modernity has taken, with its exaltation of the self, Schelling
diagnoses in the Freiheitsschrift as an “evil” brought about “through a misuse of
freedom” (SW 1/7, 366). We are free to elevate and inflate the self, to dominate
nature and to make it serve humanity’s “economic-teleological ends”; indeed, we
are free to even “annihilate nature.” But we are also at liberty to refuse freedom
as Herrschaft, and instead to dethrone the self and return it to an integrated and
balanced relationship of reciprocity with nature’s nexus of living forces. Acting
on this decision would then aim at the productive unity of self and nature,
generating an understanding of freedom as the essence of life lived embedded in
and informed by the oppositional interplay of nature’s processes. Acting on this
decision we might remove the cogito’s self-imposed limitations that exclude not
only the other of nature, but also omit the more familiar other of other human
beings.
To do this is to begin to overcome our alienation from these other beings, and in
this important sense Schelling claims that the overcoming of these limits
through the realization of the unity and mutual dependency of self and nature
will generate a knowledge that is, in fact, redemptive. Thus does “the most
sublime science” of his Naturphilosophie, in seeking “to present the actuality” of
“the living Da-sein of God in...all things” (SW 1/2, 76), seek to create an organic
frame for conceptualizing and realizing the redemptive harmony of the en kai
pan. The realization of this harmony, however, cannot be achieved by the parsing
of logical possibilities in the parlor-game manner a Descartes or Hume doubts
the existence of the world. It can only be grasped in an emphatic and
experiential act of knowing, in which what comes to be known is of such
importance that one could never be “indifferent (gleichgültig)” about it (SW 2/3,
26). Schelling injects an emotive force into his project, since if certainty is
superseded by unity, freedom must then trump logical necessity, with the result
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The New Mythology
(p.213) that a motive cause is now required to channel freedom’s power. As his
organic strategy seeks to integrate the opposing realities of the intelligible and
sensible, it follows that reason itself must reconcile with emotion, so that that
which grounds and animates philosophy once again becomes infused with
affective love of its desired wisdom.
The soteriological dimension emerges with the act of realizing our conscientia or
Mitwissenschaft with nature, engendering an identification of our subject world
with the object world of phenomenal being. This realized identity of human
consciousness with nature—in which identity signifies the unity of the reciprocal
interplay of our consciousness and nature—generates an unmediated
understanding that can never be the result of a deliberative argumentation (SW
1/8, 200; SW 1/9, 221). It is instead the inescapable beginning of Schelling’s
organic way of thinking that Fichte could never grasp, since it situates the
beginnings of our conscious freedom in an unconscious substrate of sensuous
nature, whose necessary force limits and thus remains opaque to the logos of
discursivity—an epistemological ground zero about which Schelling cites
Aristotle’s “fitting words” that “the starting point of thinking is not thinking, but
something stronger than thinking” (SW 1/2, 217). This starting point discloses
itself in the absolute of a living unity whose “symbolic presentation” is that
towards which “every true philosophy strives, which is objective in religion, an
eternal source of new intuitions, and a universal Typus of everything that is to
become, in which human activity strives to express and cultivate the harmony of
the universe” (SW 1/5, 115).
And with this, we begin to grasp Beiser’s unease with the heretical nature of
Schelling’s philosophy, since it aspires not just to a theoretical knowing, but,
more importantly, to the act of realizing a unity with nature, which as the
manifestation of divine, means that Schelling’s philosophy itself lives from what
“is objective in religion,” although “it is not in its principle religion.” Rejecting
“a knowledge of the absolute that emerges from philosophy as a result” (SW 1/5,
116), he instead demands the experience of this absolute as a precondition for
expressing and cultivating an understanding of this unitive source through the
discipline of philosophy. To do this, however, philosophy must become open to
the other of logos, with its obscure language of mythos that speaks with the
voice of nature as it “sensualizes truth” (Plitt 1, 37). This is a possibility that can
only be entertained, however, if unity becomes the telos of philosophy, thereby
challenging it to harness the disclosive powers of logos and mythos. Set into
opposition, mythos binds together the discrete moments of logos, functioning
organically as the inexponible whole that integrates and thus makes possible the
unending expression of the logoi, generating the transformative power to further
the development of our world. The loss of harmony and balance toward either
extreme, however, leads to stagnation and regression, be it the result of (p.214)
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The New Mythology
the destructive fatalism of religious or scientific zealots or the compulsive

skepticism of the tenured elite.
And it is precisely the absence of such a transformative myth that motivated the
romantics then, and Manfred Frank today, to search for a way to provide a
normative sanction to legitimize and orientate our social order—the central idea
and concern that motivated his series on the topic of The New Mythology. In his
lectures Der kommende Gott (1982), Frank argued that the contemporary
problem of the estrangement of state from society results not only in the
legitimacy of the state being undermined, but also in a general societal malaise
and political fatalism.10 Both of these concerns are symptoms of a deeper
metaphysical challenge that has faced the West throughout the past century,
namely how are we to sanction and thereby legitimize our social institutions and
practices in the shadow of God’s death. Moreover, as Frank has recently made
clear, with the ever expanding reach of the neurosciences, last century’s
philosophical “death of the subject” may just be followed by this century’s
scientific reduction of consciousness itself to neurobiological brain states. The
moral, legal, and societal consequences of this are almost unimaginable.
Dancing around ways these challenges might be met, he points out in his Kaltes
Herz unendliche Fahrt (1989) that “every myth and every religious worldview—
whether Christian or not—protects the supreme moral convictions that ground
the consensus of its members through the act of sanction.”11 Sanctio, however,
not in the instrumental sense of a Rorty-like pragmatic hypothesis that we could
change tomorrow, but in the profoundly numinous sense of a normative principle
worth dying for—what Frank calls “an absolute value” and “justification” that
can motivate and inspire people to risk their own self-interest for a higher
cause.12 Remaining true to the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy, the only
support Frank can offer for such “quasi-religious justificatory claims” are
counterfactual positions that speak only to that which is not yet, das
Seinsollende. This is what he calls a “quasi-religious dowry” of the
counterfactual, a practical hypothesis that is the necessary presupposition for
moral action (KM 99). Such “practical beliefs,” however, are not “the result of an
argumentative discourse,” since what rational discourse decides is always
fallible (KM 101). And it is in this sense that Frank appears quite close to the
position of the romantics who first diagnosed this problem, and whose
prescribed cure could only be communicated in religious terms and symbols,
specifically the idea of a new myth for a new religion.
The most captivating prescription to address this ill is the so-called “Oldest
System Program of German Idealism” (1797), which announces the advent of a
new religion whose text is nature, which, as living, provides the schema of our
freedom.13 Further developing his earlier writings in which he posits myth as the
“schematism of nature” (SW 1/1, 472), Schelling posits a new mythology of
nature, which in this new religion will usher in an era of harmony through (p.
215) the realization of the divine in nature. Connecting this new mythology with
Page 13 of 17
The New Mythology
his Naturphilosphie, he argues in his Philosophy of Art (1803) that “in the
philosophy of nature...the first, distant foundation has been laid for that future
symbolism and mythology” (SW 1/5, 449). The content of this symbolism and
mythology is “the world of ideas,” which, however, “are not objects of
speculation but of action, and to that extent objects of a future
experience...something that should be realized in reality” (SW 1/5, 451; SW 1/1,
465). Such ideas are rather straightforward when Schelling considers Kant’s
regulative ideas of soul, world (freedom), and God, all of which aim at the
unconditioned unity of human knowledge and action, but a quite different
challenge arises when he widens his kingdom of ends to include all of nature.
While acknowledging the problematic challenge of speaking to this possible
future, Schelling suggests that this “new religion” will announce itself “in the
rebirth of nature as the symbol of eternal unity,” since “in nature the life of the
newly arisen deity” will manifest itself (SW 1/5, 120). Although Schelling’s
substantive meaning here is far from clear, his words suggest Friedrich
Christoph Oetinger’s understanding of creation as the suffering body of Christ,
whose “annihilation” at the hands of our “economic-teleologic” desires echoes
Jesus’s crucifixion on the cross. In a more speculative sense, we can see in
Schelling’s use of the future an echo of his idea that the tense of the absolute
itself is the future—an understanding of a future that is not predetermined by its
past, but rather offers unseen possibilities and thus an open-ended orientation to
what should be (das Seinsollende). Embedded in the weaving of freedom into the
very fabric of living nature, Schelling’s teleology departs from the hindcasting of
the Aristotelian model in which the telos is already prefigured in its formal
cause. To say that futurity is the tense of the absolute is to acknowledge that the
living absolute is, just like every self-organizing system, incessantly engaged in
the process of stochastic development and further self-differentiation. As
Schelling’s account of creation in his early text on the Timaeus makes clear, it is
precisely this incessant creating that is complete, and completeness in this
process speaks to the possibility of the future as the arena in which what should
be is realized as what is.14 And it is in this sense that this new teleology might
support what I would like to call utopian thinking.
The denigration of the utopian vision in our own society illustrates the values of
our ruling order, which embraces not only the concrete and positivistic
restrictions of the empirically real and politically powerful, but even the
intelligentsia of the academy. Opting for the risk-free embrace of fragmentation
in the face of the alleged totalizing dangers of Grand Narratives, the very
scholars who should know better opt to repeat the mistakes of the last
generation of intellectuals who faced the growing threats of political fascism. I
am thinking of the criticism of nonaction Ernst Bloch directed at the Left of the
Weimar years, which he attributed to their inability to understand and take
seriously (p.216) both the power of people’s utopian longing and the power of
myth to satisfy and direct that longing. Bloch’s argument was that if the Nazis,
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The New Mythology
however temporarily and deceptively, fulfilled real needs, there is no point in

trying to conjure these needs away.15 Since nature abhors a vacuum, if the
contemporary Left does nothing on this level of meaning, then corporate
interests and their parties become the only voices speaking to people’s need for
the mythic, as in the myth of Globalization or American exceptionalism.
Determined as they are to reinforce current structures of power, such mythic
narratives prove regressive as they retreat into the imaginary world of a golden
era that never was.
To counter this, I suggest the idea of a utopian imperative that demands our
world be measured according to principles and ideals, rather than utility and
profits. It demands the cultivation of a “utopian conscience” that realizes the
value and necessity of imagination and yes, even illusion, in creating a future
different than our past by employing the power of the imagination to critically
reject an inhibiting reality in favor of a vision of what could become a reality.16
And indeed it is this dimension of irreality in the utopian vision that has a
subversive and emancipatory power, and it is this anticipatory illumination of a
reality not yet made real that is a fundamental category of a utopian
philosophizing that appeared in the first years of romanticism.17 And it is
precisely this subversive power of utopian thinking that makes romanticism so
important. Not only do we envy their learning and culture, we envy their
strength and courage in daring to create alternative futures and to imagine a
unified and integrated world of man and nature, of science and Bildung. The
example of Schelling and his suggestive sketch of a “mythology of nature” would
serve us well as a foil for considering how a utopian imagination might not only
integrate religion and humanism, but also envision how symbols of a suffering
god may be replaced by symbols of a suffering world—a challenge an orthodox
Kantian might reject, but a challenge nonetheless to utopian fantasy to imagine
not just a kingdom of ends that admits only rational beings, but a kingdom of
ends that encompasses all of creation.
Notes:
(1) . Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002) (hereafter RI), 151.
(2) . Manfred Frank, Ulrich Schnabel, and Thomas Assheuer, “Ein Gespräch mit
dem Tübinger Philosophen Manfred Frank über die Illusionen der Hirnforschung
und ihre zweifelhaften politischen Folgen,” Die Zeit, August 29, 2009. http://
www.zeit.de/2009/36/Hirnforschung.
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The New Mythology
(3) . Letter of September 4, 1797, in which he also asks for further works of
Ploucquet to aid his work on his Von der Weltseele: eine Hypothese der höheren
Physik (1798). Aus Schellings Leben, in Briefen, ed. G. L. Plitt, 3 vols. (Leipzig:
Herzel, 1869–70) (hereafter Plitt), vol. 1, 205ff.
(4) . Hanns-Peter Neumann and Franz Michael, eds., “Joseph Friedrich

Schellings Dissertatio philosophica de simplicibus et eorum diversis speciebus
von 1758. Einführung, Text und Übersetzung,” in Der Monadenbegriff zwischen
Spätrenaissance und Aufklärung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 362. See his
introduction to Ploucquet in the same work, 226.
(5) . Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–82), an older colleague of Schelling Sr.,

insisted that the principle of freedom with all of its consequences extended
throughout the natural world, defending the nonmechanical and nonrational
forces that in engendering and sustaining life demonstrated their divine and
sacred status. The principle of sufficient reason was not a universal law of our
world, particularly when set in contrast to the many evils of this world. Perhaps
the Principio rationis sufficientis obtained in the world of made things, but it
failed to exhaustively explain the workings and purpose of life’s multifarious
systems. See Friedmann Stengel, “Theosophie in der Aufklarung,” in
Offenbarung und Episteme: Zur europäischen Wirkung Jakob Böhmes im 17. und
18. Jahrhundert, ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann and Friedrich Vollhardt (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 2012), 513–48.
(6) . Letter to Fichte, November 11, 1800.
(7) . “Poured from the source of things and the same as the source, the human
soul has a co-knowledge (Mitwissenschaft) of creation” (SW 1/8, 200).
(8) . F. W. J. Schelling, System der Weltalter: Münchener Vorlesung 1827/28 in

einer Nachschrift von Ernst von Lasaulux, ed. Siegbert Peetz (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1990), 92.
(9) . Novalis supplies a similar account in 1800 when he writes, “We will
understand the world when we understand ourselves, since we and it are
integrated halves. Children of god, divine seeds are we. One day we will be what
our father is” (NS 2, 548).
(10) . Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue
Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 11.
(11) . Manfred Frank, Kaltes Herz unendliche Fahrt (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1989), 53.
(12) . Manfred Frank, Conditio moderna (hereafter KM) (Stuttgart: Reclam,

1993), 94.
Page 16 of 17
The New Mythology
(13) . “The So-Called ‘Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’ (1796),”

translated by Andrew Bowie, in Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990), Appendix A, 266f. Contrary to Pöggler (see
Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des
deutschen Idealismus,” Hegel-Studien 4 [1969]: 17–32) and others who see in
this document both the penmanship and brilliance of Hegel, it is clear to those
familiar with Hegel and Schelling—most notably Franz Rosenzweig, who
discovered the text—that only the latter could have developed the ideas
expressed in this fragmentary manifesto. Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften
(Berlin: Schocken, 1937), 230–77. Werner Beierwaltes makes a similar argument
when he notes that “for Schelling the essential relation of philosophy and
theology has, since his beginning in the Systemprogramme, never been
questionable: true philosophy is simultaneously theology or philosophical
religion.” Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1972), 68.
(14) . But complete in this process of development does not mean the telos of
this process is completely determined, a situation that for Schelling could only
generate “complete boredom” (SW 1/1, 472).
(15) . Ernst Bloch, Über Ungleichzeitigkeit, Provinz und Propaganda. Ein

Gespräch mit Rainer Traub und Harald Wieser, in Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 197ff.
(16) . Ibid., 14.
(17) . Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes
and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), xxxv.
Page 17 of 17
Mathematics, Computation, Language, and Poetry

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
Mathematics, Computation, Language, and

Poetry
The Novalis Paradox
Paul Redding
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0013

Recent scholarship has helped to demythologize the life and work of Georg
Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, who, as the poet “Novalis,” had come to
instantiate the nineteenth-century’s stereotype of the romantic poet. Among
Hardenberg’s interests that seem to sit uneasily with this literary persona were
his interests in science and mathematics, and especially in the idea, traceable
back to Leibniz, of a mathematically based computational approach to language.
Hardenberg’s approach to language, and his attempts to bring mathematics to
bear on poetry, is examined in relation to debates that developed late in the
eighteenth century over the relation of language to thought—debates that share
many features with contemporary ones in this area.
Keywords: Novalis, mathematics, computationalism, poetry, language
Once, Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under the nom de
plume “Novalis,” had provided a handy stereotype for the nineteenth-century
“romantic” poet—mystical, otherworldly, and fixated on death. Such a picture
was largely constructed after his own death at the age of twenty-eight around a
few episodes of his life, especially the death, at the age of fifteen, of his fiancée,
Sophie von Kühn, an event reflected in his perhaps most well-known work,
Hymns to the Night.1 More recently, however, the complexity of the actual
person has come to disrupt this nineteenth-century myth, and the interests,
Page 1 of 19
pursuits, and achievements of the hitherto “unknown Novalis” have come to be

known and appreciated.2 Among these are those interests shared with others in
the circle of so-called Jena romantics—crucially, an intense involvement with the
demanding philosophy of Immanuel Kant, occasioned by the influence of Karl
Leonard Reinhold (1757–1823), the occupant of the chair of critical philosophy
at the University of Jena between 1787 and 1794, and after that, with the
philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reinhold’s more prestigious successor at
Jena.
Hardenberg had first encountered Reinhold after arriving at University of Jena

in 1790 to study law, and although he moved from Jena to the University of
Leipzig in 1792 (and then to Wittenberg, to finish his legal education) he
remained connected to the philosophical culture of Jena via personal
connections such as that to Friedrich Schlegel. Beyond these philosophical
interests, (p.222) however, and to some extent separating him from the more
literary foci of other members of the circle, were Hardenberg’s substantial
interests in the sciences of his day, especially those developed during the formal
scientific training he came to acquire in 1797 and 1798 at the Freiburg Mining
Academy. These scientific studies themselves related to the practical dimensions
of Hardenberg’s short adult life, given that they were meant to equip him for a
managerial position at the Saxon salt mines in Weissenfels, and yet they also fed
into his philosophical interests, as can be seen in his unfinished notebook entries
for a “romantic encyclopedia” written in late 1798.
Even when traditional stereotypes of the “romantic” have been corrected by the
actual activities of the Jena romantics, there are still aspects of Hardenberg’s
interests and pursuits that can seem hard to reconcile with his status as a
romantic, however. Broadly, the Jena romantics had taken Kant’s critique of
metaphysics as a cue to raise the stakes of areas of culture such as religion and
art whose cognitive status had in many ways been threatened in modernity by,
among other factors, the rise of the mathematized natural sciences. Following
Kant they took it that metaphysics could not give us a theoretically determinate
picture of the way the world was “in itself,” but the human longing for this could
be satisfied to some degree by the indirect presentations of the world and our
place in it achievable within the arts and religion. This did not mean that the
romantics had rejected the natural sciences, and distinctly “romantic”
approaches to the sciences developed well into the first half of the nineteenth
century, especially in relation to the emerging sciences of the living world. But
romanticism, nevertheless, is usually understood as representing a reaction
against the “disenchantment” of nature—that “reduction of circumambient
nature to a mechanical system whose lineaments are provided by the immaterial
forms of mathematical physics”—and part of the attraction of the “life sciences”
consisted in the fact that they seemed to demand explanatory principles not
reducible to mechanical ones.3 However, seemingly at odds with this
anti-mechanistic tenor to romanticism in general was Hardenberg’s interest in
Page 2 of 19
the project of an ars combinatoria,4 the project of a proto-computationalist

approach to thought stretching back beyond Leibniz, but associated in Leibniz in
particular with the idea of a universal language of science whose component
concepts were able to be manipulated in mechanical ways.5
Leibniz’s speculative combinatorial or computationalist approach to the

workings of the mind, inspired by Hobbes,6 is now commonly regarded as
anticipating a number of distinctive scientific movements that started in the
nineteenth century and gained momentum in the twentieth: the developments of
symbolic logic and the formalization of proofs in mathematics and, in more
practical domains, the foundational principles of contemporary disciplines of
computer science and information theory and artificial intelligence (p.223) and
robotics.7 Leibniz believed “in advance of Hilbert, that a consistent system of
logic, language, and mathematics could be formalized by means of an alphabet
of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to mechanical rules” and
envisaged “a digital computer in which binary numbers were represented by
spherical tokens, governed by gates under mechanical control.”8 In
Hardenberg’s hands, this combinatorial approach was viewed in a very different
light as a means for the “poetization” and “romanticization” of science itself.
Hardenberg’s envisaged “machine” is to be played like a musical instrument:
“Combinatorial analysis leads to numerical imaginings—and teaches the art of
the composition of numbers—mathematical basso continuo (Pythagoras.
Leibniz). Language is a musical instrument of ideas.”9 Indeed, Hardenberg is
now associated with approaches to language and, more generally, semiotics that
seem to anticipate broadly “structuralist” and “poststructuralist” approaches of
recent times,10 approaches that seem to be anathema to computationalist
approaches to the mind and the generally “representationalist” assumptions on
which they draw. How then are we to square these two opposing aspects of the
object of his interest?
12.1. Logic, Mathematics, and the Idea of Mechanized Thought in the

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
In work that stretched from his early dissertation written at the age of nineteen,
Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria (1666), to his most mature thought, Leibniz
had pursued ideas for a project for the application of mathematics to syllogistic
logic, and thereby to the forms of discursive arguments whose forms syllogistic
logic attempted to codify.11 The calculus of concepts that Leibniz developed from
this starting point is now seen as anticipating many of the features of the mid-
nineteenth-century attempt to algebraicize logic found in the work of Boole and
others, approaches that were crucial to the later development of information
theory and ideas of “machine intelligence.”12 More than this, however, part of
Leibniz’s project was the construction of a “universal characteristic,” the
conception of which Gottlob Frege was to acknowledge as a precursor to his
own “concept script” or Begriffsschrift, announced in 1879. Leibniz’s project had
been a complex one involving diverse aspects of his metaphysics and linking
Page 3 of 19
logic to an epistemology and a philosophy of mind, and at its heart was the idea
of an ars combinatoria or universal characteristic—an “alphabet of human
thoughts.”13 Somewhat like the way in which the idea of “analysis” functioned in
the early years of analytic philosophy, the primitive concepts of Leibniz’s
universal characteristic were regarded as the ultimate termini of a process of
analysis in which “clear and confused” ideas could be decomposed into (p.224)
their “clear and distinct” elements, represented in the universal characteristic
in a way that showed their essential logical connections. Such analytic and
synthetic transitions were determined by strictly definable mathematical rules of
combination and transformation, resulting in a hierarchy of forms from simple to
compound concepts to propositions and the inferential relations linking them. In
this way, an inventory of all knowledge would eventually be able to be produced
—a “rational encyclopedia.”
The romantics were notoriously critical of system building, and of course it is

difficult to appreciate the degree to which the envisaged systematicity of
Leibniz’s project could have been appreciated by anyone in the later eighteenth
century, let alone a young polymath such as Hardenberg. Nevertheless, it is easy
to exaggerate the invisibility of such issues associated with Leibniz’s logic prior
to the mid-nineteenth century. Hardenberg seems to have been introduced to the
basics of Leibniz’s plan by the work of the Leipzig philologist turned
mathematician Carl Friedrich Hindenburg.14 In fact, despite the unavailability of
much of Leibniz’s own technical papers, the basic dimensions and purport of this
attempt to apply algebra to logic and language in general had been discussed
within German scientific circles from about the mid-eighteenth century,
especially following the publication of Johann Heinrich Lambert’s Neues
Organon (a work owned by Hardenberg) in which Lambert attempted to develop
a Leibniz-inspired universal characteristic, applying it to contemporary science.
Moreover, the publication of Neues Organon had been followed by a public
dispute between Lambert and the Tübingen logician Gottfried Ploucquet over
the question of precedence in the development of Leibniz’s approach (Risser
1770, 277). The figure of Ploucquet is of particular relevance for the
development of idealism and romanticism in the 1790s, as Hegel, Schelling, and
Hölderlin had all become familiar with his logic and metaphysics while
seminarians at the Tübingen Stift (Frank 2009, 36).
Thus in volume 2 of his Science of Logic, Subjective Logic, Hegel sets out the
key features of the Leibniz-Ploucquet approach to the structure of judgment that
allow the application of algebra to logic, associating it with the reduction of
thought to a mechanical process.15 Hegel’s attitude to the Leibniz-Ploucquet
mathematization of logic was critical but nuanced. The “mathematical
syllogisms” represents the point of collapse of the traditional Aristotelian
syllogistic, which is brought down under the negative effects of its own dialectic.
As such this mathematical logic played a necessary but purely negative role in
the dialectic of logical thought generally. The mathematical syllogism is a stage
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through which logical thought must progress, but taken as anything other than a
purely negative moment of this progression and regarded as itself a model of
thought, the mathematical syllogism was an absurdity, and had in turn to be
overcome in the characteristic move of the “negation of negation.”16
(p.225) Despite his own criticisms of romanticism, Hegel’s criticisms of

Leibniz’s and Ploucquet’s project for the mathematization of thought here are, in
many ways, typical of what might be expected of a romantic. For Hegel, logic is
meant to capture the dynamics of spirit or cognitive life, but in the
characteristica universalis and the combinatorial approach to syllogisms, all we
find are the dead remains of living thought.17 In ways analogous to Hegel,
Hardenberg seems to have recognized the application of a Leibniz-inspired
combinatoric as integral to the higher-level romantic “poeticization” of the
world, and not simply antithetical to it. Thus he seems to have thought that the
consistent application of the combinatorial approach would thereby serve to
undermine the sorts of assumptions more conventionally associated with it. To
understand Hardenberg’s thinking here we need to understand both the broader
context within which these ideas were being received in the late eighteenth
century as well as the fate that the plan to mathematize thought must have had
for Hardenberg given the fact of his basically Kantian sympathies in philosophy.
12.2. The Context for Hardenberg’s Engagement with Leibniz’s

Combinatorialism
The impact of Kant’s philosophy in Jena from the late 1780s through the 1790s
had been roughly paralleled by the growth of interest in the empirical studies of
language with the attendant philosophical reflection that had constituted what
has been described as a German “linguistic turn.”18 The issue of the significance
of language for thought in relation to Kant’s philosophy had first appeared in the
context of J. G. Hamann’s “Metacritique of the Critique of the Purism of Reason”
of 1784, where Hamann referred to language as “the first, last, and only
organon and criterion of reason.”19 The “language” in question here was not
meant to refer to the type of speculative universal languages theorized about in
the seventeenth century, or some inner “language of thought” found in medieval
logical theorists such as Ockham. For Hamann, “language” is only found as the
plurality of particular and diverse natural languages found operating within
actual living communities. With this appeal to social and linguistic particularism,
Hamann intended to undermine the universalism of Kant’s conception of the
“understanding” that was supposedly universal and necessary. In fact, the
general theme of the role of language in human cognition had been popularized
earlier by a former student of both Hamann and Kant, J. G. Herder, in his 1772
Treatise on the Origin of Language.20 More generally, the idea of a “semiotic,”
already mentioned in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had
been made the object of a thematic study by Lambert in Neues Organon, and
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had been developed in works such as Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s Semiological

Investigations, another work known to Hardenberg.21
(p.226) This question of the link of language or semiology more generally to

thought had paired naturally to the theme of Reinhold’s major revision of Kant in
the context of his attempts to develop critical philosophy—the unsystematic and
untheorized concept of “representation” (Vorstellung) that Kant seemed to
simply presuppose in his Critiques. Reinhold’s central “proposition of
consciousness” stated that “in consciousness representation is distinguished
through the subject from both object and subject and is referred to both.”22 In
turn, Reinhold’s representational account of conscious was attacked by the
Humean skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze, writing under the name “Aenesidemus,”
who questioned how such a representation could be known to refer to the
“object” to which it was supposed to refer, precipitating Fichte’s now famous
review.23 In this, Fichte criticized Reinhold’s uniformly representationalist
account of consciousness that made his account open to Schulz’s criticism,
making the subject’s own consciousness of itself a type of direct rather than
representational affair.
Among the romantics, the nature of language was theorized at a high level of
abstraction in the hermeneutic project associated with the practice of
translation by Friedrich Schleiermacher, and an explicit attempt at a Kantian
linguistics applied to the grammars of actual language was found in the work of
Wilhelm von Humboldt.24 Kant himself had suggested the analogy between the
architectonic of the understanding and the grammar of a language,25 although
he had refrained from identifying the two. In this context it is natural that older
conceptions of a language of thought as found in Leibniz and others would be
revived, and from such a perspective the crucial question to be answered
becomes whether the language in which one thinks is, following Hamann (and,
perhaps, the later Wittgenstein), one’s particular language or, following
Humboldt (and, perhaps, Chomsky), some type of universal language implicit
within each particular language. But Hardenberg, I will argue, undercut the
assumption on which this dichotomy is based, the assumption that the mind is
restricted to the processes of any internalized language itself. When talk of
“mental representation” becomes mixed with that of linguistic representation
Hardenberg avoids the Hamann-Humboldt dichotomy by denying the equation of
mental content and linguistic sign, in a way that undermines the traditional view
that linguistic signs somehow “express” a determinate conceptual psychological
content. While for Hardenberg, traditional talk of inner concepts grasped
without the capacity for use of linguistic signs is refused, this does not imply that
thought itself was considered to be a type of inner speaking.
In his Fichte Studies, composed 1795–1796, Hardenberg introduces some

initially confusing, but, I suggest, ultimately enlightening distinctions in relation
to the nature of representations (Vorstellungen). One the one hand there is the
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material (Stoff) that is the substrate of the representation (Vorstellung) itself,

but this must be distinguished from the matter (Materie) of “intuition” (p.227)
(Anschauung).26 This is immediately confusing because “intuition” is, in Kant’s
account, a kind of representation itself—a mental representation, the immediacy
and singularity of which distinguishes it from the other relevant kind of mental
representation, concept. But we might start here by thinking of “representation”
for Hardenberg as referring primarily to an “external” representation, such as a
word—an equation that seems justified by Hardenberg’s other talk of
“representation” in a explicitly linguistic context.27 Reading in this way we can
see Hardenberg as bringing into focus issues that have become thematic in
various areas of inquiry in recent times.
External representations, such as words or, say, pictures, will count as

representations because they have some kind of representational “content.” A
word “chair” will thus be thought to refer to worldly things, chairs, and often
thought to so refer because it will be used to express some mental content, a
concept, say (in this case, the concept “chair”) that will itself refer to worldly
entities (actual chairs).28 This is a view found in Aristotle’s On Interpretation,
and has been referred to by Tyler Burge as the “traditional view.”29 But clearly,
external representations such as words or pictures have properties that are not
necessarily connected with the objects to which they refer or to the concepts
that they express. The word type “chair” rhymes with that of “pear” although
chairs and pears may have nothing particularly distinctive in common. This point
is often made in terms of the idea that the meanings of words are
“conventional.” Sometimes this point is expressed in terms of the idea that such
representations are not intrinsically representational, or that they can be
individuated by properties other than their intentional or representational
properties. And this brings into focus the peculiarities of the assumed mental
contents involved, which, on the traditional view, are thought to be intrinsically
representational, and so as having no properties other than their referential
ones.30 Aquinas had in this way drawn on this principle in an argument for the
incorporeal nature of the soul with the claim that “whatever knows certain
things cannot have any of them in its own nature; because that which is in it
naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else.”31 That is, the mind
cannot have properties like the properties of the particular things it knows, as
this would interfere with its capacity for general knowledge.
12.3. Poetry and Linguistic Computationalism

It will not be surprising that a poet might take an interest in such
nonrepresentational properties of words, such as those that allow them to carry
the rhythms and rhymes that distinguish poetry as a form of speech.32 If we then
take Hardenberg’s “material” to refer to such properties of external
representations (p.228) like word tokens, and take the “matter” of perceptual
states (“intuitions”) as their actual intentional content, then it seems
uncontroversially true that the “materials” of such representations are distinct
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from the “matter” of that to which they refer. That the word “chair” resembles
the word “pear” will be part of its material, and nothing like this resemblance is
found between the concepts or their worldly extensions. But similarly, these
nonrepresentational properties of words are going to be relevant to a
“combinatory” or “computationalist” approach to language, as the types of
“combinations and permutations” intended are meant to be applied mechanically
to “uninterpreted” symbols. We can see how the interests of the poet and the
computationalist might converge on this point, and a point of convergence can
indeed be found in the strange case of the combinatorial poetics of Erycius
Puteanus, a seventeenth-century humanist whose generation of multiple verses
to the Virgin Mary from a single eight-word poem came to the attention of
Leibniz and other theorists of mathematics and language.
An eight-word, one-line Latin hexameter—“Tot tibi sund doles, Virgo quot sidera
caelo (Thou has as many virtues, O Virgin, as there are starts in heaven)”—
published in 1615 by the Jesuit Bernard Bauhuis formed the base from which
Puteanus generated 1, 022 verse permutations (this number thought to be the
actual number of stars in the firmament) in a work published two years later.33
The number of possible permutations of the eight words is 40, 320 (the number 8
factorial) but of course not all of these permutations preserve the poem’s meter,
and various attempts were made by mathematicians during the seventeenth
century to exceed Puteanus’s number. The poem had been discussed in John
Wallis’s Tractatus de Algebra, and, although Wallis had not given a number for
the possible hexametric permutations, one reviewer of that work had suggested
2, 580. This reviewer is thought to have been Leibniz, who had discussed this
and other examples of such “proteus verses” in Dissertatio de Arte
Combinatoria.34 Leibniz here, however, gave no indication of how this number
had been estimated, and the issue was later taken up by Jacob Bernoulli, who
estimated the number at 3, 312 and showed how this number could be arrived at
from the classical laws governing the prosodic structure of hexametric verse.35
The problem of finding the principles for the generation of such proteus verses
represents a clear example of the search for a “syntactic engine” that can
generate an output of well-formed sentences according to entirely syntactic
laws. Here the relevant properties of the units are not their semantic ones, but
those nonsemantic ones that determine whether or not the “output” will scan in
the appropriate way. The convergence of computational and poetic principles
here is not coincidental.
Hardenberg clearly takes the mathematical-combinatorialist account of

language seriously, and draws the conclusion that qua language its elements (p.
229) cannot be regarded as “expressing” a type of determinate mental content,
as is seen in the 1798 fragment “Monologue.” “Speaking and writing is a crazy
state of affairs really; true conversation is just a game with words. It is amazing,
the absurd error people make of imagining they are speaking for the sake of
things; no one knows the essential thing about language, that it is concerned
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only with itself....If it were only possible to make people understand that it is the
same with language as it is with mathematical formulae—they constitute a world
in itself—their play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own
marvelous nature.”36 It is this, seemingly “postmodern” aspect of Hardenberg’s
approach that denies some extralinguistic referent that is apparent in his Fichte
Studies, especially in relation to his criticism of Fichte’s account of the “I.”
In Kant, the concept “I” had been thought as a special type of concept that
captures the “transcendental unity of apperception.” It is a representation that
in the form of “I think” accompanies all of my representations, and that is
ultimately responsible for their unification into representations of a single
world.37 But the exact status of representations like this, Reinhold complained,
had never been clearly spelled out in Kant. Reinhold, as we have seen, treated
such mental “representations” as standing in a certain relation to both the
subject and the object of consciousness. Schulze (Aenesidemus) had interpreted
“representation” as referring to something like a sign or image—a typical
external representation that can be individuated without appeal to its
representational content. The skeptical question could then be put: how do we
know that such representations refer to any objects in the external world? As
Burge points out, this question cannot be posed in the “traditional view” as there
mental representations have no extrarepresentational properties that would
allow them to be individuated so that this question could be asked.38 Fichte’s
response to Schulz was then to reassert the traditional idea of the transparency
of a concept, at least for the case of the “I.” A thinker can recognize her own
thoughts as her own directly without any need for some intervening “sign.” Self-
consciousness does not depend on one’s ability to represent oneself with the sign
“I.” But this is just the view that Hardenberg challenges in his Fichte Studies.
Hardenberg’s notes here are nothing more than that, but the general drift of the
thought is the thesis that all “signifieds” of signs, the mental contents expressed
in signs, are, contrary to the traditional view, dependent for their identities on
the signs expressing them. But at the same time, the signs themselves, it would
seem, are identifiable as the signs they are only in that they express a mental
content: “The relationship of the sign to the signified. Both are in different
spheres that can mutually determine each another.”39 Given that Hardenberg’s
“sign” effectively translates what Ferdinand de Saussure was to later call
“signifier,” Hardenberg’s picture here approaches Saussure’s complex holistic
and differential account of language where differences among signifiers (p.230)
and differences among signifieds determine each other, ruling out the idea of
words expressing “concepts” as understood in the “traditional view.”40 Applied
to Fichte’s account of self-consciousness, this suggests that a being could only
be determinately conscious of itself to the extent that it could expresses itself
with the token “I,” suggesting that to be capable of intentionality, of mental
contents, the subject needs to be in some kind of communicative relation to
other subjects. Over a decade later, Hegel was to draw a similar lesson from
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Fichte’s starting point in his well-known “recognitive” theory of self-

consciousness, while the romantics were to draw their own thesis concerning
social existence as a condition of thought: all philosophy for them was
necessarily “sym-philosophy.”
It might be thought that with this Hardenberg has reverted to something like
Hamann’s idea that mental representations have the properties of “external”
representations, actual language. However, Hardenberg’s account is developed
in ways that, seemingly paradoxically, retain elements of the traditional
“transparency” view of mental content. The relation between sign and mental
content (sign and “signified”) will be different regarding whose mental state one
is considering in a communicative event. The suggestion clearly seems to be that
while for the speaker, at least considered in a particular way, the words
somehow do directly express essentially transparent thoughts, this cannot be the
case from the point of view of the person communicated to. “To the extent that
the signifying person is completely free either in the effect of the signified or in
the choice of signs, and not even dependent on his internally determined nature
—to that extent, the two [sign and signified] are interrelated for the signifying
person alone...[while] they are completely separate for a second signifying
person.”41 What I take this to mean is that from the first-person perspective,
speech must be considered as in the traditional view, with signs expressing
thoughts (signifieds) that are themselves somehow transparent and directly in
touch with the world, while for the other person this cannot be the case. For the
interlocutor, signs uttered by the other must be regarded first as elements of a
language, which has some sort of priority in the determination of the thought
being communicated. From the external point of view, language has to be taken
as a system in which the identity of each of the parts is determined by the way it
functions within the system. Our inner states must be expressed in language to
gain determinacy, but the determinacy found there can never be adequate to the
feel of those inner states themselves.
This complex account in which both elements of the traditional view and its
linguistic criticism are apparent in the later so-called logological fragments
where Hardenberg makes this point explicit, distinguishing between concepts
and words—a distinction that he describes as crucial for understanding the
nature of metaphysics and logic, and for the difficulty in bringing these two
disciplines together. Metaphysics, as the “pure dynamics of thinking” is
“concerned (p.231) with the soul of the philosophy of mind,” and metaphysical
concepts “relate to each other like thoughts, without words.”42 Hardenberg is
clearly aware as to the metaphysical strain that the idea of such wordless
thoughts commits one, as is revealed in the comment from the Fichte Studies:
“What kind of a relation is knowledge? It is a being outside of being that is
nevertheless within being....Consciousness is consequently an image of being
within being.” But then he corrects “image” with “sign,” and the theory of signs
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must be a “theory of presentation, i.e., of not-being, within being, in order to let

being be there for itself in a certain respect.”43
The “signs” invoked here are, of necessity, characterized as “nonbeing”—that is,

as having no other properties than their presentational ones. In the logological
fragments, however, he notes that the concepts of logic, which is “concerned
simply with the dead body of the philosophy of mind,” “relate to each other as
words do, without thoughts.”44 Clearly, the thesis of the overall dependence of
thoughts (signifieds) on material signs would render pure metaphysical thinking,
in the sense suggested above, impossible—a position that one would expect from
a broadly Kantian starting point. But logic consists of “words without thoughts,”
that is, signs considered exclusively in terms of their nonrepresentational (or
nonsemantic) properties. It is precisely this latter claim that he has learned from
the combinatorialist tradition.
12.4. Leibniz and Hardenberg, Beyond Hobbes and Descartes

We might thus see Hardenberg as bringing out the contradiction at the heart of
attempts to divest the traditional view of its immaterialism by treating thought
itself as a type of language understood on combinatorial or computational
principles. The perceived contradiction is centered on the fact that the
combinatorial approach itself must treat mental representations in an entirely
“syntactic” way, putting out of play all the representational features of the
“representations” themselves. Recently, Hilary Putnam has pointed to this
problem facing “language of thought” or “lingua mentis” theories: The idea that
thinking is about the manipulation of representations surely comes from our
experience of the use of representations, but “none of the methods of
representation that we know about—speech, writing, painting, carving in stone,
etc.—has the magical property that there cannot be different representations
with the same meaning.”45 That is, in no such systems do we find the
“intrinsically” meaningful representations required by thought. But the problem
seems to be deeper than that posed by Putnam. Given that qua objects to which
syntactic processes apply, “mental” words must be considered as uninterpreted,
it might be asked how any semantic (p.232) features of thought are re-
established? That this question is not easily answered in the present-day
“language of thought hypothesis” (LOTH) is suggested by the entry for this
hypothesis in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.46 The question of how
the semantic content of propositional attitudes is inherited from that of the
mental symbols computed can be asked at two levels: First, how do molecular
symbols get their semantic content from their atomic components? And next,
how do the atomic components represent what they do? Language of thought
theorists have most to say about the former, but about the latter it is stated that
“the official line doesn’t propose any theory...but simply assumes that the first
question can be answered in a naturalistically acceptable way. In other words,
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officially LOTH simply assumes that the atomic symbols/expressions in one’s

LOT have whatever meanings they have.”47
As has been pointed out by Jaan Maat in a study of Leibniz’s universal

characteristic (Maat 2004), this is precisely the problem that Leibniz faced and
struggled with, ultimately unsuccessfully: he assumed that permitted syntactic
transformations preserve the semantic features of the elements of the
characteristic, and that the “syntactic and semantic aspects of the project are
two sides of the same coin,”48 but then had to answer the difficult question of
how the atomic elements gained these semantic features in the first place.49
Indeed, the problem is signaled by his shifting between describing the
characteristic sometimes as an alphabet and sometimes as a language: contrary
to the way we think of words of a language, the individual elements of an
alphabet, of course, do not by themselves have semantic properties. Historically
we might view the tension as between two influences feeding in to Leibniz’s
project: Descartes’s account of the contents of consciousness and Hobbes’s
computational approach to the mind.
In his fourth objection to Descartes, Hobbes had linked his computational

approach to thought to a thoroughgoing materialist account of cognition and
drawn from it radically nonrepresentationalist consequences. In the suggested
picture, reasoning is conceived as a “joining together and linking of name and
labels by means of the verb ‘be.’” But such names and labels are established
entirely conventionally, as there is no possible resemblance between the two that
could establish anything here other than conventionally supported relationships.
In this picture the mind is “nothing more than motion occurring in various parts
of an organic body.”50 In his reply, Descartes insists that surely reasoning must
deal with what is signified by the words, not just with the words themselves: “As
for the linking together that occurs when we reason, this is not a linking of
names but of the things that are signified by the names....Who doubts that a
Frenchman and a German can reason about the same things despite the fact that
the words that they think of are completely different?”51 That is, Descartes
simply reasserts the traditional view of the “transparency” of mental contents: if
we are to talk of mental representations, these representations (p.233) must be
the vehicles of a direct access to the world, and ultimately it is God that
establishes this connection. The certainty with which we feel that ideas
perceived “clearly and distinctly” present the world to us as it is, is grounded in
God’s goodness, which prevents the possibility of deception here.52
In 1677 Leibniz was to write a dialogue on this very dispute, accepting Hobbes’s
view of the existence of mental characters with no intrinsic similarity to what
they signify, using the mathematical example of the lack of any resemblance
between “0” and nothing.53 But he wanted of course to avoid the type of
semantic skepticism of which Descartes accused Hobbes, and used a version of
Descartes’s appeal to clear and distinct ideas, but now such that these coincided
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with the final products of logical decomposition. But as Maat has pointed out,
Leibniz was himself troubled by doubts about the coherence of the notion of an
essentially thinkable atomic terminus of analysis. If a notion, call it A, is
essentially thinkable, then it would seem that it must be capable of further
analysis: it must be able to be analyzed into a component specific to its being A,
and the concept “thinkability” that it will have in common with all other
concepts.54 It would be considerations such as these that were behind later
idealist critiques of what is now known as the “Myth of the Given” and that has
its prototype in Kant’s insistence, noted above, that all representations, in order
to be representations, be accompanied by the concept “I,” the concept of the
thinker for whom they are representations.55
We might think of this as just another expression of the problem discussed

above. Leibniz defines his ultimate atomic units both as those for which no
further analysis is possible, and those that can be known “through themselves.”
But to think of some purported atomic ultimate “A” as something known
“through itself” sounds like it is conceived as some ultimate phenomenal
presence, like the empiricist’s “sensory impression” or “sense-datum”—
something known in terms of its phenomenal properties, its own “Stoff.” But
being regarded as essentially thinkable sounds as if it is to be regarded as
intrinsically representational, and known through the “Materie” of its content.
Hardenberg’s alternative to Leibniz’s dilemma was to aestheticize Leibniz’s

picture by emphasizing the aesthetic “stoffliche” dimensions of the
characteristic, thus, seemingly, giving up its purported representational
dimension. Poems are not to “mean,” just “be!” One is to play the machine like a
musical instrument, the products of this play, like the notes of a melody, thus
becoming “self-sufficient” in needing no reference beyond themselves. They
“express nothing but their own marvelous nature.”56 But how, then, can this
conception have any relevance for activities, like those of science, where surely
some conception of their adequacy involves the relation of their products to the
world?
It is true that certain of Hardenberg’s formulations suggest this dichotomization

of external signs and inner thought, but such a position is contradicted by (p.
234) those formulas offering a more “Saussurean” alternative. Hardenberg
wants the elements of Leibniz’s characteristic to be understood in terms of their
“Stoff” so that the “machine” can be played like a piano to produce patterns in
which the elements, as with the notes of a melody, are not organized according
to any considerations beyond those of the system of language itself—their
accuracy in reflecting nonlinguistic worldly structures, for example. But the
elements are, nevertheless, words—that is, signs—and not mere sounds. Qua
stoffliche entities, semantic considerations must enter into the identities of
words and signs in that within a language differences in sound only count when
they function to differentiate meaning.57 As Hardenberg articulates the point in
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Fichte Studies, “sign” (or for Saussure, “signifier”) and signified are “in different
spheres that can mutually determine each another.”58 Signs do not have
meaning in as much that they express “concepts” and thereby determinately
apply to “things” in the world. They have meaning to the extent that stoffliche
differences among them can determine differences within the realm of meaning
and use. Such words can be “played” according to their identities as signifiers so
as to transform the system of signifieds. Thus the idea of poetry as
“meaningless” melody does not capture the sense in which the elements are
words and not notes, elements that cannot be entirely stripped of semantic
properties and have only a syntax. For this reason we might be skeptical of those
(such as Dalhaus)59 who place “Novalis” here in the tradition of other romantics,
such as Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffman, who are seen as pointing to a
conception of poetry as aspiring “towards the condition of music” (as Pater later
put it),60 and a conception of music as “absolute music”—music totally freed
from the constraints of language and representation.
The acceptance of nonrepresentational wordless music as the paradigm of art

seems to be one consequence of the skeptical interpretation of the critique of the
“traditional view” of the relation of speech to thought like that of Hobbes.
Hardenberg, however, as we have seen, retains elements of the traditional view
within his account of the speaker’s attitude to her own thoughts: a speaker, it
appears, has no alternative but to take her expression as transparently
manifesting her own cognitive states understood as veridically disclosing the
world. It is only from the point of view of the hearer that the linguistic vehicle of
the expression is considered to have stoffliche properties that accrue from the
fact that it is a fragment of a social and public language. But it cannot be that
this external point of view simply “trumps” that of the immediate point of view of
the speaker herself. It cannot be the source of any “real” meaning of the
utterance that replaces the speaker’s irreducibly private one, as it is not the
source of any determinate meaning at all. We might say that what this external
“aesthetic” point of view provides for is a constant source of challenge to the
speaker’s understanding as to what her words amount to—a constant possibility
of (p.235) provocation to the speaker to reflect on and re-evaluate the meaning
of her expressions in the light of this “reflective,” external point of view. In this
sense Hardenberg’s “mathematical” approach to language seems to point a way
not only beyond Descartes’s and Hobbes’s opposed approaches to meaning, but
beyond what is commonly taken to be the nature of “romanticism” itself.61
Notes:
(1) . Hardenberg’s personal loss had been doubled by the death of a brother,
Erasmus, a month later.
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(2) . David W. Wood, “Introduction” to Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das

Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. David W. Wood (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2007).
(3) . J. M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics,

edited by J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix.
(4) . For a systematic treatment of this theme in the work of Novalis, see John
Neubauer, Symbolismus und symbolische Logik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
1978).
(5) . In general, positive reception of Leibniz’s work among the romantics had
centered on its quasi-vitalistic, antimechanistic dimensions. Frederick Beiser,
The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 143–44. Those aspects of
Leibniz’s work celebrated by the proponents of contemporary computationalist
approaches to the mind seem very different.
(6) . Thus Hobbes, in a work of 1656, declares that “by ratiocination, I mean
computation. Now to compute, is either to collect the sum of many things that
are added together, or to know what remains when one thing is taken out of
another. ... all ratiocination is comprehended in these two operations of the
mind, addition and subtraction.” Hobbes, “Elements of Philosophy,” in The
English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth,
vol. 1 (London: John Bohn, 1839), 3.
(7) . See George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
(New York: Random House, 2012); Ronald Hausser, Computational Linguistics
and Talking Robots (Berlin: Springer, 2011), and Martin Davis, The Universal
Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New York: Norton, 2000).
(8) . Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 103–4.
(9) . Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon,

trans. David W. Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 97.
(10) . See Boris Gasparov, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s

Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013).
(11) . Wolfgang Lenzen, “Leibniz’s Logic,” in Handbook of the History of Logic,

vol. 3: The Rise of Modern Logic from Leibniz to Frege, ed. Dov. M. Gabbay and
John Woods (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004).
(12) . Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 4, Generating All
Trees: History of Combinatorial Generation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Education, 2006); Paul J. Nahin, The Logician and the Engineer: How George
Page 15 of 19
Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age (Princeton: Princeton
(13) . Jaap Maat, Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno,

Wilkins, Leibniz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 292.
(14) . Hans Niels Jahnke, “Mathematics and Culture: The Case of Novalis,”
Science in Context 4 (1991): 279–95.
(15) . G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:

Humanities Press, 1969), 685–86. Rather than, like Aristotle, thinking of the
judgment as the joining of a universal-naming predicate to a substance-naming
particular subject, Leibniz had suggested treating the subject term as itself a
predicate, such that “S is P” could be read as identifying terms “S” and “P”
predicable of some (singular) “third” not named in the judgment. This effectively
allowed Leibniz to treat categorical judgments as hypotheticals, and regard
individual propositions as having one of two values (true or false). As Leibniz
had already regarded the system of numbers as reducible to a binary system,
this allowed the idea of computation within arithmetic to be extended to logical
relations among bivalent propositions. For a systematic reconstruction see
Lenzen, “Leibniz’s Logic.”
(16) . This transformation resulted in the traditional syllogistic being completely

reconfigured into what Hegel describes as the “syllogism of reflection,” which
becomes made up on singular judgments, which allow inductive inferences,
which then become dependent on forms of analogical judgments, and so on.
Hegel, The Science of Logic, 686–95.
(17) . Thus, in Leibniz “the rational is taken as a dead and non-rational

thing” (Hegel, The Science of Logic, 685) because thought, having been reduced
to the “notionless material” of numbers, is taken to be the sort of process that
can be performed by “calculating machines” (684). Hegel identifies Leibniz
having reached the most extreme point in the logic of “the understanding” that
works on “ossified material... already to hand” (575).
(18) . Christina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans.

José Medina (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
(19) . Jere Paul Surber, ed. Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German
Idealism (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2001), 58.
(20) . Questions of who influenced whom in these regards are complex and
contested. See, for example, Katie Terezakis, The Immanent Word: The Turn to
Language in German Philosophy, 1759–1801 (New York: Routledge, 2007) and
Michael Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition
Page 16 of 19
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and German Philosophy of Language:

From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
(21) . See Johann Christoph Hoffbauer, Semiological Investigations, or, Topics

Pertaining to the General Theory of Signs, ed. and trans. Robert E. Innis
(Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1991 [1789]).
(22) . Karl Leonard Reinhold, “The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge,” in

Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, ed.
and trans. George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1985 [1791]), 70.
(23) . J. G. Fichte, “Review of Aenesidemus,” in di Giovanni and Harris, Between

Kant and Hegel.
(24) . Forster, After Herder and German Philosophy of Language.
(25) . Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics ed. and trans.
Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, §39
(26) . Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. and trans. Jane Kneller (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), no. 226.
(27) . Ibid., no. 249.
(28) . In Kant’s account, the application of concept to thing is never direct but
always mediated by an intuition.
(29) . Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione 1, 16a4–7; Tyler Burge,

“Concepts, Definitions and Meaning,” Metaphilosophy 24 (1993): 309–25.
(30) . Burge, “Concepts, Definitions and Meaning,” 310.
(31) . Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, 75, 2.
(32) . Cf., “A poem should not mean / But be.” Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica,
in Collected Poems 1917–1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985 [1926]), 106.
(33) . The work was, Pietatis Thaumata in Bernardi Bauhusii e Societate Jesu
Proteum Parthenium.
(34) . Donald Knuth (The Art of Computer Programming) discusses this in the
context of the evolution of computer science. Neubauer notes that Novalis was
interested in the similar phenomenon of “Bouts-rimé” (Neubauer, Symbolismus
und symbolische Logik, 140).
Page 17 of 19
(35) . Bernoulli, The Art of Conjecturing, Together with Letter to a Friend on

Sets in Court Tennis, trans. Edith Dudley Sylla (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005); Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming.
(36) . Novalis, “Monologue,” trans. Joyce P. Crick, in Bernstein, Classic and

Romantic German Aesthetics, 214.
(37) . Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B131–32.
(38) . Burge, “Concepts, Definitions and Meaning,” 321.
(39) . Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 11. Hardenberg’s concept of “sign” effectively
equates to what Saussure was to call the “signifier”, i.e., the sign grasped in
terms of its nonrepresentational properties. The striking similarities between the
views of Saussure and Hardenberg are pursued in Gasparov, Beyond Pure
Reason.
(40) . Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry
Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 [1916]).
(41) . Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 113.
(42) . Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 51.
(44) . Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 51.
(45) . Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988),
21.
(46) . Murat Aydede, “The Language of Thought Hypothesis,” The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/language-thought/>.
(47) . Emphasis added.
(48) . Maat, Philosophical Languages, 313. Cf., “In Leibniz’s view, the power of a
symbolism does not reside in the individual symbols, but in the systematical
relations the symbols have to each other and to the things they designate. Hence
Leibniz’s central concern in his efforts to construct a philosophical language is
to establish a perfect conformity between its semantic and syntactic
aspects” (Maat, 309–10).
(49) . Maat, Philosophical Languages, sections 5.3.4–5.3.5.
Page 18 of 19
(50) . Hobbes in Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans.

J. Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 125–26.
(51) . Ibid., 126.
(52) . Descartes opposition to the idea that “ideas” would have their own
nonrepresentational properties is, of course, consistent with his mind-body
dualism.
(53) . M. Lagerlund, “Leibniz (and Ockham) on the Language of Thought, or How

the True Metaphysics is Derived from the True Logic,” in Categories of Being:
Essays on Metaphysics and Logic, ed. Leila Haaparanta and Heikki J. Koskinen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 103–6; Maat, Philosophical Languages,
section 5.4.2.
(54) . Maat, Philosophical Languages, 314.
(55) . Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B131–32.
(56) . Novalis, “Monologue,” 214.
(57) . For example, some languages such as English will distinguish word-types
according to whether they start with the sounds distinguished in English as “p”
and “b,” but in other languages this “voicing” of the consonant will not
differentiate meanings at all and so be inaudible.
(59) . Carl Dalhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 145.
(60) . Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 106.
(61) . I wish to thank Dalia Nassar for helpful feedback on an earlier version of
this essay. My thanks also go to Frances Massey, with whom I have had many
illuminating discussions on topics touched on here.
Page 19 of 19
Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic Calculus

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

Reflections on the Mathematical Infinite around 1800
John H. Smith
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0014

This chapter explores the way German thinkers in the decades around 1800
recognized that the new mathematics, especially differential calculus as it was
developed by Leonard Euler, had important philosophical and aesthetic
consequences. Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Hegel all
exploited in different ways the fundamental paradoxes inherent in thinking
about infinity, continuity, and the infinitesimal. Although these mathematical
concepts were powerfully effective in quantifying motion and change in physical
reality, and were thus as concrete as the arc described by a flying object, they
nonetheless defy representation. The thinkers discussed in this paper saw this
paradoxical concrete unrepresentability of mathematics as itself a metaphor for
ontological and creative processes. Their uses of this metaphor had effects
beyond the period of romanticism.
Keywords: infinite, mathematics, mathematical infinite, unrepresentability, Leonard Euler, Schlegel,

romanticism, Hegel, Maimon, Kant
[Mathematik] sollte jeder Gelehrte verstehn eben wie [Grammatik]? [Every

scholar should have an understanding of (mathematics) as well as
(grammar)?]
—F. SCHLEGEL (KA 18, 360, no. 474)
Page 1 of 20
Just what is “unendliche Annäherung” (“infinite approximation” or “approaching

to infinity”)? We know it as the title of Manfred Frank’s groundbreaking lectures
interpreting the philosophical background and contributions of the early
romantic movement. And so much of our understanding of romanticism is
associated with the infinite longing and endless striving of “progressive
Universalpoesie” (F. Schlegel). This essay provides a different interpretation of
this fundamental romantic concept by exploring the significance, context, and
consequences of discussions in the latter part of the eighteenth century around
the “mathematical infinite.” We can take as a point of departure a footnote at the
beginning of chapter 2 of Salomon (often also Solomon) Maimon’s 1790 Essay on
Transcendental Philosophy. The first sentences read:
I am not ignorant of what can be said against the introduction of

mathematical concepts of infinity into philosophy. In particular, since these
concepts are still subject to many difficulties in mathematics itself, it might
appear (p.240) as if I wanted to explain something obscure through
something yet more obscure. However, I venture to claim that these
concepts in fact belong to philosophy and were taken from there over into
mathematics; as well as that the great Leibniz came upon the discovery of
the differential calculus through his system of the Monadology.1
As we shall see, by replacing Kant’s radical distinction between the faculties of

sensibility and understanding with a view of their infinitesimal difference,
Maimon is not only attending to debates among mathematicians and
philosophers about the status of continuity, divisibility, and the infinitely small,
but also opening up new avenues for idealism and romanticism. In pursuing the
relevance of these discussions for philosophy around 1800, this essay
specifically deals with the mathematical conceptions of that period; the fact that
the foundations of calculus have undergone dramatic reformulations (at least
four, three in the nineteenth century thanks to Cauchy, Weierstrass, and Cantor,
and one in the 1960s thanks to Robinson) is not relevant here because my
interest strictly concerns the way the mathematical infinite was understood in
the latter half of the eighteenth century.2 My point is that precisely those
conceptions, “wrong” or ambivalent as they may be for (some) mathematicians
today, provided powerful tools for rethinking both reality and consciousness. In
fact, the very ambivalence associated with the notion of the differential, or the
infinitesimal increment of a variable—Were they actual quantities? Did they
“exist” or were they nothing? Can they “add up” to anything if they are
equivalent to zero?—made them particularly fruitful for philosophical
speculations. Friedrich Schlegel’s thought around 1800 is imbued with the
paradoxes of the infinite as they had been explored by mathematicians and
philosophers (especially Kant and Maimon). His concept of the infinite, which
both embraces philosophical dualisms even as he empowers consciousness with
Page 2 of 20
the ability to approach their overcoming, owes much of its formulation to

debates concerning the infinitesimal calculus.
13.1. The Status of the Infinite in Eighteenth-Century Calculus

As is well known, the techniques of differential and integral calculus as
introduced in different ways by Newton and Leibniz in the last part of the
seventeenth century had a tremendous range of application in the sciences. They
could be used to calculate the movements of the planets, the course of a
projectile, or flows of water—in sum, anything that undergoes change. And yet,
as Hegel himself noted, “On the one hand its introduction into mathematics has
(p.241) led to an expansion of the science and to important results; but on the
other hand it is remarkable that mathematics has not yet succeeded in justifying
its use of this infinite by the Notion” (Hegel 279). The unclear status of the
infinite in calculus led to major suspicions (as in Berkeley’s sharp critiques of
“infinitesimals” or infinitely small magnitudes as “ghosts of departed
quantities”). But the lack of justification for the basic concepts in calculus also
meant that leading mathematicians were inclined to philosophize about the
foundations of their methods (even as they continued expanding those methods)
and philosophers were able to exploit the ambivalence in the use of the
“mathematical infinite” to address problems of their own. At stake are a number
of fundamental issues: Does it make sense to speak of infinite divisibility? Are
infinite quantities, especially infinitely small quantities (differentials), equivalent
to zero? What is the effect of introducing quantities that can be thought but
neither intuited nor represented? Let us look at three influential mathematicians
for the different, and ambivalent, positions circulating on these questions.
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), considered one of the most gifted mathematicians

of his age (and in general), argued vehemently in his Briefe an eine deutsche
Prinzessin über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Physik und Philosophie
(Letters to a German Princess concerning Different Matters in Physics and
Philosophy, 1768) against the Leibnizian and Wolffian systems in the name of a
radical materialism.3 The two ideas he rejects are (1) the notion of a gradation of
consciousness, that is, all monads—and there must be an infinite number of
them—have “only very obscure ideas, whereas we have clear and occasionally
even distinct ideas/representations” (Euler 192) and (2) the claim “that each
body is composed of such parts, which have no extension whatever” (Euler 189)
since this claim entails the emergence of extension from a composite of (an
infinite number of) extensionless entities—which he finds absurd. It will be
precisely the issues of infinite gradations of representability and the adding up
(integrating) of infinitesimal acts of consciousness that will play a role in post-
Kantian philosophies.
To appreciate the conundrum that mathematicians faced consider the odd

results that can be produced when working with the infinite. In his highly
significant Institutiones calculi differentialis (Foundations of Differential
Page 3 of 20
Calculus) of 1755 Euler argued for a deep ambivalence: infinitesimals are both
nothing and something. In the preface to his book he claims first:
[D]ifferential calculus is concerned not so much with vanishing increments,

which indeed are nothing, but with the ratio and mutual proportion. Since
these ratios are expressed as finite quantities, we must think of calculus as
being concerned with finite quantities.4
(p.242) And then claimed:
To many who have discussed the rules of differential calculus, it has

seemed that there is a distinction between absolutely nothing and a special
order of quantities infinitely small, which do not quite vanish completely
but retain a certain quantity that is indeed less than any assignable
quantity.5
As Sandifer points out, Euler seems to want it both ways. Indeed, this was the
way differentials were often treated, for example, by Newton and Leibniz: as
existing quantities so that they could be manipulated in equations, but then
disregarded as equivalent to zero in order to produce the final results.
Lazarus Ben David (often also Bendavid, 1762–1832) comes down on the side of
Euler in seeing infinitesimal magnitudes as equal to zero but also grapples with
the problem of representation and intuition.6Although he wrote on a variety of
philosophical topics, of particular interest here is his Versuch einer logischen
Auseinandersetzung des mathematischen Unendlichen (Essay on the Logical
Analysis of the Mathematical Infinite) of 1789. Maimon must have been aware of
it prior to its publication since, as we shall see, he responds to it already in his
own Versuch. Like so many others, Ben David addresses the awkwardness of the
situation in which a science like calculus rests on a concept that has no clear
definition. Indeed, the more successful calculus is, the greater the need to
understand its fundamental principles: “the greater the advantages are that
calculus affords us, and the more its results concur with those that had been
found by other means, the more desirous we become to establish the principles
out of which this calculus and its results emerge.”7 The problem with the
particular concept of the infinite is that it cannot be intuited or represented, its
Evidenz is not constructed as in geometry; therefore it requires logical analysis
(Bendavid xxx–xxxi).8 He proceeds by looking at the nature of numbers and
defining them as manifolds that are gathered in a unity (Bendavid §18).
Whatever is finite (“endlich”) can be measured, is “meßbar” (Bendavid §19). An
infinite magnitude, therefore, is one for which no number can be found that can
be a measure for it, and he concludes that “the mathematician calls every
magnitude, which cannot be expressed through numbers, infinite” (Bendavid
§18). Since neither the infinitely small nor infinitely large “can be given in terms
of number or measure; and it cannot be represented using any means that we
Page 4 of 20
would otherwise use to make a magnitude intuitable, as by

construction” (Bendavid §22), it is, strictly speaking, nothing. That is: “The
expression ‘infinite’ means nothing other than nowhere and nothing everywhere
where it is used” (Bendavid §24). It can be only thought, but not represented.
Hence the crowning “logical analysis” in the form of a syllogism:
(p.243)
A. Only zero can be thought absolutely as quantity.

B. The infinite must, as quantity, be thought absolutely; from which it
follows directly that
C. The infinite is zero. (Bendavid §28)
The infinite has only the quality of being an immeasurable quantity, but is used
analogously in calculations as if it were a quantity (Bendavid §44). The infinite is
thus like an intensive magnitude that cannot be increased or decreased as such
(although something else can be measured, like the rise of mercury in a
thermometer) (Bendavid §48–49).
A somewhat different position was represented by one of the more widely read
mathematicians—in part because of his textbooks—of the second half of the
eighteenth century, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800).9 He points out in his
Anfangsgründe der Analysis des Unendlichen (Foundations of the Analysis of the
Infinite) that the “mysteries” and “inconsistencies” that so many authors have
produced around the concept of infinity arise “whenever one views an infinite
magnitude as something really existing”; instead, one needs to conceive
“magnitudes that grow or diminish [as] undetermined/indefinite [unbestimmt]”
and thus, strictly speaking, as not a number.10 And indeed he refers positively to
Euler in the preface to the second edition of 1770 (Kästner xvi). In a manner that
will lead in the nineteenth century to a formulation of the foundations of calculus
that does away with infinitesimals altogether, he understands the infinitely small
or large relationship between dx and dy in terms of limits (Kästner 52–54).
However, he refers to Leibniz’s expression “toleranter vera” (a tolerable truth)
that does permit us to speak of “the infinite as something real” (Kästner 52).
That is, Kästner is referring to the fact that although given his metaphysics of
monads Leibniz had argued for the reality of infinitesimal magnitudes, he later
came to see them as “necessary fictions.” Thus, though using somewhat
different arguments than Euler, Kästner also ends up revealing the paradox of
the mathematical infinite—it exists and does not exist—which leads him to
suggest accepting the “manner of speaking” (“Redensart”) which is “tolerably
true” (“erträglich wahr”): “The relationship between infinitely small magnitudes,
which can be given in terms of finite magnitudes” (Kästner 54). The
unrepresentable (infinitely small or large magnitudes) can be represented as
necessary fictions and tolerable truths.11
Page 5 of 20
13.2. The Mathematical Infinite in Philosophy: Maimon

Against this background of conflicting positions—the mathematical infinite is
both something and nothing and it cannot be intuited or represented (like (p.
244) geometric constructions) but only thought—we can understand the reason
why Kant needs to address the “mathematical antinomies” that revolve around
notions of infinity. When reason grapples with the infinite, as it apparently must,
it also gets drawn toward the conundrums of the infinite. In the Prolegomena zu
einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (1784, Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics) Kant introduces the Antinomies with a remarkable number of
hyperboles: We see here, he writes, “the most striking phenomenon” of reason,
which “affects us most forcefully” and which has the power “to awaken
philosophy from its dogmatic slumber” (Kant, Prolegomena 101) such that
thanks to this “strangest phenomenon of human reason...the critical
philosopher...is forced into reflection and disquietude” (Kant, Prolegomena 103).
However, whereas Kant strove to dissolve the contradictions that arise when
thinking of the power of the infinite and its ambivalences in mathematics, many
post-Kantians and the romantics embraced them. Thus we read a fragment by F.
Schlegel: “Consciousness of 1/0 is the root of all knowing. Consciousness can
only be thought as 1/0 and 1/0 only as consciousness” (KA 18, 409, no. 1062).
But to see how Schlegel could make such an extraordinary claim, we should
return to Maimon, for his response to basic problems in Kant introduced the
mathematical infinite into consciousness itself.12 Maimon’s argument is, indeed,
very difficult to grasp at times, for he himself was aware of his limitations as an
autodidact in philosophy and as a nonnative speaker of German (since he came
from a Jewish family in Lithuania). At its core, his argument seems to be a
rethinking of Kant with a commitment to the reality of the infinitesimal, and to
the infinitesimal nature of reality for consciousness. We can state it this way: the
act of synthesizing that Kant had considered consciousness’s contribution to the
production of knowledge is interpreted by Maimon in terms of the twin notions
of the differential and the integral. While for Kant, knowledge as experience
comes about by the two steps of first subsuming the manifold of sense data
under the forms of intuition to make representations and then subsuming these
representations under the categories provided by the understanding, Maimon
argues in a way more consistent with Leibniz and Wolff that there is an infinite
gradation of consciousness. At the “lower end” of the continuum—and it is a
continuum in a mathematical sense—we have the “primitive consciousness of a
constituent part of a synthesis” (which he calls a “presentation” [Vorstellung])
and at the “upper end” we have the “consciousness of the completed
synthesis” (Maimon 181). These two are “limit concepts” or “mere
ideas” (Maimon 181) in that by definition there would be no object of knowledge
whatever if there were no consciousness, that is, if consciousness were reduced
to zero; and likewise, only an “infinite consciousness” (God) could possibly attain
full knowledge of how any object could be synthesized (p.245)
Page 6 of 20
with the totality of reality. He

clearly has in mind something like
the asymptotic function y = 1/x,
where the x- and y-axes would be
the “symbolic infinite,” the
“limits” that can never be reached
(the asymptotes), while the
infinitesimal difference that is
“determinable yet undetermined”
because it can always be made
smaller, is the “intuitive” infinite
(Maimon 181).13
If for Kant the infinite leads
reason into antinomies, Maimon Figure 13.1 . Asymptote of a curve is the
uses it in order to challenge the line such that the distance between the
distinction between the line and the curve approaches zero as
faculties of sensibility and they tend to infinity.
understanding, the radical
nature of which Kant
continually stressed.14 Although Kant felt compelled to insist on an absolute
difference between the faculty that subsumes data under the forms of intuition
and the faculty that takes those “appearances” and unites them into objective
judgments, this difference led to problems that forced him to introduce
additional features, the “schematisms,” in order to mediate between the two
faculties if cognition is to occur. Maimon, however, points to the unbridgeability
of the faculties in the Kantian model, realizes it threatens the critical enterprise,
and asks: “Who will lead me out of this embarrassment?” (Maimon 204). Given
the stark distinction, he views the question of the legitimacy of bringing them
together (the issue of “quid juris?”) as equivalent to the traditional mind/body
dualism, “commercio animi et corporis” (Maimon 186). Maimon argues that the
only way around the problem is not to accept the Kantian premise; he adopts,
rather than breaks with, the Leibniz-Wolff position that these faculties are not
different in kind, but only in degree. But because he has a mathematical notion
of difference—the infinitesimal or differential—he can argue for the relationship
between full consciousness and the apparent passivity of the senses as one of an
infinite limit or, we (p.246) might say, “unendliche Annäherung.” If the
difference between sensible intuition and the understanding can be made
infinitely small, that is, if faculties of consciousness can be thought in terms of
the infinite, then they do not need a “bridge” between them.
Maimon’s introduction of the mathematical infinite, what he himself refers to as

his “sublime” idea, not only “solves the greatest difficulties” (Maimon 38) that
Kant seems to face, but also transforms the very nature of reality as a product of
a finite consciousness working with the infinite. The task of consciousness is to
continually relate the differentials, symbolized as the infinitesimal increase in
Page 7 of 20
the variables x and y as dx and dy, each of which may be considered = 0 but in
their relations have determinate values and thus give rise to the gradation of
experiences: “These differentials of objects are the so-called noumena; but the
objects themselves arising from them are the phenomena. With respect to
intuition = 0, the differential of any object in itself is dx = 0, dy = 0 etc.;
however, their relations are not = 0, but can rather be given determinately in
the intuitions arising from them” (Maimon 21). Consciousness is constantly
active in constructing reality out of, or perhaps better, as, relations between
perceptions. The greater the conscious activity, the more we are aware of our
contribution to this construction. As consciousness diminishes or approaches
zero we do not recognize our own activity at the level of perception. While it is
still a synthesis “in” us, it appears to come from the “outside”—a term that is not
to be understood spatially but as “not part of our consciousness,” since the
conscious activity approaches zero. That sense of something “beyond” our
consciousness as a limit idea would be the “thing in itself.” But because it makes
no sense for us to talk about our consciousness ever reaching that zero point,
the perceptions can always be “added up” (integrated) so that we become
increasingly aware of them. Maimon makes the comparison with physics and one
of the primary uses of calculus: “Just as, for example, with an accelerated
movement, the preceding velocity does not disappear, but ever joins itself onto
the following ones, so that an ever increasing velocity arises, so equally the first
sensible representation does not disappear, but ever joins itself onto the
following ones, until the degree necessary for consciousness is
reached” (Maimon 20–21). This “joining” of minimal sensations by consciousness
is understood as the integrating of an infinity of infinitesimal differential
relations.15 Maimon has thereby defined consciousness as an entity that
synthesizes a reality across a continuum ranging between the limits of zero
(receptivity) and infinity (totality of all relations in thought), without ever
reaching them. Although finite in nature, consciousness nonetheless works with
the infinitely small and infinitely large in paradoxical yet powerful ways in order
to produce conceptual knowledge. In a sense, consciousness is like the
mathematicians who depend on notions of the infinitesimal and infinity to
produce effective results even though, from the perspective (p.247) of their
discipline around 1800, they cannot fully explain them in terms of their finite
tools.
13.3. Romanticizing the Mathematical Infinite

Recent studies have demonstrated the significance of mathematics, specifically
aspects of calculus and the infinite, in the work of thinkers like Novalis and
Kleist in the romantic tradition.16Given these studies, let me therefore focus on
Friedrich Schlegel, for despite works exploring the infinite in his thought
generally and his relation to other sciences, the role of mathematics has not
been investigated with any thoroughness.17 Now, while it is true that he never
studied mathematics intensely (in comparison to his friend Novalis, from whom
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he undoubtedly heard a good deal about it), or delved deeply into calculus, or
employed its concepts rigorously, we can see how it permeates and frames his
thought.
The key problematic for Schlegel, namely the relationship of the absolute and
the individual, is captured in his questions “on the answer to which everything
depends”: “Why has the infinite come out of itself and made itself finite?—that is
in other words: Why are there individuals?—Or: Why does the play of nature not
run itself out in an instant, so that nothing would exist?” (KA 12, 39).18 He is in
many ways the romantic thinker of the infinite, or, to state the inverse, the
infinite is the key issue that he attempts to capture. While undoubtedly this
concept enters into his thought via Spinoza and Fichte, we can hear clearly in
these questions Leibniz, and with him then enters the mathematical infinite.19
That is, the questions he is posing are versions of the debate about the
continuous and the discrete, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and the
emergence of reality out of differentials, which seem to both exist and not exist
at the same time. By considering the introduction of the mathematical infinite
into philosophy not as a cause for reason’s dialectic with itself but as an
explanation of consciousness’s construction of reality, we can understand how
Schlegel can offer an answer to his questions: The infinite has entered into, or is
always already within, the finite just as calculus employs differentials,
infinitesimals, and their infinite integration in order to explore the world of
constant change. The paradoxes of the ill-defined or at least highly ambivalent
methods of the new mathematics resonate for Schlegel and make the infinite in
his thought productive. It has consequences for his considerations of method,
consciousness, the task of overcoming dualisms, and the nature of philosophy
itself.
That Schlegel grappled with questions surrounding the mathematical infinite is

clear from his voluminous fragments from the last years of the eighteenth
century, where we encounter not only hundreds that address them, but also a
(p.248) variety of mathematical symbols, most commonly the paradoxical
division by zero (see KA 18, 10, no. 66 for echoes of Ben David). While they
clearly serve as a kind of shorthand, like Schlegel’s use of Greek letters to
abbreviate words, the use of symbols also points to a mode of thinking. Here we
might recall his axiom: “All knowing is symbolic” (KA 12, 9), which itself echoes
Maimon’s discussion of symbolic cognition needed to deal with the
nonrepresentable infinite. Schlegel never tires of representing anything absolute
by putting it over 0, as in as in μαθ/0 or φυ/0 for “absolute/infinite mathematics
or physics” (KA 18, 154, no. 371) and he formulates a thought about the novel as
follows: “Evidently the novel has the complete form from math, rhetoric, and
music. From math, powers, progression of the x/0 irrational” (KA 18, 347, no.
311). Such mathemes become particularly prominent around 1800 (see the
notebooks comprising KA 18, 408–22, nos. 1060–1231). He thinks through the
problem of the I’s relation to the Non-I, that is, the I’s encounter with a limit in
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the ambivalent terms of the infinitesimal, a zero that is a productive nothing:

“Limit = 0, but a becoming zero...Non-I = zero, a becoming or an only apparent
zero” (KA 18, 408, nos. 1068, 1069). And immortality, the endless becoming,
seems to be cast in terms of a differential between life and death, like the
infinite tangents that make up a curve: “Symbol of immortality the curved line.
Each part a play between two functions of the spirit” (KA 18, 410, no. 1084).
And, of course, it would not be Schlegel if he didn’t outdo the mathematicians,
developing unique (and somewhat wild) formulas of his own: “The infinite not
1/0 but 1/0√x1/0/0” (KA 18, 491, no. 197), read, I suppose, as “the infinite root of
the infinite power of x over 0” or “the infinite root of the infinite power of
infinity.”20 Such references abound in his notes from the late 1790s.
It is, however, in Schlegel’s main early effort to formulate a philosophical

position, his lectures on transcendental philosophy held in Jena, winter 1800 to
spring 1801, that we see the fruits of his grappling with the mathematical. It is
thus not by chance that from the outset he aligns himself with thinking in
mathematics (and physics): “The method according to which we proceed will be
that of physics or mathematics. That is, our investigations will be an
experimenting, as in physics, or a constructing, as in mathematics” (KA 12, 3).
As with so much in these rich and thought-provoking lectures, Schlegel seems to
be providing more of a program for a transcendental philosophy than a fully
developed execution of one. That is, we are dealing with what he might mean by
a theory of philosophical construction rather than by a philosophy that is actually
produced by it. As is well known, Fichte and Schelling in the latter part of the
1790s were engaged in formulating their systems by means of (differing) notions
of construction, and Schlegel was undoubtedly aware of them.21 But I would
propose that what Schlegel has in mind here differs dramatically because the
model he is basing his method on is not geometry but the new (p.249)
mathematics of the infinite. The ideal of geometric construction is to grasp in an
act of intuition how a theorem is proven, and the rise of the notion of
“intellectual intuition” in this period speaks to the reliance on this ideal. One
might think of a presentation of the Pythagorean theorem in one image that
makes its proof immediately evident. In arithmetical construction, to the
contrary, only a rule or process can be given; there is no intuitive act that can
“see” the result. Schlegel states this principle explicitly in a fragment from the
time of the lectures: “All numbers lie between 1 and 0 or 1/0 and 0/1. The prime
numbers must be able to be constructed through a rule between them” (KA 18,
413; KA 5, 1109). Although he uses the example here of prime numbers, the
notion of “construction [of a number] through a rule” comes closer to Maimon’s
understanding of the “symbolic cognition” required when dealing with the
infinite. As Maimon writes in the appendix to his Versuch:
So symbolic cognition extends to infinity... as with, for example, a circle

viewed as a polygon with infinitely many sides, the asymptotes of a curved
line, and the like. Although we cannot think the infinite as an object this is
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besides the point here, since we do not make use of infinity to think the
object, but merely to think the way it arises.
(Maimon 143)22
Schlegel’s emphasis on both approximation and symbolism can thus be

explained by the fact that the infinite cannot be grasped by intuition (intellectual
or otherwise) but must be thought by a rule that can be extended (the simplest
being 1 + 1 + 1 + 1...or a diminishing series like 1, ½, ¼, ⅛...). We find a
number of fragments in close proximity to each other in his notebooks that bring
these ideas together, namely the arithmetical (not geometrical) nature of
construction, infinite synthesis, and unrepresentability: “Numbers as well are
constructed. Consciousness = object + subject. The infinite = form + matter.
These are the factors of the matter of idealism”; “The infinite is a One raised to
powers [eine potentirte Eins]; consciousness is a never attained Zero [eine nie
zu vollendende Null]”; and “Symbols are signs, representations of elements that
can never be presented [darstellbar] in themselves” (KA 18, 406, no. 1030, KA
18, 418, no. 1173, and KA 18, 420, no. 1197). The radicality of Schlegel’s
mathematical infinite would demand a different notion of construction than the
traditional one that relied on the intuitive basis of geometry.23 While intellectual
intuition is one moment of philosophy, it does not represent the “transcendental
standpoint” (Schlegel says), which must be a “knowing of a unique kind, an
infinite knowing” (KA 12, 24).
The reference to consciousness in the fragments just cited also allows us to

understand the nature of Schlegel’s idealism. Given that Schlegel praised
Maimon as “the most significant among the new skeptics,” even as he goes on
(p.250) to call for a move beyond skepticism to pure idealism (KA 12, 95; Frank
105), Schlegel’s model of consciousness seems to develop Maimon’s own
interpretation of Kant. That is, the experience of consciousness is not a
“subsumption” of representations under categories, but a synthesis along the
continuum of mental faculties (intuition, perception, imagination,
understanding) thanks to the gradation or integration of differentials. Since
“continuity” is one of the “conditions” (Bedingungen) of the system (KA 12, 21),
or, as he says in a fragment, “Connection of all matter. This gradation
[Gradazion] and continuity [Continuität] is the essence of progressivity
[Progreßivität]” (KA 18, 47, no. 291), it should not surprise us that the origin of
reality for consciousness also emerges through a continuous synthesis.24
“Consciousness is so to speak +a−a...a becoming and disappearing zero” (KA 12,
25). Out of an infinite series of infinitely graduated representations, each of
which in itself approaches zero but which in their relations have definite
(intensive) magnitude, the mind “integrates”—synthesizes—its sense of the real.
The absolute (noumena) is not “elsewhere” in the sense of “outside”
consciousness but always already in consciousness as the infinitesimal building
blocks of experience. If we consider this synthesis a form-giving activity, then
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what is real is always formed by consciousness, even though as finite beings we

cannot be fully aware of our own activity. As in Maimon’s view, there is a
gradation from infinitely approximating zero (“objectivity”) to infinity (pure
consciousness and form). Matter, Schlegel argues, should not be considered an
“object” (Gegenstand) outside of consciousness since “only form can enter
consciousness,” or perhaps it would have been better to say that we can only be
conscious of what has form (KA 12, 38). However, because the formative power
of consciousness is in fact finite but extending without end in principle—“each
form is infinite” (KA 12, 39)—we approach a condition of totalized form as the
limit but never attain it, that is, “we cannot transform everything into form” (KA
12, 38). That remainder of our sythesizing/forming activity is matter. This is not
to say that matter is a mere “given”; on the contrary, the necessity of matter
(indeed, formless “chaos”) “is brought forth in us” (KA 12, 38). Frank
summarizes Schlegel’s position in terms that likewise (unconsciously) exploit the
language derived from the mathematical discussions of the late 1700s: “The
absolute transverses the entire series in a way that generates continuity; and to
this extent the series demonstrates...the synthetic activity of the absolute in its
ostensible manifestation in relative (particular) syntheses” (Frank 933). In
Schlegel’s own words: “Mathematics must take as its point of departure
elements, from which everything else must be produced. The elements of
geometry would be the point (.) and the straight line (—). The elements of
arithmetic would be 1 and 0” (KA 12, 15). In this infinite space between the 0
and the 1 consciousness unfolds over time, its two limit concepts being “chaos”
and infinite knowledge, also called “allegory” (KA (p.251) 18, 421, no. 1226) or
the divine (Gottheit) (KA 12, 39). Just as a curved line could be conceived of as
constructed or produced from the infinite number of infinitely small straight
lines that make up the tangents at all points along its trajectory (as Newton
conceived of movement), so, too, consciousness builds up the form of reality out
of its syntheses. Perhaps it is in this light that we can understand Schlegel’s
fragment: “The schema for communication/transmission (Mittheilung) is to be
sought in the doctrine of the curved line” (KA 18, 406, no. 1034).
If both being and consciousness, and their relationship, are constructed out of
the infinite gradations of and between the zero and the one, this has
consequences for the nature of philosophy itself. Thus, we encounter the
dialectic of the one and the many in a familiar form. On the one hand, “All
knowing is infinite. It is an indivisible totality.” But on the other, “[Philosophy’s]
divisibility is arbitrary,” by which he does not so much mean random as, rather,
infinite, or, perhaps more precisely, indeterminate in degree (KA 12, 10). In a
way that anticipates Hegel, Schlegel here does not so much “resolve” a Kantian
antinomy as embrace it thanks to a turn to the mathematical infinite. The “one”
of infinity can also be approximated by the infinite synthesis (integration) of
infinitesimals. That he is indeed thinking in terms of “magnitudes” we can see
from the otherwise odd formulation that philosophy is infinite in the sense of
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“intensive as well as extensive” (KA 12, 9). And this has the further consequence
“that the most perfect/complete system can only be by approximation” (KA 12,
9). If philosophy is infinite, as knowledge is infinite, then we are also driven by
an infinite skepticism (KA 12, 9; recall his praise of Maimon). The longing and
striving for the infinite (“Streben” or “Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen,” KA
12, 8, 11) that drive the philosopher and that the philosopher must awaken in
others, is therefore closer to discussions of irrational numbers than antirational
feelings.
Thus, for Schlegel the way to address the fundamental dualisms that preoccupy
his, and indeed all post-Kantian, thought—dogmatism and empiricism, reality
and consciousness, absolute and individual—is through the tools of
mathematical thinking (not necessarily the rigors of mathematical proof). This
conclusion is rooted in the nature of such thinking, for just before the previous
quote on the elements of mathematics he states: “If one combines dualism and
theory, a science would emerge that does not have phenomena as its point of
departure but, rather, elements. This is mathematics. It is so to speak a dualism
a priori” (KA 12, 15). Mathematical reasoning about the infinite is so important
to him because it allows him to think through the dualism in its pure
relationality. “All reality is the product of opposing elements” (KA 12, 8) in the
sense of the infinitely small and the infinitely large that, then, converge with
each other. Thus we can understand how Schlegel arrives at what he calls “our
formula now (p.252) from a positive perspective”: “the minimum of the I is
equal to the maximum of nature; and the minimum of nature is equal to the
maximum of the I. That is, the smallest sphere of consciousness is equal to the
largest of nature, and vice versa” (KA 12, 6). What might sound like a playful
paradox coming from the philosopher of irony is rooted in the discussions
around the antinomies associated with the infinitesimal. He formulates the task
of idealism in terms that echo fully Maimon’s uses of the differential relation to
explain Kant’s anticipations of perception and reality: “The philosopher
(idealism) deals with the minimum and the maximum, and physics with the finite
members between reality and the elements of an infinite progression of
proportions” (KA 12, 17).
In thinking through the infinite in this way, Schlegel brings together a

conception of a system that thinks through opposites. He formulates his own
version of the fundamental antinomy: “the thesis, that matter [passes over] into
consciousness; the antithesis...that all form is infinite” (KA 12, 36). But rather
than flee the infinite or turn it into the merely indefinite, he makes it the task of
philosophy to provide the “synthesis.” Schlegel called for a final stage of
philosophy that would introduce a crucial form of self-reflexivity. It would be the
“philosophy of philosophy,” a concept his age was in the process of
“constructing” (konstruieren) (KA 12, 92). While Schlegel went on to dedicate
himself to many other pursuits and thus did not devote himself exclusively to the
task of this philosophical construction, he did contribute something crucial to its
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formation. For he recognized the need to introduce “a knowledge of the sciences

that are connected to [the] whole, to the infinite [eine Kenntnis der
Wissenschaften, die sich auf (das) Ganze, Unendliche beziehen]” (KA 12, 92).
Because his conception of the infinite was radically paradoxical in that it had to
be both the heart of philosophy and yet by definition unattainable, Schlegel’s
encyclopedic effort had to include that one science that itself embraced this
paradox, infinitesimal calculus.
My project of connecting romantic “unendliche Annäherung” with specific

discussions of the mathematical infinite is motivated in principle by David Foster
Wallace’s association between mathematics and metaphysics: “It is in areas like
math and metaphysics that we encounter one of the average human mind’s
weirdest attributes, [namely] the ability to conceive of things that we cannot,
strictly speaking, conceive of.”25 And with the romantics in mind, and Schlegel’s
conception of “progressive Universalpoesie,” we could add poetry to these
attempts to grasp the ungraspable. Indeed, there is an element of the poetic at
the heart of the mathematical infinite, also as a result of its historical
development.26 One might even include Goethe in this rich body of
mathematical, philosophical, and poetic literature, who said in a conversation
with Riemer on March 27, 1814: “Numbers, like our poor words, are only
attempts to grasp and express appearances, eternal unattainable
approximations.”27
(p.253) What is particularly productive in Friedrich Schlegel’s account was the

way he united these elements—metaphysics, mathematics, and poetry—in the
last years of the eighteenth century into a program centered on the infinite. For
him, “unendliche Annäherung” was neither a forceful activity of the ego coming
to grips with its other (nature) nor an emotional longing for the impossible akin
to nostalgia. Rather, it marked a powerful paradox that lay at the heart of the
calculus that had been developed during the previous century and which could
be formulated as a series of antinomic propositions (the world is and is not
infinitely divisible; the infinitesimal exists and is nothing). It was a paradox that
could not be represented but could be thought. And it was a paradox that
nonetheless made possible a powerful mathematical tool for grasping reality as
change. Schlegel seized that paradox, following the lead of Salomon Maimon,
used it to ground a new form of idealism that grasped the duality of
consciousness and the infinite, and further to create a unity out of that dualism
by locating the infinite as continuous synthesis within our finite consciousness.
By definition, a philosophy and poetic practice based on this paradox could
never become a completed system. Its relevance lies in its contrast to other
approaches to the infinite, such as a (Kantian) critical practice that would
impose limits on our thinking of the infinite, or a (Hegelian) idealism that would
sublate it, or later nineteenth-century mathematical axiomatizations that would
produce a grounding of calculus without the paradoxical infinitesimals.28 The
creative openness of Schlegel’s philosophical thought is made possible by his
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insistence on the nonextinguishable difference that is the differential and infinite

approximation, a difference lying at the heart of reality as constructed by
consciousness. The next time this mode of philosophizing finds anything
comparable (though without direct influence) comes with the similarly
mathematically inflected “new thinking” of Franz Rosenzweig after the First
World War, which departs from the neo-Kantian philosophy of mathematics of
Hermann Cohen (as influenced by Maimon) and challenges the legacy of
Hegelianism.29 It was Friedrich Schlegel’s romantic calculus that first opened up
a way to conceive of the relation of mind, world, and God rigorously as infinite
approximation.30
Notes:
(1) . Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgley,
Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman, and Merten Reglitz (New York:
Continuum, 2010), 19 n. 1. Hereafter cited as “Maimon” in the body of the text.
In his Logic (1812) Hegel also argues for the significance of the mathematical
infinite in terms that echo Maimon’s: “But in a philosophical respect the
mathematical infinite is important because underlying it, in fact, is the notion of
the genuine infinite and it is far superior to the ordinary so-called metaphysical
infinite on which are based the objections to the mathematical infinite.” Georg
Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden,
ed. K. Michel E. Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 280.
Hereafter cited as “Hegel” in the body of the text.
(2) . On the history of calculus, see I. Grattan-Guinness, ed., From Calculus to

Set Theory, 1630–1910 (London: Duckworth, 1980); Shaughan Lavine,
Understanding the Infinite (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
and David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
(New York: Norton: 2003).
(3) . Leonhard Euler, Briefe an eine deutsche Prinzessin. Philosophische Auswahl

(Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1968). Hereafter cited as “Euler” in the
body of the text. Swiss by birth, Euler spent most of his life in St. Petersburg,
with an intervening twenty-five-year sojourn in Berlin at the invitation of
Frederick the Great (1741–1766). Grattan-Guinness summarizes Euler’s
contributions: “The man who reshaped the Leibnizian calculus into a soundly
organised body of mathematical knowledge was Leonard Euler....Euler’s greatest
influence on the calculus and on analysis in general was through his great
textbooks, in which he gave analysis a definitive form, which it was to keep until
well into the 19th century.” Grattan-Guinness, From Calculus to Set Theory, 53.
Page 15 of 20
(4) . Cited in C. Edward Sandifer, How Euler Did It (Washington, DC:

Mathematical Association of America, 2000), 148.
(5) . Sandifer, How Euler Did It, 148.
(6) . Ben David, a respected Jewish supporter and propagator of Kant’s

philosophy, moved to Berlin in 1797 (after having been expelled with other
foreigners from Vienna), where he was part of the circle around Marcus and
Henriette Herz. The latter had a famous salon attended, among others, by
Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher at the end of the century. Ben
David also came to the financial aid of Maimon when he was having difficulties
gaining entry into Berlin (as described in Maimon’s autobiography). See
Weissberg for biographical accounts. Frank mentions briefly the association
between Bendavid and Maimon. Manfred Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung.” Die
Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997), 114 n. 2.
(7) . Lazarus Ben David, Versuch einer logischen Auseinandersetzung über das
mathematische Unendliche (Berlin: Petit und Schöne, 1789), 23. Hereafter cited
as “Bendavid” in the body of the text.
(8) . This discussion has remarkable parallels to sections of Moses

Mendelssohn’s winning response to the Academy question on whether
metaphysical truths can have the same Evidenz as mathematical ones. In his
Essay on the Evidence of Mathematical Science (Abhandlung über die Evidenz
der mathematischen Wissenschaft), he compares them to the mathematics of
“Fluxional-Rechung,” which can be “begreiflich” but not “faßlich” (Moses
Mendelsson, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 [Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843], 271.)
(9) . Kästner exerted considerable influence on the intellectual life of Germany

through his teaching activities at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen as
well as through the prolific output of textbooks on mathematics and the physical
sciences.
(10) . Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Anfangsgründe der Analysis des Unendlichen

(Göttingen: Im Verlag der Wittwe Vandenhoeck, 1761–70), x. Hereafter cited as
“Kästner” in the body of the text.
(11) . This is just a very small sampling of the wealth of work done in these years
on the topic. In addition to the separate textbooks, there was also the 1786
Preisfrage of the Prussian Academy to provide a clear and precise treatment of
the mathematical infinite. Related to this issue was also the Preisfrage of 1782 to
derive notions of calculus from Euclidean geometry. The concern there was the
central one of whether the new notions of the infinite could be grasped with
intuition (like geometry) or needed to be “constructed.”
Page 16 of 20
(12) . The contribution that Maimon made to the history of modern philosophy
has been well documented over the last twenty years. Manfred Frank devotes
over two lectures to him in his Unendliche Annäherung but he makes no mention
of the mathematics in his otherwise excellent discussion. Beiser claims that
Maimon’s work is “of the first importance for the history of post-Kantian
idealism,” and he offers a brief discussion of the “difficult” theory of
differentials. Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from
Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 286. A number
of Maimon scholars have argued that he be considered seriously in his own right
and not just as a middle figure (S. H. Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon
Maimon [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967]; Jan Bransen, The Antinomy of Thought:
Maimonian Skepticism and the Relation between Thoughts and Objects
[Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991]). However, few address why the
notion of the mathematical infinite can shift our perspective on fundamental
problems in philosophy. And while others address his use of the differential, no
one has sought to locate him within the discussions of the period. Exceptions are
recent discussions by Simon Duffy and Daniel W. Smith (in Sjoerd van Tuinen
and Niamh McDonnell, eds., Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader [New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010]), spurred by interest in Deleuze’s work on Leibniz
and mathematics. The one commentator to devote a monograph on Maimon and
mathematics is Buzaglo, who offers a very brief discussion of the pertinent
sections of Chapter 2 of the Versuch, only to claim that the notion of the
differential is not relevant. See Meir Buzaglo, Solomon Maimon: Monism,
Skepticism and Mathematics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002),
125. Freudenthal provides a very rich reading, recognizing at the outset that
“Maimon’s philosophy is imbued with mathematics.” Gideon Freudenthal,
“Maimon’s Philosophical Program. Understanding versus Intuition,”
Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of
German Idealism 8 (2010), 83.
(13) . See also Freudenthal, “Maimon’s Philosophical Program,” 84, on

asymptotes.
(14) . See Nuzzo’s discussion of Kant’s distinction between the faculties.

Angelica Nuzzo, Kant and the Unity of Reason (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue
University Press, 2005), 23–38. And according to Förster, “the claim that the
faculty of sensibility differs in principle from conceptual abilities is Kant’s own
quite original position,” although he then points to the passage where Kant
himself says that these “two stems of human knowledge perhaps arise out of a
common, but to us unknown root.” Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of
Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 7 and 10. He cites Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A15/
B28.
Page 17 of 20
(15) . Given his position that the differential is an infinitely small quantum,
which can never be zero but is only a “limit concept” of consciousness and the
activity of consciousness in constituting reality, it is not by chance that Maimon
offers a spirited critique of his friend and supporter, Ben David, for mistakenly
taking Euler’s position that dx = 0. In the first part of the appendix to his
Versuch, Maimon includes an essay “On Symbolic Cognition and Philosophical
Language” (Maimon 139–72) that demonstrates the role of the mathematicians
we have explored in his philosophical investigations. Differentials constitute a
particular kind of “nothing that mathematicians nevertheless make into an
object of their cognition because of the universality of their calculus” (Maimon
150). They must be thought of as infinitely small, “but this does not make them
any less real” (Maimon 152). Ben David, in defining “the infinitely small = the
infinitely large = 0” fails “to distinguish precisely these different types of
nothing from one another” (Maimon 152). Instead, Maimon suggests, one should
turn to another mathematician, for “it is only necessary to read a
Kästner” (Maimon 150). See below on parallels between Maimon and Schlegel
on such “symbolic cognition” of such nonrepresentables as infinitesimals.
Furthermore, Maimon’s argument makes use of Kant’s later discussions in the
Critique of Pure Reason of the “anticipations of perception” and reveals the
power of the mathematical infinite beyond what Kant himself could see.
(16) . See Howard Pollack-Milgate’s “Novalis and Mathematics Revisited,”

Athäneum: Jahrbuch für Romantik (1997): 113–40. In it, he provides a new
reading that goes beyond Hamburger and Dyck. For Kleist, see Wolf Kittler on
Kleist: “Falling after the Fall: The Analysis of the Infinite in Kleist’s
Marionettentheater,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. Bernd Fischer
and Tim Mehigan (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011). By taking Kleist’s
knowledge of mathematics (via Kästner) seriously, Kittler offers a stringent
critique of de Man’s earlier reading. David Martyn looks at Kleist’s
understanding of the mathematics of probability. See “Figures of the Mean:
Freedom, Progress, and the Law of Statistical Averages in Kleist’s ‘Allerneuester
Erziehungsplan,’” Germanic Review 85 (2010): 44–62.
(17) . Brauers and Zeuch explore Schlegel and the infinite, also in relation to the
Western tradition. Chaouli discusses Schlegel and chemistry. See Claudia
Brauers, Perspektiven des Unendlichen. Friedrich Schlegels ästhetische
Vermittlungstheorie (Berlin: Ernst Schmidt Verlag, 1996) and Ulrike Zeuch, Das
Unendliche: Höchste Fülle oder Nichts? Zur Problematik von Friedrich Schlegels
Geist-Begriff und dessen geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Würzburg:
Königshausen und Neumann, 1991).
(18) . See Dalia Nassar, “Schelling und die Frühromantik: Das Unendliche und
das Endliche im Kunstwerk,” http://www.academia.edu/656856/
Schelling_und_die_Fruhromantik_Das_Unendliche_und_das_Endliche_im_Kunstwerk
Page 18 of 20
(accessed April 20, 2013), for a discussion of Schlegel on the absolute in relation
to Schelling and poetry.
(19) . Consider the footnote near the end of the introduction to his lectures:
“Zwischen Spinoza und Fichte liegt Leibnitz in der Mitte” (KA 12, 30). Also John
H. Smith, “Leibniz Reception around 1800: Monadic Vitalism and Harmony in
Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion and Schlegel’s Lucinde,” in Religion,
Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe, ed. Elizabeth Kimmerer and Patricia
Simpson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013).
(20) . See also the many variation on this formula, such as: “√χα/0 = Gott” (the
square root of chaos divided by zero, i.e. infinite chaos; KA 18, 238, no. 540) or
even wilder: “Gott = 1/0 √χα1/0/0” (the infinite root of chaos to the infinite power
divided by 0; KA 18, 277, no. 999). Or also: “Der Monolog ein 1/0√Dialog1/0” (KA
18, 199, no. 34).
(21) . See especially Daniel Breazeale, “Men at Work: Philosophical Construction

in Fichte and Schelling,” http://www.europhilosophie.eu/recherche/IMG/pdf/
Plenar-Breazeale-beitrag.pdf (accessed April 20, 2013); and Helga Ende, Der
Konstruktionsbegriff im Umkreis des deutschen Idealismus (Meisenheim am
Glan: Anton Hain, 1973).
(22) . See also note 11 above.
(23) . Maimon goes so far as to “hold that geometrical propositions can be

demonstrated far more powerfully through the methodus indivisibilium, or the
differential calculus, than in the usual way” (Maimon 143). And consider
Schlegel’s fragment: “All geometry is cyclical and classical [cyklisch und
classisch]—algebra is merely constructed [construirt] in itself and progressive
[progreßiv]” (KA 18, 274, no. 954). Indeed, the notion of a rule to explain the
way to generate an infinite (magnitude) that can only be represented
symbolically seems here to be the very definition of the idea of “progression”
that is the basis of romantic poetry.
(24) . See also the fragment from the time of the lectures: “Continuity is the
character of all that is idealist [alles Idealistischen]” (KA 18, 363, no. 504).
(25) . Wallace, Everything and More, 22.
(26) . As Thiel reminds us: “In terms of the history of philosophy and of
mathematics it is noteworthy that out of notions of the infinitesimal, which were
often attacked as imprecise, a philosophy of the mathematics of the infinite
arose in the eighteenth century, a ‘metaphysics of infinitesimal calculus.’ And a
rich body of literature was produced that argued often in the style of its
founders, like Leibniz, who....saw through infinitesimals as fictions and yet,
rather than eliminate them, justified them by analogies.” Christian Thiel,
Page 19 of 20
Philosophie und Mathematik. Eine Einführung in ihre Wechselwirkungen und in

die Philosophie der Mathematik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1995), 175–76.
(27) . Cited in Martin Dyck, “Goethe’s Views on Pure Mathematics,” Germanic

Review 31 (1956): 59.
(28) . Robinson’s nonstandard analysis did reintroduce infinitesimals, but with a

new rigor that aimed to remove the paradoxes. See the discussion in John Bell,
The Continuous and the Infinitesimal in Mathematics and Philosophy (Milan:
Polimetrica, 2006).
(29) . See John H. Smith, “The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle:

Representing the Paradoxes of God and Nothing in Cohen, Rosenzweig,
Scholem, and Barth,” MLN 127 (2012): 562–88.
(30) . I dedicate this essay to my friends, students, and colleagues at the

University of Waterloo who provided a stimulating environment for me to write
it. Research for the essay was supported by a UW/SSHRC Seed Grant.
Page 20 of 20
The “Mathematical” Wissenschaftslehre

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

On a Late Fichtean Reflection of Novalis
David W. Wood
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0015

This chapter argues that in his late writings Novalis (1772–1801) was one of the
first thinkers to positively grasp the underlying mathematicity of Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre. In a neo-Platonistic sense, both Novalis and Fichte
acknowledged that mathematical and geometrical methods should form an ideal
for all scientific philosophy, and that a proper philosophy of mathematics must
take into account the intellectual activity of the mathematician. These elements
of Fichte’s system only became more widely recognized in the twentieth century
by philosophers of mathematics such as Hermann Weyl, Andreas Speiser, and
Jules Vuillemin. This may be considered as a belated but independent
confirmation of Novalis’s original insights on the relationship between
mathematics and philosophy in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.
Keywords: Fichte, Novalis, mathematics, geometry, philosophical romanticism, German idealism,

Wissenschaftslehre
14.1. Mathematics and Romantic Philosophy

There have been a number of important studies on Novalis’s understanding of
the mathematical sciences, revealing his technical competency in the field of
pure mathematics.1 This recognition has not always been present in Novalis
scholarship. Not only in philosophy but also in the field of mathematics, Novalis
has had to overcome the reputation of being a romantic dilettante. For example,
in 1910, no less an authority than Wilhelm Dilthey dismissed Novalis’s late
reflections on mathematics as mere “hymns to mathematics,” or as “unfruitful”
Page 1 of 16
instances of “conceptual mystical games.”2 Later studies have furnished a much

more balanced and positive view of Novalis’s mathematical thought and
education. Any research completed in the last half-century has also had the
benefit of the Historical-Critical edition of Novalis’s works, which in its
completeness, rearrangement, and reordering of the texts allows us to see his
ideas and readings in context.3 This edition demonstrates that Novalis’s training
in mathematics was exceedingly broad and up-to-date, with studies in
combinatorial analysis, analytic functions, pure geometry, arithmetic,
exponentiation, logarithms, and calculus.4
For a romantic figure, one could ask: why was Novalis interested in these
abstract and complex fields of thought? As we will see with Fichte, the late
fragments of Novalis show his interest to have been much more of a
philosophical (p.259) one, and he above all attempted to grasp the reciprocal
interactions between the symbolic languages and methods of philosophy and
mathematics. Or in the words of the historian of mathematics, Hans Niels
Jahnke, it was mathematics as the “symbol of a higher unity of knowledge” that
appealed to Novalis.5
Novalis’s most in-depth study of mathematics took place in 1791–1793 at the

University of Leipzig, where he attended courses on the combinatorial analysis
of Carl Friedrich Hindenburg,6 and in 1798–99 while at the Freiberg Mining
Academy, where he indeed sought theoretical and systematic unity, not just in
mathematics, but in all the sciences. This attempt achieved its most
comprehensive expression in his “scientific Bible” of 1798–99, a romantic
encyclopedia of the sciences written parallel to his mathematical studies.7
According to Frederick Beiser, on account of its systematicity the encyclopedia
project exhibits one of the clearest differences between the early and later
notebooks of Novalis: “While Novalis was critical of almost all philosophical
pretensions in his early notebooks, he continued to nurture systematic
ambitions, which eventually grew into his project for the encyclopaedia of all the
sciences. No less than Schelling and Hegel, Novalis was a systematic
philosopher, whose goal was to show how all the sciences form a unity.”8 This
positive evaluation of the power of philosophy in Novalis’s later notebooks
compared to his earlier ones such as the “Fichte-Studies” from 1795–96, raises
the question of the status of idealism in philosophical romanticism—a question
lying at the heart of a number of modern debates. Due to their inherent
skepticism and rejection of a philosophy of first principles, Manfred Frank
primarily situates the romantics outside the idealist stream; whereas on account
of its rationality, Platonistic tendencies and systematic pretensions such as
Novalis’s encyclopedia, Beiser places philosophical romanticism within the
idealist current.9 Despite these interpretative differences, these debates have
been fruitful insofar as they have led to a much closer examination of the
philosophical texts of the early German romantics. However, they have also
Page 2 of 16
exposed certain lacunae, such as the lack of critical attention paid to the later
philosophical writings of Novalis.
Although Novalis’s encyclopedia project remained incomplete and was put aside
in March 1799, its guiding philosophical idea of a single universal science can
still be found in Novalis’s postencyclopedia writings, including the 1799 essay
“Christendom or Europe”.10 It is similarly present in 1800 toward the end of the
final “Fragments and Studies”, where philosophy only becomes “truly visible”
within the finished system of all the sciences: “[Philosophy] is the undetermined
science of the sciences—a mysticism of the drive for knowledge on the whole—
the spirit of science as it were....Thus all the sciences are interrelated—and
philosophy will never be completed. Only in the perfect system of all the
sciences will philosophy become truly visible” (NS 3, 666). This final systematic
form of philosophy for Novalis is therefore a regulative ideal in the (p.260)
Kantian sense, because we can approach it but never fully attain it. Or it can be
conceived as similar to the Fichtean idea of a vocation (Bestimmung): philosophy
can never be completed, nor can it ever appear in concreto. Hence in addition to
the terms “romantic philosophy,” or “magical idealism,” Novalis’s system of
thought in these later fragments may also be characterized as a form of
“encyclopedic philosophy.” Comparing his idea with Fichte’s goal to make the
Wissenschaftslehre into a “science of the sciences” or with Hegel’s
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences we see that Novalis likewise shares
this striving for a system of universal knowledge with the German idealists.
A further point in which Novalis is intellectually aligned with the idealistic

stream lies in the fact that he ascribes a special status to mathematical thinking.
Mathematics plays a central role in his encyclopedic brand of philosophy, since it
serves as an ideal model and standard of all scientific knowledge.11 Specifically,
entries 1006–1042 of the Romantic Encyclopaedia—most probably written in
February–March 1799—are concerned with problem-solving and with and how
mathematical methodology may shed light on scientific method. He writes, for
instance, how it is not so much the content of this science that gives one the
right to be called a mathematician, but the understanding of its cognitive
methodology as the core of science method on the whole: “The mathematical
method is the essence of mathematics. Whoever fully understands this method,
is a mathematician. As the scientific method in general it is extremely
interesting, and perhaps supplies us with the most accurate model for the
classification of knowledge, or for the faculty of experience” (NS 3, 457). As we
will see, this view of mathematics forms a direct parallel with Fichte’s
conception of philosophy developed one year later as a form of mathematical
thought or scientific mathesis.
Unlike philosophy, which only becomes visible after the unification of all the
sciences, mathematics is already a visible and useful instrument, because the
objects of mathematics are initially found in the visible sense world. This
Page 3 of 16
concept is apparent in the group of about forty “mathematical fragments” of

1799–1800 (the ones labeled by Dilthey as “hymns to mathematics”).
Nevertheless, what is mathematics itself? Here we once again approach the
contentious issue of how to interpret Novalis’s idealism in mathematics and
philosophy: that is, whether or not it should be viewed as a form of absolute
idealism in the rationalistic or Platonistic tradition, a reading supported by
Beiser but resisted by Frank.12 With respect to Novalis and mathematics, one
could go further and say that there is not just a Platonic but even a Pythagorean
undercurrent in his thought, when he reflects on the following interrelations
between number and language: “The numerical system is the model for a
genuine system of linguistic signs.—The letters of our alphabet shall become
numbers, our language, arithmetic. What did the Pythagoreans really
understand by the forces of numbers?” (p.261) (NS 3, 52). Novalis’s conception
of mathematics repeatedly argues in favor of a harmony between idealistic
philosophy and the world of nature: “Mathematics is the most complete and
valid testimony of the idealism of nature”; mathematics has the “internal
connection, the sympathy of the universe, as its basis” (NS 3, 52). Or again:
nature speaks the language of mathematics because nature herself is a supreme
mathematician: “Nature incessantly adds, subtracts, multiplies, raises to a
higher power etc. The applied mathematical sciences show us Nature as a
mathematician” (NS 3, 52). To be sure, with Dilthey, one could interpret these
fragments as an expression of the mysteriousness of mathematics and the
mysticism of the German romantics.13 Yet these fragments could also be placed
in the scientific tradition of Galileo, in which mathematics is the language that
nature herself speaks. Novalis adheres to an immanent view of nature and
mathematics; mathematics is “in” nature, and we have to learn to read and
decipher these outer mathematical symbols or language of nature in order to
understand its inner meaning or workings.
Moreover, these late fragments recall Novalis’s famous mathematical definition

of romanticizing in the Vorarbeiten of 1798: “The world must be romanticized.
This yields again its original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing else than a
qualitative potentialization. In this operation the lower self becomes identified
with a better self. Just as we ourselves are a qualitative potential series of this
kind” (NS 2, 545, no. 105). Quantitative potentialization is the operation of
exponentiation or raising to a higher power. However, in addition to the
quantitative version of this mathematical operation, Novalis maintains that there
is a qualitative version, but that this aspect is still unknown to researchers. On
the one hand, this qualitative version of potentialization concerns the status of
the self, where the romantic philosopher endeavors to raise his ordinary self up
to a “better self.” On the other hand it is an operation referring to the external
world, for ordinary objects can likewise be raised to a higher degree, and “given
a mysterious appearance.”14 Hence potentialization is a twofold intellectual
operation, and this is the essence of romanticizing: in its quantitative version it
Page 4 of 16
is primarily a numerical operation in mathematics. This quantitative operation

concerns the external or visible activities of measurement and counting the
sensible objects of nature. Whereas in its qualitative version, this operation
designates inner, moral, or intelligible operations, the activity of understanding
or grasping our self and its place in the world.
14.2. The Wissenschaftslehre as Mathematics?

In entry no. 429 of the Romantic Encyclopaedia Novalis writes: “There exists a
philosophical, a critical, a mathematical, a poetical, a chemical, a historical (p.
262) Wissenschaftslehre.”15 Or again in entry no. 464: “One could imagine a
highly instructive series of specific presentations of the Fichtean and Kantian
systems, for example, a poetical, a chemical, a mathematical, a musical etc.”16
Fichte’s philosophical or critical Wissenschaftslehre is relatively well-known, and
the mathematical aspects of Kant’s system have been frequently examined, but
what could a mathematical version of Fichte’s system be?
Manfred Frank has convincingly demonstrated, particularly in his detailed

reading of Novalis’s “Fichte Studies”, that Novalis and many of the other
romantics had rejected the “fictional” and axiomatic starting point (Grundsatz)
of the Wissenschaftslehre almost as soon as Fichte had arrived in Jena.17
Notwithstanding, in the above entries from the 1798–99 encyclopedia, the poet-
philosopher Novalis continues to make a number of positive remarks on Fichte
after writing this text, and after his period of “Fichticizing” with Friedrich
Schlegel in 1795–96.18 If the early Novalis was skeptical of the Fichtean
enterprise and rejected significant elements of it, how are we to understand his
later positive remarks on Fichte, particularly those concerning a possible
mathematical reading of the Wissenschaftslehre?
This question could be preceded by another one: did Fichte himself think the
Wissenschaftslehre to be mathematical? One has to give an affirmative answer
to this question. In fact, beginning with the discovery of the Wissenschaftslehre
in the winter of 1793–94, where he saw himself as a sort of modern Euclid, right
up until his final lectures in the winter of 1813–14, Fichte repeatedly argued for
the Wissenschaftslehre’s close affinity and even at times its identity with
mathematics.19 Why did Fichte equate his philosophy with mathematics? This is
because for him they shared a number of crucial “distinctions” or characteristics
in common. First, he considered the first postulate of his system, like those in
geometry, to be wholly self-evident to the unprejudiced thinker. Second, genuine
intellectual intuition for him was similar to mathematical intuition because the
act of thinking about oneself possesses a universal validity that holds for every
rational being, regardless of the language, signs, or symbols we choose to use.
The language or signs are only external assistances to arrive at an internal
intuition of the self. Third, again like in Euclidean geometry, Fichte’s starting
point or first postulate was unprovable and therefore logically “irrefutable”; that
Page 5 of 16
is because for Fichte all refuting and disproving are confined to the sphere of
conceptual operations.
Fichte’s point of departure is a based on pure or intellection intuition. Intuition

is not subject to conceptual proofs, but must be directly grasped or seen by each
individual. In this sense the “proof” of his first principle cannot be fully
demonstrated by means of sensible or linguistic propositions, or be drawn like
ordinary lines or figures on a page. The latter are merely sensible manifestations
of an intelligible act, in which every sensible element must ultimately be (p.
263) abstracted or stripped away, and where every rational person must
inwardly carry out this intelligible act individually. The postulates of geometry
state the possibility of carrying out certain spatial activities, expressed, for
instance, in Euclid’s first postulate concerning the act of drawing a line: “To
draw a straight line from any point to any point.” Fichte’s postulate in the
Second Introduction of 1797 likewise expresses the invitation to carry out an
act; however, not that of drawing a line in space, but of a specific mental act.
“And our first postulate would be the following: Think of yourself; construct the
concept of yourself and take note of how you do this.”20 These parallels between
self-evidence, intuition, and a postulate-based system led Fichte to explicitly
equate his own philosophy with pure mathematics, in the small but controversial
Announcement of 1801: “Because the Wissenschaftslehre is mathematics, it also
has the distinctions of mathematics.”21 To this extent geometry and mathematics
are propaedeutics for the Fichtean system. Thus, similar to Novalis’s comments
on the value of mathematics for philosophy, Fichte’s views too could be placed in
the Platonic tradition. Echoing the legendary words to the entrance of the
Platonic Academy that no one could enter who had not properly studied
geometry, Fichte would likewise write in THE Announcement: “Hence, I wish
people had some knowledge of mathematics before embarking on a study of the
Wissenschaftslehre; i.e. not without first obtaining a clear insight into the
ground of the immediate self-evidence and universal validity of mathematical
postulates and theorems.”22
Apart from Kant and Spinoza, Fichte rarely compared his philosophy directly to
other systems in philosophical history; yet on account of its similarly profound
commitment to idealism, he saw Plato’s philosophy as a forerunner to his own:
“Among the Greeks, Plato was on this path to the Wissenschaftslehre....among
the ancient philosophers Plato may have had an inkling [of our view]” (GA 1/9,
73, 110). This Platonist component of Fichte’s thought is particularly evident in
his theory of “original” geometry from 1805, which is based on absolute, ideal,
and infinite elements that have to be grasped in geometric intuition, and which
he set in opposition to the “ordinary” geometry of Euclid.23 Novalis was one of
the first thinkers to detect this Platonist or Neoplatonist heritage in the Fichtean
system, when in 1798 he briefly cited the “idealistic similarity” between Fichte
and Plotinus.24 Fichte’s idealistic proximity to the Platonic stream was finally
Page 6 of 16
explained in convincing detail by the Swiss philosopher of mathematics Andreas

Speiser in the middle of the twentieth century.25
In contrast to Novalis’s remarks on Fichte’s idealism and the possibility of a

mathematical Wissenschaftslehre, the majority of Fichte’s contemporaries,
including Kant, Jacobi, Jakob Sigismund Beck, and even his own student Johann
Friedrich Herbart, all either explicitly rejected or failed to see its mathematical
(p.264) pretensions. Friedrich Karl Forberg, Fichte’s colleague at the
University of Jena, who was later to play a prominent role in the atheism dispute,
summed up the views of many of these contemporaries when he said in 1795:
“What Fichte understands about mathematics is for the most part false, and he
has not fared any better in this field than Maimon, who likewise wanted to deal
with mathematics, but without any greater success.”26 In other words, Novalis’s
remarks are at odds with many of the other thinkers of the time. Again, this is
not to say that Novalis did not harbor doubts about certain elements of Fichte’s
philosophy, such as the emphasis on a philosophy of first principles. He did
harbor doubts, yet he was still able to recognize the mathematical aspects of
Fichte’s philosophy. If Novalis was not convinced of the self-evident geometric
starting point of the Wissenschaftslehre, then what was mathematical about it
for him? One way of answering this question is to see that Novalis and Fichte
were interested in wholly different branches of mathematics, and this influenced
their mathematical readings.
14.3. Exponentiation and Problem-Solving

As we saw, when speaking of the relationship between the methods of
mathematics and philosophy, Fichte particularly appeals to the Euclidean
axiomatic system, that is to say, to indemonstrable first principles or postulates.
His conception of mathematics is more of a synthetic or geometric one. Fichte is
following Kant’s lead insofar as the latter too especially chose examples from
geometry to illustrate philosophical problems.27 Fichte’s theory of mathematics
underscores the importance of geometrical images (Bilder) and the conscious
construction of these images. He frequently resorts to the examples of drawing a
line and the construction of triangles, in which the geometrical figures are
sensible images for understanding intellectual activities such as the construction
of the I or self. Novalis, by contrast, often has arithmetic, logarithms,
exponentiation, or more analytic methods in mind, and selects his principal
examples from the sphere of algebra, arithmetic, and calculus. In contrast to
Fichte, Novalis seeks qualitative versions of quantitative mathematical
operations, and wishes to find unknown variables by means of known numerical
values and figures. This is most apparent in his famous definition of romanticism
mentioned above, in which the chief operation is not a geometrical construction,
but the quantitative algebraic operation of exponentiation (potentialization).
Page 7 of 16
Paradoxically perhaps, it is precisely the more analytic problem-solving methods

of algebra and calculus that Novalis finds related to the Wissenschaftslehre. In a
sense, one could say that this provides further support for Manfred Frank’s
thesis of the romantics’ rejection of Grundsatz philosophy. With regard to (p.
265) Novalis, he rejected and was skeptical about Fichte’s postulate-like first
principle because he was less attracted to and convinced by axiomatic systems
in general. Nevertheless, he did not dismiss every mathematical aspect of the
Wissenschaftslehre, for he still discerned in it a problem-solving power similar to
the operations found in algebra and calculus. He saw in the Fichtean project an
ideal meta-reflection on the activity of philosophizing that could be applied back
to an understanding of the nature of mathematical activity itself. This is why
three years after “Fichticizing” with Friedrich Schlegel he could still write:
“Fichte’s demand for simultaneous thinking, acting and observing is the ideal of
philosophizing.”28 This reflective focus on joint volitional and intellectual
operations, as well as the reciprocal relationships between the disciplines of
philosophy and mathematics, seems to have held an enduring appeal for Novalis.
Here the operation of exponentiation and its inverse once again holds: the ideal
system of philosophy may be viewed as a potentialization of mathematics and
vice versa: “In the end, mathematics is only common, simple philosophy, and
philosophy is higher mathematics in general.”29 Or again: “(Has philosophy
originated from the contemplation of mathematics?) Philosophy is universal—or
higher mathematics—the animating principle of mathematics—poetic
mathematics—or the substance, if mathematics is the form.”30
It is interesting to note that Fichte too referred to the Wissenschaftslehre in

terms of the potentialization of mathematics. As we saw, he considers his system
to be similar to geometry because it is based on intuition, self-evidence, and
construction, although it still does not possess the same authority. In terms of
knowledge or epistemology, he believed that the Wissenschaftslehre even stood
at a higher level than mathematics. While mathematicians carry out
constructions or intuitions with their attention generally focused on the specific
sensible objects of their knowledge (their spatial constructions), the philosopher
of the Wissenschaftslehre abstracts away all these sensible aspects and focuses
on the pure activities of constructing and intuiting themselves: “The
Wissenschaftslehre is mathesis of the mind. In actual mathematics one only
examines the products of construction; here [in the Wissenschaftslehre], one
examines the [activity of] constructing itself” (GA 2/5, 344).31 Fichte ultimately
considers his philosophy to be a more universal science than mathematics,
because the latter only contains limited and particular examples and instances of
intuition, self-evidence, and construction, whereas the Wissenschaftslehre aims
to explain the universal nature of intuition, self-evidence, and construction.
Accordingly, the Wissenschaftslehre should no longer simply be considered as
mathematics or “mathesis,” but as a science of the nature of mathematical
knowledge as such, or “mathesis of mathesis.”32
Page 8 of 16
Of course, Novalis and Fichte realize there are limits to our problem-solving
abilities in mathematics and philosophy. The unknown is not always attained (p.
266) from out of the known, and sometimes we fail to uncover the right answer,
or a problem simply cannot be solved. We therefore need a science to
consciously reflect on these methodological limits, whose origin lies in a
reflection on the limits and nature of the activity of problem-solving itself. This is
entirely in the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy, which is a science reflecting on
the limits and boundaries of pure thought. This critical approach should be
adopted with regard to mathematics, resulting in a discipline that takes over
where ordinary mathematics leaves off, a transcendental or meta-discipline
explaining why ordinary mathematics reaches and runs up against certain limits,
as well as explaining the very conditions of its possibility. In other words, there
is a necessity for a genuine philosophy of mathematics, a discipline that had not
yet been sufficiently established during the idealistic and romantic period. With
his cognitive reflections on the nature and possibility of mathematical activity it
is obvious that Fichte considered the Wissenschaftslehre as being able to
contribute to such a disciple. Fichte writes in 1804,
Let the arithmetician as mere arithmetician tell me how he is able to

generate a solid and fixed number one; or let the geometer explain what
holds and keeps his space stationary for him while he draws his continuous
lines in it;.... This is not in any way meant as a reproach to mathematics;
because mathematics should and cannot be anything else. And it is
certainly not our business to blur the boundaries of the sciences; but it
should simply be recognized that this science [of mathematics], like all the
other sciences, is not the first science, and it is not independent, but that
the principles of its possibility lie in another, higher science.
(GA 2/8, 47f)
Fichte’s most detailed reflections on a philosophy of mathematics were to

appear the following year in his 1805 course on logic in Erlangen.33
One could argue that what is particularly “Fichtean” about some of the late
fragments of Novalis is that he seems to agree with Fichte that the methods of
the Wissenschaftslehre could provide a framework for a kind of proto-philosophy
of mathematics. Novalis here made a direct comparison between Fichte and the
French mathematician Georges-Louis Le Sage, who was trying to introduce
rigorous “speculative” and mechanistic models into physics: “The
Wissenschaftslehre is nothing more than a proof of the reality of logic—its
harmony with the rest of nature and [it is] completely analogous to mathematics
with regard to its discoveries, its rectifications—and to what it can achieve. (Le
Sage has accomplished something similar in mathematics)” (NS 3, 559). For
Novalis, the Wissenschaftslehre’s method of inwardly directing one’s attention to
the activities of the mind during the constructing of the self could serve as a
Page 9 of 16
model for reflecting on the activities and constructions (p.267) of mathematics,

especially on its limits and failures, to render mathematics in turn more
scientific. Such a discipline, according to Novalis, could be called the
“Wissenschaftslehre of mathematics,” as he outlines in entry 1015 of the
Romantic Encyclopaedia:
Attempt to prove and solve this [i.e., the functions of the analytic and
synthetic methods in mathematics]—to construct what mathematics fails to
prove or solve—the Wissenschaftslehre of mathematics. The application of
problems and theorems—combining them—the scientification of
mathematics.
(NS 3, 175)34
Hence, among contemporary philosophers, it is above all Novalis who saw the
Wissenschaftslehre’s potential for contributing to a scientific discipline
reflecting on the problems, activities, and limits of mathematics. However, here
one should keep in mind a number of other things. Firstly, one has to be careful
about overinterpreting these late fragments on the need for a philosophy of
mathematics, or attributing too much value to what are admittedly only
scattered remarks on Fichte’s mathematical Wissenschaftslehre. Novalis’s ideas
remain brief indications and are not fully developed.35 Second, one should not
forget Novalis’s cutting criticisms of the presentation of Fichte’s system in the
late fragments: the Wissenschaftslehre is a “frightful convolution of
abstractions” that is not yet “complete or presented precisely enough” and
“absolutely unpoetic” (NS 4, 230).36 Finally, Novalis’s utterances on the
deficiencies in the presentations of Fichte’s system should not be taken in turn
as rejections of the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole. For Fichte had made exactly
the same criticisms about the presentation of his philosophy. He too was not
satisfied with its external form, and continually revised and recast his system in
an attempt to assist the understanding of his readers. As Fichte remarked to
Reinhold in 1797: “Your evaluation of my presentation, as it has appeared so far,
is much too favorable. Or perhaps the content has allowed you to overlook the
deficiency of the presentation. I consider it to be most imperfect. Yes, I know
that it gives off sparks of spirit; but it is not a single flame.”37
14.4. The Relevance of Novalis’s Final Fragments

How can one speak about the relevance of Novalis’s final philosophical
fragments today? One way would be to show how some of his insights are still
fruitful because they help us to better understand certain aspects or
phenomena. In addition to Novalis’s indication of Fichte’s affinity to
Neoplatonism, I maintain that this is also the case with his views on the
mathematicity of the (p.268) Wissenschaftslehre. For it was likewise only in the
twentieth century that this aspect of Fichte’s system was acknowledged as
significant by a number of leading philosophers and mathematicians, such as
Page 10 of 16
Hermann Weyl and Jules Vuillemin. Neither of these later thinkers directly refers
to Novalis’s remarks on the mathematical nature of Fichte’s philosophy, yet they
too argue for a positive mathematical reading of the Wissenschaftslehre. Hence,
like the above-mentioned example of Andreas Speiser’s research on the Platonic
elements of Fichte’s thought, one could also consider the work of Weyl and
Vuillemin to have provided an independent confirmation of some of Novalis’s
original insights. In conclusion, we will outline two specific instances of this.
First, the German mathematician and philosopher Hermann Weyl (1885–1955)

seems to have especially valued Fichte’s theory of construction and his art of
conceptual distinctions. As Norman Sieroka has shown in great detail in his
recent book Umgebungen, it was Fichte’s l812 lectures on transcendental logic
that helped Weyl to better grasp the nature of logical antinomies, the
understanding of which subsequently helped him to clarify certain elements of
set theory and mathematical logic.38 Already in his 1918 book Das Kontinuum,
Weyl had proposed that Fichte’s philosophy could be of benefit to philosophers
of mathematics: “We cannot now proceed to the final explanation of the essence
of a factual issue, judgment, object, and quality; this task would lead us into
metaphysical depths. Here one has to receive advice from men whose names
cannot be mentioned among mathematicians without eliciting a compassionate
smile—Fichte, for example.”39 Moreover, with reference to the Pythagorean
theorem, Sieroka explains how for both Weyl and Fichte the mathematical theory
of self-evidence has its initial foundation in a “feeling for truth and certainty.”40
These are then combined with the hovering (“Schweben”) of the imagination,
allowing the mathematician to “construct” certain laws, principles, and
operations. Weyl’s emphasis on a clear analysis of the concept of operation and
activity in mathematics also parallels a key mathematical concept in Novalis, as
has been recently noted by Benoît Timmermans.41 In any event, these particular
elements of Fichte’s theory were much more palatable to Weyl than the
phenomenological theory of Husserl.42
A second example of the prescience of Novalis’s remarks concerning the

mathematicity of the Wissenschaftslehre may be found in the work of the late
French philosopher of mathematics Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001). In his 1962
seminal study, La philosophie de l’algèbre, Vuillemin argues that Fichte’s
progression beyond Kant’s theory of sensible intuition to an exact and reflective
mode of intellectual intuition has a direct historical comparison with the
algebraic methods developed by the French mathematician Joseph-Louis
Lagrange in 1770. Philosophically, Vuillemin asserts two main points: first, the
history of mathematics shows that revolutions in the methods of mathematics
have repercussions on the methods of philosophy, which are only subsequently
(p.269) understood by philosophers. Thus, philosophers could learn a lot and
make advances in their knowledge by studying the revolutions in mathematics.43
Second, Vuillemin applies this to Fichte by demonstrating a significant parallel
between the genetic method of the Wissenschaftslehre and Lagrange’s
Page 11 of 16
abstracting method in algebra. Technically speaking, Lagrange had noticed how

a posteriori methods for solving algebraic equations frequently reduced the
problem by employing some kind of transformation to the solution of a certain
auxiliary equation of a lower degree. Instead of merely obtaining particular
solutions to particular equations, Lagrange discovered an a priori general
method for solving cubic and quartic equations, that is, of the third and fourth
degree. Lagrange’s insight was to consider the roots (the particular numerical
values) of an equation in a symbolic or wholly abstract manner, instead of (as his
predecessors had done) as a numerical value. Thus, instead of achieving just
particular solutions, Lagrange was able to proceed to a higher level of rational
abstraction by examining problem-solving methods in general, and to explain
why certain methods were successful and others were not. Lagrange’s
realization was the first step in an a priori and generalized method that would
ultimately lead to the branch of mathematics called group theory—not with
particular quantitative solutions, but a theory of their qualitative structures and
laws.44
For Vuillemin, this revolution in mathematics sheds important light on the

philosophical path from Kant to Fichte. He maintains that Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre is similar to the problem-solving power of Lagrange’s
algebraic method because it too makes the transition from sensible, particular
cases and constructions, to abstracted and universalized considerations on the
activity of constructing itself. Vuillemin sees this as one of Fichte’s principal
advances over Kant: the move beyond sensible intuition to intellectual intuition,
and the focus on the nature of intellectual activities and operations.45 Thus, an
earlier progression in mathematical thought was later paralleled by a
progression in philosophical thought. As we saw above, it is precisely the
considerations on the operations and limits of problem-solving that also led
Novalis to qualify the Wissenschaftslehre as “mathematical,” for the latter not
only seeks to obtain answers to particular, sensible questions, but also to
abstract away and supply more universal and intelligible solutions. In the
language of the romantic philosopher, the methodology of mathematics has
become philosophically potentialized, for one has abstracted from the particular
quantitative case to find a higher universal or qualitative case.46
14.5. Conclusion
To summarize: as we saw above, Novalis did not just write lovely poetic hymns to
mathematics, but had also engaged in serious mathematical studies, which (p.
270) led him in turn to reflect on the relationship between this discipline and
philosophy. Like Fichte, the late Novalis saw mathematics as a scientific ideal
and argued for the need for a genuine philosophy of mathematics. Writing in the
1799 Freiberg Natural-Scientific Studies, Novalis remarks: “All the sciences
should become mathematics. Up to now, mathematics has merely been the first
and simplest expression or revelation of true scientific spirit....Poetics of
mathematics. Grammar of mathematics. Physics of mathematics. Philosophy of
Page 12 of 16
mathematics” (NS 3, 50).47 Moreover, there are two kinds of mathematical

operations for Novalis, the purely quantitative operations concerned with
numerical facts and the measurement of external sensible nature, and a
qualitative operation, concerned with the higher self or intelligible inner world
of the human being. Novalis not only defined the latter qualitative operation as
the method of romanticizing as such, but on account of their similar concerns
with mathematical operations or activity, he also saw a link between this
qualitative mathematical method and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, or what he
called the “Wissenschaftslehre of mathematics.” Finally, with their views on the
propaedeutic value of mathematical thinking for idealistic philosophy, both
Fichte and Novalis could be placed in the Platonic tradition. As Novalis remarks
in his Final Fragments of 1800 on the relationship of mathematics to idealism:
“Pure mathematics is the intuition of the intellect as a universe. Genuine
mathematics is the actual element of the magician....In music it appears
formally, as revelation—as creative idealism” (NS 3, 593).
In the field of German philosophy the question is often asked: “Did the
Romantics really understand Kant and Fichte?” With regard to the mathematical
pretensions of the Wissenschaftslehre the first elements of an answer may now
be provided. In contrast to the outdated view that Novalis had at most a
“poetically inspired” grasp of Fichte’s system, one could argue that he was only
able to attain his insights on account of his extensive mathematical and
philosophical studies. This background allowed him to actually understand the
Wissenschaftslehre better than many of his contemporaries, and to perceive
mathematical aspects in it which have only been grasped by more recent
research. In terms of relevance it therefore seems that scholars of German
idealism and philosophical romanticism can still benefit from a closer
examination of Novalis’s reflections on Fichte, especially those found in his final
philosophical fragments.
Notes:
(1) . I would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for their generous
assistance during the period of writing this essay. On Novalis and mathematics,
see among others: Martin Dyck, Novalis and Mathematics (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Käte Hamburger, “Novalis und die
Mathematik,” in Philosophie der Dichter: Novalis, Schiller, Rilke (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1966), 11–82; Howard Pollack, “Novalis and Mathematics
Revisited: Paradoxes of the Infinite in the Allgemeine Brouillon,” Athenäum:
Jahrbuch für Romantik 7 (1997), 113–140; and more recently, Benoît
Timmermans, “Novalis et la réforme des mathématiques,” in Modernité
Romantique, ed. Augustin Dumont and Laurent van Eynde (Paris: Éditions Kimé,
2011), 73–88.
Page 13 of 16
(2) . Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis,
Hölderlin, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 26 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2005), 196.
(3) . The Historical-Critical edition was begun in 1960 and completed in 1988.
(4) . See especially NS 3, 50–53, 115–28, 593–94.
(5) . Hans Niels Jahnke, “Mathematik und Romantik,” in Disziplinen im Kontext,

ed. Volker Peckhaus and Christian Thiel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999),
172.
(6) . See Timmermans’s remarks on Novalis and Hindenburg’s theories, “Novalis

et la réforme des mathématiques,” 80–81.
(7) . For an English translation of this text see Novalis, Notes for a Romantic
Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and trans. David W. Wood
(hereafter Romantic Encyclopedia) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
(8) . Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism,

1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 410.
(9) . Cf. Manfred Frank’s summary of his differences with Beiser in his Auswege
aus dem Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 16–19.
See also Chapter 1 of this volume.
(10) . Here Novalis speaks of how philosophy can assist in the unification of the
sciences. See “Christenheit oder Europa”, 1799 (NS 3, 521).
(11) . Cf. Dyck, Novalis and Mathematics, 75–77.
(12) . Cf. Beiser’s criticisms in German Idealism, 354–355.
(13) . On Novalis’s view of the “mysterious” function of mathematics, see

Pollack, “Novalis and Mathematics Revisited,” 139f.
(14) . Ibid.
(15) . Romantic Encyclopaedia, 66.
(16) . Ibid., 78.
(17) . Cf. Manfred Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung.” Die Anfänge der

philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 816–22,
849–53.
(18) . See Friedrich Schlegel’s letter to Novalis, May 5, 1797 (NS 4, 482). On
this romantic notion, see my “From ‘Fichticizing’ to ‘Romanticizing’: Fichte and
Page 14 of 16
Novalis on the Activities of Philosophy and Art,” Fichte-Studien 42 (2013): 249–

80.
(19) . For more details of this, see David W. Wood, “Mathesis of the Mind”: A
Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry (hereafter “Mathesis of the
Mind”) (New York: Rodopi, 2012).
(20) . See Fichte’s “Second Introduction,” in J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the

Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 41.
(21) . J. G. Fichte, “Announcement,” in The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte

and Schelling: Texts and Selected Writings (hereafter Philosophical Rupture)
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 89.
(22) . Ibid.
(23) . For a discussion of Fichte’s theory of original geometry and its relation to
Platonism, as well as a translation into English of the key text, see my “Mathesis
of the Mind,” esp. 79–120, 275–90.
(24) . As he also did with Kant. See Novalis to Friedrich Schlegel, December 10,
1798 (NS 4, 269). Cf. Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1972; reprint 2004), 84–85.
(25) . See Andreas Speiser, Ein Parmenideskommentar—Studien zur

platonischen Dialektik, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1959), 73–106; and “Die
Grundlagen der Mathematik von Plato bis Fichte,” Eranos Jahrbuch 14 (1946):
11–38.
(26) . Cf. J. G. Fichte im Gespräch, vol. 1, ed. Erich Fuchs (Stuttgart-Bad

Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978), 241.
(27) . Cf. Lisa Shabel, Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 115.
(28) . Romantic Encyclopaedia, 107, 189; Vorarbeiten (NS 2, 524).
(29) . Romantic Encyclopaedia, 86.
(30) . Ibid., 133.
(31) . Cf. Philosophical Rupture, 102.
(32) . See Philosophical Rupture, 87.
(33) . See “Mathesis of the Mind,” 33–78.
Page 15 of 16
(34) . The relation of “Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre” to problem-solving,

“connecting—and higher science” or “universal system,” is again intimated in
the so-called “Mathematische Fragmente” of the Freiberg Natural Scientific
Studies (see NS 3, 127; translated in “Appendix” to Romantic Encyclopaedia,
207).
(35) . Cf. Jahnke, “Mathematik und Romantik,” 175.
(36) . See Romantic Encyclopaedia, 164.
(37) . J. G. Fichte to K. L. Reinhold, March 21, 1797, in Fichte: Early

Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 417.
(38) . See Norman Sieroka, Umgebungen: Symbolischer Konstruktivismus im

Anschluss an Hermann Weyl und Fritz Medicus (Zurich: Chronos, 2010), 57–59.
(39) . Hermann Weyl, Das Kontinuum (Leipzig: Veit & Comp., 1919), 2.
(40) . See Norman Sieroka, Umgebungen, 102–4.
(41) . Cf. Timmermans, “Novalis et la réforme des mathématiques,” 84–85.
(42) . See Sieroka, Umgebungen, 175–79.
(43) . See Jules Vuillemin, La philosophie de l’algèbre (Paris: PUF, 1962, reprint
1993), 116.
(44) . Ibid., 99–120.
(45) . Ibid., 59–60, 102–22.
(46) . Regarding Novalis’s mathematical ideas and later parallels in the

development of group theory, see Timmermans, “Novalis et la réforme des
mathématiques,” 78–80.
(47) . See Romantic Encyclopaedia, 195.
Page 16 of 16
Irritable Figures

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
Irritable Figures
Herder’s Poetic Empiricism
Amanda Jo Goldstein
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0016

This chapter treats Johann Gottfried Herder as exemplary of an overlooked
strain of revisionary, romantic empiricism catalyzed by the new sciences of life.
It shows how Herder deployed the latest physiology of sensation to depict
sensuous experience—not least the kind that grounds empirical inquiry—as
physically poetic, a relay between sensation and cognition that transfigures the
observer and tropes the object under view. But for Herder, the poetry of the
senses is not only necessary but fortuitous for science and its philosophy: it
expresses sensation’s susceptibility to circumstance without reducing its
knowledge to sheer social construct, it substantiates a theory of physical nature
as itself inclined towards transport and transformation, and, above, all it
elevates poetry—whose tropes were long thought to occlude the simple evidence
of sense—as a privileged technique of empirical representation. All three
possibilities are themselves occulted by our own disciplinarity: a division of labor
between the natural and human sciences that was both unfinished and brilliantly
contested in romantic period projects.
Keywords: Herder, empiricism, romanticism, figuration, physiology, poetics, science, metaphor,

sensation, disciplines
I want to begin by emphasizing this chapter’s once improbable premise: there is

“romantic” philosophy of science, whether we capitalize “Romantic” to name a
historically bounded cultural movement, or leave it small to hold open, at the
same time, the possibility of a recurrent position, style, or mode. In a tenacious
Page 1 of 24
Irritable Figures
nineteenth-century caricature that begins at last to give way, romanticism has

frequently been defined against natural scientific curiosity, as the inward-
turning, imaginative backlash against a (symmetrically caricatured)
Enlightenment, out to master nature through reason and experiment. But the
romantic era in fact confronts us with the as yet unfinished emergence of the
very opposition between literature and science upon which such assessments
have relied: a process of field differentiation that was neither complete nor
inevitable during the period in question. This process would ultimately transform
the meaning of “literature” from learning in general to a prestige feature of a
certain kind of text; it would polarize the vocations of artist and scientist; and it
would circumscribe poetry, formerly one mode of expressing anything important,
to a special discourse of subjective universality that ceded the task of
representing natural realities to a host of professionalizing scientific
discourses.1 But at work in the romantic period were not only arguments and
impulses that contributed to the now deep-seated division of labor between
scientific and literary production but also those that contested, ignored, did not
accept, or did not know that division—positions of which the period’s many
apparently hybrid, amorphous, or even “monstrous” projects are the sign.2 (p.
274) It is my premise that such projects were not necessarily philosophically
naive, although their ontological, epistemological, and ethical ground has
frequently slipped from view. If the organization of Kant’s monumental third
Critique into aesthetic and natural philosophical halves predicted the
nineteenth-century consolidation of the “Two Cultures,” rival romantic
philosophies presumed, proposed, or defended other possible orders of
knowledge. Period philosophies of science, then, merit our attention both for
their role in the emergence of lasting separations between the natural and
human sciences and, more provocatively, for their richness as a reservoir of
neglected alternatives to that division. Such lapsed possibilities renew their
relevance at our own historical moment: it is at last abundantly clear that the
field divisions we have inherited from the nineteenth century not only fail to
resolve but also help to produce, the ecological, bio-political, and economic
crises that chronically evade their grasp.
From the historical reconstruction of romantic era philosophies of science, we

might begin to delineate as “romantic” a kind of provocation that also precedes
and follows the period bearing the name: recurrent challenges to what
twentieth-century philosophers of science have come to call the “criteria of
demarcation” distinguishing science from nonscience. It is romantic to
experiment upon the constitutive exclusions that divide scientific rationality
from its purported opposites at a given historical moment—fiction, for instance,
or theology, or feeling. When it came to the protocols of experimental science
emergent after the scientific revolution, romantics were above all intent to query
what counted as a relevant “experience” or trial. On revision, the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century movement’s notorious “irrationality”—its preoccupations
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Irritable Figures
with states of reverie, infancy, primitivity, ecstasy, madness, illness, intoxication,

and Rausch—can be seen as as the systematic solicitation of forms of sensory
experience excluded from contemporary protocols of empirical accounting. Such
gestures, as Robert Richards, John H. Zammito, and Frederick Beiser have each
amply proved, do not only or always reject outright the Enlightened aspiration to
know the natural world through the testimony of the senses. Romantic writers
also elaborate and radicalize this project, carrying it into unexamined corners of
experience and subjecting its methods to unforeseen renovation.3
Under particular, and particularly romantic, pressure in this essay will be the
line of demarcation between science (Wissenschaft, scientia) and poetry (poesis,
production), as well as the fate of stimuli so plural and so slight that they hardly
cross the threshold into sensation. I will explore the subversion of that line of
demarcation and the fate of those obscure stimuli in two essays by Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), one that argues for the physiologically poetic
relation between sensation and thought, and another for the veracity of poetic
figures. (p.275) Herder’s “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul
[Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele]” (1778) and “On Image,
Poetry, and Fable [Über Bild, Dichtung, und Fabel]” (1787) anticipate many of
the challenges that have come to define “postpositivist” problems in the
philosophy of science: the interimplication of history and philosophy, the
instability of the “fact/value” distinction, the “theory-ladenness” of observation,
and the constitutive role of linguistic and technological apparatus in the
“discovery” and representation of scientific facts and theories.4 Herder develops
an empiricist epistemology profoundly sensitive to the historicity, social-
situatedness, and asymmetrical relations of power inherent in the process of
studying nature through experimental enquiry—and yet, as I will try to argue,
this philosophy of science does not issue in sheer linguistic or social
constructivism, as some of its postmodern analogues seem to do. Here the
ineradicable contingency and anthropomorphism of the knowledge humans
make neither derealizes the objects of scientific inquiry nor severs that
knowledge finally from the world of (other) things. For Herder, I will argue, the
“all too human” contingency of knowledge in fact describes its scientifically
indispensible zone of contact with other natures. And Herder moreover
rehabilitates poetry—specially understood as the joint product of observer and
observed—as the mode of representation adequate to this contact: a neglected
resource for a science capable of resisting radical skepticism in both its
empiricist and idealist flavors.5
“Not ashamed to run after images,” as he puts it, Herder’ revalues poetry for, or
better, as natural science in unapologetically figurative style (CS 189). Drawing
on contemporary physiology to explore the relays required to transform
“obscure irritations” into something as polished and unitary as a conscious
sensation, Herder concludes that our sense organs are constantly “translating,”
“allegorizing,” and “schematizing” (CS 189–90, IPF 359). He thus sees poetic
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Irritable Figures
tropes as intrinsically linked to the physical activity of sensory experience, and

proceeds to advocate figurative language as sensory knowledge’s fittest mode of
expression. Yet this is not tantamount to discrediting empirical knowledge as a
“mere” verbal construct. The physiology of figure at issue in Herder entails
neither the linguistic production of the natural body, nor the naturalization of
language as inborn or “hardwired” biological fact. Instead, he confronts us with
a premise now strange in the extremity of its naturalism: human figurative work
on words is just one species of the tropic activity that propels natural bodies in
general. Human metaphorics derive from, and depend upon, forms of non- and
pre-verbal transport that precede it phylogenetically, ontogenetically, and in
each act of sensation. To write in tropes, then, as poets do, may be less to
obscure the simple evidence of sense than to practice maximum fidelity to it.
(p.276) Isaiah Berlin once designated the polymathic philosopher, theologian,

poet, and literary critic, Johann Gottfried Herder, with Kant, as one of the two
“true fathers of romanticism.”6 Yet Kantian critical philosophy, its transformation
at Jena, and its refracted dissemination in English romantic aesthetics,
persistently overshadows the naturalist, historicist, and anti-dualist romantic
strain that Herder prolifically advocated. Herder’s writings furnish an
alternative set of philosophical premises that help us to recognise and account
for, features of the English and German romantic literary canons that do not
square with the subjectivist and idealizing trends long thought to define
romantic aesthetic and natural philosophy (the physiology-saturated poetics of
John Keats, William Blake, Novalis, and Georg Büchner, for example). That
invoking Herder for “romanticism” brings the dates and motives of that
classification into dizzying overlap with many others (Enlightenment
[Aufklärung], Counter-Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, the culture of
sensibility) is true to the best new insights of interdisciplinary scholarship on
what many are calling “the long eighteenth century.” At stake are more diverse,
nuanced, and skeptical Enlightenment cultures—and more scientifically and
socially engaged romantic ones—than we have previously been called upon to
explain.7
In this essay’s first part, “Revisionary Empiricism and the Science of Sensation,”
I take a step back in order to set out how Herder’s philosophy of science derives
and departs from the legacies of New Scientific experimentalism and classical
empiricist psychology, as well as to touch on its engagement with the emergent
sciences of life. In the second, longer part, “The Physiology of Tropes,” I delve
deeper into the irritable fibers of Herder’s romantic observer, exploring how his
provocative account of the physiology of sensation as a seriously figurative
process serves to valorize poetry as a privileged technique of empirical inquiry
and representation.
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Irritable Figures
15.1. Revisionary Empiricism and the Science of Sensation

As intimated above, Herder’s philosophy of science exemplifies a strain of
revisionary, romantic empiricism that cannily sophisticates the empiricist and
experimentalist project of knowing the world through the testimony of the
senses. Herder’s revisionary empiricism, like that of Goethe, Erasmus Darwin,
William Wordsworth, and William Blake, demands that practitioners confront
bewildering intricacies of human sensoria—their multiplicity, historicity, and
social formation—in order to comprehend and cultivate their limits and
potentials as instruments of experimental inquiry. Like these thinkers, Herder
delves with freshly voluptuous (p.277) natural scientific curiosity into the
obscurity, confusion, and complexity that prior empiricisms had sought to
eliminate from sensuously derived knowledge.
Jonathan Crary has influentially posited the camera obscura as the epitome of
classical empiricist protocol: presuming both a “pre-given world of objective
truth” and an autonomous subject capable of observing this world from the
sequestered space of his own interiority, this optical apparatus figured
knowledge as a “kind of askesis” through which the observer purified and
regulated the world’s disorderly advance.8 At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Crary argues, the science of vision abandoned these pristine mechanics
of light and descended into the observer’s complex physiology: the visible
“escaped from the timeless order of the camera obscura” to “lodg[e] in another
apparatus...the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body.”9
Crary’s sketch is broad-brush, but Herder wittily affirms the caricature (albeit
two decades earlier than Crary’s periodization scheme would allow). The author
of “On the Sensation and Cognition of the Human Soul” describes his own essay
as a descent into the body that would have made prior philosophers blush:
“Often there lie under the diaphragm causes which we very incorrectly and
laboriously seek in the head...in the face of this sort of deep abyss of obscure
sensations...our bright and clear philosophy is horrified” (CS 196). Herder
delights to ridicule those abstemious philosophers, “standing firm and secure,”
in “happy ignorance” of the uncouth abyss of “obscure forces and irritations”
from which their luminous ideas actually arise (201).
To argue that classical empiricist psychologies had decorporealized thought

curiously minimizes those philosophies’ signature provocation, which had been
to redescribe selves and their thoughts as aggregates of sense impressions
without innate or transcendent source. But if Crary and Herder tend to
underestimate prior empiricisms’ rich exploration of the linguistic and historical
contingencies that afflict sense-based knowledge, this is because, in that prior
philosophical discourse, such problems had intruded above all at the secondary
level of “association” between “simple ideas of sense,” rather than at the level of
sensation itself. In Locke, sense impressions are as “simple” as ideas come;
though shorn of any transcendental guarantee, they nonetheless constitute the
least problematic building blocks for knowledge. “[T]he ideas [things] produce in
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the mind,” Locke affirms, “enter by the senses simple and unmixed,” and
“nothing can be plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of
those simple ideas.”10 Famously, these “simple ideas of sensation” impress a self
of correspondent uniformity and simplicity: “white paper, void of all characters,
without any ideas,” and Locke explicitly declined to examine “by what motions of
our spirits or alterations of our bodies we come to have any sensation by our
organs, or any ideas in our understandings.”11 Herder, then, and Crary after him,
is astute to (p.278) notice that the rise of experimental physiology, a science
precisely devoted to how “we come to have any sensation by our organs,” has
the potential to transform empiricist psychology. For better or worse, this
science could restore the “body full of sensations, full of irritations” to the
“vaporous skeleton” common to both rationalist metaphysics and empiricist
philosophy (CS 182).
From Herder’s physiologically informed point of view, it is quite futile to posit an

“idea of sense” as “simple” or “uncompounded.” He argues that any sensation
attaining to consciousness represents a belated sum of innumerable and
nameless interactions: an “aggregate of all the obscure wishes [sie ein Aggregat
sind alle der dunklen Wünsche]” emanating from “each little thicket of life” in a
creature’s “diverse, thousandfold organized body” (192 [335], 182). Discrete
sense impressions, impressions that fall neatly into the five acknowledged
categories of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, are reductive approximations
of the panoply of subliminal and multisensory co-operations that make up a
person’s felt state:
At the very moment that he sees, he also hears, and unconsciously enjoys,
through all the organs of his manifold machine, external influences that,
though they remain largely obscure sensations, nevertheless secretly
cooperate on the sum of his whole condition at all times. He floats in a sea
of impressions of objects, in which one wave laps against him softly,
another more perceptibly.
(IPF 357, trans. mod.)
Zu eben derselben Zeit, da er siehet, höret er auch und genießt

unvermerkt durch alle Organe seiner vielartigen Maschine Einflüsse von
außen, die zwar größtenteils dunkle Empfindungen bleiben, jederzeit aber
auf die Summe seines ganzen Zustandes ingeheim mitwerken. Er
schwimmt in einem Meer von Eindrücken der Gegenstände, wo Eine Welle
leiser, die andre fühlbarer ihn berühret.
(633)
Ideas of sense are late glosses on the “sea of impressions” registered within the
thousand-fold weave of his body. Moreover, the whole method of distillation that
an individual unconsciously performs—the method of producing sensations from
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“obscure forces and irritations,” and cognitions from sensations—is a work of

cultural history (CS 201).
That is, regardless of sensory stimulus, Herder argues, “we would grope about
in deep night and blindness if instruction [Unterweisung] had not early on
thought for us and, so to speak, imprinted in us ready-made thought-formulas
[fertige Gedankenformeln uns eingeprägt hätte]” (CS 212 [358]). We require the
prosthetic of instruction—“the support of staffs that were reached to us in
earliest childhood”—to bind sensations to cognitions and, indeed, to sense
coherently at all. In an important formulation, Herder writes that familial and
(p.279) cultural indoctrination forge an armature of “secret bonds [geheime
Bände]” through which any “object has to come to us,” if it is to take sensible
shape at all (212 [358], emphasis added). The present members of any given
society have their very eyes “accustomed, tied, limited” to the “viewpoint”
characteristic of their context; any sensed object arrives by way of prepared and
permissible paths.12 For Herder, then, it is not particularly fruitful, even
heuristically, to conceive of sensation as simple or the self in originary
blankness: “Man is such a complex, artificial being [ein so zusammengesetztes,
künstliches Wesen] that despite every effort he can never achieve a wholly
simple state” (IPF 357 [633]). Herder instead exposes philosophical pretenses of
purity and autonomy as attempts to suppress the real “birth of our reason” in
circumstances of physical and psychic dependency (CS 212). Dependency on
women, no less: from the very womb forward, Herder points out embryonic
philosophers float in a maternal matrix of communicated “impressions and
irritations” (CS 207); “the nursemaids who form our tongues are our first
teachers of logic” (F 48); the best human inventions emerge from “the husks of
human need, in a cradle of childhood, in swaddling clothes” (F 55); and “in this
matter women are our philosophers, not we theirs” (CS 207).
Extraordinary in these passages, from a present-day perspective, is the single

gesture with which Herder performs what would now seem to be ideologically
opposed operations, “naturalizing” and “historicizing” human knowledge at
once. Thought is coextensive with the biological body, worked up from “the
longing yearning, with which each little thicket of life in our body [jeder kleine
Lebensbusch unsres Körpers] thirsts for satisfaction [Befriedigung]” (CS 192
[335]). Yet this very assertion enables Herder to describe that body’s necessary
and consequential incorporation of social forms. At issue is a notion of natural
(or biological, or organic) life that is neither determined in advance nor purely
auto-poetic, but unfinished, needy, pliant, and resourceful. Such a life
incorporates, from the outset, the helps on offer, even to attain basic physical
development—even to be able to see.
What Herder strikingly calls the “sense of an alien which imprints itself in us
[dieser Sinn eines Fremden, der sich in uns einprägt]” thus shapes our
profoundest interiority and is perpetuated in each instance of movement,
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sensation, or thought (CS 212 [359]). Illusions of subjective autonomy ironically

reveal the relational nature of human life, for only an animal equipped to
interweave “alien” stays so early, necessarily, and easily into its frame could
mistake these “bonds” for its own creations. One begins to see just how
tactically powerful naturalism could be, in the late eighteenth century, as a
means to articulate natural life as a process of sociohistorical conformation.
Herder shows how a collection of norms that precede our coming scaffold “the
deepest self in us”: a self, therefore, “not as autonomous, voluntarily choosing,
and unbound as is believed [nicht so eigenmächtig, willkürlich, und los, als man
glaubet]” (CS 212 [359]).
(p.280) Having sketched the way Herder’s thought intensifies its classical
empiricist inheritance by bringing historical contingency to bear at the level of
sensation, I want to underscore a second, characteristically romantic revision of
that legacy. Perpetuating the Cartesian truth criteria of “clarity and
distinctness,” previous empiricist psychology had emphasized the obscurity and
heterogeneity inherent in sensuously derived knowledge primarily in order to
target such imperfections for elimination. Herder and like-minded romantics
viewed sensory impurity less as an epistemic impediment (whose removal would
adequate knowledge to truth) than as a neglected cache of true experience
(awaiting transformation into knowledge by philosophically unorthodox means).
Thus Herder inverts the philosophical virtue of clarity and distinctness with
mischievous precision: “what,” he asks, “does that clear, luminous,
encompassing cognition lack so that it is not and does not become sensation?”13
Here, the distillation of sensation into “so called pure thinking” enforces a loss of
information and accuracy prior philosophy splendidly “reveals the unity in
everything...but does it also reveal as distinguishingly the eachness in each
thing?” (CSd 180, CS 242). Herder regrets that a “broad region of sensations,
drives, affects...gets called body, obscure ideas, feelings”—and systematically
ignored. He therefore sets out to track and redeem the “rich traces [reiche
Spuren]” of bodily interaction with the world that thinking must bear, “despite
all distillation [Trotz aller Destillation]” (CS 181, 242 [392]).
For such revisionary empiricism, the mixed “abyss” of “obscure forces and
irritations” that do not cross the threshold into discursive clarity constitutes a
critical, corporeal register of interactions with the objects of scientific curiosity
(CS 201). Its “rich traces” are essential to any empirical effort to document
these objects’ efficacy and ours. Attending to the subtle, divergent, near-
imperceptible impressions, impressions that “touch him softly,” “whose sounds
get lost in each other more obscurely,” will advance the description of nature,
without and within (CS 192).
Clearly such a project requires enhanced self-scrutiny on the part of the

observer, vigilantly attuned to “the most complexly woven sensations and
passions of our so composite machine [unsrer so zusammengesetzten
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Maschine]” (190 [333]). But we ought no longer assume that such romantic self-
scrutiny relinquishes natural curiosity in favor of the purely introspective work
of subjective genius. Indeed, Herder dismisses as “puerile hysteria” and
“abstract egoism” the contemporary cult of genius that was pressing philosophy
—natural, aesthetic, and moral—towards idealism: “inspiration; creative force;
originality; heaven- aspiring, independently self-developing original power; and
so forth” (239, 209, 235). The “soul”—which Herder’s essay invites us to
interpret as the “nerve structure” personified, if not the power of nerves to
conjure up our very sense of personhood—“spins, knows, cognizes nothing out of
itself...it must use the (p.281) irritations, the senses, the forces and
opportunities which became its own through a fortunate, unearned
inheritance” (209). Like the natural body, from which it ought no longer be
separated, the psyche resourcefully assimilates chance materials that condition
its coming.
“In my modest opinion,” comments Herder, “no psychology is possible which is

not in each step determinate physiology” (196). As I suggested at the outset of
this section, “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul” aims to fulfill
this antidualist agenda, bringing empiricist psychology into step with the new
sciences of the animal life. These sciences, then, are the final context to thicken
before turning in detail to Herder’s own poetic physiology. Herder’s essay is,
among other things, a rhapsody on the groundbreaking experimental physiology
of Albrecht von Haller. Haller’s work on the “irritability” and “sensibility” of
bodily fibers and nerves redescribed the once quasi-mechanical animal body as
nervous, responsive, productive, and communicative; his research provided a
physiological dimension to the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility.14
Despite Haller’s own dualist theological commitments, many of his
contemporaries took his reactive corporeal conduits as evidence that the
“higher” powers of sentience and cognition were firmly rooted in the body’s
“soft marrow” (198). Herder’s essay thus openly aspires to raise “Haller’s
physiological work” to the level of “psychology” in a way that Haller himself was
loathe to do (196).15
The physiology of sensation thus expresses one aspect of that controversial

“epistemological rupture” in eighteenth-century culture that Michel Foucault,
Georges Canguillhem, and François Jacob famously posited for the twentieth-
century historiography of modern science. Their theses argued the
unprecedented appearance of “life” as a discrete and autonomous concern
around 1800, a special category of being that, now seeming to merit its own
research program, catalyzed widespread transformation in the traditional
domains of natural, aesthetic, and moral philosophy.16 Though the temporality of
“rupture” has been nuanced, elongated, and backdated, few historians contest
the pan-cultural “vitalization of nature” in the course of the eighteenth century:
research into the forms of motion, reactivity, force, and power purportedly
unique to living beings flourished, and active matter displaced inert, Newtonian
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stuff as the basic material of the cosmos and the most alluring target of
experimental and philosophical inquiry.17
The rise of experimental physiology goes some way toward explaining the
bewildering crossing of subjects and objects of experimental observation, and
indeed of methodological essays and experimental findings, in the texts of the
romantic period. With biological life under scrutiny, the living observer, no less
than the live animals subject to inspection (embryonic chicks, freshwater polyps,
microscopic animalculae), becomes an object of interest and a (p.282)
physiological variable at the scene of empirical investigation.18 It is perhaps
Goethe, writing in his journal On Morphology, who provides the most economical
gloss on this conundrum and the prospects for turning it to advantage: “Every
new object, well seen, opens up a new organ in us [Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl
beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf].”19 Revisionary empiricism is
abbreviated in this astonishing phrase, which transforms “us” from observing
subject to observed object, and back again: keen observers of metamorphosis,
Goethe suggests, cannot but metamorphose in the act of observation; we cannot
but open an “organ” adjusted to the metamorphic object that occasioned this
opening, ourselves the objects of a transformative process whose outcome is to
produce us as observing subjects once again. Sensation is here understood as a
process of bilateral physical transformation, and the living “metamorphoses”
that are the object of life scientific enquiry begin to implicate observing subjects
and their empirical methods, as well.
In the next section, we will see Herder splendidly elaborate the other end of this
rigorous confusion between the subjects and objects of live observation,
exploring the way the observer’s sensorium transforms objects to fit its habits
and needs. Clearly needful, in the romantic period, were forms of empiricism
that would confront, and even cultivate, the methodologically untidy likelihood
that neither subject nor object emerges unchanged from the scene of sensory
observation. Both, Herder will suggest, are transfigured in a way that only
poetic figures can mark.
15.2. The Physiology of Tropes

As we have seen, the kind of sidelined corporeal experience that Herder sets out
to vindicate for knowledge in “On the Sensation and Cognition of the Human
Soul” resists “clear and distinct” representation. In place of this, Herder’s
philosophy proposes something extraordinary from a present-day point of view:
the form of representation scientifically adequate to sensory experience is
figuration—image, metaphor, allegory, personification. And this is not because
here Herder parts ways with the aims and methods of natural science in order to
initiate a linguistic turn that would forgo reference to nondiscursive realities, or
a subjectivist one that would strive to represent imagined experience by
unapologetically fictional means. Instead, Herder pioneers a point that
Nietzsche would make famous a century later: sensation, the basis of all
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knowledge from an empiricist point of view, is literally, physiologically, poetic (in

the root sense of “making”), figurative (in the root sense of “fashioning”), and
metaphoric (in the root sense of “carrying-over” [Übertragung]).20
(p.283) And since for Herder, as we will see, the sensory basis of empirical
knowledge is poetic down to its very nerves and fibers, the epistemological
status of poetic language changes: the tropes, figures, images, and metaphors
formerly thought to veil the simple evidence of experience may instead manifest
underappreciated forms of veracity. Herder concedes that any truth
communicated in such poetic science will be “human truth, certainly,”
ineluctably anthropomorphic in shape (CS 188). But for him, this condition,
though necessary, is neither tragic nor debilitating for knowledge.21 Instead, the
contingencies that delimit human knowledge also demarcate its points of contact
with other natures.22 Indeed, part of what makes Herder’s stance so difficult to
re-inhabit today is his thoroughgoing attempt to philosophize not about nature,
but as one nature among others, one body among many bodies—without letting
go his prescient grasp on the historicity and the species-specificity (to speak
redundantly), of this effort.
“Our whole life,” Herder argues in “On Image, Poetry, and Fable,” “is to a
certain extent poetics.” It turns out that “life” here is physiologically meant, and
that Herder sees sensation as the primary site of coextension between life and
poetics. No neutral register of the influx of the external world, Herder presents
sensation as the active and selective process through which we “separat[e]
objects from others,” “giving them outline, dimension, and form [Umriß, Maß
und Gestalt]” (IPF 358 [635]). Receptive only to those aspects of an “infinite”
object that approach in a specific medium—and, as we have seen, by socially
sanctioned paths—our sense organs parse and transform “the interwoven tangle
of obscure irritations [zusammen geflochtner Knäuel dunkler Reize],” into the
consistent and manageable phenomena of a “world-structure
[Weltgebäude]” (CS 202–3 [348]).
Explaining life’s “poetics,” Herder argues that any sensation attaining to

minimal awareness needs to be understood as a perceptual artwork utterly,
transformed by its passage “through the eye”:
[W]e do not see, rather we create images for ourselves [wir sehen nicht,
sondern wir erschaffen uns Bilder]....For the image that is projected on the
retina of your eye is not the idea that you derive from its object; it is
merely a product of your inner sense, a work of art created by your soul’s
faculty of perception [ein Kunstgemälde der Bemerkungskraft deiner
Seele].
(IPF 358, trans. mod. [635])
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Here again, in Herder, we come upon a basic physical “datum” of sensation—the

retinal image—redescribed as the product of a prior relay, an unnoticed act of
re-presentation among the functions of the animate body. But true to his scorn
for the idealist notion that a soul “should dream a world out of itself” (CS (p.
284) 208), he quickly takes pains to prevent readers from mistaking his notion
of sensory poetics for ex nihilo creation:23
In real and absolute terms, the human being can neither poeticize nor
invent, for otherwise in doing so he would become the creator of another
world. What he can do is conjoin images and ideas, designate them with
the stamp of analogy, thus leaving his own mark on them;...For everything
that we call image in Nature becomes such only through the reception and
operation of his perceiving, separating, composing, and designating soul.
(IPF 365)
Eigentlich und absolut kann der Mensch weder dichten, noch erfinden; er
würde damit der Schöpfer einer neuen Welt. Was er tun kann, ist, Bilder
und Gedanken paaren, sie mit dem Stempel der Analogie, insonderheit aus
sich selbst, bezeichnen;...Denn alles was Bild in der Natur heißt, wird
solches nur durch die Empfängnis und Wirkung seiner bemerkenden,
absondernden, zusammensetzenden, bezeichnenden Seele.
(645)
The “stamp of analogy” invoked in this passage and its cognates—“stamp of our
consciousness,” “stamp of my inner sense”—recur frequently in Herder in order
to defamiliarize the image of an object, to reveal its appearance “in Nature” as
the outcome of a prior assimilation. At stake in sensation is a “reception and
operation” between observer and observed for which the image must be
understood not as the raw or simple datum but the final “mark.”
With his emphatically figurative figure of an appropriating “stamp [Stempel]” or

“seal [Siegel]” of analogy, Herder rewrites the inherited notion of a simple sense
“impression [Eindruck]” printed on the passive mind. Here, in a word, the senses
press back, intervening consequentially—transfiguratively—between things and
ideas. The wrought or figured contours of a finished sensation in Herder—its
“outline, dimension, and form”—bear witness to an active, bilateral process that
conforms the entering object to the capacities, needs, and habits of the
perceiver’s sensorium. Thus, Herder likens diverse sensory apertures to customs
offices: “pass[ing] though the gates of a different sense,” an object is “given a
different stamp, in keeping with the different customs prevalent there and the
different use to which it is put” (IPF 359). Again, revisionary empiricism points
out the activity of culture, convention, and even state power, within the most
primary and miniscule of physiological processes. And even as Herder attributes
active, shaping power to the organs of sense, he does not render sensation a
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unilateral imaginative act: as we saw above, the very capacity to sense in this
way, to fashion sensory experience into coherent subjectivity (one’s “own
mark”), is contingent upon the ingress of “an alien which imprints itself in us.”
(p.285) One asset of this account of “sensuous cognition,” a feature that would
appeal to Nietzsche and to Foucault, is that it brooks no illusion of a sensory
transaction that does not leave its mark, no pretense at impartial observation
(aesthetic or scientific) uncontaminated by relations of power and appropriation.
“Only a fool,” Herder explains, “forgets the having [das Haben]” in thinking,
severing thought from the needy and desirous, “receiving and giving,” body that
“draws in and exudes” (CS 213 [359], 191). Both the consequential ingress of
the object into the body of the observer, and the selecting and assimilating force,
which, like a customs officer, conditions that “reception,” are openly expressed
through Herder’s “stamp of analogy,” a figure of assimilation that renders the
object perceptible, licit, legitimate, but only by occulting or excluding aspects of
its difference from the perceiving self.
Perhaps acknowledging that something of perceiver and perceived is risked and

lost in this transaction, Herder writes of the irritations that excite sensation as a
kind of “gentle violence [sanfte Gewalt]”: “nature does him gentle violence, and
he nature” (CS 191 [335]). But the modifier “gentle” suggests that such violence
poses no real threat to life; instead, it merely jeopardizes philosophical
confidence in the integrity of subjects and their objects, a confidence at risk
whenever embodied sensation is taken seriously. The media of light, scent, and
sound, “flow into [the] senses and bring the objects into them,” such that “a way
is already opened up for cognition outside us” (CS 202–3). “Sensation” for
Herder, is really and ineradicably relational: the “circle of thinking and sensing,”
like the “deepest self in us,” is coconstituted with other beings and thereby
exceeds the scope of our own skin (188 [330], 212 [359]).
Sensation, as we have seen, is a bilateral act of figuration (from the Lat. fingere)
in the material sense of to fashion, form, or shape: sense organs physically
fashion “obscure irritations” into assimilable images, sounds, or scents. But as
he uncovers the “image” and “analogy” producing capacities of the sense
organs, Herder connects this physical meaning of figure to its other, rhetorical
meaning: the deviation from proper use and arrangement usually reserved for a
work on words. Stressing the radical differences between the “chaos” of sensible
objects and the fibrous irritations they induce, between those irritations and
visible images they occasion, between those visible images and thoughts to
which they are yoked by “secret bonds,” and between the different sensory
systems that simultaneously admit an object, Herder describes the activity of
sensuous perception as allegorizing, schematizing, translating work. He thus
insists that the tropic operations typically consigned to verbal ornamentation are
moving non- and pre-verbally within the very physiology of sensation:
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Hence it follows that our soul, like our language, allegorizes constantly
[beständig allegorisiere]. When the soul sees objects as images, or rather
(p.286) when it transforms them into mental images [in Gedankenbilder
verwandelt], according to rules that are imprinted [eingeprägt] on it, what
is it doing but translating [übersetzen], metaschematizing
[metaschematisieren]? And if the soul now strives to illuminate these
mental images—which are its work alone—through words, through signs
[Zeichen] for the sense of hearing, and thereby to express them to others,
what is it doing once again but translating, alloisizing [alläosieren]?
(IPF 359 [635–36])
A careful reading makes it clear that here the work of sensation is a poetic work
that is “like our language,” but not exclusive to it. The “translation” that finally
produces “words” in this passage is but the latest in a series of transfigurative
relays that render the object differently, “alloisizing” or “othering” it at each
turn. The passage’s subtle shift from the soul allegorizing, “speaking otherwise
than one seems to speak,” to the more general alloisizing, “changing, altering,”
encapsulates our point about a poetics not limited to words: Herder
etymologically revises the figural action from “other-speaking” to a broader
sensory “othering” of which verbal language would be but one outcome and
instance. Herder does not further explain the emphatic term
“metaschematizing” upon which the above passage’s account of sensation and
speech seems to hinge.24 But to prefix meta to “schema”—Greek for form and
shape, which Latin translated to figura—drives home the central Herderian
insight that any word or image that attains to consciousness, let alone to
language, is already a meta-figure that glosses a complex of preverbal figurative
events: “cloth[ing],” as Herder puts it elsewhere, “a thousand beings with one
robe for me” (CS 203).
The passage proceeds to further underscore the heterogeneity internal to any

sensorium, reframing the figurality of sensation (which we initially examined as
a poetics of assimilation, a poetics of making mine exemplified by the “stamp of
analogy”) from the perspective of an alloisis that stresses instead the
discrepancies that enable and motivate such assimilating movements:
The object has so little in common with the image, the image with the
thought, the thought with the expression, the visual perception with the
name, that they, as it were, touch one another only by virtue of the
sensibility of our complex organization, which perceives several things
through several senses at the same time. Only the communicability among
our several senses... [constitutes] the so-called perfectibility of man. If we
had but one sense and were connected with Creation only by a single
aspect of the world, as it were, there would be no possibility of converting
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objects into images and images into words or other signs. Then we should
have to bid farewell to human reason!
(IPF 359 [636])
(p.287) Herder’s astonishing final claim is this: the advanced semiotic practice
distinctive of “human reason” stems from the copresence of plural sensory
systems within the confined space of the human body, where their divergent,
modes of “converting objects” overlap. Tropological communications within a
body that senses “a thousandfold and a thousandfold differently” set the pattern,
and condition the possibility, for the verbal version of “language” as we usually
mean it. Such language, then, must be conceived fundamentally as metaphor
(meta, over/beyond + pherein to bear or carry) and its near synonym,
translation, both figures of transport that deviate as they represent.
Remarkably, Herder declares the poetic quality that marks sensuous experience
not a symptom of fictitiousness, but a “seal of truth [Siegel der Wahrheit]” (CS
189 [331]). This figured mark is truthful in at least two ways: it attests, first, to
the fact of real, physical contact between perceiver and perceived, and it makes
plain, second, the anthropomorphic shape that any fact perceived by a human
truth-seeker will bear. For Herder, the kind of truth that manifests this figurative
“seal,” that is, the kind of truth that neither conceals its “analogy to the human
being,” nor pretends to transcendent validity, is the best possible truth:
Human truth [Menschliche Wahrheit], certainly, and as long as I am a

human being I have no information about any higher [truth]. I am very
little concerned about the superterrestrial abstraction which places itself
beyond everything that is called “circle of our thinking and sensing” onto I
know not what throne of divinity.
(CS 188 [330])
This unabashedly figural truth—truth transfigured and sealed in the act of

observation—is thus, in Herder, the mark of philosophy’s epistemological
modesty and its realism. Thought, Herder insists, is “present in the universe
through action and reaction on this body full of sensations, full of irritations” (CS
181–82), and figuration precisely manifests this physicality, this corporeality, of
thought. To eschew the poetic confines and resources of “this body” is not only
impossible but also undesirable for knowledge: it is as a body that we come into
transfigurative contact with the bodies we wish to know (181–82). Deflationary
for metaphysicians, the poetics of the senses might be a resource for physicians,
physicists, and poets, all concerned to register the subtle interactions at work
within and between embodied beings.
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From this perspective, the purportedly modest Kantian prohibition against

projecting our own thinking onto “things in themselves” veils a greater hubris:
the presumption that our thinking is independent of other things and that
thought (or what matters of it) owes nothing to natural bodies, ours or others’.
Herder’s revisionary empiricism thus marks out the vast distance between (p.
288) the epistemologically modest recognition that the truth gleaned by
humans will be inflected by our partial, personal, and species limitations, and
the conclusion that within this “circle of thinking and sensing,” we can know
nothing with certainty other than the workings of our own minds (CS 188). For
Herder, the knowledge that sensation bears is indeed partial, even doubly so:
both incomplete and biased towards the human form, each human sense
“abstracts from created beings as much as this portal can receive, but leaves to
them everything else, their whole infinite abyss [das so viel von den Geschöpfen
abreißt als diese Pforte empfangen kann, alles übrige, ihren ganzen unendlichen
Abgrund, ihnen aber lässet]” (CS 202 [347]). Yet this partiality does not render
the senses’ transmissions invalid—and certainly not invented. “Poetic” is the
perfect way to describe their manifest impropriety and their truth.
Again, if the very portals of empirical experience are poetic, poetic language
might be doing the work of high-resolution representation, rather than
inessential adornment. Indeed, Herder praises poetic language in terms we
frequently reserve for the scientific and journalistic prose genres that now
monopolize objective description. Poetry excels in “accuracy,” “faithfulness,”
“truth” and “minor detail”:
Our inner poetic sense is able to bind together the manifold features of the
sensation so faithfully and accurately [so wahr und genau zusammen zu
knüpfen] that in its artificial world [Kunstwelt] we feel once more the
whole living world, for it is precisely the minor details [kleinen Umstände]
—which the frigid understanding might not have noticed...[or] omits as
superfluous [als Überfluß wegstreichet]—that are the truest lineaments
[wahresten Striche] of the peculiar feeling, and that precisely because of
this truth, therefore, possess the most decided efficacy [dieser Wahrheit
wegen von der entschiedensten Wirkung].
(IPF 362 [641])
Above all, poetry is the “truest” representation of the panoply of noticed and
unnoticed interactions that amount to a given sensation; its empirical truth
consists in unstinting reproduction of all “the diversity of that which we felt all
at once” upon sensing an object (“der Mannigfaltigkeit dessen, was wir beim
Genuß dieses Gegenstandes damals auf Einmal fühlten” (IPF 362 [640–41]).
Such a reproduction rejects no detail as “superfluous,” and therefore presents a
Page 16 of 24
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thorough record of both the perceiver’s sensibility and the manifold “efficacy” of
the perceived (IPF 362).
Might poetic and fictional texts, then, provide access to those “rich traces” of
embodied experience unavailable to science while “clarity and distinctness”
remain the criteria of sound knowledge? By now it will come as no surprise (p.
289) that Herder’s essays answer this question with multiple “yeses” and a
flurry of metaphors. That Shakespeare “is no physiologist,” he writes, “no one
could say who had seen Hamlet and Lear”: “without knowing it, he depicts the
passion right down to the deepest abysses and fibres from which it
sprouted” (CS 199). The logical complement to this view is equally important to
Herder. Scientific discovery, he argues, is disavowed poetics:
Newton in his system of the world became a poet contrary to his wishes
[wider Willen en Dichter], as did Buffon in his cosmogony... for the most
part it was a single new image [Bild], a single analogy [Analogie], a single
striking metaphor [auffallendes Gleichnis] that gave birth to the greatest
and boldest theories. The philosophers who declaim against figurative
language [Bildersprache], and themselves serve nothing but old, often
uncomprehended, figurative idols [unverstandnen Bildgötzen], are at least
in great contradiction with themselves.
(CS 188 [330])
At stake is an observation akin to the one that would open Hans Blumenberg’s
“Prospect for a Theory of Non-Conceptuality” (1960) some two hundred years
later. Metaphors, Blumenberg observes, form the cutting edge of “experimental
theoretical conceptions,” preceding and leading the consolidation of technical
terminology.25 But more than mere placeholders for incipient concepts,
metaphors demonstrate a theoretical efficacy that attests to their “authentic way
of grasping...connections with the life-world”—connections that, for
Blumenberg, form “the constant motivating support (though one that cannot be
constantly kept in view) of all theory” (81). For Herder, too, figures issue from
couplings with the world that conceptual philosophy is structurally ill-equipped
to see; in his case, from the subtle, opaque, and erotic interactions that define
our physiological being: “in the face of this sort of deep abyss of obscure
sensations our bright and clear philosophy is horrified” (CS 196). Expressing
real-physical interactions that conceptual decorum needs to leave unknown,
metaphors know more than knowledge cares to acknowledge.
In the context of a given conceptual system, then, this form of poetic and
theoretical expression can easily take on the elevated, prophetic, and mystified
character of genius (CS 199). Herder will ground it firmly in terrestrial
experience instead. In an extraordinary passage, he likens poetics to animal
instinct, deriving the prophetic power of each from their link to the “unknown
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region” of physiological irritation. Here the “it” in question refers to the

irritation induced by an unanticipated object:
It is a new experience [Erfahrung], which... does not exactly follow from

our system now [nicht eben aus unserm System jetzt folget]. It is a new,
prophetic (p.290) drive [weissagender Trieb] which promises us
enjoyment, makes us intuit this obscurely [dunkel ihn ahnden läßt], jumps
over space and time [Raum und Zeit überspringet], and gives us a
foretaste of the future [uns Vorgeschmack gibt in die Zukunft]. Perhaps
that is how it is with the instincts of the animals. They are like instrument
strings [Saiten] which a certain sound of the universe stirs...connected
with the element [Sie hangen mit dem Element]...with the unknown region
of the world [mit der unbekannten Weltgegend] whither they speed;
invisible bonds [unsichtbare Bande] pull them in that direction, whether
they arrive there or not.
(CS 200 [345])
Indeed, provided as an elaboration on the physiological insightfulness of poetry,

the above passage makes clear that the “drives” increasingly attributed to living
matter in the new life sciences are another name for the practice that poets call
“metaphor,” that transport whose movement discloses an unforeseen link
between apparently dissimilar entities and actions. This movement is audible, in
the above passage, when the drive “jumps over” the limits of the present
knowledge at the instigation of “invisible bonds.”
Here Nietzsche’s strikingly Herderian essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense [Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne],” aids
interpretation.26 After affirming that preverbal sensation is already metaphor
—“The stimulation of the nerve is first translated into an image: first
metaphor!”—Nietzsche explains metaphor exactly in terms of a leaping motion
between “spheres” of being: “each time there is a complete leap from one
sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (144). Echoing Herder’s “drive to
make analogies,” Nietzsche designates “the drive to form metaphors [Trieb zur
Metapherbildung]” as the “fundamental human drive” (150).27 For Nietzsche
here, as Sarah Kofman has argued, metaphoric activity “is not just a drive like
any other; it could be called the general form of all drives.”28
Herder’s easy oscillation between the prophetic transports of poetry and those
of fibrous irritation seems to agree that to speak of a metaphor-forming drive is
nearly tautological. Indeed, Andrea Christian Bertino has argued in this context
that the fundamentally relational notion of a “drive” signals a movement towards
something not contained or containable in its concept: drives in Herder and
Nietzsche advert to their own conceptual limits and even, he argues, to “the
uncontrollable necessity of metaphorical carrying-over.”29 Terms like “drive” and
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“irritability” are not typical concepts; with them, Herder recognized in

experimental physiology not only the potential to speak more poetically (and
therefore more truthfully) about natural bodies, but also, as we have seen, the
potential to recognize among natural bodies (including, but not limited to our
own) forms of metaphoric activity more basic and more general than our works
on words. For Herder, then, the “uncontrollable necessity of (p.291)
metaphorical carrying-over” betokened in the physiology “of force, irritation,
efficacy,” is of interest precisely because it is not given as exclusive to human
language. Rather, it opens onto a notion of natural bodies in general as instinct
with tropic, transfigurative movement. Here, for instance, is how Herder is wont
to describe a botanical body, rife with tropic (“turning”), assimilating, and
mimetic activity: “Observe that plant, that beautiful structure of organic fibers!
How it twists, how it turns...[it] purifies alien juice into parts of its more subtle
self...[and] produces living off-prints of itself, leaves, germs, blooms, and
fruits” (CS 192).
So we might close by stressing again how Herder’s interest in the poetic quality
of empirical knowing and representing does not aim, as Nietzsche’s essay does,
primarily to uncover our role as “artistically creative subjects,” unwitting
linguistic producers of the world that our science purports to “discover” (148).
At stake instead is a now unfamiliar understanding of physical bodies as
fundamentally tropic, enmeshed in a multitude of figurative transactions and
displacements of which human rhetoric is but one outcome and instance. Indeed,
from his prize-winning essay On the Origins of Human Language (1772) forward,
Herder strenuously advocated a natural origin for human language, synecdoche
in the period for a naturalism so thoroughgoing that it would account for even
the most intellective, apparently immaterial aspects of the universe (languages)
without recourse to divine causes.30
In asserting the figurative status of human sensation and language, then, Herder
does not subordinate “nature” to our verbal metaphorics, but renders those
metaphorics derivative of a broader category transfigurations and transports
already and everywhere underway. Similarly, when Herder notices that
metaphors and organic drives share a formal structure, his aim is not to unmask
physiological theory as “mere” metaphor, “mere” product of human speech. Like
many of his contemporaries, Herder finds in Haller’s “irritable” fibers—“these
obscure stamens of irritation towards sensation” (CS 190 [133])—scientific
confirmation that material nature tends towards changes of shape, form, and
figure, and the metaphoric leaping between levels of which language is only the
most flagrant example. Irritation, an effect akin to mechanical expansion and
contraction, nonetheless tends “towards sensation,” effecting a transport that
shuttles “dead nature” toward animate life, physics toward physiology, bodily
toward mental activity. In Herder’s hands, irritations and drives participate in
the epochal shift towards a naturalistic conception of life’s origins: the
conviction that “life in swift flight” could spring up from inert materials was
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necessary both to evolutionist accounts of phylogeny and to epigenetic accounts

of ontogeny (CS 194).31
In “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul,” poets and scientists
demonstrate a conspicuously reciprocal ignorance of the fact that “for (p.292)
us all of physics remains a kind of poetics for our senses,” a fact that, as we have
seen, Herder regards as both ineluctable and fortuitous for knowledge.
Shakespeare was a “physiologist” “without knowing it,” Newton a poet despite
himself. Herder’s is romantic philosophy of science insofar as it seeks the
knowledgeable form of representation that would result if we could cultivate the
poetic aspect of scientific representation as a key source of its truth, and the
scientific aspect of poetic representation as a key source of its pleasure. “Oh,
what a work of strangely fine developments and observations,” he muses, could
a “thinking and feeling physiologist” write: it would capture “this noble string-
play in its structure, in its conducting and knotting, entwining and
subtilizing” (206). And what an unvarnished “offprint of a living human soul
[Abdruck einer lebendigen Menschenseele]” could be produced by a poet who
cultivated his writing’s function as “betrayer” of “how he received images, how
he ordered and adjusted them and the chaos of his impressions” (217–19 [366]).
The assumption that literature has no science and science no poetics, Herder
thinks, inhibits the truth and efficacy of each.
Notes:
(1) . Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual
Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–33; Raymond
Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 30–48; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York and
Cambridge: Zone Books and MIT Press, 2007), 37, 242–47.
(2) . For a pithy, like-minded account of the alternative Herder posed to the
(ultimately victorious) formation of the disciplines, and of the frequent
misprision of this alternative in historical retrospect, see Eva Knodt,
“Hermeneutics and the End of Science: Herder’s Role in the Formation of Natur-
and Geisteswissenschaften,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines
and the Pursuit of Knowledge, ed. Wulf Koepke, (Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1996), 1–12. Notice how the characterization “monstrous” arises in works as
diverse as Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009) and Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). After decades of careful
scholarship on the scientific “contexts” of romantic-era literature, as well as new
histories of romantic-era science, it is now safe to conclude that natural
scientific reading, writing, and research were the rule, rather than the
exception, among even the most canonically literary romantics, productive of the
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texts, not just the contexts, of romantic era literature. Fine emblems of this now
vast bibliography include Jocelyn Holland, German Romanticism and Science:
The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge,
2009), Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in British Romanticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Safia Azzouni, Kunst als praktischer
Wissenschaft: Goethes “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre” und die Hefte Zur
Morphologie (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005).
(3) . Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German

Romanticism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1–
5; Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age
of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xvii–xix; Zammito,
“Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary
controversies over function in biology.”
(4) . Herder, “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul,” in Herder:
Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 187–243; and “On Image, Poetry, and Fable,”
in Selected Writings on Aesthetics: Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. and trans.
Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006),
357–82. These two essays are abbreviated CS and IPF in what follows. Citations
from the German, when given, refer to HW 4, 329–93 and 633–77; page
references to this edition appear in square brackets. My summary of cruxes in
postpositivist philosophy of science is heavily indebted to Zammito, A Nice
Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine
to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
(5) . See Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
(6) . Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 57.
(7) . See, for instance, Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing
Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005),
Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and
Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998), Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British
Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Maureen
McClane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the
Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
(8) . Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (London: October/MIT Press, 1990), 39.
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Irritable Figures
(9) . Ibid., 70.
(10) . John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols., ed.

Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 1, book 2, 2.1, 144.
(11) . Ibid., 2, 1.2, 121; Intro., 2, 26.
(12) . Herder, “Fragments on Recent German Literature,” in Forster, Herder:

Philosophical Writings, 33–64, 50. Abbreviated F hereafter. See Forster’s
illuminating discussion of Herder’s “quasi-empiricist” theory of language in After
Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), esp. 70–74 and 132–37. Forster argues that Herder
agrees with Locke and Hume that concepts originate in sensation, but innovates
upon them to argue that the acquisition of language “transforms the nature of a
person’s sensations” (71). I depart from Forster’s further argument that Herder
thinks we can also “achieve concepts which are in a way non-empirical...by
means of a sort of metaphorical extension from the empirical ones” (72). As I
argue in the next section, such metaphorical extensions are not necessarily “non-
empirical” because, (1) for Herder, metaphors occur within nonverbal processes
of sensation, and (2) metaphors function by virtue of their contact with
unnoticed physical and sensory stimuli.
(13) . “On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forces of the Human Soul,” a
1775 draft of Herder’s published essay; in Forster, Philosophical Writings, 178–
86, 180. Abbreviated CSd hereafter.
(14) . See Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, and Shirley A. Roe, Matter,
Life, and Generation: 18th-Century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
(15) . See Zammito’s excellent account of the importance of Herder’s strategic

misappropriation of Haller’s physiology in Kant, Herder, and the Birth of
Anthropology, 309–45, esp. 326–332.
(16) . Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965); Jacob, The

Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York:
Pantheon, 1973), 19–129; Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 226–32. See also Roe’s
excellent overview of the epigenesis controversy in Matter, Life, and Generation
and Charles T. Wolfe, “Why Was There No Controversy over Life in the Scientific
Revolution?” in Controversies within the Scientific Revolution, eds. V. Boantza
and M. Dascal (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 187–221.
(17) . For a most lucid and nuanced account of this process that, in my view,
opens up continuities between “high and late Enlightenment” and “romantic”
sophistications of early Enlightenment rationalism and mechanism, see Reill,
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Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Because idealist Naturphilosophie

exemplifies romanticism for Reill, however, he positions the two movements as
radically distinct, and treats the poetic science of the “Schwärmer” Herder as
surprisingly typical of Enlightenment thought (in “Herder’s Historical Practice
and the Discourse of Late Enlightenment Science,” J.G. Herder: Academic
Disciplines, 13–21).
(18) . See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 70–74.
(19) . Goethe, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort,” Zur
Morphologie 2.1, in MA 12, 306.
(20) . Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of
Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs, trans.
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139–53.
(21) . On Herder’s comfort with the inexorable sensuousness and contingency of

human knowledge, an orientation that enabled him to position images (Bilder) at
the origin of thought, rather than to attempt, like Kant, to purify analytical
concepts of that which belongs to sensation, see Tilman Borsche, “Bildworte.
Vom Ursprung Unserer Begriffe,” in Zwischen Bild und Begriff: Kant und Herder
zum Schema, ed. Ulrich Gaier and Ralf Simon (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2010),
55–69, esp. 63. On the consequences of his refusal to distinguish ontologically
between man and nature, see Knodt, “Hermeneutics,” 3–7.
(22) . As per their shared Latin etymon con + tangere, to touch together.
(23) . Notice how starkly this contradicts a variety of epistemological modernity

emergent in Herder’s lifetime and quite hegemonic in ours, according to which
the truth in poetry inheres in its status as self-productive and self-referential
language. As Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy put it in their
seminal poststructuralist interpretation of the Athenaeum fragments, romantic
literary philosophy aspired towards a notion of poesis as utterly self-authorizing
truth, “production, absolutely speaking...in which the literary thing produces the
truth of production in itself...the truth of the production of itself” (The Literary
Absolute, 12). This interpretation in fact reflects the consolidation of a division
of labor and prestige between science and literature that some romantic oeuvres
fundamentally contest. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute:
The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and
Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988) and Beiser’s rebuttal in The
Romantic Imperative.
(24) . See, however, Ulrich Gaier, “Metaschematisieren? Hieroglyphe und

Periodus,” in Gaier and Simon, Zwischen Bild und Begriff, 19–53, for a thorough
interpretation.
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(25) . Hans Blumenberg, “Prospect for a theory of Nonconceptuality,” in

Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1997), 81–102. See Hans Dietrich Irmscher’s indispensible study of Witz
and Analogie in Herder as technologies for the discovery of new fields of
knowledge, “Witz und Analogie als Instrumente des entdeckenden Erkennens,”
in “Weitstrahlsinniges” Denken: Studien zu Johann Gottfried Herder von Hans
Dietrich Irmscher, ed. Marion Heinz und Violetta Stolz (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2009), 206–35, and his “Der Vergleich im Denken Herders,” in J.G.
Herder: Academic Disciplines, 78–96.
(26) . Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” in The Birth of
Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs, trans.
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199), 139–153 On Niezsche’s
debts to Herder on the question of the tropic origin of thought, see Andrea
Christian Bertino, “Vernatürlichung”: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches
Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei
Johann Gottfried Herder, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), esp. 170–203. See also
Borsche, “Bildworte,” 63–64.
(27) . Bertino, Vernatürlichung, 170–72.
(28) . Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1993), 25.
(29) . Bentino, Vernatürlichung, 172. I disagree that Herder uses the notion of
figurative drive as a “non-biological” heuristic: Bertino bases this conclusion on
the assertion that this drive surfaces in discussions of poetry and language,
rather than in biological natural scientific contexts—but the “Sensation and
Cognition” essay is biological indeed.
(30) . See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 130–35.
(31) . Ibid., 328.
Page 24 of 24
Romantic Empiricism after the “End of Nature”

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
Romantic Empiricism after the “End of

Nature”
Contributions to Environmental Philosophy
Dalia Nassar
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0017

Over the last two decades, environmental theorists have repeatedly pronounced
the “end” of nature, arguing that the idea of nature is neither plausible nor
desirable. This chapter offers an environmental reappraisal of romanticism, in
light of these critiques. Its goals are historical and systematic. First, the chapter
assesses the validity of the environmentalist critique of the romantic conception
of nature by distinguishing different strands within romanticism, and locating an
empiricist strand in the natural-scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Second, the chapter considers the systematic significance of Goethe’s “romantic
empiricism,” and argues that while an abstract notion of nature is problematic, a
concrete conception achieved through the mutually supportive work of
observation and reflection is essential for environmental thought.
Keywords: environmental philosophy, nature, romanticism, empiricism, Goethe, environmental ethics,

Naturphilosophie, critique of romanticism, romantic science, epistemic obligation
It has been almost two decades since the publication of Bill McKibben’s book,
The End of Nature (1989), which, as the title proclaims, announced the end of
that which we have, for many centuries, called nature. McKibben’s claim is that
the increasing influence of human activity on the natural environment has led
not only to unprecedented transformations in an extremely short amount of time,
but also to the complete elimination of a reality that is outside of or independent
of the sphere of human activity. “The idea of nature,” he writes, “will not survive
Page 1 of 19
the new global pollution—the carbon dioxide and CFCs and the like....We have
changed the atmosphere, and we are changing the weather. By changing the
weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial....The world, the
whole world, is touched by our work even when that work is invisible.”1
Over the last decade, McKibben’s claim that nature has come to an end has been
reiterated and, in many cases, reconfigured. Thus, although environmental
philosophers have generally agreed with the view that the idea of nature is
problematic or implausible, their reasoning often differs from McKibben’s.
Timothy Morton is a case in point. In his recent book, Ecology without Nature
(2007), Morton argues that ecology and ecological thought must rid itself of the
idea of nature. This is not, however, because we have destroyed nature such that
it no longer exists. Rather, Morton’s claim is that nature is an idealized reality—
an idea—that does not describe material reality or specify phenomena. (p.297)
The idea of nature, he argues, “hinders authentic ecological politics, ethics
philosophy and art” because it is “transcendental term in a material mask.”2
In agreement with Morton’s view, recent work in environmental theory has

similarly argued that the idea of nature, as Kate Rigby puts it, “is a metaphysical
construct borne of a particular intertextual history and projected onto certain
kinds of stuff in a variety of contexts, with a range of potentially very material
effects.”3 Rigby claims that the emergence of the abstract concept of nature
coincides with the emergence of human culture. In the Western tradition, it is
when human beings achieved a fully formed alphabetical writing and theorized
the purely intelligible world of ideas in classical Greece that an opposing notion
of nature—whether as cosmic whole or as indwelling principle or as virgin
territory or as mother—emerged.4 Thus, from the beginning, she argues, the
idea of nature both assumes and implies a problematic and false opposition or
dualism between nature and culture, natural product and human product.
Alongside these critiques of the idea of nature, a number of studies have

appeared that consider (and in part reintroduce) the environmental
contributions of romantic thought. These works, which largely focus on the
British poetic tradition, seek to offer a reappraisal of romanticism as proto-
ecological. Thus although the term “ecology” was not coined until 1866 by Ernst
Haeckel, a number of scholars (primarily literary critics) have traced the origins
of ecology back to romantic ideas circulating in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.5
This recent interest in the environmental appraisal of romanticism is not

surprising. After all, the movement that we now identify as “romanticism,” and
which spanned several decades and transcended national boundaries, was
united in its critique of the instrumentalization of reason and industrialization—
which it considered to be symptomatic of a deeply problematic relationship to
nature. Furthermore, the romantics challenged the dualistic view—which
Page 2 of 19
underlay and legitimized modern science—of the mind as opposed to and

distinct from nature. Instead, the romantics contended that mind and matter are
two sides of the same reality. Or, as Schelling put it in one of his earliest writings
on the philosophy of nature: “Nature should be spirit made invisible, spirit the
invisible nature” (HKA 1/5, 107).
What is surprising, however, is that the rise of interest in romanticism occurred

alongside—and partly in dialogue with—the critique of the idea of nature.6 The
interest in romanticism thus seems out of place, given that the romantics were
the modern thinkers who ascribed to nature a special significance. In both their
philosophical and their poetic works, the romantics did not simply conceive of
nature as a mysterious entity whose secrets must be (through the work of
experimentation or mathematization) uncovered, but as the fundamental and
underlying reality (principle) of all things—including the (p.298) human being.
In other words, for the romantics, nature—not ecology, the environment, or, to
use Morton’s most recent term, the “coexistence” of things—was the most
significant and central concern.
In light of the critiques of the idea of nature, the interest in romanticism seems
perplexing and perhaps even problematic. Does the romantic idea of nature not
also suffer from the kinds of problems that McKibben and Morton point out? In
fact, Morton’s rejection of the idea of nature begins with a critical assessment of
romanticism, and it is precisely the romantic view of and approach to nature that
he considers to be the source of the problem. Nonetheless, one is left to wonder
whether the (or a) romantic conception of nature can contribute to
contemporary debates, and whether the critical challenges to the idea of nature
have either overlooked or misunderstood certain aspects of romanticism.
In the following, I offer an environmental reappraisal of romanticism, which

takes account of the recent critiques of the idea of nature. My goals are
historical and systematic. First, I seek to assess the validity of Morton’s critique
of romanticism by distinguishing different traditions or strands within romantic
thought. Thus I aim to shed light on the various conceptions of nature within
romanticism, and challenge the view that romanticism offers only one account of
nature, which is implausible or problematic in the contemporary context. I argue
that within romanticism, we find a tradition that emphasizes empirical
experience, careful observation, and methodological inquiry, and offers a
conception of nature that cannot be criticized as an idealized or abstracted
transcendental entity.7 Second, I consider the systematic significance of this
“romantic empiricism,” and argue that while an abstract or idealized notion of
nature is indeed problematic, a concrete conception that is achieved through the
mutually supportive work of observation and reflection is essential for
environmental thought. In particular, I contend that it is only on the basis of the
kind of careful empirical observation and rigorous ontological account of nature
that we find in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that an environmental
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ethic is possible. In Goethe’s approach, we find a notion of epistemological

responsibility or obligation that offers the necessary first step toward developing
a sustainable environmental ethic.
16.1. German Romanticism and Nature

As Jonathan Bate has clarified, a key difference between the British and
American romantics concerns their understanding of nature. While the British
romantics were interested in specific places and the ways in which these places
could affect and vitalize the human spirit, the Americans were concerned with
the vastness of nature, and understood nature as pristine (p.299) wilderness.8
In contrast to both, the German romantics were concerned, above all, with
exploring the relation between nature and culture, understanding the way in
which the two can enhance or destroy one another, and developing an ethical
ideal for the relation between the human being and the natural world. They did
this by observing cultural differences in varying geographies (Herder, Alexander
von Humboldt), explicating the relation between natural organisms and artifacts
(Herder, Schelling, Goethe), outlining a comprehensive theory of mind
(Schelling), and elaborating how the destruction of nature would lead to the
destruction of culture (A. von Humboldt). For the German romantics, nature was
never thought of as a particular landscape or a vast expanse, but as a dynamic
reality in which human beings dwell and to which they contribute.
In Jena, Weimar, and Berlin, the generation of philosophers after Kant was
concerned with overcoming the various oppositions that resounded throughout
his corpus: the opposition between sensibility and the understanding (intuition
and intellect), noumena and phenomena, necessity and freedom, matter and
mind, passivity and activity. Although in the Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant
promised to bridge the gulf between these distinct domains, his concluding
claim that nature and freedom can only be unified in a hypothetical and
unknowable “supersensible substrate” did not ultimately achieve this end. So
long as the unity between nature and freedom (matter and mind) remained
hypothetical, there was no way by which to establish the connection necessary
for, on the one hand, overcoming skepticism, and, on the other, developing an
adequate philosophy of nature.9 At this time, I will not delve into the specific
difficulties of Kant’s position, or the criticisms it received.10 Rather, I will only
briefly mention the romantic response to the Kantian project.
The romantics challenged the mind-matter dualism on two fronts: ontologically

and epistemologically. In the first instance, they contended that human beings
participate in natural processes both directly and indirectly. Growth and sexual
reproduction (which by the late eighteenth century had become the central
concern of natural philosophers) in addition to mounting evidence of
morphological continuity between animal and human bodies illustrated a direct
and immanent relationship between human beings and a larger (more than
human) world. In turn, the study of different (primarily non-European) cultures
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and increased knowledge of geography illustrated the influence of natural

surroundings and habitats on human culture (including human language). In
significant ways, Herder’s call for a “new world of knowledge,” which would
bring together various scientific disciplines and show the influences of heat and
cold, electricity, chemistry, and the climate on “the mineral and vegetable
kingdoms, and on men and animals,” played a key role in motivating the
romantic project.11
(p.300) From an epistemological perspective, the romantics maintained that

knowledge is only possible if the known object (nature) is not ultimately beyond
or distinct from the knowing subject. As Schelling puts it in his 1800 System of
Transcendental Idealism, knowledge rests upon the “coincidence” of subject and
object, such that the primary aim of philosophy must be the demonstration of
this coincidence (HKA 9/1, 32). Thus in the wake of Kantian philosophy, and the
premise that the thing-in-itself is infinitely unknowable, the romantics argued
that the very possibility of knowledge and philosophy depends on a unity
between self and world, the human mind and nature.
Yet, even within the larger German romantic tradition, one finds distinctive
directions with diverse methods and perspectives. Schelling is exemplary in his
attempt to construct a “system of nature.” This construction begins by positing
an original premise, an absolute or necessary first principle. This principle,
however, contains a contradiction, a duality, which must be resolved. The
resolution of this duality occurs in the so-called process of construction, in which
one intuition is generated after the other, until finally, an “absolute synthesis” is
achieved. That is, a synthesis of all the previous intuition is realized in one
culminating insight—an insight that also demonstrates the validity of the original
premise.12 In the philosophy of nature, the different intuitions that are
successively generated through the internal contradiction of the first premise
are nothing other than the stages of natural development: from magnetism and
electricity, to chemistry and organisms, and, finally, to the specific evolutionary
relationships between different organisms, Schelling constructs the history of
nature.13 While Schelling undertook experiments and emphasized the
significance of experience for the adequate construction of a system of nature,
his method and aims were determined by his systematic ideals. More
specifically, his goal was to establish the theoretical foundations of a system of
nature.
In contrast to Schelling’s systematic construction of nature, Herder, Goethe, and

eventually Alexander von Humboldt were concerned with developing a new
empiricism—what Schiller described as “rational empiricism,” and what I call
“romantic empiricism.” The juxtaposition of romantic and empiricism is—to most
minds—highly unlikely and even contradictory. The romantics are, after all,
known for their abstract systematic ideals, which appear to strongly contrast
with an empiricist approach grounded in phenomena and concerned with the
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observation of nature. Thus, to speak of a romantic empiricism is to speak of the

“unknown romanticism.” What differentiates this strand of romanticism is an
interest in nature as a phenomenon to be observed (and not merely theorized or
systematically constructed), and a concern with investigating and transforming
our capacity to observe and grasp the natural world.
In what follows I investigate this understudied empiricist approach within

romanticism, and consider its relevance for contemporary environmental (p.
301) theory. Due to lack of space, I will focus on the romantic whose work most
clearly exemplifies this approach, namely Goethe.
16.2. Goethe’s Romantic Empiricism

In a letter to Goethe from January 19, 1798, Schiller describes Goethe’s
scientific method as a “rational empiricism.” “Only rational empiricism,” he
writes, “can penetrate the pure phenomenon” (MA 8/1, 499). Rational
empiricism, Schiller continues, must be a true wedding of both empiricism and
rationalism: “only the most perfect activity of the free powers of thought with
the purest and most expansive activity of sensible perception
[Wahrnehmungsvermögen] lead to scientific knowledge.” In what ways was
Goethe’s method both rational and empirical, and what are the implications of
this method?
Goethe’s interest in nature and the natural sciences commenced during his
tenure as an administrator in Saxe-Weimar Eisenach. One of his first tasks in
Weimar was the reopening of the mines in Ilmenau, which led him to the study of
minerals and the development of his own mineral collections.
During this time, Goethe began to study botany, reading Carl Linneaus, working
with the Jena professor August Johann Batch, and developing a garden for his
research. For Goethe, reading Linneaus was both exciting and disappointing.
Linneaus had attempted to organize the world; however, Goethe surmised, not
one of his attempts was a success. Linneaus’s system led to a fragmentary and
superficial taxonomy because it was based on a few visible parts. In contrast,
Goethe argued that knowledge must seek to grasp and present the unity of the
phenomena—that is to say, discern how the different parts and stages of
development participate in the phenomenon as a whole. Only by grasping the
integrated character of the plant, he maintained, can we go on to recognize it as
a member of a particular species or kingdom (a plant as plant, an animal as
animal). The question for Goethe, then, was not whether plants exhibit a
distinctive unity, but rather what this unity involves, and how it can be
recognized and articulated.
In his essay “Intuitive Judgment” (“Anschauende Urteilskraft”) Goethe takes to

task Kant’s claim that natural ends or organic unities cannot be cognized. While
he expresses sympathy with Kant’s project, Goethe also emphasizes his
disagreement with the latter’s premises and methodology.14 By setting limits to
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knowledge, Goethe argues, Kant was also, and necessarily, transgressing them.
He writes,
In my effort to utilize, if not actually master, the Kantian doctrine, it

sometimes occurred to me that the worthy man was proceeding roguishly
and ironically, at one point appearing to set narrow limits for our cognitive
(p.302) capacity and at another beckoning us furtively beyond them....
Our master thus restricts his thinkers to reflective and expository
judgment, sternly forbidding determinative judgment; but after driving us
sufficiently into a corner and even bringing us to despair, he suddenly
decides in favor of the most liberal interpretations and allows us to make
what use we will of the freedom he has in some measure vouchsafed for us.
(MA 12, 98)15
Goethe’s critique, which Hegel also leveled against Kant’s methodology, applies
most directly to Kant’s claim that knowledge of natural ends or organisms is
beyond our cognition. How, Goethe asks, was Kant able to draw these limits if he
(Kant) did not have any access to what is beyond them? This was not, however,
the only reason that Kant’s framework appeared perplexing to Goethe. The very
thing that Kant had denied—cognition of organic beings—Goethe believed
himself to have achieved. Thus, he goes on, “had I myself not ceaselessly
pressed forward to the archetype, though at first unconsciously, from an inner
drive; had I not even succeeded in evolving a method in harmony with Nature?
What then was to prevent me from courageously embarking upon the adventure
of reason, as the old gentleman of Königsberg himself calls it?” (MA 12, 99).
In Kant’s writings, Goethe found much to praise; yet he felt compelled to go

beyond the limits that Kant had set—at first without realizing it because he was
unfamiliar with Kant’s work, and then later, after studying critical philosophy, by
giving more thought to methodological and epistemological questions.
Nonetheless, for Goethe, the Kantian problems were largely, although not
exclusively, theoretical. His own methodology, in contrast, was not developed
purely theoretically, but through continued scientific practice and observation
(something with which Kant was less concerned, as his primary concern was
with the possibility of offering an explanation of the phenomena).
Goethe agreed with Kant that there is always a “gap” between idea and
experience. For Kant, this gap is due to an incongruity between the singularity
of the perceived (the individual this) and the generality or universality of
concepts. This incongruity, according to Kant, results in a “contingency” in our
knowledge: “our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive
understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different
might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its
concepts” (AA 5: 406). For Goethe, by contrast, the gap between idea and
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experience is specifically temporal, and concerns the temporal and spatial

character of experience and the nontemporal and nonspatial character of ideas.
He describes the gap as follows:
this difficulty of uniting idea and experience presents obstacles in all

scientific research: the idea is independent of space and time, while
scientific (p.303) research is bound by space and time. In the idea, then,
simultaneous elements are intimately bound up with sequential ones, but
our experience always shows them to be separate; we are seemingly
plunged into madness by a natural process that we are to conceive of in
idea as both simultaneous and sequential.
(MA 12, 99–100)
While in the idea, successive and simultaneous are “intimately connected,” in

experience they are “always separated.” But what exactly do these terms mean,
and how is it possible—if at all—to overcome the gap between idea and
experience? To answer these questions, it is important to understand the
problem that underlies them, and this requires investigating Goethe’s project in
some detail.
In 1786, Goethe travelled to Italy with the aim of immersing himself in the visual
arts and learning about plant physiology. It was during this time that he arrived
at his idea of an “Urpflanze” or archetypal plant. In the garden in Palermo, he
was struck by both the diversity and unity of what he observed. He writes: “I
was confronted with so many kinds of fresh, new forms, I was taken again by my
old fanciful idea: might I not discover the Urpflanze amid this multitude? Such a
thing must exist after all! How else would I recognize this or that form as being
a plant, if they were not all constructed according to one model?” (MA 15, 327).
What is it, Goethe asks himself, that enables him to recognize the manifold
varieties of plants as plant. Or, what is the unifying principle of plants?
Importantly, he does not seek it outside of the multiplicity, but “amid the
multitude.”
In a letter to Herder, dated exactly one month following his visit to the garden,
Goethe writes that he has come very near to comprehending “the secret of plant
generation and organization” (MA 15, 393). He has realized, he reports to
Herder, that the unity he is after is inherently connected to growth and
generation. It was not until July of 1787, however, that Goethe more clearly
articulated his discovery. In a report in which he includes the two passages
quoted above, he adds the important conclusion: “it has become apparent to me
that in the plant organ we ordinarily call the leaf a true Proteus is concealed,
that can hide and reveal itself in all formations. From top to bottom, a plant is all
leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined
without the other” (MA 15, 456). What distinguishes a plant, what makes it
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recognizable as a plant, are the formative relationships between its parts: the
way in which each of the parts appears to anticipate what comes after it and the
plant as a whole—or, as Goethe put it, each part anticipates “the future bud.”
Thus, by claiming that “all plant is leaf,” Goethe is not reducing the plant to the
leaf, but rather recognizing a morphological continuity between the parts,
wherein each part is a formative manifestation (“bildende Kraft”)16 of the “true
Proteus,” that is, of an underlying ideal that determines the parts and their
relations in (p.304) developmental terms. In other words, what unifies the
plant is not simply its structure, but its structure as its formative unity, that is, as
the developmental relations between the parts, as the way in which each part
realizes the plant’s continued development.
In his Essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) Goethe presents this insight
in greater detail. An observation of plants, he writes, reveals “that certain of
their external parts sometimes undergo a change and assume, either entirely or
in greater or lesser degree, the form of the parts adjacent to them” (MA 12, 29,
no. 1). This is most evident, he explains, in what might be called intermediate
parts, cases where stem leaves have taken on attributes of the calyx, or where
the calyx is tinted with the color of the blossom, or where petals show
resemblances to stamens and so on. In other words, if the plant’s parts are
perceived alongside one another, one begins to recognize morphological
continuity between the parts, and it becomes clear that each part assumes a
form that is a modification or progression of the other parts.
The various parts of the plant thus appear as moments in a continuum of

formation—particular manifestations of the transformation that the plant
undergoes from seed to fruit (or seed). This transformation, Goethe goes on, is
the bringing forth of “one part through the other,” which presents “the most
diverse forms through modification of a single organ” (MA 12, 29, no. 3). Further
observation of the plant reveals that plant metamorphosis occurs in two
complementary ways. First, it is apparent that every part of the plant is a
moment of either expansion or contraction. While the seed is the first
contraction, the stem leaves are the first expansion. The calyx is a contraction,
and the petals are an expansion. The sexual organs are once again a contraction,
while the fruit is the “maximum expansion” and the seed within it is the
“maximum concentration.” Alongside this development, is a second development
—that of progression or intensification (Steigerung). Each of the parts comes
progressively closer toward reaching the goal of growth, attained in the final
parts of the plant, the reproductive organs (MA 12, 44, no. 50; MA 12, 65, no.
113).
By observing the plant’s development and discerning morphological continuity

along an axis of contraction and expansion, as well as progression, Goethe
arrived at the of idea of the plant: the internal unity and coherence that makes
the plant, plant. His claim is that this unity is inseparable from the distinctive
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form of each of the plant’s parts, that is, the way in which each part is both a
response to what precedes it and an anticipation of what is to come. Each part,
one can say, reflects the history of the plant and thereby contains within it the
whole plant. The unity of the plant is thus inherently connected to its growth,
and development, such that each part is a physical manifestation of a stage of
metamorphosis. It is a unity that emerges in time, and is realized in and through
the plant’s growth and transformation.
(p.305) But how is such a unity to be grasped and articulated? More

specifically, what kind of temporal structure underlies and makes this unity
possible, and how does it differ from the structure of experience? Goethe had
remarked that while in the idea, successive and simultaneous are “intimately
connected,” in experience they are “always separated.” The question thus is:
how can one grasp the plant’s organizing principle if its temporal structure is
contrary to the structure of experience?
Observation, Goethe explains, always begins by distinguishing or delimiting the

different stages or parts of a living being. One sees the stem, then the leaf, then
the bud, and so on. The relations between the parts and the continuity between
them are thus not immediately perceived. In an organism, however, the parts do
not develop in isolation of one another, nor are their forms (morphological
forms) or functions independent of one another. Rather, the development of the
different parts of living beings occurs in both sequential and simultaneous
relation to one another. In the plant, for instance, the leaf develops through the
stem, the flower through the calyx, and so on. Each of the parts, as we have
seen, emerges in relation to what precedes it (and in relation to what is to come
after it). In addition, Goethe explains, development or formation occurs
simultaneously. A stem does not first grow to full length, and is then followed by
a leaf. Rather, leaves develop simultaneously with the stem.
Thus, the very fact that organic beings grow and their parts represent stages of
development means that the different stages presuppose and anticipate one
another. That is, the possibility of future stages is already at work in earlier
ones. For example, just as the formation of the flower presupposes the formation
of the stem, so the possibility of the flower is already at work in the development
of pistil and stem. The structure of the organism can be thus distinguished from
the structure of casual observation in three ways. First, the parts grow in
relation to one another, and not independently of one another. Second, this
development reveals an anticipation of the future, such that the possibility of
“the future bud,” as Goethe put it, is already at work in the present. Finally, the
parts develop simultaneously (they grow together or at once).
Given the fact that, when we perceive, we see the parts independently of one
another, and, moreover, experience a temporal structure in which the past alone
determines the present, how are we to grasp the organizing principle that
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underlies plant development? The answer to this question lies in our ability to
perceive and grasp the continuity and relatedness between the different stages,
so as to be able to see the simultaneous and the successive as one.17 How is this
to take place?
The transitions, after all, are not given immediately to sensibility. For this
reason, Goethe surmises, the only way by which to grasp them is by visualizing
them in memory—and for this the imagination is necessary. Through the (p.
306) imagination I recreate in my mind what takes place in nature, and thereby
present to the mind’s eye what remains imperceptible to the physical eye. To
achieve this, Goethe writes, I must “consider all phenomena in a certain
developmental sequence and attentively follow the transitions forwards and
backwards. Only in this way do I finally arrive at the living view of the whole,
from which a concept is formed that soon will merge with the idea along an
ascending line” (LA 1/8, 74).
This involves two steps. First, I must discern the transitions between the parts,
and thereby see how each part relates to the one that precedes and the one that
follows it. Second, I must grasp these transitions as they occur simultaneously.
After all, the goal is not simply to arrive at an understanding of the continuity
between the parts and see how each part is a metamorphosis of the one that
preceded it, but also to grasp the unified activity of the plant. For only in this
way can one see all the parts as interrelated members of a living process. But
what does it mean to grasp the unified activity, or the underlying unity of the
distinctive parts? For Goethe this means nothing less than transforming what is
given to perception and imagination into an idea. He explains this
transformation as follows:
If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this
process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not
actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so
that they form a certain ideal whole.
At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and
thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity
as a whole. I can do so only by dissolving the particularity without
destroying the impression itself.
(WA 2/6, 303–4)18
The idea that is grasped in this way is not a static or abstract concept that is
divested of difference and particularity. Nor is it something that is imposed upon
the sensibly given by the understanding. Rather, it emerges out of an
engagement with the sensibly given, and thus provides, as Goethe puts it, an
impression of the whole that does not destroy the particular. The idea must
enable insight of the different parts and their relations—the continuity between
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them—and thus present the differences within the unity. Only in this way can I
grasp the unity of a living organism, that is, an internally differentiated unity.
Goethe’s claim is that perception must be transformed through imagination so

that what is perceived more accurately presents what occurs in nature. Only in
this way does the idea (as the organizing principle of an internally differentiated
unity) emerge, such that there is no “gap” between idea and experience. This is
in deep contrast to the method that commences with ideas, applies them onto
(p.307) some particular given, and then concludes that ideas (precisely
because they are the abstract starting point) cannot depict these singular
empirical givens. For, unlike Kant, Goethe begins with a particular experience
and asks what is involved in it—what makes this experience possible—and in this
way arrives at the idea (at the implicit organizing principle). He agrees with
Kant’s view that the distinctive character of a living organism is its growth and
reproduction, and with his claim that an organism is both “cause and effect of
itself” (AA 5: 370).19 Thus, Goethe emphasizes that the key to grasping a living
being is grasping its growth, more specifically, the causal or temporal structure
that underlies and determines this growth. This did not mean, however, offering
an abstract explanation of the mechanism of growth, but rather overcoming the
gap that emerges in the first moment of observation, that is, the temporal gap
between experience and the actual structure of an organism. In other words,
understanding means above all remaining with what is perceived and seeking to
make it meaningful and coherent.
From an epistemological or methodological perspective this means that to grasp

the distinctive character of organic unity (what makes a plant, plant), to grasp
the idea that underlies it, it is imperative that one immerse oneself in the
phenomena and seek the unity therein. For this reason, Goethe recommends to
anyone who wishes to observe nature to “seek nothing behind the phenomena:
they are themselves the theory” (MA 17, 824).20 Goethe’s empiricism is rational,
then, because it does not remain on the level of observation and eliminate
theory. Rather, it seeks to make conscious or explicit the idea that is implied in
what is observed. As he put it in the preface to the Theory of Color, “we labor in
vain to describe a person’s character, but when we draw together his actions, his
deeds, a picture of his character will emerge” (MA 10, 9).
Goethe’s approach has significant implications. First, it implies both the

necessity and possibility of transforming thinking and perceiving, such that they
are no longer incongruous, or in Kant’s words “contingent.” As he puts it, “my
perception itself [becomes] a thinking, and my thinking a perception” (MA 12,
306). Only in this way, he maintains, do we achieve a necessary “plasticity” in
our thinking. For, he elaborates, “if we want to arrive at a living intuition of
nature, we must become as flexible and quick as the examples that nature gives
us” (MA 12, 13).
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Second, his approach implies that knowledge involves the attempt to become
identical with the thing known. Goethe described his method as a “delicate
empiricism, which makes itself utterly identical with the object” (MA 17, 823).
This identity requires a transformation in the knower—a transformation that
takes place on two levels. On the one hand, the knower actively seeks to make
her thinking identical with her perceiving—and thus shifts the balance in her
cognition, so that concepts do not determine and grant meaning to inchoate (p.
308) sensibly given data, but rather, thought and ideas emerge from and in
light of what is perceived. On the other hand, perceiving must itself strive to
become identical with what is before it; it too must achieve a certain plasticity,
so as to be able to grasp the organism as an integrated unity. This double
transformation leads to what Goethe calls the “eye of the mind,” that is, a
thinking that emerges out of and is identical with perception.21
Goethe’s emphasis on phenomena, and his refusal to think of nature as an

abstract, transcendent entity, places him in great proximity to contemporary
environmental philosophers and theorists. Yet Goethe differs from the majority
of contemporary theorists in that his objections to philosophical abstractions
were articulated alongside a positive account of natural phenomena and
scientific methodology. Thus Goethe’s views on nature and philosophical
knowledge were not simply critical, but offered a concrete method, developed
through continuous engagement with the phenomena and a serious commitment
to the practice of science. It is his particular approach, and his insistence on
remaining with the phenomena, rather than merely theorizing about them, that
makes Goethe particularly relevant in environmental debates today. However,
before considering the extent to which his views can offer insights or solutions
to contemporary questions, it is important first to turn to a brief examination of
the state of environmental thought and examine the prospects of environmental
philosophy “after the end of nature.”
16.3. Environmental Philosophy after Nature

The origins of the environmental movement were in conservation, whose goal, as
the name belies, were to conserve or protect. These origins are significant
because they reveal the underlying assumption of environmentalism, namely
that there is something that should be conserved or protected. In other words,
environmental thought is based on the idea that there is a “nature” or
“environment” that carries some normative value and should be protected. If
there were no such entity (nature or environment), then environmentalism
would find itself in a difficult situation, in which there is no clear object of
concern or self-evident goal, and must therefore justify not only its goals, but
also its very existence. If there is no nature, then we must ask the question: what
is environmental action and theory for?22
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As a substitute for the concept of nature and in order to answer this question,
several thinkers have developed new concepts or employed old ones in new
ways. Morton, for instance, speaks of the “coexistence” of things, and argues
that we should strive to exist with things.23 Coexistence, according to Morton,
describes a “pre-ontological level of ‘existence,’” in which we cannot speak (p.
309) about distinct ontological beings, but rather the “intimacy of all life
forms.” What he means, however, is never made clear. For one, he refuses to
distinguish between living and nonliving things, and at no point does he explain
what he means by “life forms.” Yet he often includes nonliving entities into his
schema of “coexistence.” Although Morton’s notion of coexistence has the
positive intention of offering an inclusive conception of reality, it ends up doing
exactly what Morton finds problematic in the idea of nature: it is a vague and
abstract concept that is imposed on the phenomena. It is, furthermore, a concept
that does not offer a concrete approach to the phenomena or disclose the
phenomena in their particularity: it does not tell us anything other than that
things stand next to one another. What they are, how they stand next to one
another, and what their relations are remain unclear. Thus, rather than seeking
to understand a phenomenon, the notion of coexistence eclipses phenomena in,
as Morton puts it, the “constant flux.”
Biodiversity is another idea that has been put forth as a replacement for the
notion of nature and is connected with the disappearance or extinction of certain
types. While Morton distinguishes his notion of coexistence from the idea of
biodiversity, where the goal is to save or maintain as many kinds of beings as
possible, in both cases the decisive idea is that of the existence or continuation
of existence—that is, the preservation of something that exists now. Biodiversity
rests on the idea that we must strive to maintain the greatest number of kinds.
Number, however, is not self-evidently healthy. Thus kinds must be understood in
accordance to their diverse and complex functions within an ecological niche.
This means that we must investigate and understand these niches, and to simply
speak in terms of the concept of “biodiversity” is just as vague and abstract as
the concept “nature.” Furthermore, the notion of biodiversity alone fails to offer
a concrete approach to the phenomena. Instead, just like the notion of
“coexistence,” it relies on a vague idea of preservation and continuity, which
does not provide adequate ways of discerning differences, recognizing
similarities, and drawing judgments. The unquestioned assumption in both is
that because all things are part of the general flux (coexist), they must continue
to exist.
Thus both concepts—coexistence and biodiversity—lack the grounded and

concrete approach that Morton and others have called for. As they have rightly
argued, it is only on the basis of such an approach, an approach that regards
things in their particularity or specificity, that a convincing environmental ethic
can be developed. However, rather than delivering this approach, they have
resorted to the same abstractions that they criticize. If we do not develop ways
Page 14 of 19
by which to discern differences, and thereby recognize different kinds of

processes—process that are affected by human activity and those that remain
unaffected (such as bird flight); processes that can be described as complex (p.
310) mechanisms, and those that are not reducible to mechanical principles—
then we not only find ourselves in a state of ignorance, but also, I think, in a
state of ethical immobility—that is, an inability to make adequate judgments.
16.4. Goethe’s Environmental Ethics

Following the various declarations of the end of nature, thinkers have found it
necessary to posit some idea to play the role that nature (as that which is to be
preserved or investigated) has traditionally played. However, these ideas not
only lack epistemological and ontological rigor, but also appear to be more
abstract than the idea of nature. In other words, in spite of their critical
objections to nature as an idea, theorists have not offered viable substitutes that
can ground and justify the environmental movement.
Although Goethe was no critic of nature, he was a critic of philosophical

abstractions. However, alongside his objection to philosophical constructs that
had little to do with empirical observation, Goethe offered a positive account of
natural phenomena, based on careful methodological considerations.
My thesis is that Goethe and specifically his method offer a viable solution to the
lacuna in contemporary environmental theory. His approach to the natural world
allows him to discern differences, without however undermining or overlooking
similarities. For his goal was to grasp the unity in the multiplicity, and thereby
recognize the distinctive singularity of each thing through its relations and place
within a larger context. His Urpflanze, or archetypal plant, was indeed an idea.
As such, however, it was not separable from the phenomena of the plants; it was
neither an arbitrary abstraction derived from some apparent commonalities
between a set of plants, nor a purely mental construct generated through an
intellectual intuition. Rather, as an idea, the Urpflanze was achieved through
empirical investigation; it was verified through its ability to disclose the
distinctive character of plants, or as Goethe put it, the “secret of plant
generation and organization.” Thus, in Goethe we find an idealism that does not
imply antirealism, nor does it involve a shutting out of empirical phenomena.
The opposite is the case. As I have shown, for Goethe, knowledge can emerge
only through careful and arduous observation coupled with theoretical and
methodological consideration. The idea is never divorced from the phenomenon,
but rather is the phenomenon in the most immanent sense.
Furthermore, Goethe’s epistemology and his approach to nature carry some

significant consequences for environmental ethics. His view that the knowing
subject must transform herself in order to grasp the phenomenon adequately
challenges two widespread conceptions of the character of knowledge. On the
one hand, it challenges the idea that knowledge is purely representation or
Page 15 of 19
construction, in which the known object (nature) is considered to be no more (p.

311) than inert and passive, receiving forms imposed upon it by an active
knowing subject. On the other hand, Goethe’s view implies that the act of
knowing is never morally neutral, but always already involves a specific ethical
demand, namely the demand to remain open to being transformed by what is
known. The knower, in other words, stands in a relation of obligation to what she
seeks to know: an obligation to know it in the right way. This in turn implies that
the knower must be open to transforming herself in order to intimate properly
that which is before her. Thus, the act of knowledge is always already an act that
carries with it an obligation to what is known, an obligation that specifically
pertains to the knower. This obligation, importantly, cannot be thought apart
from the particular phenomenon, for it is only in seeking to understand it in the
right way that one is compelled to transform her- or himself. In other words, to
know responsibly, and to transform oneself for the sake of knowledge, is only
possible if there is an ontological reality (a particular entity) that demands to be
known in a particular way. That is to say, the epistemological act is not separable
from the ontological reality, and the two are ultimately connected to a specific
ethical demand and responsibility.
The act of knowledge thus rests on an honest engagement with reality, with the
phenomena. While this is not a thorough and comprehensive environmental
ethics, the claim that we are under an epistemological obligation to what is
before us provides the first step in that direction. This obligation falls entirely on
the side of the knower, and, importantly, does not involve the ethicist in the
vicious circle of having to assume values or rights—precisely what she or he
seeks to justify.24
Notes:
(1) . Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Viking, 1990), 54 and 56.
(2) . Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental

Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14.
(3) . Kate Rigby, “Writing after Nature,” Australian Humanities Review 39–40
(2006). www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-
September-2006.rigby.html.
(4) . Ibid.
(5) . See for instance, Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the
Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Karl Kroeber, Ecological
Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York:
Page 16 of 19
Columbia University Press, 1994); James McKusick, “Coleridge and the Economy
of Nature,” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 375–92.
(6) . This is all the more astonishing when one sees that the key critics of the
idea of nature are also scholars of literary romanticism. This includes Timothy
Morton and Kate Rigby. Rigby’s book on European romanticism significantly
assesses the relevance of romantic thought for environmental philosophy. She
remains uncomfortable, however, with what she sees as an overarching (and
anthropocentric) holism in romanticism. See Topographies of the Sacred: The
Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of
Virginia Press, 2004). In this paper, I seek to emphasize a specific romantic
legacy—what I call “romantic empiricism”—that Rigby also discusses, but does
not specifically consider in relation to contemporary environmental thought.
(7) . Amanda Jo Goldstein’s chapter in this volume similarly traces the empiricist
tradition of romantic thought in the work of Herder. See chapter 15.
(8) . Bate, Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, 39.
(9) . Shortly after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant’s
first critics accused him of skepticism. If things-in-themselves could not be
known, then how could we be sure that our knowledge actually reflects truth
and is not merely illusory? (The first review of the Critique, coauthored by
Johann Georg Heinrich Feder and Christian Garve, published in 1782 and known
as the “Göttingen Review” or the “Feder/Grave Review,” leveled precisely this
critique, arguing that Kantian philosophy was a full-blown idealism). Or, how can
a priori forms agree with or correspond to a posteriori matter? (This is the
principle critique of Salomon Maimon in his Versuch über die
Transcendentalphilosophie [1789].) Or, given Kant’s basic premises, how can we
know that sensibility was indeed receptive, and that things-in-themselves existed
at all? (This was the essence of Jacobi’s argument, in which he claimed that Kant
inconsistently argued that objects are the causes of our representations.) For a
complete account of the skeptical attacks on Kant’s philosophy, see Frederick C.
Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy between Kant and Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). In turn, the possibility of a
philosophy of nature depends on the unification of two irreconcilable principles:
the mechanism that underlies nature “as the sum of all appearances,” and the
teleology that is presumed (and is thus only regulative) to explain those entities
that are inexplicable on mechanical principles. Although Kant seeks to reconcile
these two principles in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, it is difficult to
see how exactly his solution achieves reconciliation. For a comprehensive and
illuminating analysis of the difficulty of the task at hand, see Eric Watkins, “The
Antinomy of Teleological Judgment,” Kant Yearbook 1 (2009): 197–222.
Page 17 of 19
(10) . See my The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in German Romantic
Philosophy 1795–1804 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
(11) . Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man,

trans. T. Churchill (London: J. Johnson, St Paul’s Churchyard, 1803), 24.
(12) . For an explication of how the first premise determines the development of
the system, see my The Romantic Absolute, Part 3.
(13) . For an account of Schelling’s derivations, see Eckart Förster, The Twenty
Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, trans. Brady Bowman
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 233–34.
(14) . For a more complete account of Goethe’s relation to Kant’s conception of

organisms, and his methodology, see my “Sensibility and Organic Unity: Kant,
Goethe and the Plasticity of Cognition,” Intellectual History Review (forthcoming
2014).
(15) . One of the more difficult aspects of the Critique of Judgment has to do with
the apparent distinction that Kant draws between our experience of organisms
and our cognition of them (as ends of nature or as purposive). For it seems that,
on the one hand, organisms “appear” to us in experience—such that we are able
to distinguish them from nonorganic beings and make claims about their
structure—while, on the other hand, they are deemed as ultimately
incomprehensible (see for instance, Peter McLaughlin, Kant’s Critique of
Teleology in Biological Explanation [Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990], 56).
For Goethe, the kind of difference that Kant seems to want to draw between
experience and knowledge does not make sense—for insofar as a phenomenon
appears, then it is knowable.
(16) . In his work on animal morphology, Goethe describes the relations between
the parts of an animal as developing “according to a certain scheme, formed
[umgeformt] differently through the formative force [bildende Kraft] in the most
steady manner” (FA 24, 280).
(17) . See Förster, The Twenty-Five Years, 261.
(18) . See also FA 1/24, 102.
(19) . The causal structure of an organism thus appears to challenge or

contradict the structure of efficient causality in which the cause is distinct from
(and precedes) the effect. Goethe realized this and for this reason focuses on the
temporal incongruity between our experience of organisms and their actual
structure.
(20) . In the same remark in Maxims and Reflections Goethe also states that “the
most important thing to grasp is that all fact is already theory” (MA 17, 824).
Page 18 of 19
(21) . On the transformative or plastic nature of cognition according to Goethe,

see Eckart Förster, “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes,’” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75:1 (2001):
87–101 and Frederick Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” Goethe
Yearbook 5 (1990): 188–212.
(22) . It should be noted that this is a problem that specifically plagues thinkers
who claim that the idea of nature is incoherent and philosophically unjustifiable
(Morton, for instance). McKibben’s take, in contrast, is that nature once was but
no longer is, such that he is able to demand environmental activism that is
inspired by this historical reality. In other words, the idea of nature (although no
longer a reality) has a normative status in McKibben’s thought.
(23) . Timothy Morton, “Coexistence and Coexistents: Ecology without a World,”

in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2011), 168–80. In this context, Morton criticizes the notion of a
lifeworld or lifeworlds, which have been used (at least since Heidegger) to
distinguish the domain of living beings and, more recently, justify an
environmental ethic.
(24) . The research and writing of this paper was supported by the Australian
Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE120102402).
Page 19 of 19
Texts by Authors from the Romantic Era

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001

German
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Page 23 of 23
Index

Dalia Nassar

Print ISBN-13: 9780199976201
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.001.0001
(p.335) Index
absolute idealism. See idealism
absolute, the,
epistemological ground of, 24
experience of, 213, 250
definition of, 130–131
in Hölderlin, 130, 131–132, 136–137, 139–140
irrepresentability
as antinomial attempt, 150
as endless striving, 18, 28–29 (see also infinite striving)
and gap between finite and infinite, 190
and limits of language, 170, 173
magnitude, questions of, 188–189
and reason, 36
in relation to the subject, 210, 247
in Schlegel, F., 170
temporality of, 247
Adorno, Theodor W., 150, 159 n14
aesthetics
creativity in, 41
and Naturphilosophie, 41
romantic, 39
and the truth of art, 41
See also beauty; sublime
“annihilation of nature,” 203, 210, 215
antifoundationalism, 5, 23–25, 30, 37–38, 150. See also Schlegel, Friedrich von
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 227
archetype, theory of, 33, 193, 302
Arnim, Achim von, 191
Athäneum (journal), 2, 9 n2, 10 n6, 10 n7, 114
Austin, J. L., 179
Bate, Jonathan, 298
Page 1 of 15
Index
beauty
in art and nature, 122
as completion of science, 154–155
as harmony of parts, 162 n42
as intuition of perfection, 40
in Kant’s Copernican Revolution, 39
Neoplatonic vs. Kantian, 189
sublime, as opposed to, 188
truth, as not equivalent to, 162 n39
See also sublime
being
and consciousness, 27, 251
and identity, 19, 22
Beiser, Frederick
on freedom, 203–206
on Novalis, 259
Romantic Imperative, The, 202–203, 209, 210, 213
romanticism
interpretation of, 2–3, 259–260, 264–265
and politics, 205
and religion, 213
and Spinoza, 209
Ben David, Lazarus, 242–243
Berlin, Isaiah, 276
Bildung
alternative conceptions of, 93, 105–106
definition of, 92
(p.336) in Hegel, 105
in Schleiermacher, 99, 105–106
and science, 216
Bloch, Ernst, 215–216
Blumenberg, Hans, 289
Boeckh, August, 80
Brandt, Reinhard, 190
Brentano, Clemens, 191
Burge, Tyler, 161 n36, 227, 229–230
Cavell, Stanley, 152–153, 165, 167, 176
complementarity thesis, 151–155
computationalism, 222–228, 231–232
constellation research, 15–16, 18. See also Henrich, Dieter
Corngold, Stanley, 140
Crary, Jonathan, 277
Critchely, Simon, 150
De Man, Paul, 140
Diamond, Cora, 153
Diez, Carl Immanuel, 25
drives, 136–138, 290–291
emotion in fiction and reality, 174–175, 177. See also literature; poetry
empiricism, romantic
Page 2 of 15
Index
corporeality of sensation, and the, 280–281

culture, in relation to, 284
and knowledge, 287–288
multiplicity of sensation, and the, 276, 278
observation, and the role of, 300, 304–305
as rational, 300–301, 307
as self-transforming, 282, 307
sources of cognition, and the, 277
environmental ethics. See environmental philosophy
environmental movement, 308
environmental philosophy, 297–298, 308, 310–311
epistemology
in Fichte, 265
in Goethe, 301–308
in Herder, 275, 280
justification of, 25, 30, 37
in Kant, 38
Erhard, Johann Benjamin, 17–18
Euler, Leonhard, 241–243
experimental physiology, 281–282, 290
feeling
of ideal, 38
of participation, 110, 112
in relation to poetry and reality, 167–168, 173
in Schleiermacher, 92, 103
of self, 19, 21–23
of sublime, 188–189, 191
Feuerbach, Paul Johann Anselm, 17
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
his criticism of Reinhold, 226, 229–230
epistemology in, 265
on freedom, 204–205
and Lagrange, 269
his mathematical method in relation to Novalis, 262, 264
mathematics in his Wissenschaftslehre, 262, 263–267
and Schlegel, F., 248
as successor to Reinhold, 16
his theory of self-consciousness, 229–230
and Weyl, Hermann, 268
Forberg, Friedrich Carl, 17, 26–27
Foley, Peter, 124
Frank, Manfred
Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus, 35
his complementarity thesis, 151–153
contra Habermas, 152
Der kommende Gott, 214
Einführung in die frühromantischen Ästhetik, 1, 38–39
on free will, 202
on Friedrich, Caspar David, 190
Page 3 of 15
Index
on language, discursive, and poetic use of, 151

on myth, 214
on Novalis, 261
ontological realism, definition of, 35
romanticism, interpretation of, 259–260, 264–265
(p.337) on Schleiermacher, 106 n2, 107 n18
Unendliche Annäherung, 30, 34–35, 239, 255 n12
on Wittgenstein and Novalis, 153
freedom
and dependency of the subject, 103
and disinterested pleasure, 124
and divinity, 206
Fichte’s radical, 205–206, 209
and humanism, 202
natural, 148, 208, 212, 215, 217 n5
necessity, in relation to, 204, 207, 299
and religion, 214
its role in society, 124
Friedrich, Caspar David
archetype in, 193
Äußerungen bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung von Gemälden von größtentheils
noch lebenden und unlängst verstorbenen Künstlern, 190, 194, 195
Fog, 196
landscape painting of, 194–195
Large Enclosure, 193
Monk by the Sea, 186, 188, 191, 192, 196
in relation to Novalis, 201 n26
his pietism, 192
on reflection, 193
Sea of Ice (Wreck of Hope), 190, 196–197
significance, his concept of, 192
sublime
artistic, 193, 198
and device of scale, 194–195, 199
and device of visibility and opacity, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199
divine, in relation to, 190, 192, 198, 199
interpretations of, 188–189
natural, 187, 190–192, 194, 198
Tetschen Altarpiece, 192
use of fog in painting, 195
veiling, his principle of, 195–196, 198
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 187, 196
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 43 n22
Frühromantik, 2, 9 n2, 10 n6, 31. See also Jena romanticism
fulfillment thesis, 152–155
Gabriel, Gottfried, 151
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 38, 89 n32, 94, 97, 107 n14
Gibson, John, 151–152, 154
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Page 4 of 15
Index
his empiricism, 307–308, 310

his environmental ethics, 310, 311
epistemology in, 301–308
Essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants, 304
on the relation of idea and experience, 302–303, 305–307
on imagination, 305–306
“Intuitive Judgment,” 301–302
Kant, his criticism of, 301–303, 307, 312 n15
on mathematics, 251
on minerals, 301
observation, theory of, 305, 307
on realizing dignity through art, 200 n15
and romanticism, 10 n8
scientific development of, 301
on self-transformation, 282, 310–311
on time, 302–303, 305, 307
on unity, 306, 307
Urpflanze, his concept of, 303–304, 310
Haller, Albrecht von, 281, 291
Hamann, J. G., 225–226, 230
Hamburger, Michael, 60
Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis
Hartmann, Nicolai, 32
Haym, Rudolf, 32
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm
and Bildung, 4, 92–93, 100, 105
on calculus, 240–241
and certainty, 132, 135
contra romanticism, 55, 92
dialectic, use of, 37
Differenzschrift, 34
on history, 49
“Oldest System Program of German Idealism,” 160 n24, 217 n13
Phenomenology of Spirit, 62
on self-consciousness, 230
Science of Logic, 224–225, 236nn15–16, 253 n1
(p.338) Herder, Johann Gottfried
analogy, use of, 284
on empirical psychology, 277–278
his empiricism, 276–279, 280, 286–287
epistemology in, 275, 280
figuration, concept of, 282, 285, 287, 295 n29
Fragments on Recent German Literature, 69
Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 203
on Kant, 204
his naturalism, 275, 279
nature, his concept of, 203
organic forces, his concept of, 203–204
“On Imagery, Poetry, and Fable,” 275, 283
Page 5 of 15
Index
“On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul,” 275, 277, 281, 282, 291–292
his philosophy of language, 69
poetry
definition of, 275
and knowledge, 287, 288, 294–295n23
and language, 283, 289, 290, 291
on sensation, 282, 285–286
on translation, 81
Treatise on the Origin of Language, 68, 225, 291
hermeneutics
and philosophy, 95
in Schlegel, F., 77, 79, 80
in Schleiermacher
and circularity, 76, 101
and divination, 96
and Gadamer, 94, 107 n14, 108 n24
and history of discipline, 93, 100
and individuality, 94–96, 97, 98, 104
interpretations of, 74, 75, 96, 97
and philosophy, 108 n22
and preconceptions of interpreter, 102
and primary vs. secondary thoughts, 98–99
and psychology, 96;
of religious texts, 100
and Ricoeur, Paul, 107 n7
his rules for implementation, 75
social and ethical motivations of, 99
its universalization, 94
validity, question of 97
See also translation theory
Heidegger, Martin, 150
Henrich, Dieter, 15–16, 18. See also constellation research
Herbert, Paul von, 16
Hindenburg, Carl Friedrich, 224
history
circular view of, 48
chaotic view of, 51
Hegel’s view of, 49
and the “historical turn” in Germany, 57
Kant’s view of, 63 n4
linear view of, 50
paths of, romantic and elliptical, 47
romantic criticisms of views of, 52–53
value of its philosophical investigation, 54
Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph, 225
Hölderlin, Friedrich
absolute, conception of the, 130, 131–132, 136–137, 139–140
Diotma poems, 139
exteriority, experience of, 131, 132
Page 6 of 15
Index
Friedensfeier, 58, 60–62

“Gespräch,” 58, 61, 63
and Hegel, 135
Henrich, Dieter, on, 145 n6
Hyperion, 59, 137, 139
and Kant, 66 n38, 135
Neue Aesthetische Briefe, 41
his pluralism, 59
on reflection, 20
and Schiller, 136
on self-knowledge, 137–138, 144
on spirit, 61
subject and object, division of, 19
“Rousseau,” 140–144
theorization and feeling, 133–138
Ur-theilung, concept of, 21–22, 131
holism, 311 n6
Humboldt, Alexander von, 299–300
(p.339) Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 73, 91 n57, 148–149, 226
idealism
aesthetics, in relation to, 38–39
in Fichte, 26
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, as conceived by, 43 n22
in Goethe, 10 n8, 310
interpretations of, 3, 31–32
in Novalis, 259–261, 270
in opposition to materialism, 34
and postructuralism (postmodernism), 15
romanticism, in relation to, 3, 32
romantic opposition to, 30
in Schelling, 10 n7
in Schlegel, F., 249–250, 252, 253
subjective and objective (absolute), 23, 33–38, 42 n5
imagination
desire, as awakening, 196
genius, role in, 122–123
literary, 154–156, 179 n6
ordinary, and the, 198
recreation of nature, and the, 305–306
supersensible, in confronting the, 188–189
value of, 216
infinite, concept of the, 239, 240, 241, 252, 254 n8
infinite approximation, 139, 239, 246, 251–253, 255 n12
infinitesimal, concept of the, 197, 240–248, 250–253
infinite striving, 18, 116, 136–137, 205, 251
intellectual intuition, 23, 249, 262–263, 268–269, 310
irony, romantic, 23, 114–115, 150, 155, 170
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich
his criticism of Kant, 312 n9
Page 7 of 15
Index
and feeling of one’s self, 22–23

Letters on Spinoza’s Doctrine, 16, 131
and Pantheism Controversy, 131
and problem of infinite regress, 24
and skepticism, 134
Jena romanticism
and aesthetic cognition, 152
its forms of discourse, 112
foundationalism and skepticism, in relation to, 24, 37
Kant, in response to, 221–222
meaning of, 2, 9 n2, 31, 148
philosophy and science, in relation to, 150–151, 153
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy on, 10 n6
seminar, its use of the, 111
judgment, underdetermination of, 172–176
Kadaver, Hans Georg, 38
Kant, Immanuel
on anthropology, 121
on beautiful and sublime, 187–188, 189, 196, 198–199
his Copernican Revolution, 38
his critique of metaphysics, 222
Critique of Judgment
as admired by Schiller, 41
aesthetic judgment and sociability in, 40
aesthetic judgment and truth in, 39
in anticipation of romantic themes, 40
as bridging sensibility and the understanding, 207, 299
experience and cognition of organisms in, 312 n15
genius in, 122–123
mechanism and teleology, its principles of, 312 n9
romanticism, relation to, 40–41
veil of Isis in, 195
epistemology in, 38
on genius, 38
his influence on romanticism, 126 n18
on kingdom of ends, 211
Milton, in relation to, 59, 65 n32
on position of a concept, relative and absolute, 21
Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, 244
(p.340) on regulative ideas, 41, 215
and Reinhold, 226, 229
The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of
God, 21
Kapoor, Anish, 186, 196–198
Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 243, 254 n9
Kepler, Johannes, 63 n5
Kneller, Jane, 18
Korff, H. A., 32
LaGrange, Joseph-Louis, 268–269
Page 8 of 15
Index
Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 224, 225

landscape painting. See Friedrich, Caspar David
language, 226, 232–233. See also philosophy of language
Le Sage, George Louis 266
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 222–224, 228, 232–233, 236 n15, 243
life, as scientific category, 281
linguistic holism
against Herder, 70, 87 n15
grammar as its unifying principle, 72
importance of context, and the, 70
language as organism, and the conception of, 72
meaning, in relation to, 89 n35
and semantics, 76
literature
and academia, 147
complementarity thesis in, 152–155
and conceptual space, 154
fulfillment thesis in, 153–155
and Hölderlin, 156
and philosophy, 147, 151, 157 n5
and science, 148–149, 151–152, 156 n4
priority thesis in, 152, 154–155, 156 n1
See also poetry
Locke, John, 225
Lovejoy, Arthur, 31
Lyotard, Jean-François, 190
Maat, Jaan, 232, 233
Maatsch, Jonas, 153
Maimon, Salomon
Frederick Beiser on, 255 n12
continuum of consciousness, on the, 244, 246, 253
Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, 239–240, 249
Manfred Frank on, 255 n12
infinite, on symbolic vs. intuitive, 245
on infinitesimal difference, 240, 250, 252
mathematical infinite, his concept of the, 244–246, 255 n15
on mathematics, 240
his response to Ben David, 242
on sensibility and the understanding, 240, 245
mathematics
and application of algebra to logic and language, 224
computationalism, 222–228, 231–232
infinite, and concept of the, 239, 240, 241, 252, 254 n8 (see also infinite
approximation)
infinitesimal, concept of the, 197, 240–248, 250–253
and philosophy, 260, 266
McKibben, Bill, 296
meaning, 176–177
Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth, 115
Page 9 of 15
Index
Moore, G. E., 166

Morton, Timothy, 296–297, 298, 308–309, 313 n22
mythology, 48, 152, 213–216, 233
nature
biodiversity in, 309
coercion of, 211–212
concepts of, 296–298, 299–300, 308–310
and culture, 299
and ecology, 297
and the environmental movement, 308
and romanticism, American, British, German, 298–299
Naturphilosophie, 42, 157 n6, 209, 212
neoclassicism, 192
Newman, Barnett, 186
(p.341) Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, 16, 20
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54, 78, 151, 282, 290
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)
and aesthetics, 27
on being, 19–25, 27
on computationalism, 222, 225, 228–229
his “encyclopedia,” 222, 259, 261–262, 267
and Fichte, 20, 26, 263–267, 270
Fichte-Studies, 18, 23–24, 113, 226, 229, 231, 234, 262
Final Fragments, 259, 270
Freiberg Natural-Scientific Studies, 270
on Friedrichian sublime, 198
and Hamann, 230
Hymns to the Night, 221
and Kant, 121, 126 n18
and Leibniz, 222–226, 228, 231–234
mathematics
Dilthey, Wilhelm on his, 258, 260
his method of, 260–261, 264
and nature, 260,
philosophy of, 266, 270
his study of, 247, 258–259
value of, 263
Novices of Sais, The, 117, 195
and Plato, 263
on poetry, 234
poststructuralism, in relation to, 223
potentialization, his concept of, 198, 260–261, 264–265
on realism, 27
and Reinhold, 221
on representation, 226–228, 230–234
to “romanticize,” his concept of, 10 n9, 120, 187, 261, 270
his scientific training, 222
on self-consciousness, 19
on signs and signifieds, 226, 229, 230
Page 10 of 15
Index
on sociability, 116–117
“symphilosophy,” concept of, 113, 120
on universal knowledge, 260
Wittgenstein, influence on, 153
Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 206, 215, 217 n5
“Oldest System Program of German Idealism,” 160 n24, 202, 214, 217 n13
painting. See Friedrich, Caspar David
Pantheism Controversy, 131
Pfau, Thomas, 134–135
philology, 148
philosophy of art. See aesthetics
philosophy of history. See history
philosophy of language, 68–71, 176–177, 225. See also Schlegel, Friedrich von
philosophy of mathematics. See mathematics
philosophy of science. See science
Pinkard, Terry, 132
Ploucquet, Gottfried, 22, 206, 224–225
poetry
classical vs. romantic, 78
in Herder, 275, 287, 288, 294–295n23, 283, 289, 290, 291
in Hölderlin, 59, 130, 136, 137, 138–144
and individuality, 95
and literature, 157 n8
in Novalis, 233–234
Plato’s criticism of, 147, 148, 151
progressive universal, 47, 48, 52, 114–116, 252, 257 n23
reality, in relation to, 175–179
and representation, 27, 140, 227, 233–234, 276, 288
in Schelling, 149
in Schlegel, F., 115, 163–165, 172–179, 179 n6, 183 n81, 184 n89, 252
and science, 149, 152, 274–275, 292, 292 n2, 294–295n23
translation of, 83
value of, 154, 156, 156 n1
See also literature
poststructuralism (postmodernism), 15
priority thesis, 151–155, 156 n1
Puteanus, Erycius, 228
Putnam, Hilary, 231
realism, 27, 35–36, 41
reflection, 19–20, 129–131, 133–140, 144
(p.342) Reinhold, Karl Leonard
Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, 20–21
on consciousness, 226
Diez’s criticism of, 25
Fichte as successor to, 16
Fichte’s criticism of, 226, 229–230
Jena romanticism, in relation to, 16–17
and Kant, 226, 229
and Novalis, 221
Page 11 of 15
Index
principle of his philosophy, and the, 23–26

Reinholdian program, 37
Schmid’s criticism of, 25
religion, 55–57, 62, 100–101, 204–205, 213–216
Rigby, Kate, 297
romanticism
academic character of, 111–112
and aesthetics, 39
chronological demarcation of, 10 n8
collective character of, 111, 113
and cultural formation, 149
definitions of, 1, 2, 9 n5, 31, 63 n2, 273
and empiricism, 300–301, 307
and Enlightenment, 273
Fichte, and criticisms of, 32
Heine, in relation to, 205
and idealism, 3, 30, 32
in distinction to Hegel, 92–93
Kepler, Johannes, in relation to, 63 n5
Marx, Karl, in relation to, 205
mind-body dualism, and responses to, 299–300
nostalgia, and its criticisms of, 56
Platonic influence on, 36, 39
rationalism, and the rejection of, 37
and realism, 3, 32
and science, 148–149, 222–223, 273–274, 292, 304
subjectivism, and criticisms of, 18
See also Jena romanticism
to “romanticize,” 10 n9, 120, 187, 261, 270
Rosenblum, Robert 186
Rothko, Mark, 186
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 141, 143–144. See also Hölderlin, Friedrich
Rückenfigur, 197–198
Rush, Fred, 35
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 229
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses, 34
on Bildungstrieb, 207
on construction, 300
Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, 148
and Descartes, 210
and Fichte, 211, 213
on freedom, 206, 208, 211–212
Freiheitschrift, 212
on God and humanity, 205
and Kant, 207
life, on concept of, 207, 209
Magistar, 204
on mythology, 213, 216
Page 12 of 15
Index
nature, concept of, 202–203, 209, 210, 212–214, 297

Naturrecht, 206–210
and philosophy of art, 152, 215
principle of indiscernibles, on the, 208
and solipsism, 210–211
System of Transcendental Idealism, 149, 205, 300
on temporality, 215
on Timaeus, 215
Wechselwirkung, on concept of, 203, 206–210, 212, 213
Weltalter, 217 n8
Weltseele, 207
Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik, 1
Schelling, Joseph Friedrich von (father of Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von),
205
Schiller, Friedrich von, 41, 111, 301
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 69, 191
Schlegel, Friedrich von
absolute, concept of the, 170
his antifoundationalism, 150, 170, 172
Athenäum (journal), 2, 9 n2, 10 n6, 10 n7, 114, 163, 171
on consciousness, 250–251
(p.343) Dialogue on Poetry, 115
on dogmatism, 182 n56
on feeling, 173
on Greek tragedy, 78
History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans, 78
on infinite, the, 240, 247–252
his influence on Schleiermacher, 90 n37
irony, his concept of, 170
and Kant, 164
and mysticism, 170
“On Incomprehensibility,” 114–115, 169
On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 68, 70–72, 82
On the Study of Greek Poetry, 78
on ordinary language, 172, 178
his philosophical development, 54
his philosophy of language, 68, 70, 71, 72, 169, 170, 177
on poetry, 252
on poetry (fiction) and its relation to reality, 164–165, 172–179, 179 n6, 183 n81,
184 n89
on realism, 36
on skepticism, 165, 169–171, 172, 179 n7
on symphilosophy, 170
on wit, 165, 172, 183 n74
and Wittgenstein
and aesthetics, 166–167
and comparison of method, 166–167, 169, 171, 183 n74
and dialogical style, 170
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst
Page 13 of 15
Index
absolute dependency, his concept of, 103

on Bildung, 99, 105–106
The Christian Faith, 103
Essay on a Theory of Social Behavior, 103–104, 117–121, 125 n15
and feeling, 92, 103
and historicity, 105
influence of F. Schlegel on, 90 n37
and Kant, 121–124
On Religion, 100
his philosophy of language, 70, 226
and Schiller, 108 n30
on self-understanding, 103
on selfhood, 103–104
on sociability, 104, 117–120, 122–124
See also hermeneutics
Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard, 25–26
Schulze, Gottlob Ernst, 226, 229
science
against social constructivism, 275
and art, 89 n36
curriculum of, 148
and demarcation, 274
empiricist psychology, 276, 278, 281
experimental physiology, 281–282, 290
life, and the category of, 281
and literature, 148–149, 151–152, 156 n4
neuroscience, 214
New Scientific experimentalism, 276
and philosophy, 57–58, 151–152, 259–260, 266
and poetry, 149, 152, 274–275, 292, 292 n2, 294–295n23
Promethean and Orphic, 195
romantic, 148–149, 222–223, 273–274, 292, 304
self-consciousness, 18–21, 27, 33–36, 206, 229–230
Seyhan, Azade, 170
Sieroka, Norman, 268
skepticism
and alienation, 150
its dissolution as disillusionment, 169
and dogmatism, 182 n56
in Jacobi, 134
first principles, in relation to, 23, 150, 259
as infinite striving, 251
as irresolution, 132–133
in F. Schlegel, 165, 169–171, 172, 179 n7
semantic, 233
things-in-themselves, about knowledge of, 312 n9
in Wittgenstein, 168–169, 171
sociability
Berlin salons, and the role of, 124
Page 14 of 15
Index
and communal scholarship, 113

as free encounter, 104
as goal of humanity, 118
individual to other, and relation of, 116
and problem of retaining individuality, the, 119–120
(p.344) Speiser, Andreas, 263, 268
Spinoza, Baruch, 205, 209
style, 92, 97, 104
subjectivism, 15, 18
sublime, concept of the, 6, 187–199
symphilosophy, 113, 171
translation theory, 82, 83, 85. See also hermeneutics
time, cosmic and historical, in relation to the sublime, 196–197. See also, history
temporality
absolute, with respect to the, 215
as characteristic of ideas, 302
living beings, with respect to, 305, 307
successive and simultaneous, 303–306
future, in terms of the, 51–52, 57, 67 n42, 78, 216
utopian thinking, 203, 215–216
unendliche Annäherung. See Frank, Manfred; infinite approximation
Unger, Richard, 140
veiling, principle of, 195–196, 198
Vuillemin, Jules, 268–269
Waibel, Violetta, 134, 136,137
Wallace, David Foster, 252
Wallis, John, 228
Walton, Kendall, 175, 178, 184nn88–89
Walzel, Oskar, 36
Weyl, Hermann, 268
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
language-game, 167–168
meaning as use, his concept of, 167
on ordinary language, 171, 172
Philosophical Investigations, 167
philosophical method, 167–170
romantics, in relation to, 152–153
and skepticism, 168–169, 171
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 150
See also Novalis; Schlegel, F.
Ziolkowski, Theodore, 111–112
Page 15 of 15

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Title Pages

The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on

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(p.iii) The Relevance of Romanticism

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The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on

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The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)

Novalis Schriften: Die Werke von Friedrich von Hardenberg. Edited

Johann Gottfried Herder

(p.x) Friedrich Hölderlin

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

Friedrich von Schlegel

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s sämmtliche Werke. Edited by O. Braun

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Jena (2000–2007). His recent publications include Hegel’s

Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Suhrkamp, 1997);

de Gruyter, 2012). Gorodeisky is the recipient of the 2012–13 Philip

Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, 2007),

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Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: romanticism, idealism, themes in contemporary philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich

“The romantic imperative,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1797–1798, “demands

At a time of greater disciplinary specialization and rigid distinctions between

There is, however, a second reason for widening the connotations of

Philosophers working on romanticism generally concur on its contemporary

(p.3) The aim of this volume is to answer this question. By situating

Beiser’s chapter directly challenges Frank’s interpretation of the romantics,

Michael N. Forster’s “Romanticism and Language” challenges the common

argues, made vitally important and new contributions to the philosophy of

Kristin Gjesdal’s “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher’s

Part 3 offers highly innovative accounts of and responses to romantic

Keren Gorodeisky’s “‘No Poetry, No Reality’: Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Fiction, and

Laure Cahen-Maurel’s “The Simplicity of the Sublime: A New Picturing of

In “The New Mythology: Romanticism between Religion and Humanism,” Bruce

Part 4 offers rigorous examinations of romantic conceptions of science that seek

developed later in the eighteenth century concerning the relation between

John H. Smith’s “Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic Calculus: Reflections on the

In agreement with Redding’s assessment of Novalis’s grasp of mathematics,

grounds his understanding of scientific knowledge and truth. Herder recognizes,