Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings

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Theory as Practice

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Theory as Practice A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings

Jochen Schulte-Sasse, General Editor Coedited, translated, and introduced by Haynes Horne Andreas Michel Elizabeth Mittman Assenka Oksiloff Lisa C. Roetzel Mary R. Strand

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided by the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota for the publication of this book. Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theory as practice : a critical anthology of early German romantic writings / Jochen Schulte-Sasse, general editor ; translated, annotated, and introduced by Haynes Home .. . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8166-2778-9. — ISBN 0-8166-2779-7 (pbk.) 1. Romanticism—Germany. 2. Authors, German—18th century— Aesthetics. 3. Authors, German—19th century—Aesthetics. 4. Philosophy, German. I. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. PT361.T55 1996 830.8'0145—dc20 96-17056 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations General Introduction: Romanticism's Paradoxical Articulation of Desire

ix xi i

Joche,n Schulte-Sasse

I. Critique in the Wake of German Idealism Introductory Essay: Representing Self and Other in Early German Romanticism

45 47

Elizabeth Mittman and Mary R. Strand

Notes to Introductory Essay Texts 1. Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism (1796) 2. Selections from Fichte-Schelling Correspondence (1800-1801) 3. Novalis: Fichte Studies (1795-96) 4. Friedrich Schlegel: Fichte's Basic Characteristics of the Present Age (1808) 5. Friedrich Schlegel: On Incomprehensibility (1800) 6. Novalis: Faith and Love and Political Aphorisms (1798) 7. Novalis: Soliloquy (1798) Notes II. Theory of Aesthetics Introductory Essay: Romantic Crossovers: Philosophy as Art and Art as Philosophy

68 72 73 90 112 118 128 145 146 155 157

Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff

Notes to Introductory Essay

178 v

vi

Contents

Texts

1. Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poesy (1799) 2. A. W. Schlegel: Theory of Art (Selection) (1798-1803) 3. Novalis: The Universal Brouillon (1798-99) 4. Friedrich Schlegel: Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy (1800) 5. Friedrich Schlegel: Concerning the Essence of Critique (1804) Notes

180 194 226 240

III. The Fragmentary Imperative Introductory Essay: The Early Romantic Fragment and Incompleteness

287 289

268 277

Haynes Home

Notes to Introductory Essay Texts 1. Friedrich Schlegel: Critical Fragments (1797-1801) 2. Friedrich Schlegel: Athenaum Fragments (1798) 3. Friedrich Schlegel: Ideas (1800) 4. Friedrich Schlegel: Fragments on Literature and Poesy (1797) 5. Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments (1796) 6. Friedrich Schlegel: Philological Fragments Notes IV. Toward a Theory of the Feminine Introductory Essay: Feminizing Philosophy

311 314 319 326 329 335 344 354 359 361

Lisa C. Roetzel

Notes to Introductory Essay Texts 1. Novalis: On Women and Femininity 2. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Natural Philosophy of Femininity 3. Friedrich Schlegel: Theory of Femininity 4. Friedrich Schlegel: On Diotima (1795) 5. Friedrich Schlegel: On Philosophy. To Dorothea 6. Dorothea Veit-Schlegel: Selected Diaries and Letters 7. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling: Selected Letters/ Reviews/Parody

380 382 390 397 400 419 440 443

Contents

vii

Notes

455

Bibliography Selected Studies on Early German Romanticism in English German Romanticism in English Translation Sources for Translations Index

463 463 467 469 47 1


Preface

In 1987, I asked six graduate students, three each from the Departments of German and of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, whether they were interested in a cooperative project on Early German Romanticism. All responded with enthusiasm, and the present volume is the product of our six-year collaboration. Our project survived both the inevitable dispersal of the group after each student's graduation and the equally inevitable disagreements on subject matter, with our devotion to intellectual cooperation still intact. For the first year, we did little besides an exhaustive reading and discussion of German Romantic theory; in our second year, we started the selection process and began discussing how best to render central terms in English. Although in the end subgroups took responsibility for individual sections, the translations and notes are the result of genuine teamwork. Even the introductory essays to each section are, to a certain extent, the result of collaborative efforts. However, these essays do document slight differences in our readings of the material, and the individuals identified by name wish to accept full responsibility' for the published version of their readings. All of us would like to thank the Graduate School and the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Minnesota for a generous grant that allowed us to purchase computer equipment, the Western European Area Center for summer fellowships supporting the six graduate students, and the Departments of German and Comparative Literature for technical and moral support. Jochen Schulte-Sasse October 1994

ix


Abbreviations

AF KA

Athendum Fragments Friedrich Schlegel, KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Schoningh, 1958-. A [KA] at the end of a note indicates our indebtedness to an annotation in this edition. N Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Khickhohn and Richard Samuel. 3d ed. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981. PhoA Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed., trans., and in trod. Douglas W. Stott, foreword by David Simpson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

xi


General Introduction Romanticism's Paradoxical Articulation of Desire Jochen Schulte-Sasse

In the past two to three decades, the criticism of European—in particular German—Romanticism has undergone vast revision. Among the revisionist literature that appeared during this time, Paul de Man's essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality," first published in 1969, may very well have had the greatest impact in reshaping common perceptions of Romanticism. De Man claims in the essay to have developed "a historical scheme that differs entirely from the customary picture," according to which Romanticism fits neatly into the overall emergence of a "modern" notion of art.1 He maintains, in fact, that conventional criticism domesticates the radical insights of Romantic theorists and that this is due, at least in part, to the inability of subsequent artistic movements to sustain the Romantics' level of theoretical sophistication: "Wide areas of European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear as regressive with regards to the truths that come to light in the last quarter of the eighteenth century" (ibid.). The "truths" to which de Man refers emerged most notably in a small circle called the Jena Romantics who, in turn, exerted a considerable influence on English Romantics such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. If de Man's claim is correct, it would more than suffice in justifying a publication like this one, which attempts to collect the most pertinent documents of the Jena Romantics' theoretical project. Yet what are the "truths" that allegedly come to light here? According to de Man's scheme, the "dialectical relationship between subject and object" that previous movements had postulated "is no longer the central statement of Romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs." I would like to pursue briefly de Man's implicit distinction between two broad artistic directions in modernity. To be i

2

Jochen Schulte-Sasse

sure, one might argue that de Man's juxtaposition of two movements portrays as a neat opposition what were in fact complex and contradictory discursive strategies within the work of individual writers, among them Romantics. Nonetheless, he pinpoints a crucial tension within modern aesthetics: between a desire for selfsameness or identity and the acceptance of the "impossibility" of such a desire; between the symbolic and the allegorical; between aesthetic ideology and rhetoric, to name just a few of the most important. Central to de Man's thesis is the susceptibility of many artistic movements preceding and following Romanticism, as well as conventional readings of Romanticism, to aesthetic ideology. By this he means that they stress an "analogical unity of nature and consciousness," give priority "to the symbol as the unit of language in which the subject-object synthesis can take place," and transfer "into nature attributes of consciousness and . . . unify it organically with respect to a center that acts, for natural objects, as the identity of the self functions for a consciousness" (199-200). Aesthetic ideology is thus an ideology—or, more precisely, an institutionalized discursive practice—that seeks to suppress the structurality of structures in favor of an illusive experience of wholeness. To use Lacanian terminology, the aesthetic enables the subject to establish an imaginary relationship between self and text. Art serves here as a mirror in which the subject experiences itself as unified and as possessing an equally unified, privileged consciousness. Poetic language sustains this imaginary relationship because it allegedly transcends the rhetorical nature of language, which, in turn, is able to close the gap between experience and its representation. Essential to aesthetic ideology is the notion of a beautiful object converging with an artistic subject. The two enter into a harmonious mirror relationship; that is, the intrinsic harmony of a work of art finds its equivalent in the internal harmony of the artistic genius as the privileged human being par excellence. Just as a configuration of symbols suspends the arbitrariness and instability of linguistic signs by referring to a "total, single and universal meaning," the symbolic imagination of the artist is the result of a fundamental harmony of human faculties; in the genius, "no disjunction of the constitutive faculties takes place" (191). Jena Romanticism, according to de Man, is the first artistic movement in modernity that radically opposes and deconstructs such an ideology. Given de Man's claim, it seems bizarre indeed that no artist has ex-

Romanticism's Paradoxical Articulation of Desire

3

pressed an allegedly unromantic ideology more definitively and affirmatively than the Romantic Coleridge, according to whom the poetic genius . . . brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties into each other, according to their relative worth of dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative.2

Coleridge's remarks amount to a succinct exposition of what de Man indicts as an ideological conception of the artist's imagination, namely a "symbolic imagination [in which] no disjunction of the constitutive faculties takes place." Coleridge invokes a vitalistic experience in which a subject establishes its unity or identity in the process of aesthetic activity, which is not restricted to the activity of an artist, that is, to the creation of art, but includes any "apt" encounter with art on the part of connoisseurs. Indeed, his articulation is not that far removed from Kant's notion of aesthetic experience as a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Significantly, such an experience of unity cannot be an ecstatic one (Greek ekstasis referring to a stepping or standing outside of oneself); on the contrary, it centers the subject while simultaneously affording pleasure. Coleridge achieves this by connecting reflexivity with pleasure, the split subject with selfsame identity: "it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject."3 Even the genius must "construct" its subjectivity on the basis of a mirror relationship; the subject is selfsame or with-itself only while simultaneously being without-itself, a split subject. This is why Coleridge characterizes self-consciousness as a "perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into subject and object, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antithesis."4 Art helps the subject construct itself (its consciousness) as unity; for the contemplation of the unity in the manifold via art is analogous to the reflection of the subject's various faculties as unity. Coleridge's obviously strong desire for unity and centeredness leaves unanswered a series of questions: What is the status of this desire? Does he privilege the imaginary register at the expense of die symbolic (and the real)? Does he, furthermore, emphasize a fundamen-

4


tally split subjectivity only in order to overcome it through an aesthetic praxis grounded upon a narcissistic mirroring of subject in object and object in subject? Finally, if Coleridge shares major features of an aesthetic ideology, how symptomatic is this of Romanticism as a whole? Returning to de Man, we can now distinguish between two aspects of aesthetic ideology, one centered around the notion of symbol, the other around that of genius. Whereas "symbol" emphasizes an "analogical unity of nature and consciousness," "genius" stresses the euphony among the artist's "constitutive faculties." The first aspect implies a theory of representation, the second a theory of subjectivity. In aesthetic ideology, both aspects converge in the concept of a "symbolic imagination." Although de Man deals with Coleridge's theory of (artistic) subjectivity only in passing, he does discuss his notion of representation at length, conceding that we "find in Coleridge what appears to be, at first sight, an unqualified assertion of the superiority of the symbol over allegory."5 He tries, however, to foreground the ambiguity of Coleridge's remarks on symbol and allegory and holds, against his critical predecessors, that Coleridge, like most Romantics, was aware of the allegorical, rhetorical nature of language. Thus it seems that, in de Man's eyes, Coleridge is rescued as a Romantic. But the question must be raised whether a more thorough consideration of Coleridge's theory of subjectivity might not have changed de Man's judgment. How does a subject construct "itself objectively to itself"? What is the role ascribed to art in this construction of the self as a selfsame identity? Is it possible, in any consistent fashion, to assert at once the allegorical (rhetorical) nature of language and the necessity of constructing the subject as a selfsame identity? Furthermore, what is it that makes the appreciation of "symbol" over "allegory" an expression of aesthetic ideology if not a theory of subjectivity that emphasizes the construction of selfsame identity? In de Man's discourse, the close relationship between the Romantics' theory of representation and their theory of subjectivity is reflected in his tendency to constantly slide from statements concerning representation to ones concerning the self. Interestingly, this sliding is most obvious in a statement in which de Man comes closest to defining the fundamental difference between "symbol" and "allegory" as incompatible poetic projects:


5

Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self. (207)

The question remains whether the construction of identity is possible without identification with something else, without what de Man calls an "analogical unity of nature and consciousness." Coleridge seems to suggest that it is by privileging a reflexive relation of the self to itself over the self's narcissistic relation with nature. Ultimately, we are left to ponder whether, in the Romantic version of aesthetic experience, the self s folding back on itself aims for a different (nonnarcissistic) kind of subjectivity, one not subjected to aesthetic ideology. The key figure underlying de Man's reading of Romanticism is not Coleridge but Friedrich Schlegel, who is most prominently represented in our volume. In particular, Schlegel's concept of irony becomes central for de Man. As a matter of fact, irony seems to serve, in de Man's reading, as the one pivotal concept in which the Romantics' theory of representation and their theory of subjectivity intersect. Whereas "symbol" expresses a notion of (or, more precisely, a desire for) unified subjectivity, "allegory" and "irony," with their foregrounding the discontinuity between sign and meaning, express a notion of subjectivity accepting the subject's inherent fissures and rifts. "The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity" (214). According to this reading. Schlegel—and other early German Romantics such as Novalis—would thus be radical structuralists, accepting the inevitability of structural, that is, spatial and temporal, difference, and consequently the impossibility of constructing a subject identical with itself. "The act of irony . . . reveals the existence of a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that it relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality" (222). Irony counters the subject's dispersal in time and space by embracing it. In this context, de Man quotes extensively from Peter Szondi's essay "Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony." The conflict between de Man's and Szondi's readings provides an excellent starting point for

6


our own discussion of the topicality of the theory of Early German Romanticism. For this reason, I am reproducing part of the Szondi quote, although in a different, more accurate translation published in an English-language collection of Szondi's essays: In the romantic conception of irony the subject is the isolated man who has become his own object, from whom the ability to act has been taken away by consciousness. He longs for unity and infinity; the world appears to him riven and finite. Irony, then, is his attempt to endure a painfully difficult position by means of a renunciation and an inversion of values. Through ever more intense reflection he seeks to reach a standpoint outside himself and to eliminate, on the level of appearance, the cleft between his ego and the world. He cannot overcome the negativity of his situation through an action leading to a reconciliation of the contingent and the necessary. Nevertheless, by anticipating the future unity in which he believes, he declares this negativity to be temporary, whereby it is both preserved and reevaluated. . . . Irony, however, by preserving the very negativity it was designed to overcome, is itself transformed into negativity. Tolerant of completion only in the past or in the future, whatever irony encounters in the present it measures against infinity and thus destroys it.6

According to Szondi, then, Schlegel shares a desire recalling that of Coleridge: for presence, for self-consciousness as a nondifferential entity, one neither dispersed by structures nor characterized by separation and alienation. Yet Szondi emphasizes the Romantics' belief that "the cleft between his ego and the world" can be eliminated only "on the level of appearance (Schein, which dc Man more appropriately translates as fiction)." Furthermore, Szondi stresses an ambiguity in Schlegel's notion of irony, suggesting that irony involves an endurance of tension or a perseverance in spite of itself. In other words, the tension in question is a fundamental, unsublatable one that nonetheless can be "braved" if one employs certain discursive and mental strategies. At stake here is, of course, neither a more correct reading of Szondi than de Man offers nor a resolution in favor of one or the other reading of Romanticism. My interest lies, rather, in exploring whether in the gap between de Man's reading of Romanticism and its misunderstanding Other (Szondi as constructed by de Man), an alternative reading might emerge, one that escapes the oppositions of authenticity and inauthenticity, symbol and allegory, aesthetic ideology and awareness of difference, "mystified self" and ironist. De Man com-


7

ments on Szondi's passage: "Every word in this admirable quotation is right from the point of view of the mystified self, but wrong from the point of view of the ironist. Szondi has to posit the belief in a reconciliation between the ideal and the real as the result of an action or the activity of the mind." De Man counters Szondi by insisting that "irony engenders a temporal sequence of acts of consciousness" that is "endless," "not temporary . . . but repetitive, the recurrence of a selfescalating act of consciousness."7 Yet may it not also be the case that the Romantics, while grasping the "impossibility" of longing as a futile and delusory activity, nevertheless stressed its necessity and inevitability? Rather than arresting their thinking at the point of recognition that language is rhetorical, they may have accepted the pursuit of aesthetic ideology's ideal as necessary while simultaneously appreciating its "impossibility." The notion of isolation or alienation would then have to be read in a Lacanian fashion as an insurmountable, unsublatable fact of life that nonetheless engenders an equally inevitable longing for its reversal. Szondi's reading, alluding to such a paradox, is indeed far more ambiguous than de Man makes it out to be. In fact, de Man systematically reduces the ambiguity of Szondi (and the Romantics) through translation. To name just two examples: for "longs for [sehnt sick nach] unity and infinity" he chooses "nostalgically aspires toward unity and infinity"; for "he seeks to reach a standpoint outside himself," which would allow the ironist to reflect his own being, that is, to reflcxively bend back on his own structure, de Man chooses "a point of view beyond himself." Nonetheless, at times Szondi's language seems to suggest a historicophilosophical reading of the Romantic project that would place it in the vicinity of the Enlightenment's teleological philosophies of history. For instance, his statement that the Romantic longs for a "future unity in which he believes' indeed at first glance supports de Man's reading. However, Szondi refers—even if in a somewhat laconic and confusing way—to early Romanticism's concepts of belief, fiction, and illusion. The Romantic "believes" in a "future unity" in the sense that he consciously constructs such a unity as a fiction, an illusion that enables him to construct or "synthesize" himself as unified, while always remaining aware of the fact that every construction is preliminary and incomplete. In this vein, Novalis maintains: "All synthesis—all progression—or transition begins with illusion. I see outside of me that which is in me. . . . Belief is the operation of illuding—the basis of illu-

8


sion—all knowledge, at a distance, is belief—any concept that is outside of me is a thing. All knowledge ends and begins with belief."8 Novalis argues here in essence that the subject can construct itself as (an ethical) subject only in the medium of a previously constructed (discursive or symbolic) opposite. The subject's relationship with such an object is characterized by "illusion" or "belief." His emphasis on representation's illusory quality is meant to prevent the self s mystification as something coinciding with its representations. When Coleridge says that "a subject . . . becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself," and that it is never "an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject," he is alluding to the same function of a discursive or mental object. Both Coleridge and Novalis are thinking of an opposite in the sense of a Gegen-stand9 in the mirror of which humans constitute themselves as subjects. The necessity of such opposites blurs the distinction between a reflexive relation of the self to itself and the self s relation to its representations. Part of Novalis's importance for Romantic theory lies in his articulation of representation, knowledge and belief. The distinction between knowledge and belief is connected with the equally relevant one between consciousness and selfconsciousness. Consciousness is made up of objects that constitute knowledge, whereas self-consciousness is the result of a reflective relation to one's self (the self as object constitutes the self as subject). Belief eases the necessary transition from consciousness to selfconsciousness. We have to elaborate on this difference if we want to shed light on the nature of the Romantic project and rescue it from the binary opposition of mystified self versus ironist.

The Concept of Self-Consciousness Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics expanded and refined the concept of self-consciousness, which had its roots in Descartes and Leibniz. Kant had assumed, in the tradition of Descartes and Leibniz, that the unity of self-consciousness establishes the unity of philosophy as a theory of knowledge.10 Thus, in his Critique of Pure Reason, he says: This thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold which is given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself di-


g

verse and without relation to the identity of the subject. That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness (which Kant calls analytic unity of consciousness and which, according to him, is the only unity Descartes addressed with his cogito, ergo sum), but only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Only in so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations. In other words, the analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a certain synthetic unity."

In the view of Fichte, Schelling, and the early Romantics, Kant's philosophy failed precisely because it was unable to ground that which Kant himself had acknowledged to be the "highest point" of his philosophy—a principle explaining the synthetic unity of apperception or identity of the subject. With his remark that "the synthetic unity of apperception is therefore the highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith of transcendental philosophy" (B 134), Kant proclaims self-consciousness or identity to be the ground of any theory of knowledge. Although the term "self-consciousness" does not appear here, Kant's use of "apperception" leaves little doubt that "selfconsciousness" is precisely what he is talking about. The term "apperception" originated with Leibniz, who distinguished it from perception as a mode of perceiving the self as accompanied by a unifying feeling of itself. Apperception thus refers to the sublation of object and subject in a "synthetic unity," that is, in the identity of the self. Perception, on the other hand, refers to appearances and to the representation of the "world"; it is perceptions that constitute consciousness. Human consciousness, in turn, depends on a series of reflective acts directed toward that which it perceives. If the human mind were comprised of nothing but reflective acts of consciousness, cognition could not be grounded and the self would always and by necessity feel dispersed. (Already at this point, it becomes clear that the relation of "symbol" and "allegory" duplicates, in certain regards, that of "self-consciousness" and "consciousness.") The question thus arises whether consciousness can be grounded in self-consciousness, or, in Kant's terminology, whether the experience of unity among perceptions, rather than being a unity accompanying perceptions (like Descartes's "cogito" and Kant's analytical unity of self-consciousness),

io Jochen Schulte-Sasse

has to be thought of as a unity grounded in an ultimate identity (which Kant calls synthetic unity of self-consciousness). How intelligible is such a unity of self-consciousness, if it exists? How can the transcendental structure of a unified self-consciousness be perceived or reflected without establishing yet another infinite series of reflective acts? Because any grounding of consciousness in self-consciousness would amount to a cessation, in the selfsame identity of a thinking subject, of the reflective acts of consciousness (which in and by themselves could only establish an infinite regression), the further question arises of how one is to discern the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. To reiterate, all of these questions are very closely related to what de Man discusses as the difference between the ironist and the mystified self, for "irony engenders a temporal sequence of acts of consciousness" that is "endless," "not temporary . . . but repetitive, the recurrence of a self-escalating act of consciousness."12 As a matter of fact, de Man here implicitly defends Kant against Fichte's and Schelling's criticism that he failed to ground his theory of knowledge in an adequate notion of self-consciousness, or, to put it differently, that he was not able to ground the infinite acts of consciousness in a synthetic unity of apperception. One might even say that de Man's critique of the notion of self-consciousness, which is implied by his collation of mystified self and ironist, turns out to be Lacanian. This is by no means surprising, for Lacan is as much a philosopher of consciousness as he is a psychoanalyst; his writings are filled with (mostly indirect and cryptic) references to the philosophies of consciousness emerging with Descartes, in particular to the notions of consciousness and self-consciousness in German Idealism. Because Lacan is greatly influenced by the very tradition he negates, it will be useful to refer occasionally to his reading of this tradition in our attempt to determine the topicality of Romantic theory. In one of his more explicit remarks concerning this tradition, Lacan calls the problem of self-consciousness the classical problem that has brought all philosophy since Leibniz to a standstill, that is, at least since consciousness has been emphasized as the foundation of certainty—must a thought, to be a thought, necessarily think of itself thinking? Must all thought necessarily perceive that it's thinking of what it is thinking? This is so far from being straightforward that it immediately leads into an endless play of mirrors—if it's the nature of thought to think of itself thinking, there will be a third thought


11

that will think of itself thinking thought, and so on. This small problem, which has never been resolved, suffices on its own to demonstrate the insufficiency of the subject's foundation in the phenomenon of thought as transparent to itself." Lacan translates the issue of self-consciousness into the question whether "the subject has an endoscopy of what is actually going on within its own mechanisms" and maintains that any assumption of such an endoscopy is "obliged to admit that the subject is somewhere, at a privileged point" (ibid.). Such an endoscopy (Locke called it "inner sense," by which he meant a reflexive relation of the self to itself rather than just an inner sensing of the self) would entail more than a particular kind of Anschauung or perception of the self; it would require a synthesis or sublation of object and subject in a nonsplit form of self-consciousness. The subject of self-consciousness, that is, would need to do more than simply transcend itself; in order to be transparent to itself, it would have to be its own transcendence.14 The desire to constitute the self as something transparent to itself is occasioned by an apprehension concerning the possibility of selfdetermination, or, to put it differently, by fears of dispersal. Is a cognizing subject a subject in and of itself or is it determined by what it thinks? Fichte had formulated the "law of reflection of all our cognition" thus: "Nothing is recognized for what it is, without us thinking what it is not. . . . [T]his nature of our cognition, namely to recognize something by means of its opposite, means to determine something."15 Notwithstanding his different terminology, Fichte expresses here a clear understanding of the structurality of structures and the dependency of consciousness (which is by definition determined by its content or objects) on structures. German Idealists repeatedly lament the dispersing effect of determination or structures, as does the twenty-year-old Schelling in Of the I as the, Principle of Philosophy; or On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge. He opens with the statement: Either our knowledge has no reality at all and must be an eternal round of propositions, each dissolving in its opposite, a chaos in which no element can crystallize—or else there must be an ultimate point of reality on which everything depends, from which all firmness and all form of our knowledge springs, a point which sunders the elements, and which circumscribes for each of them the circle of its continuous effect in the universe of knowledge.16

is


No wonder, therefore, that Schelling frequently expresses a fear of dispersal (Zerstreuung). An incomplete "synthesis of the I and the not-I would make the I absorb the multiplicity of the not-I and thus would totally scatter the I" (94). Precisely because "the I is no longer the pure, absolute I once it occurs in consciousness," the I must strive to overcome or go beyond consciousness. Like Miinchhausen, who pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair, the subject must be able to pull itself out of structures (or an infinite sequence of reflective acts) and rescue itself to the safe haven of a "pure" self-consciousness. Even if self-consciousness "implies the danger of losing the I," the I must "strive to maintain its identity and to reassert itself in the undertow of endless change" (84). Here we encounter yet another problem in de Man's reading, juxtaposing the Romantic ironist, as the self of consciousness that has no desire to ground itself in a selfsame identity or self-consciousness, with the mystified self, which hopes to achieve exactly such a grounding. Within de Man's framework, there is no reason why Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis should be affected by Kant's alleged failure to ground self-consciousness and to block off an infinite regression of reflection. Their very usage of "irony" and "allegory" would reflect their acceptance of the notion that a unified self-consciousness is impossible, or—to use a Zizekian joke—it would show that they had read Lacan. This would, moreover, dissociate the early Romantics from Fichte and Schelling and their philosophies of (self-) consciousness, which grew out of a critique of Kant. It is, however, a widely accepted truism of literary history that both Fichte and Schelling had a considerable influence on Romantic theory. De Man's revisionism must hence be checked against the background of philosophical attempts around 1800, including those by the Romantics, to halt the sliding of reflective acts in a privileged moment of experience. One of several passages that, in the eyes of Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics, betray Kant's failure to adequately solve the problem "of the subject's foundation in the phenomenon of thought" (Lacan) reads thus: We can assign no other basis for this (transcendental psychology) than the simple, and in itself completely empty, representation "I"; and we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcenden-


13

tal subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. And the reason why this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it, is that consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation in general, that is, of representation in so far as it is to be entitled knowledge; for it is only of knowledge that I can say that I am thereby thinking something."

To a certain extent, Kant here avoids positing for the subject a privileged point from which it can perform an "endoscopy" of itself and experience itself as identical with itself or transparent to itself. The phrase "in itself completely empty representation T " is a rather problematic translation of the German: "fur sich selbst an Inhalt ganzlich leere Vorstellung: Ich." What the translation renders as "representation" is not in Kant's German Darstellung, which would be a representation in the linguistic sense, but Vorstellung, that is, mental image or perception. This particular perception, however, is—to use a more literal rendering of the German—"completely empty of content"; that is, Kant refers not to a perception of an object, a sensation in Locke's sense, but rather to a mere feeling accompanying cognition or the reflective acts of consciousness. His notion of an "in itself completely empty perception T" is conceived in the tradition of Locke's "inner sense," a somewhat vitalistic experience of the self, based on a reflexive relation of the self to itself, ensuring the subject's unity not in terms of knowledge (content) but of a feeling of existence (Rousseau called it "le sentiment de 1'existence"). To reiterate, this feeling of existence is, rather than being ecstatic, a reflexive movement revolving in itself. Kant labored not to conflate knowledge and an "inner sense" of the self precisely because he realized that this feeling of existence was fundamentally an aesthetic phenomenon. If space would allow, I would argue in detail that the third Critique is the result of this labor. The euphony or harmony of faculties that accompanies the experience of the beautiful and the sublime (which, according to Kant, can never be separated in an actual aesthetic experience) engenders an experience of the self that is aesthetic in its etymological sense (aisthanomai, to perceive by the senses). The aesthetic, not "pure reason" or the theory of knowledge, is, for Kant, the proper place for theorizing "inner sense" and the unity of the self. He seems to have rec-

14


ognized that any attempt to ground knowledge or cognition in a principle of knowledge or cognition inevitably allows an aesthetic agenda to encroach upon the theory of knowledge or, for that matter, the theory of morality. As I pointed out earlier, any theory of knowledge that wants to ground itself in a principle of knowledge must provide a cognitive principle that is able to halt the infinite sequence of reflective acts. The notion of a unity of pure self-consciousness is designed to serve precisely as such a principle. In other words, this principle is only able to ground cognition if it can be "thought," that is, if it can become an object of cognition without initiating another sequence of reflective acts. The question is whether a theory of knowledge that remains just that can ground itself in a selfsame principle of knowledge without being conflated with aesthetics; or, in different words, whether the notion of a unified and pure self-consciousness is not aesthetic by nature. It was Fichte who first claimed that a theory of knowledge is possible by grounding itself solely in a principle of knowledge. As he contended against Kant: Now, however, there remains consciousness; therefore the assertion (that the endless regression is unavoidable) must be wrong. That it is wrong means: its opposite is true, according to which the following sentence holds true: there is a consciousness in which the subjective and the objective are not separable, but rather absolutely one and the same. Accordingly, it would be such a consciousness that we would need, in order to explain consciousness at all.18

Fichte's "consciousness in which the subjective and the objective are not separable" refers to the assumption that a consciousness capable of grounding knowledge cannot be a reflective consciousness because any reflection of subjects on objects disperses or alienates the subject of consciousness in an infinite sequence of reflective acts, that is, in the structurally of structures. The term Fichte uses for the special mode of consciousness in which subject and object are sublated, in which the subject no longer reflects upon objects or contents, is "intellectual intuition." This intuition or Anschauung is intellectual precisely because it does not relate to objects or material contents in acts of reflection; it is without sensorial content. In several instances, Kant also speaks of intellectual intuition, generally denying its possibility. However, in one case he seems to acknowledge the necessity of such an intuition or Anschauung for a prin-


15

cipled theory of knowledge. A detailed examination of this passage is worth the effort because it points to a radical difference between Kant on the one hand, and Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics on the other. Kant says: The "I think" is ... an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist". But I cannot say "Everything which thinks, exists". For in that case the property of thought would render all beings which possess it necessary beings. My existence cannot, therefore, be regarded as an inference from the proposition "I think", as Descartes sought to contend—for it would then have to be preceded by the major premise "Everything which thinks, exists"—but is identical with it."

Kant here addresses the feeling of existence accompanying thought that I mentioned earlier. "Inferences" would be part of a theory of knowledge, whereas the feeling of existence accompanying thought is, in Kant's words, "an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e. perception (and thus shows that sensation, which as such belongs to sensibility, lies at the basis of this existential proposition)" (B 423). Again, the translation "sensation" for the German Empfmdung is somewhat misleading, since English Empiricism uses this term to designate an experience resulting from sensory stimulation or the collection of sensor)' data. Empfindung, on the other hand, means sentience, the sensual experience of the self as self. Kant explicitly states that this "indeterminate empirical intuition" or feeling precedes experience. As "indeterminate," this intuition or feeling is not a category, that is, is not part of a theory of knowledge. The theory of knowledge is exclusively concerned with determinate thoughts or objects. For an object or thought to be determinate, it has to be juxtaposed with another object or thought: The category as such does not apply to an indeterminately given object but only to one of which we have a concept and about which we seek to know whether it does or does not exist outside the concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real that is given, given indeed to thought in general, and so not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumeiion), but as something which actually exists, and which in the proposition, "I think", is denoted [bezeuhnet] as such. (Ibid.)

This "indeterminate perception" of my existence is what Kant calls "purely intellectual." It is, as he expressly states, an "empirical proposition" in which the "I" is not, and can never be, an "empirical representation." If the "I" were a representation, it would be determinate

16


and part of the theory of knowledge. And this would return us to Lacan's point about the necessary possibility of an endoscopy and a privileged site from which the subject could perform such an endoscopy. For Kant, "purely intellectual" means no more than the absence of any "conscious" difference of subject and object, "I" and "Non-1." "Without some empirical representation to supply some material for thought, the actus, 'I think', would not, indeed, take place; but the empirical is only the condition of the application, or of the employment, of the pure intellectual faculty" (ibid.). It is precisely this idea of a feeling of existence, an "empirical proposition" that is not an "empirical representation," which drew the criticism of Fichte and Schelling. Schelling immediately noticed that Kant conceived this "pure intellectual faculty" in the tradition of the Empiricist's "inner sense." In 1804 he wrote, without mentioning Kant by name, but referring to an anonymous group of philosophers: "The intellectual intuition, too,... is for these thinkers, according to their psychological concepts, a mere intuition [Anschauung] of an identity that is self-created with the help of an inner sense, and therefore completely empirical."20 As I stressed earlier, Kant labored to keep the theory of knowledge and aesthetics apart. Within Kant's theory of knowledge, intellectual intuition appears only as a feeling accompanying acts of thought. It is indeed a vague feeling that cannot be classified further within the framework of this theory. Although Kant never employs the term "intellectual intuition" in an aesthetic context, there is a connection between the feeling of existence expressed by this term and the feeling of pleasure (and the judgment of taste based on it) that Kant investigates in his third Critique. There he says: "We can also directly connect with a perception a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and a liking that accompanies the object's presentation and serves it in the place of a predicate. This is how an aesthetic judgment arises, which is not a cognitive judgment" (§ 36). Aesthetic judgments, or judgments of taste, are the result of a twolayered experience of ourselves: first, a euphony among our faculties, and second, a reflection on that euphony that intensifies the first-level experience and encompasses it. Schelling, by contrast, does not hesitate for a moment to conflate aesthetic and cognitive principles. In 1800, in an attempt to develop a theory of consciousness that finds its ground in consciousness, he wrote: "In philosophizing" (that is, in a theory of knowledge or cogni-


17

tion), "one is not simply the object of contemplation [Betrachtung], but always at the same time the subject."21 Kant had insisted that the subject reflecting on the transcendental mechanism of cognition remains a mere "X" within the theory of knowledge, that the theory of this subject should not and could not be a part of a theory of knowledge. Schelling deviates from Kant by incorporating the cognizing subject into the theory of knowledge, which forces him to think a synthetic unity not of apperception (which always stresses the aspect of perception and places its unity outside itself) but of self-consciousness, in which perceiving subject and perceived object are one and the same: "Two conditions are therefore required for the understanding of philosophy, first that one be engaged in a constant inner activity, a constant producing of these original acts of the intellect; and second, that one be constantly reflecting upon this production; in a word, that one always remain at the same time both the intuited (the producer) and the intuitant" (14). Schelling here obviously has in mind the two-layered experience I mentioned earlier. In the German original, "intuited" and "intuitant" are Angeschaute (the looked-upon) and Anschauende (the one who looks), referring to the mirror relation of reflection. In transcendental philosophy the "intuited" (Angeschaute) is indeed the same as the "producer" (Pwducirende), because the intuited is the transcendental apparatus with which humans "produce" knowledge, whereas the "intuitant" is the subject trying to understand this process. Schelling expresses here a desire to overcome split (reflecting) subjectivity in the "wholesome" state of a selfsame identity, a "nonconscious and nonobjective" state in which the looked-upon and the act of looking are one and the same. He is striving for a subject that is transparent to itself. In his Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophic (Representation of my system of philosophy) of 1801, Schelling, comparing his own philosophy with Fichte's, maintains that Fichte thought idealism "in a completely subjective framework," whereas Schelling himself, by contrast, thought of it in "objective" terms. According to Schelling, Fichte restricted himself with his idealism to the "standpoint of reflection," while he himself not only "thoroughly distanced [himself] from the standpoint of reflection, since this merely proceeds from oppositions and is based on oppositions," but rather "placed [himself] on the standpoint of production."82 Reflection, in Schelling's view, moves in time, in society, in the existing, and is thus unable to overcome alien-

18


ation, that is, separation. In another early document, he writes: "Selfawareness implies the danger of losing the 1. It is not a free act of the immutable but an unfree urge that induces the mutable I, conditioned by the not-I, to strive to maintain its identity and to reassert itself in the undertow of endless change."2' But what exactly does the difference between "production" and "reflection" mean, apart from the will to avoid falling prey to the reflection of what is posited? Doesn't a contradiction become apparent here, on the basis of which the end result of the "production" is no longer conceivable? If Schelling's philosophy places itself "on the standpoint of production," how can that which is to be produced, the free I, simultaneously be liberated from the structurality of structure and be a principle of structure, a ground of knowledge? Wouldn't it, as such a principle or ground, have to be at once part of a structure (or of knowledge) and independent of it? How can it exist simultaneously inside and outside of itself? Indeed, a sublation of reflection (or structure) through philosophical thinking is precisely what Schelling strives for: It is the nature of philosophy to sublate completely all temporality and spatiality, all difference in time, to sublate any distinction that the mere imagination introduces into thinking; it is, in short, the nature of philosophy to see in things only that which expresses absolute reason, but not to consider things insofar as they are objects of a mechanistic and temporal reflection, a reflection employing laws of mechanism and of progress in time.24 It is exactly at this point that the Romantics and German Idealists abandon Kant's strict distinction between a theory of knowledge and of (aesthetic) pleasure; namely, the state of mind Schelling speaks of, the highest point and keystone of his theory of knowledge, can be reached only through an aesthetic act This coming-to-be-reflected [Reflectirlwerden; more accurately: this beingreflected] of the absolutely nonconscious and nonobjective is possible only through an aesthetic act of the imagination. . . . Thus philosophy depends as much as art does on the productive capacity, and the difference between them rests merely on the different direction taken by the productive force. For whereas in art the production is directed outwards, so as to reflect the unknown by means of products, philosophical production is directed immediately inwards, so as to reflect it in intellectual intuition. The proper sense by which this type of philosophy must be apprehended is thus the aesthetic sense, and that is why the philosophy of art is the true organon of philosophy.25


19

With respect to the contrast between "mystified self" and "ironist," it is imperative to recognize how contradictory Schelling's language is (which might be deliberate). He alludes to a state of mind that is "productive" without ever reaching that which it wants to produce. At least, that is the only way phrases like "this being-reflected of the absolutely nonconscious and nonobjective" and "philosophical production is directed immediately inwards, so as to reflect it (the nonconscious) in intellectual intuition" would make sense. Something nonconscious and nonobjective cannot, strictly speaking, be reflected, and an intellectual intuition cannot, strictly speaking, be an intuition (= Anschauung) if intellectual means the absence of an object. The state of mind in question, then, may be no more than an ideal, a necessary illusion. Intellectual intuition, the state of mind in which we transcend reflection (i.e., the difference of subject and object as well as split subjectivity), may thus be an impossibility. Schelling seems to come close to such an implication in passages like the following: We awaken from intellectual intuition as from a state of death. We awaken through reflection, that is, through a forced return to ourselves. But no return is thinkable without resistance, no reflection without an object. We designate as alive an activity intent upon objects alone and as dead an activity losing itself in itself. . . . The I, on finding resistance, is obliged to take a stand against it, that is, to return into self. However, where sensuous intuition ceases, where everything objective vanishes, there is nothing but infinite expansion without a return into self. Should I maintain intellectual intuition I would cease to live; I would go "from time into eternity."*

Schelling seems to acknowledge here the convergence or interrelatedness of "life," "structure," and "consciousness," stressing their centrality for a theory of knowledge. However, he seems to assume, first, that for fleeting moments we are able to achieve intellectual intuition (after all, we awaken from it #5 from a state of death), and, second, that this state is "higher" than the realm of "life," "structure," and "consciousness." What precisely is the epistemological status of this state? Intellectual intuition, which we produce for fleeting moments, is obviously connected with the epistemological assumption of an originary act creating consciousness. For Schelling as for Fichte, the empirical fact that our consciousness is always limited and determinate does not preclude another "fact," namely, that the "I," prior to all distinctions, was an unlimited and infinite activity and that conscious-

20


ness cannot be understood without such a presupposition. As Novalis noted in his Fichte Studies: "Why we are not aware of the first act: because it is this act alone that makes awareness possible; awareness thus lies within its sphere. Therefore, the act of awareness cannot leave its own sphere and try to embrace the mother sphere."27 Intellectual intuition is a "first" or "pure" act in this sense. As Schelling wrote in 1800: The self is pure act, a pure doing, which simply has to be nonobjective in knowledge, precisely because it is the principleofa.il knowledge. So if it is to become an object of knowledge, this must come about through a type of knowing utterly different from ordinary knowledge. This knowing must be ad) absolutely free . . . a knowing, therefore, that is not arrived at by way of proofs, or inferences, or any sort of aid from concepts, and is thus essentially an intuition; bb) a knowing whose object is not independent thereof, and thus a knowing that is simultaneously a producing of its object—an intuition freely productive in itself, and in which producer and product are one and the same.... an intuition ... called intellectual intuition.28

On the other hand, Schelling repeatedly insists that intellectual intuition cannot be proven to be the principle of knowledge; for "intellectual intuition . . . is ... an absolutely free action, and so cannot be demonstrated, but only demanded; so if the self is itself this intuition merely, it too, as principle of philosophy, is itself merely something that is postulated."29 If it "cannot be demonstrated, but only demanded," then it clearly is a moral imperative. Novalis says even more explicitly: "Self-consciousness in the broader sense is a task—an ideal—it would be that state in which time stood still, a timeless—constant, never-changing state."30 Can there be an epistemological principle, a principle of knowledge, that simultaneously expresses an ethical postulate and a mode of production that is aesthetic in nature? On the one hand, we thus have Kant's rigorous separation of a theory of knowledge and aesthetics; on the other hand, we have the Romantics' and Idealists' insistence that any theory of knowledge has to be grounded in self-consciousness, even if this amounts to a blurring of the boundaries between knowledge and aesthetics and even if that ground remains a mere ideal, that is, remains "impossible" or unattainable in reality. In several essays, Jtirgen Habermas has accused the Romantics of obfuscating the institutional boundaries of modernity, the most important being precisely the one between the aesthetic


21

realm and the political or moral sphere.31 He accused them, in essence, of initiating the infamous tradition of a philosophical antimodernism that led via Nietzsche to postmodernism. If, as I have argued, the Romantics did not simply attempt to dislodge the institutional boundaries of modernity, but rather addressed a paradox inherent in and simultaneously suppressed by those boundaries, what, then, is the relationship of the Romantics to modernity? Do the Romantics address the desire for reconciliation or unity—a desire characteristic of the "modern" yet obfuscated by modernism—in a way that preempts the obfuscation of that desire? Closely related to this question is another: if the desire for unity is an "impossible" desire, what is the status of this "impossibility"? Before I examine these questions, I would like to add a note of caution regarding terminology. Not every philosopher of consciousness in German Idealism defines self-consciousness as absolute identity or synthesis of subject and object; moreover, even those who at times tend to define self-consciousness thus often change their terminology in the course of their thinking. In his Philosophy of Art, Schelling takes great pain to distinguish three terms that express varying degrees of identity or synthesis of subject and object, namely, self-consciousness as the lowest, least complete form of identity that is surpassed by a "point of indifference" and an "absolute point of identity." Only the identity of the latter is "absolute." However, precisely because identity here is absolute, it remains, within consciousness, a construct or representation (which by definition cannot be absolute): "The absolute as such is neither conscious nor nonconscious, neither free nor urifree nor necessary. It is not conscious, for all consciousness results from the relative unity of thinking and being, whereas absolute unity or identity obtains within the absolute" (PhoA, 26). Ultimately, because it can only exist as part of our consciousness or symbolic order, the absolute is a paradox, a necessary impossibility. For Friedrich Schlegel, as for the later Schelling, self-consciousness is not possible without the subject undergoing a splitting that is always already occurring (initial, incomplete). Intellectual intuition is thus "the consciousness of the consciousness of the infinite"; it is the "sum of the whole, original consciousness, when it comes into consciousness—that is, when it intuits and understands original consciousness."32 Yet these terminological differences are not essential. What counts is the pre-

22 Jochen Schulte-Sasse supposition of a "common point of unity and stability,"33 not variations in the terminology designating this point.

The Romantic Desire for the Infinite In this section, I shall address the question of desire, in particular the desire for the infinite or absolute. The primary form in which the Romantics articulated their theory—fragments—was by no means an arbitrary choice. A fundamental theoretical premise underlay the fragments' appeal: If systematic writing restrains thinking and if the purpose of thinking is to reflect on existing structures "freely," to dissolve established delimitations, one must turn to a form that merely initiates thought rather than harnessing and arresting it through its own rules. This tension between thought and its recording imposes a double bind on expository essays like this one. My expository style is in itself in conflict with Romantic presuppositions. On the other hand, a more systematic level is, of course, present in Romantic discourse, even if that level is largely dependent on its chance activation in the mind of readers. In what follows, I have brought this systematic level to the fore by frequently citing and conjoining related fragments from various parts of our collection (as well as texts not included here), without doing the spirit of the Romantic project more injustice than necessary. The Romantics constantly and persistently speak of a desire for the infinite. They define the infinite as that which is neither determined nor structured, neither dispersed nor dispersing; it is centered and eternal, a "common point of unity and stability that receives absolute identity, not through something else, but through itself, by its own being, in order to gather all rays of existence in the center of its identity."34 Such a notion of infinity could, of course, easily be deconstructed if we were to isolate it from its context. However, the picture changes if we take the full range of the Romantic notion of desire or longing into account. The infinite or centeredness is not simply an ideal we strive for, nor is desire simply an aspect of a "striving" toward such an ideal. When Friedrich Schlegel, in his lectures on transcendental philosophy (1800-1801), introduces the notion of a "striving toward the ideal," a striving proceeding "from culture alone," he holds that if we mediate this striving with a "feeling of the sublime," this mediation yields something "higher," namely "a yearning [Sehnen],


23

a longing [Sehnsucht] for the infinite" that, although impossible to satisfy, is nonetheless absolutely necessary. There is "nothing higher in man" than a "longing for the infinite" that is "bound up with the feeling of the sublime." For Schlegel, the "cultural formation [Bildung]" of individuals is a "condition" that is defined by a motion "toward." Paradoxically, then, culture and personal formation or Bildungare dependent on a quality that by definition is excluded from the "infinite," namely, movement in time toward a goal. The latter is neither reachable nor representable; for the "longing for the infinite must always be a longing. It cannot appear in the form of intuition [Anschauung]. The ideal never lets itself be intuited/viewed. The ideal is engendered [erzeugt] through speculation."35 Among the Romantics, Novalis seems to place the greatest emphasis on the contradictory, unsublatable tension between the necessity of desire and the impossibility of its gratification. On the one hand, he affirms that philosophizing is a necessary activity and that a "striving toward the thinking of a ground is the ground of philosophizing"; on the other hand, he insists that we cannot (re) cognize this ground positively. He charges that if "such a ground were not given, if this concept (of a ground) would contain an impossibility, then the drive to philosophize"—rather than being "groundless"—would be "an infinite activity," an activity "without end" that would nonetheless remain an indispensable, essential aspect of the human condition. The lack of a ground would not affect the "eternal need for an absolute ground," a need that "could only be satisfied to a relative degree, and therefore would never cease." Since we "cannot reach what we are searching for through any action," Novalis likens the unworkable, yet culturally inevitable, search to an "attempt to find the square of a circle."36 Even more unequivocally, Friedrich Schlegel states in the introduction to his Transcendental Philosophy: "But, one could easily argue, is then the infinite itself not a fiction? Is it not an error, illusion, or a misunderstanding? . . . To this we answer as follows: Yes, it is a fiction. But an absolutely necessary one." The striving subject is by definition a knowing subject, an empirical I that is conscious of its surroundings. As such, it is characterized by its split or lack of unity. In Novalis's words, even' "cognition is ... differentiation and relation." Similarly, Schelling defined the subject as "that which is determinable only by contrast with but also in relation to a previously posited object."37 Consciousness, and thus knowledge,

24


is possible only insofar as the subject externalizes meaningful structures and establishes relations to them. Knowledge is a function of the subject's relation to posited objects. Novalis thus holds that the "I must be divided in order to be I." The knowing I, however, is complemented by an ethical one that is denned by a drive to be one, whole, nondispersed.38 Yet the I itself can never be unified; it "is only the drive to be I that unifies it." For Novalis, as for other Romantics, "the primary characteristic of the I" is hence not the urge to know but the "unconditioned ideal of the pure I." The subject must therefore proceed "from the finite to the infinite, from thesis to synthesis." On the level of thesis, the subject "posits" and "cognizes"; on the level of synthesis, it seizes itself as an ethical, unified individual. Kant's "synthetic unity a priori" is here transformed from a principle grounding knowledge into an ethical principle grounding identity, which also means into a principle with psychological repercussions. Knowledge is ultimately grounded in ethics and aesthetics. It is therefore not surprising when Novalis maintains that the "highest form of philosophy is ethics." However, ethics includes aesthetics; they converge because both are informed by the ideal of an unalienated individuality, an individuality fully centered and selfsame, a characteristic the Romantics called free. As Novalis puts it: "I do not exist to the extent that I posit myself, but to the extent that I sublate myself (in the sense of aufheben, i.e., of simultaneously eliminating and preserving something)."39 I eliminate myself as a knowing subject while I preserve myself as a "free" individual. In this last formulation, the necessarily contradictory and "impossible" nature of the Romantic ideal becomes visible. An ethical existence—the "pure I," as the Romantics often called it—can be no more than an ideal sustaining a divided, knowing subject. As an ideal, an "ethical existence" is no more than a representation, a function within a symbolic order. At the same time, however, an "ethical existence" is alleged not just to be a representation but to exist as something "whole." Yet, if it indeed existed as "whole," the "pure I" would not be an ideal; that is, it could not relate, as "whole," to a divided empirical subject—which leads Novalis to formulate the paradox he calls the "famous antagonism that characterizes the I": "The pure I is divided precisely insofar as it is whole, and it is whole precisely insofar as it is divided." The "pure I" thus turns out to be "nothing but a necessary illusion of the mediated I alone, which in turn wants to cease being a


25

mediated I and in this respect resists itself." The Romantics perceive resistance to dispersal, to our dependence on structures, even to knowledge, as the ultimate ethical act of human existence, even if this resistance is doomed to fail. Ultimately, then, de Man's reading of Romanticism is at once doubtful and entirely convincing. It is flawed because it eliminates a fundamental paradox of Romantic thinking. In his juxtaposition of symbol and allegory, de Man maintains that "the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification," whereas "allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin" and, thus, supposedly renounces "the nostalgia and the desire to coincide." Schlegel and Novalis do not go so far as to renounce "the desire to coincide," as de Man would have it.4" They do, however, clearly stress the impossibility of a coincidence between an ideal and its representation, as well as between the representation of an ideal and the subject's reality. In short, they adhere to a notion of subjectivity that accepts the impossibility of overcoming its inherent fissures and rifts while simultaneously accepting the ideal of a unified self as an ethical imperative. Not even in art, which reinforces our longing for unity, can we "view" unity. De Man is thus fully correct in viewing the notion of symbol as an unromantic one (if and when the Romantics do use the term affirmatively, they redefine it); it reflects the profoundly unromantic belief that an ideal can be intuited or viewed and that an individual can internalize or realize such an ideal through identification. The assumed possibility of an identity between an individual and nature, or between an individual and an ideal, is ultimately a narcissistic one that dreams of short-circuiting the self with its own image. It is thus closely connected with the concept of a harmonious, closed, and complete work of art.

The Question of Identity In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel, referring mainly to Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism, criticizes Schilling's Romantic philosophy because of its dependence on art and imagination: The highest objectivity which the subject attains, the highest identity of subjective and objective, is that which Schelling terms the power of the imagination. Art is thus comprehended as what is inmost and highest, that which produces the intellectual and real in one, and philosophizing

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is conceived as this genius of art. But art and power of imagination are not supreme. For the Idea, spirit, cannot be truly given expression to in the manner in which art expresses its Idea. This last is always a method of pertaining to intuitive perception; and on account of this sensuous form of existence the work of art cannot correspond to the spirit.41

Hegel objects here to the specular nature of the relationship between subject and object (art); "intuitive perception" is simply Anschauung in Hegel's German (the act of viewing something) and the notion of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) does not, according to Hegel, solve a basic deficiency of all perception, namely, that it is a sensuous form of relation between subject and object. To Hegel's mind, Schelling's philosophy fails precisely because of its dual emphasis on art and imagination, that is, on an object and a visual faculty relating to that object. For the faculty of imagination does not overcome or sublate the opposition of subject and object; rather, it steadies it, firms it up. When Hegel, in his Encyclopedia of Philosophy of 1830, characterizes the imagination as cognitive faculty, he places even greater stress on its specular aspects. On the level of imagination, he maintains, there enters the opposition between my subjective or represented content, and the intuitively perceived content, of the object [angeschaute Inhalt derSache]. . . . Since at this stage the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity is dominant, the unity here of these determinations cannot be an immediate unity as at the stage of mere recollection, but only a restored unity. The manner in which this restoration takes place is that the intuitively perceived external content [angeschaute duferliche Inhalt (the looked-at external content) ] is subjugated to the mentally represented content which has been raised to universality, is reduced to a sign of the latter content which is, however, thereby made objective, external, is imaged.12

Hegel's reading of the imagination is centered around various terms referring to processes of visualization, objectification, reification, and externalization (I count ten in the German original). The subject's imagination interlocks it with an external image in whose mirror it focuses and stabilizes itself. This is precisely the desire for coincidence de Man speaks of in regard to the "unromantic" conception of nature he attributes to aesthetic ideology. Hegel obviously read Schelling as a representative of an aesthetic ideology that is, as we have seen, informed by a narcissistic desire for a coincidence of subject and object, and that both foregrounds and represses the specu-


27

larity of subject-object relations. With his (mis) reading of the Romantic notion of imagination, Hegel might very well have inaugurated the nineteenth-century misconceptions of Romanticism to which de Man refers. In fact, nothing is more rigorously assailed by the Romantics, including Schelling, than the very desire for consonance (i.e., the aesthetic ideology) that Hegel reads into Schelling. It is with this in mind that Friedrich Schlegel critiques Schiller's philosophy of history, in particular his notion of an aesthetic state, a form of government in which the dissension of politics has been overcome and the political state has been turned into a work of art: "There is no more dangerous an error for art than to seek it, like Schiller, in politics and universality."4'* Schlegel, too, is convinced that a philosophy of history nurturing desires for coincidence by positing a harmonious end point betrays the same ideology of presence or nondifferentiation that underlies nature poesy (I will address later the very different Romantic use of the term "indifference"). The early Romantics share a belief that a teleological and totalizing notion of history encourages equally totalizing gestures of violence toward dissidents: the self that longs for a pure coincidence of subject and object as an actual experience of life tends to view difference as an obstacle that must be forcefully subdued. In the view of the Romantics, the "other" of political reality, an imaginary place of fulfillment, presence, meaning, and purpose, can only become a historical and political force if it is presented as an ideal not claiming to represent a realizable goal. In his Fichte Studies, Novalis thus argued against "enlightened" conceptions of historical progress: One should guard against the illusion that a time may come when this (transcending difference) would actually occur. First, it is in and of itself a contradiction to say that something could occur within time that would sublate all temporality, such as those attempts to transplant the nonsensual, the thinkable, the subjective, to the sensual world of appearances. Whenever we act freely, such a triumph of the infinite I over the finite I occurs. In this moment the Non-I is destroyed in reality, but not in terms of its sensual existence. . . . Time can never cease—we cannot think away time, for time is indeed the condition of the thinking being. Time ceases only when thought does. Thought outside of time is an absurdity.44

For the Romantics, acknowledging difference or, in modern-day parlance, diversity, is indeed a moral imperative (in their eyes, it. is mainly a question of gender, not race or ethnicity). However, in an at

a8 Jochen Schulte-Sasse first sight paradoxical fashion, they consider difference acceptable as a moral and political ideal only if and when it is appended by an ideal of presence or "indifference." Significantly, though, the latter must remain a subjective ideal, not an objective point of reference in space and time. Alluding to Schiller's conceptual pair "naive" and "sentimental," which, according to Schlegel, expresses a desire to arrest time in a future state of reconciliation, Schlegel argues that the term "sentimental" becomes worthless the moment it gives in to a delusion of fulfillment in time and space: "Only through absolute progressivity (striving towards the infinite) does the sentimental become sentimental and of aesthetic interest." As long as, in Schelling's words, "modern culture . . . views the universe only as history, as a moral realm" (PhoA, 76), an aesthetic conception of history will, in a paradoxical twist, obstruct precisely what it desires most. When Novalis insists that to perceive the pure or absolute I as the "beginning of the I is merely an ideal—If it had begun, it would have to have begun thus," he has more in mind than the I. He suggests, rather, that temporality is always a construct, a discourse, a representation. Novalis continues his unambiguous deliberation on subjectivity's relation to time as follows: "The beginning is a concept that comes later. The beginning originates later than the I; therefore, the I cannot have begun. From this we can see that we are in the realm of art—but this artificial supposition is the foundation of a genuine science which always arises out of artificial facts. The I must be constructed."45 He applies this thought to individual identity as judiciously as to a collective one, to biography as fully as to history. Ironically, the collapse of "enlightened" philosophies of history in Romanticism can therefore not be lamented without revealing what, in everyday parlance, is called romantic thinking (the expectation of a "romantic" happy ending). Romantics labor to prod the pseudo-"romantic" presuppositions of philosophies of history to the surface, which amounts to a detemporalization of romantic concepts of history and to a displacement of active political intervention in the direction of discursive, rhetorical intervention. Hence, when Schelling calls for a "synthesis of the absolute with limitation," which is for him the "mystery of all life"—that is, when he calls for a "highest or ultimate life, the most free, unique existence and operation without stricture or limitation of the absolute" (PhoA, 37)—he has certain discursive and intellectual strategies in mind that of necessity and by definition cannot achieve what they claim to pur-


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sue most; for the "absolute in and for itself offers no multiplicity or variety whatever, and to that extent it is for the understanding an absolute, bottomless emptiness. Life is found only within particularity," which includes art or any form of representation. Schelling's notion of life, though, is far removed from its counterpart in aesthetic ideology. The latter pursues "life" in the particularity of culturally valued images and "beautiful visions." Those "visions" serve subjects as a focal point of cultural formation; they lack any design or intent to transcend the conjoined, interlocked subject-object constellation of the "visions" of aesthetic pleasure. In contrast, the Romantics develop, against the established meaning of imagination as a creator of "beautiful visions," a notion of a chaotically creative fantasy sanctioned to deconstruct visions and to tear down the institutional boundaries of aesthetic pleasure. Although "life and multiplicity—in a general sense particularity without limitation of that which is without qualification one—are originally and within themselves possible only through the principle of the divine imagination" (which again is a construct), no empirical I can claim to possess the latter. Humans too easily embrace a pseudo-equivalent of the divine imagination, one that is mollified by "beautiful visions." Against such a mollified, specular version of the imagination, the Romantics insist that in the "derived world," particularity without limitation is "possible only through fantasy, which brings the absolute and limitation together and forms into the particular the entire divinity of the universal." The imagination of "beautiful visions" arrests itself in "limited" images. While acknowledging the inevitability of limitation in everyday life, the Romantics attempt to create a tension between the world of limitation or determination and the world of thought or reason that exceeds the specularity of aesthetic culture. "For reason as well as for the creative imagination we demand that nothing in the universe be constrained, purely limited, and subordinated. . . . Only the understanding subordinates" (PhoA, 37). Yet, if "within reason and the creative imagination everything is free and moves about in the same realm without crowding or chafing" and if the "sight of pure limitation is from a subordinated perspective sometimes annoying, sometimes painful, sometimes even insulting— but in any case repugnant," what are the repercussions for a cultural politics? Schelling offers a clear answer: "For reason and fantasy limitation . . . , considered as limitation, [becomes] an inexhaustible source of jest and play, for one is allowed to joke with limitation, since

go


it takes nothing away from the essence and is within itself nullity, or nothingness." Artistic representation becomes, thus, a mere occasion for an "excessive" mode of combinatory thinking. Linguistic "jests and plays" are thus part and parcel of a movement toward the "absolute," a "point of indifference" that can never be achieved. These "jests and plays" are, moreover, essential and indispensable precisely because the "absolute" can never be reached. It is at this point, as part of an attempt to circumscribe various rhetorical and mental strategies of an infinite movement toward an unattainable ideal, that the Romantics introduce terms such as irony, chaos, Witz (wit), fantasy, synthesis, hovering, and some less often used, yet equally characteristic, expressions such as menstruum universal and ordo inversus.46 Menstruum universale is the alchemistic term for a universal solvent, a liquid solution in which everything dissolves. The Romantics use the term to designate their ideal of dissolving established limitations and determinations. Novalis put it thus: "Witz as a principle of affinities is at the same time the menstruum universale," to which JeanLuc Nancy, in an excellent reading of these strategies, adds: "If Novalis could call Witz the menstruum universale . . . then it is in the end (but could it bring about an end?) dissolution itself, in Witz and of Witz itself, with which we inevitably have to deal."47 A dissolution of established boundaries, real and imaginary, linguistic and mental, is indeed what is at stake here. Yet no single term can exclusively designate strategies of dissolution; such an exclusive term would be a contradictio in adjecto. The linguistic variations and characterizations of the same rhetorical procedure are therefore endless, as Friedrich Schlegel writes, assembling seven of the most frequently used terms in one short utterance: "Irony is the universal solvent and the synthesis of reflection and fantasy, of harmony and enthusiasm."18 Elsewhere he claims that a "chaotic fullness . . . belongs to fantasy." Is irony, then, indeed an articulation of split subjectivity, as de Man contends? Does the act of irony reveal a mental disposition that endures and sustains a tension between "an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity"?49 It seems that the Romantics, while acknowledging that spatial and temporal difference cannot be surpassed in any exact or undiluted sense, nonetheless insist that humans must strive to reach a level of "indifference" or dissolution on which they may constitute themselves—


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comprehend and grasp themselves—as self-contained individuals. Humans must strive for "synthesis" in the act of "fantasy" or "irony." The Romantics described this mental state by a metaphor that suggests a defiance of gravity but a concomitant failure to achieve great heights: as a "hovering" (Schweberi). Identity is a production that depends on representations and their reflection, on a short-circuiting of representations that is quite different from a short-circuiting of self and image. While the former, as speculation, aims at dissolving established delimitations, the latter arrests itself in a narcissistic and specular constellation of subject and object. In his Fichte Studies, Novalis habitually returns to this thought, as a compilation from various fragments may document: All production approaches being, and being is hovering. . . . Being, being I, being free, and hovering are synonyms. . . . An infinite realization of being would be the I's destiny. It would strive ever more toward being. . . . harmony is the condition of its activity, of the hovering between opposites. "Be one with yourself" is therefore the fundamental precondition of the highest goal: to be or to be free. All being, being in general, is nothing other than being free—hovering between extremes that must necessarily be both unified and divided.50 "Hovering" designates a state of linguistically grounded and bounded reflection, the closest that humans may come to the absolute. In establishing their distance to Kant, German Idealism and Romanticism transform transcendental philosophy into a morally, psychologically, epistemologically, and aesthetically pertinent mode of molding and grasping the "I" as identity. In Kant, the transcendental is a given, not a means of producing subjectivity, even if the solely aesthetic experience of the euphony of our faculties assures us "after the fact," so to speak, that the unity of our transcendental powers is not only imagined. Schelling, on the other hand, holds that "the whole sequence of the transcendental philosophy is based merely upon a continual raising of self-intuition to increasingly higher powers [aufeinem fortwahrenden Potenziren der Selbstanschauung], from the first and simplest exercise of self-consciousness, to the highest, namely the aesthetic.""'1 Art is a mere means of a "continual raising of self-intuition to increasingly higher powers." The same can be said of speculation or philosophy. "The ideal is engendered [erzeugt] through speculation" (Friedrich Schlegel), which is the reason why criticism is an indis-

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pensable component of art; for criticism transforms "speculation into a useful and even poetic instrument," according to Novalis. In the act of speculation or reflection, there can never, as Novalis puts it, "be an end to the process of connecting the manifold—an end that would be a state of inactivity for the thinking I." Human consciousness will necessarily be confined by the manifold; it cannot transcend the "extremes between which hovering occurs." At first glance, this sounds like a return to the infinite regression of a consciousness of consciousness that can never be halted in self-consciousness. I mentioned earlier the claim of German Idealists that Kant's notion of a synthetic unity of apperception opened itself up to such an infinite regression, and that the ultimate failure of Kant's philosophy was, in the eyes of his successors, due precisely to its lack of a sufficiently grounded notion of self-consciousness. If the "principle of the I" is supposed to be "a unity that is without boundary or determination," if selfconsciousness is supposed to make "all determinations possible and fixed" and to give "them absolute coherence and meaning," and if selfhood is supposed to be the "ground of constancy in change, . . . the ground of all cognition," as Novalis persistently asserts, how does this "ground of constancy" relate to temporality and spatiality? How do the epistemological and ethical aspects of subjectivity relate to each other? What does it mean when the Romantics perceive self-consciousness as an "action whereby reason ... comes into play," "a task—an ideal," or a "state in which time stood still, a timeless—constant, never-changing state?" What does it mean that in "a state of true self-consciousness we would simply be changing, without going forward," that "we are not I indirectly, by means of conclusions—but rather directly . . . through the calculations of instinct," as Novalis contends? How is the "hovering" of reflection related to "pure" self-consciousness? The answer is that in self-consciousness knowledge shifts into a state of nonconscious feeling. The Romantics tend to describe the result of "hovering" as chaos or nonrule. "Non-rule is the rule of fantasy— the rule of arbitrariness—the rule of chance—of miracles" (Novalis). According to Schelling, the "fundamental intuition of chaos itself lies within the vision or intuition of the absolute. . . . through this vision of chaos, the understanding passes over to the perception of the absolute, be it in art or in science [philosophy]" (PhoA, 88). The "perception of the absolute," however, cannot remain a perception; only if and when it shifts or slides into a feeling do we establish self-


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consciousness. This is what Novalis has in mind when he insists that "we are not I indirectly, by means of conclusions—but rather directly . . . through the calculations of instinct." The result of raising our self-perception to increasingly higher powers is a feeling of the self that the Romantics dissociate from any form of a reflective relationship to the self: "It cannot be self-contemplation, for then it would not be that which is required here. Perhaps it is a feeling of the self."52 Novalis answers his own question "What, then, is a feeling?" thus: "the I feels itself, as content." Since the I "can only be contemplated in reflection—the spirit of feeling is, then, gone," feeling does not follow "the schema of reflection." The subject either knows or feels. "The limits of feeling are the limits of philosophy. Feeling cannot feel itself." This is precisely why Novalis defines that which the subject does not know, but rather feels, as belief. "Belief," not knowledge, is a condition of identity. However, identity cannot be selfsame in any rigorous sense, for it is always preceded by conscious acts of reflection, it is based on acts of differentiation to which it must return. In a reading of Hegel's notion of self-consciousness as "pure self-contained unity," Jean-Luc Nancy stresses Hegel's deliberately paradoxical conception of identity: "The subject has differentiated itself from itself, from its quantitative state, from its indifference, and is only in having differentiated itself—which means that it has acquired for itself the infinite indifference that it was in itself."53 This is precisely the Jena Romantics' notion of identity, as articulated by Novalis: "The possibility of selfdelimitation is the possibility of all synthesis."54 Only as self-delimited subjects that transcend reflective relations do we grasp ourselves as selfsame individuals. However, just as the subject should never fully alienate itself in acts of a mechanistic "understanding," the self should never seek to transform its feeling into a state of inactivity. The self is, as feeling, highest activity; more precisely, only the highest activity of Witz, fantasy, and irony generates this feeling. In order to avoid an inactive indulgence in feeling, the Romantics insist on the necessity of an operation they refer to as an ordo inversus, a shifting motion between exclusionary, opposite states of mind, between consciousness (knowledge) and selfconsciousness (feeling).55 This mental operation, although similar to the operations of fantasy or irony, is nevertheless decidedly different. Whereas irony moves solely among the delimited, the manifold, this operation moves back and forth between the levels of knowledge and

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feeling. According to Holderlin, the "poetic spirit" must be careful that its striving for unity does "not cancel itself as something undifferentiable" and thus "become an empty infinity." He therefore argues: It is necessary that the poetic spirit in its unity and harmonious progress also provide for itself an infinite perspective for its transaction, a unity where in the harmonious progress and alternation everything move forward and backward and, through its sustained characteristic relation to that unity, not only gain objective coherence for the observer [but] also gain [a] felt and tangible coherence and identity in the alternation of oppositions.sfi

The feeling of identity gained in acts of "ironic" or "chaotic" reflection must take turns with acts of knowledge. How paradoxical the relationship between feeling and knowledge is becomes clear if we attempt to determine their respective relation to the "absolute." On the one hand, feeling is the only mode in which the absolute can be approached existentially in "real life." On the other hand, knowledge is the only mode in which we can think the absolute, relate to it consciously. Needless to say, this absolute eludes us in either mode. In the realm of knowledge, the absolute is first and foremost a moral imperative. It ultimately, then, is not only a fiction or illusion, but a narrative. It is an element of a figuration that permits us to reflect on something that always remains beyond our grasp. This is the decisive meaning of Novalis's statement that the "beginning is a concept that comes later."

Identity and Alter!ty I have argued for a reading of the Romantic absolute as an impossible center (a nodal or quilting point in Lacan's terminology), a "point of indifference" that may be posited, yet whose positing cannot realize the desire that underlies it, namely, a suturing of difference into a one. If this reading is correct, then the Romantics must have approximated a notion of figuration that does not dissociate the mental operations of thought from its foundation in the materiality of signs. The most astounding text documenting Romantic insight into the role of the letter or signiner is Novalis's "Soliloquy." This piece of a mere page and a half begins as follows: It's quite a peculiar thing about speaking and writing; a proper conversation is a mere word-game. One can but marvel at the ridiculous error


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that people make in thinking that they speak about things. No one realizes the very particularity of language: that it is only concerned with itself. And this is why it is such a wondrous and fruitful secret: that when one speaks merely in order to speak, one gives voice to the most splendid, original truths.57

Novalis stresses here the autonomy of the signifier, that is, a selfsufficiency of language as a differential system of signifiers; for the signs of language "play only with themselves." This complements a recurring motif in Novalis—that the contingency of the letter can dissolve the "petrification of reason." The materiality of language is what subjects it to such extreme contingency—a contingency that can never be mastered, exiled, or eliminated. Novalis is far from seeing this as a disadvantage, since misunderstandings are just as productive as the incomprehensibility of which Friedrich Schlegel speaks (recalling a Wolf Biermann phrase: "I don't misunderstand you correctly"). "Things"—that is, referents—only seemingly center discourse; the intention of the speaker is always already undermined by language and consequently every discourse is productive against its own intentions. But here again the "effectiveness of language" is ultimately anchored not in the intention of the speaker, but in something transcending the speaker, namely, a "peculiar relational play of things": "If one could only make it clear to people that language is like mathematical formulas. Formulas comprise a world of their own: they play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wondrous nature and are for that very reason so expressive. For that very reason as well, the peculiar relational play of things reflects itself in them."58 A "relational play" of signifier and things homologizes reality and language, even if these homologies can never fully be grasped or pronounced by cognizing subjects. For Novalis, "play" is, of course, still far removed from the radical structuralism of a Lacan. For Lacan, "nature" does nothing but provide signifiers, "and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them."59 Moreover, although for Lacan there is nothing that centers this game itself, for Novalis the "relational play" approximates a "truth." Romanticism's privileging of allegory has its basis not in the conviction that a homology of signs and nature or truth is impossible, but, on the contrary, that the contingency of the sign elicits an endless reflection, in the wake of which the reflecting subject approaches "truth." The de-

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sired unity of sign and nature or truth is not concretely sought in a particular representation, but is constituted only in the reflecting consciousness. The subject experiences itself in reflection or speculation as identical with itself. One senses here a conflict between the ethical imperative to grasp one's identity and the equally ethical obligation to endorse alterity. The subject's ethical as well as epistemological task to grasp "itself as a unity that I am in myself" (Jean-Luc Nancy) does not seem fit to shield it from the desire to experience itself as a masterful, agonistic subject controlling and dominating its environment. Even if the task of self-constitution could be dissociated from such a desire, it seems dubious that this task could be negotiated with the moral imperative of embracing alterity. Jean-Francois Lyotard can therefore claim that by "opposing discontinuity with synthesis, consciousness seems to be the very thing that throws down a challenge to alterity."60 The theory of subjectivity advanced by the early Romantics seems indeed to establish a contradiction between the importance placed on the immediacy of the ego or I, on the one hand, and on difference, on the other. Can there be immediacy without an elimination or sublation of difference? The Romantics and German Idealists are convinced that Being (understood as something identical with itself) cannot be explained on the basis of reflective relations. However, "reflection" refers both to a state of being reflected and an act of reflecting. According to the Romantics, it is only the specular notion of reflection, the state of being reflected, that undermines the experience of identity. As we have seen, the act of reflecting actually establishes, in the form of a mental connecting of the manifold, an experience of identity. The ordo inversus, the constant inversion of the direction of thought, implies a folding back upon the process of thinking that, in a rather paradoxical fashion, both increases the experience of identity and upholds alterity by sustaining the difference between a desiring subject and a desired object. Novalis tried to capture this paradox in the fragment "On the Phenomenon of Reflection—Reflective powerjumping onto its own shoulders. (Compression of time—concentration of thoughts)."61 The circular act of (self-)reflection concentrates both time and thoughts in a way that centers the self's selfhood. It is precisely this gesture of a "jumping onto one's own shoulders" that finds its equivalent in the Romantic understanding of representa-


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tion and that ultimately is able to negotiate the opposition of identity and alterity. Novalis says that the "essence of identity can only be put forward in a pseudoproposition [Scheinsatz]. We leave the identical in order to represent it." Paradoxically, we can grasp or constitute our identity as a conscious one only if and when we represent it, that is, when we destroy it. Among the Romantics, Novalis expresses this thought most succinctly: "one understands the I only insofar as it is represented by the Non-I. The Non-I is the symbol of the I, and its sole purpose is to serve the I's understanding of itself."62 The subject is for itself only when it experiences itself as something reflecting upon itself in the medium or mirror of representations. There are two dimensions to this thought; the first has to do with the figurality and contingency of representation, the second with the relationship of necessarily figural and contingent representations to the "absolute." I will conclude my introductory essay by dealing with these two dimensions; together they make up the core of Romanticism's paradoxical articulation of desire. What are the ramifications of the Romantics' insistence that a "thing only becomes intelligible through representation" (Novalis)? Representation means, first, externalization in the sense emphasized by Hegel. This usage would still be in agreement with the subject's desire to coincide with a sign or natural object, a desire to which aesthetic ideology caters. As Novalis says, "everything within us should become external and visible—our soul should become representable— The system of sciences should become the symbolic body (system of organs) of our interior—Our mind should become a sensually perceptible machine—not in us, but outside of us." However, the Romantics are acutely aware of the fact that the act of making something "external and visible" introduces the contingency of rhetoric into representations. The "Romantic author must," as Friedrich Schlegel puts it, "be rhetorical." In another context, he states: "Everything I write is an allegory; the mythologist must find the appropriate meaning for it" (KA 18: 342). Both statements address the same problematic: all representations are figurative; that is, they are historically accidental and conditional figurations. However, by no means does this suggest that they are culturally dispensable or that they are deficient when it comes to approximating the "absolute." Rather, Schlegel's notion of mythology stresses precisely the insuperable fact of representation's rhetoricity. Far from being a specialist in mythology, his "mythologist"

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is a reader in a very general sense. S/he is a reader of allegories, to be sure, but because all representations are allegorical (which is merely a different label for their figurality), s/he is no more able than anyone else to uncover "meaning." Even "God" is a mythological figure in the rhetorical sense. He is the rhetorical and narrative embodiment of the "absolute," and thus "fiction," "illusion," or "belief in the sense described earlier. Consequently, when the Romantics speak of God, they do not wish to denote a transcendent locale inhabited by a divine authority. On the contrary, they imply that God as divine authority is dead, to give it a Nietzschean twist, even if they themselves would never phrase it. thus. When Schelling states that "the Greeks did not at all take the Gods to be real in the sense, for example, that common understanding believes in the reality of physical objects; from that perspective the Greeks considered the gods to be neither real nor unreal. In the higher sense they were more real for the Greeks than every other reality" (PhoA, 35), he claims that they considered their mythology as a mere figuration that was "real" only to the extent that they viewed it as an indispensable external and material medium for meditative reflections on the human condition. The need for such figurations is part of that condition, which is why Schelling can state: "Ever)' truly creative individual must himself create his own mythology" (PhoA, 75). Even the Catholic "church is to be viewed as a work of art" (PhoA, 81); that is, as a figurative representation. The Romantics' critique of Protestantism addresses, in this sense, the latter's lack of appreciation of figurative representations. Hence Schelling's remark that the "quickly appearing consequence of the Reformation . . . was that a new, prosaic, literal authority replaced the old one." For Schelling, this amounts to a "slavery to the letter" ("letter" here in its literal meaning), which is why "Protestantism was never really able to give itself an external and genuinely objective and finite form" (PhoA, 70). In contrast, Schelling can pronounce Catholicism to be "a necessary element of all modern poesy and mythology" (PhoA, 72) precisely because of the figurality of its representations. If all representations are of necessity figurative, then any form of writing (and reading) must be mythological. The mystified self that de Man speaks of is a self that habitually forgets the mythological nature of language. For Friedrich Schlegel, the mystified self par excellence was the mystic who "concerns himself . . . with intuition [Anschauung] alone and hates not only the letter but also the concept."


39

The triad of intuition, letter, and concept addresses the three most central aspects of Romantic thought. "Letter" refers to the materiality of language and "concept" to speculation; both are repressed or dodged in favor of aesthetic ideology (intuition). "Intuition" in the sense of Anschauung (the act of looking at) aims at a deceptive unanimity, that is, a reflective relation in which the fact and act of reflection is suppressed. Narcissism is the ultimate form of the self's mystification; the narcissist abstracts from the materiality of reflection just as the mystic abstracts from the letter. In both cases, reflection cedes to a delusive coincidence of subject and object: "The Mystic has a sense for all spirit and, like every virtuoso of the spirit, hates the letter." Schlegel therefore demands an "apology of the letter, which, as the only genuine vehicle of communication, is quite venerable."63 In their critique of the possibility of a coincidence of subject and object, the Romantics come quite close to defining what was to become de Man's target, aesthetic ideology. As important as the question is which particular objects may be privileged and promoted culturally as the ones with which subjects desire to coincide, more important is a structural effect generated by the delusion of coincidence. This structural effect concerns the politics of identity more than questions of content; for the subject that deludes itself into believing it coincides with an object establishes its identity in the mirror of an (imaginary) object by short-circuiting image and self. Since the eighteenth century, societies have often privileged certain objects as points of reference or crystallization for collective identities. Arguably the most momentous and far-reaching expression of aesthetic ideology is nationalism, for the embodiment of the nation as an imaginary whole through nationalistic discourses helps construct a national identity conceiving itself as an indivisible totality. Contrary to their reputation as political conservatives, the Romantics' notion of representation stresses a lack of coincidence; it is designed to prevent such a delusion of oneness. Although Novalis's statement that the "whole state comes down to representation" appears, at least at first glance, still fully compatible with the aesthetic ideology of nationalism, he, like all Jena Romantics, consistently emphasizes the insuperable discontinuity between the present and the nonpresent in such representations: All of representation is based on a making-present—of the nonpresent and so on—(marvelous power of fiction). My "Faith and Love" is based

4-O


upon representational faith [belief]. Thus the assumption—Perpetual Peace is already here—God is among us—America is here or nowhere— the Golden Age is upon us—we are magicians—we are moral and so on."

Although his comments preclude any misconception of representation as organic, as signifying or mediating a coincidence of subject and object, Novalis does insist that the desire to coincide must be engaged as a moral force. Given the Romantics' recognition of the materiality and figurality of representation, their insistence that critics and poets should represent "truth" must not be confused with the tenets of aesthetic ideology. Novalis's statement that we "must be able to make truth present [vergegenwdrtigen] everywhere—to represent it (in the active, productive sense) everywhere" is linked with his conviction that "truth" can be achieved only on the basis of a "self-activating, intentional, ideal production of chance." He equates "chance" with "free catenation," which puts the term in the context of irony and fantasy. Although my earlier discussion of irony and fantasy led me to emphasize, proceeding from Nancy, irony's power to dissolve petrified meaning, it is clear that the Romantics intended to halt this process in a moment of "truth" not determined by a specific content. "Truth" is a structural premise; it refers to the moral and epistemological necessity of—to use Lacanian terminology—arresting the sliding of the signifier in a quilting point. As Novalis says in the Prologue to "Faith and Love": As necessary as it perhaps is that everything periodically be brought into flux in order to bring forth new, necessary mixtures and give rise to new, purer crystallizations, it is neverthelessjust as essential to temper this crisis and hinder total dissolution so that a stock remains intact, a core to which the new mass can attach itself and around which it can grow in new, beautiful forms. . . . Would it not be foolish to make a crisis permanent, and to believe that a feverish condition is the genuine, healthy condition upon whose maintenance alone man depends?

This stock or point of condensation is by definition a mythological or allegorical one. Whereas the creative imagination gives birth to mythologies, fantasy reads them in a manner that eludes the trap of aesthetic ideology. As Schelling put it: "I define creative imagination in relation to fantasy as that in which the productions of art are received and formed, fantasy as that which intuits [anschaut] them externally, casts them out from within itself, as it were, and to that extent


41

also portrays them" (PhoA, 38). However, the intuition of fantasy is intellectual. It is "the intellectual intuition within art," as Schelling argues, which means that it is designed to escape an aesthetic ideology dependent on sensual representations, on discursive "embodiments" that "naturalize" the delusory coincidence between subject and object. Fantasy, in contrast, disembodies or decenters the subject's unwavering focus by constantly inverting or shuffling it between external image and internal movement of thought. Because mythologies or "the gods" are allegorical representations par excellence, Schelling can maintain that "the gods are both outside of and within their own centers" (ibid.). If they were centered and steadfast images, they would be objects in time and space to which we would relate as canonized embodiments of value (or as impersonated authorities with whom we identify). However, if they are "gods" in the sense of the Romantic concept of configuration—configurations that have to be "read" allegorically because they lack, of necessity, any transparency— they cannot be arrested "within their own centers" for the simple reason that they cannot be reduced to a vis-a-vis, an Anschauung. We have to end, then, back where de Man began: with an insight on the part of the Romantics that a centered structure is impossible, leaving us no choice but to read allegorically. What makes the Romantics so fascinating, though, is that they push this insight one step further: allegorical readings are insufficient in and of themselves, as is an "act of irony" that "relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality."65 To the Romantic mind, these allegorical readings and acts of irony need to be supplemented by acts of reflection that clearly surpass "distance and difference." Such reflection affords the only unity that is possible, a subjective unity of (self-)consciousness that is of epistemological, psychological, and ethical relevance. Notes 1. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228; here 208. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Riogmp/iia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 15—17. 3. Ibid., vol. i , 273. 4. Ibid. As the commentators of the critical edition of Coleridge's works note, Coleridge paraphrases here ideas in Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800;

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cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System of'transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath, introd. Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 85—26. Similar ideas can be found in sections 3 and 16 of Schelling's Oj the I as thePrinriple of Philosophy; or On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge (1795), included in: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794-1796), trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980). 5. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 191. 6. Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 68. 7. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 220. 8. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon 601. 9. German for "object," literally "standing against." 10. For a detailed exposition of some of the issues discussed over the next few pages, see Manfred Frank. Eine Kinfiihrung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 23-48. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), B 133 (emphasis in original). 12. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 220. 13. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; book 3: The Psychoses 1955—11)56, trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1993), 35. 14. This is, of course, not the traditional notion of transcendence; it is, in a very paradoxical fashion, an immanent transcendence. Schelling can thus assert that the "assertion of an absolute 1 is ... least of all a transcendent assertion.. .. Every assertion which tries to bypass [uberjliegen] the I is transcendent. Consequently the assertion of an absolute I has to be the most immanent of all assertions: indeed it must be the condition of all immanent philosophy" (The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 102). 15. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Nac/igelassene Schriften aus den Jahren ijcjo-i8oo, ed. Hans Jacob (Berlin: Junker and Diinnhaupt, 1937), 2: 368. 16. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 71. 17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 404. 18.Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Samtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, 1845), vol. i, 527. 19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 423. 20. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke, i: 6 (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1860), 23. 21. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 13-14. 22. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Werke, ed. Manfred Schroter, vol. 3: Schriften zur Identitatsphilosophie 1801-1806 (Munich: Beck und Oldenburg, 1927), 9, 5.. 23. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 84. 24. Schelling, Werke, 3: 11. 25. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 13-14. 26. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 325. 27. Novalis, Fichte Studies i. 28. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 27. 29. Ibid., 28. 30. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon 832. 31. Cf. Jiirgen Habcrmas, "Dcr Eintritt in die Postmoderne," Merkuryj.io (1983). 32. Friedrich Schlege!, Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy (I11B, 4). 33. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 83. 34. Ibid.


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35. Friedrich Schlegel, Introduction (III B, 4). 36. Novalis, Fichte Studies 566. 37. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge., 73. 38. For an excellent reading of the ethical implications of Novalis's theory of subjectivity; see Geza von Molnar, Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 39. Novalis, Fichte Studies 278. 40. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 207. 41. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and Francis Simson (London: Kegan Paul et al., 1896), 3: 524-25. 42. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1791), 202. 43. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragments on Literature and Poesy, 194. 44. Novalis, Fichte Studies 564. 45. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon 76. 46. For a reading of the romantic notion of Witz and menstruum universale, see JeanLuc Nancy, "Menstruum Universale," in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 248-65. For ordo inversus, see note 55. 47. Ibid., 250. 48. Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas 127 (VB, 3). 49. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 214. 50. Novalis, Fichte Studies 555 and 556. 51. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idea/ism, 233. 52. Novalis, Kichte Studies 15. 53. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Identity and Trembling," in The Birth to Presence, 13. 54. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon 775. 55. On the notion of ordo inversus, see note 29 to the texts in Part I. See also Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kiirz, "Ordo Inversus. Zu ciner Rellexionsfigur bei Novalis, Holderlin, Kleist und Kafka," in Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift fur Arthur Henkel, ed. Herbert Anton et al. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), 75-97. 56. Friedrich Holderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 70-71. 57. Novalis, Soliloquy (II B, 7). 58. Ibid. 59. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 20. 60. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 60. 61. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon ggv,. 62. Ibid., 49. 63. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments 90 and 15. 64. Novalis, Fichte Studies 565. 65. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 222.


I

Critique in the Wake of German Idealism


Introductory Essay Representing Self and Other in Early German Romanticism Elizabeth Mittman and Mary R. Strand

Beginnings In approaching early German Romanticism as both a philosophical movement and a model for an aesthetic practice, it is tempting to look to the "Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism" as a conceptual and chronological starting point. The concerns outlined in this short text, which opens this volume—and whose authorship remains unclear to this day, but which has been attributed alternately to Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling—are echoed in many of the other texts that follow. The primary interest of this early text, which was written in 1796, lies in its unique presentation of the central concerns that propelled the thinking of the Jena Romantics. This is not to say that the "Earliest Program" is a clear starting point of early German Romantic thought, nor indeed its "earliest" document: Novalis began his Fichte Studies, for example, in 1795. Nor can it be read as a summary of a coherent movement: the term "early Romanticism" is itself a construct that encourages the homogenization of a very heterogeneous array of texts. It is even misleading to talk of one Novalis or one Friedrich Schlegel, for contradictor)' moments appear within and among their texts. The "Earliest Program" itself reflects some of these problems; most informative, perhaps, are the moments of tension that issue from the text's tide itself: origin, program, system. Azade Seyhan has called it a "manifesto of Romantic idealism";1 it is, however, anything but an ordinary manifesto in the sense of the Latin manifestus, meaning plain, distinct, evident. Rather, its fragmentary and elliptical nature marks it as a uniquely Romantic kind of manifesto. In The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy ponder whether the fact that it "comes to us in a fragmentary state is perhaps 47

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a symbol. A symbol of the incompletion that still constrains us, to which the will to completion, moreover, was deliberately dedicated."2 This juxtaposition of completion/incompletion is mirrored in the text's self-proclamation as "system," a move that we see echoed repeatedly in the attempts of early Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who were dedicated at once to the formulation of a new "system" and to the repeated questioning of any such attempts. Just as the "Earliest Program" criticizes the status accorded to instrumental, rational, and systematized thought in the Enlightenment, it simultaneously seeks to revive and revise the notion of "system" altogether. This text offers its most explicit critique of the mechanized system of the Enlightenment in its condemnation of the "whole wretched human artifice of state," a radically anarchic move that bears witness to an atmosphere of political upheaval that resonated in Germany in the wake of the French Revolution and is evident in many of the other texts included in this volume. Just as the "Earliest Program" moves from critique toward the proposal of a new paradigm under the sign of "mythology," Novalis's "Faith and Love" performs a double gesture as well: the simultaneous critique of the existing (mechanistic) Prussian state and creation of a new (organic) notion of "state" based on "faith and love."3 But it is precisely the intersection of social-political critique and philosophical-aesthetic practice in the work of these early German Romantics that reveals some of the fault lines of their thinking, contradictions that arise as they attempt to formulate new possibilities without falling back into the (idealist) traps that they seek to expose. Their paradoxical strategy becomes evident as we draw connections between the central terms of the Romantic dialogue; the contradictions in their thinking come to light in their reflections on the selfgenerating "I." In the "Earliest Program," the self "as an absolutely free being" serves as the conceptual starting point for the other projects enunciated in the remainder of that text: the pursuit of a new physics, an aesthetic philosophy, a new poetic art, and indeed the rejection of the Enlightenment "state."4 Following the work of thinkers such as Kant and Fichte, the early Romantics were convinced that the renewal they envisioned for all spheres of human life had to begin with a rethinking of the constitution of the I itself. In the case of Novalis, a fundamental questioning of the structure of self-consciousness or self-awareness led to the development of new notions of (self-)

Self and Other in Early German Romanticism

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representation, signification, and poetic praxis. His rethinking took the form of a complex process of appropriation and critique of Fichte's notion of the subject. This introduction thus begins with an exploration of the complex relationship between Fichte and the Jena Romantics (who knew each other and debated these issues intensely, as the Fichte-Schelling correspondence attests), with special attention given to Novalis's extensive work on identity and consciousness in the Fichte Studies of 1795-96. Like the "Earliest Program," the Fichte Studies reveal early Romanticism both as emerging from an idealist philosophical tradition and as marking a radical break from that past, as is evident in Novalis's simultaneous appropriation and critique of Fichte. Although the theoretically abstract Fichte Studies may not at first glance have much in common with the provocative call in the "Earliest Program" for an aesthetic philosophy, a philosophical mythology, and sensuous philosophers, the Fichte Studies do in fact serve as a critical basis for Novalis's radical vision of aesthetic representation that emerges in "Faith and Love." Indeed, it is out of the philosophical that the new vision of art and poesy arises, and it is through a series of reflections upon Novalis's rethinking of the structure of the "1" that we are able to perceive the structures underlying the newly imagined state in his political-poetic text "Faith and Love."

Identity and Otherness Inspired by Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophical texts, Novalis wrote the fragments now called the Fichte Studies.' In these fragments, which were not published in his lifetime, Novalis critiques and revises Fichte's ideas; he creates his own early Romantic philosophy as he begins to explore the notion of the other. The concern with otherness was, of course, at the time not new. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, even points to a tradition reaching back to ancient Greece: "The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality—that of Self and Other."6 In Novalis's Fichte Studies the notion of the self is inscribed as the concept of the I; the notion of the other takes on several forms: the nonbeing, NonI, and You, and, in his fragments on signification, the second signifying person, or foreign being.

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He begins his critique of Fichte with an articulation of the central roics that signification and otherness play in the construction of identity. With this he criticizes the part that sameness plays in Fichte's idealist notion of identity. For Fichte, the self is fundamentally a unity, a self-identical or selfsame whole. By suggesting that otherness is central to subjectivity, that the subject itself is always already split into self and other, Novalis problematizes Fichte's idealist notion of the unity or sameness of the subject. In his Foundations of the Entire Theory of Scientific Knowledge Fichte maintains that identity can be described with the sentence A equals A.7 The subject's sense of identity is articulated in this equation, which shows how the subject represents itself to itself as a replica of itself. Novalis suggests that Fichte's proposition of identity is illusory, a "pseudoproposition" (Scheinsatz), because the I does not merely represent itself to itself as selfsame; rather, it imagines itself as other, as "something not identical," as a sign of otherness (FS i) .8 In his reevaluation of identity, he indicates that it occurs through a process of signification in which the subject is split into self and other; the I imagines a sign of itself, the "nonbeing," and thus represents itself to itself with a sign of otherness (FS i). The I can only imagine its identity by means of a sign that necessarily expresses nonidentity; in other words, it imagines the other—its nonbeing—in itself. Fichte grounds the identity of the self in the fundamental, continual act of self-positing, which he calls the Tathandlung. Novalis shares this insight, but radicalizes it by suggesting that the I is ultimately dependent on a Non-1, or other, as it posits itself: "There must be a NonI in order for the I to posit itself as I" (FS 7). By insisting on the necessity of the Non-I in the positing of the I, he criticizes the deceptive homogeneity of Fichte's notion of Tathandlung, according to which "originally the I freely posits its own being."9 Although the I in Fichte's theories also needs to posit an other, the Non-I, it is originally grounded in its own autonomous self-positing. The Non-I, for Fichte, is thus merely a dependent construct of the I, an other that originates within the subject. Otherness outside of the I is then excluded in the self-constitution of the I. In his letter to Fichte of November 19, 1800, Schelling criticizes him for deducing everything from "the subjective and philosophizing I": he claims that the I is both objective and subjective, thus emphasizing the otherness of the I, thinking of it as an object, or other, as well as a cognizing self. Similarly, Novalis suggests that the I is as much other, or Non-I, as it is I, or identical with itself


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(FS 561). With this shift toward otherness he then breaks with Fichte, decentering his idealist notion of the self. According to Novalis, the subject is not only split into self and other, or I and Non-I: it is simultaneously "whole and divided" in the realm of the "absolute I" (FS 32). In other words, the "absolute I" is the form in which the differentiation and unity of the I coexist: "The act in which the I posits itself as I must be connected to the antithesis, an independent Non-I, and the relationship to a sphere that encompasses them both—this sphere can be called God and I" (FS 8). The Non-I is independent, or separate from the I, yet also united with it in an absolute sphere, which is associated with God.10 This is a new notion of the Non-I: it is not merely an "inside" Non-I, an other within the subject, as in Fichte, but rather is outside of the (empirical) I. Novalis's notion of the Non-I leads to his concept of the "You," another being that is different from as well as independent of the self (UB 820). u Otherness as "You" is not merely the opposite of the self. For Novalis, the absolute I, then, is the paradoxical simultaneity of wholeness and division, sameness and otherness.12 In his correspondence with Fichte, Schelling gives voice to these same concerns. In his letter of October 3, 1801, for example, Schelling suggests that absolute identity is "the inseparable coexistence of the finite with the infinite," or the simultaneity of what Fichte refers to as "separation" and the "unity of all."13 Ultimately, then, Fichte's notion of the absolute, which is for him the principle of activity, shifts into "absolute stasis." Novalis too problematizes the stasis created by Fichte's notion of the absolute: he emphasizes its active side, its intrinsic paradoxical movements between unity and division, which are ultimately suppressed in Fichte in favor of stasis. For Novalis, the absolute I is not a positive or clear point of transcendence that serves as an anchor for the subject, as it does in Fichte. Novalis suggests, on the contrary, that the subject does not have transcendent anchors that stabilize it: "The whole rests somewhat like the players of a game in which people sit in a circle without chairs, one resting upon the other's knee" (FS 445) .H The absolute I is a realm of "hovering," of the destabilizing of the subject in which "reality" emerges (FS 555). By suggesting that reality emanates from the absolute I, Novalis criticizes the idealist notion that the absolute is merely a transcendent realm beyond the world of the subject. His notion of the absolute I is similar to Schelling's notion of the absolute, a point of "unobscured indifference" of the "ideal and the

52


real." It is neither real nor ideal, but both at once. Schelling's notion of indifference is similar to what Novalis calls "an absolute beginning," which is a retroactive "construction" of a subject who longs to return to the starting point of his/her consciousness; the subject presupposes an originary "act of freedom" that occurs outside of structures of differentiation, beyond the world of oppositions (UB'jQ, 717). In his letter to Fichte of November 19, 1800, Schelling attempts to break down the opposition between the real and the ideal by bringing the realm of the real into his early Romantic philosophy. Whereas Fichte does not allow nature into his system—for this philosopher of consciousness, nature is in a sense beyond the I—Schelling claims that nature can be deduced from what he calls the objective I, an I connected to the real, to the material world. In a draft of his letter to Schelling on December 27, 1800, Fichte suggests that nature cannot be grasped by the I: when the I thinks it sees nature, it is merely encountering a "creation of the imagination." The I is a subjective, selfenclosed center that exists in an ideal realm, separate from the real. By contrast, Schelling's I is affected by nature, an independent other that is similar to Novalis's notions of the Non-I and the You, different beings outside of the self. He brings natural and transcendental philosophy together in one system in order to show the "material proof of idealism," connecting the real with the ideal. In his thinking, philosophy is not separated from materiality, just as in Novalis's work theory is not split from praxis (UB 733). Like Novalis, Schelling does not completely reject Fichte's idealism, but critiques and expands it by including a recognition of otherness and materiality, which ultimately challenges the Fs self-contained act of positing.15 Nature, as an "outside" other, prevents the I from ossifying itself from within: the I must rearrange its relationships with the world as it encounters independent others, such as nature and the You. Novalis and Schelling rewrite idealist notions such as the absolute I in order to emphasize the paradoxes inherent in the constitution of subjectivity and dissolve the opposition between the ideal and the real. Just as the notions of nature and the Non-I undergo revision in early Romantic thought, the concept of the absolute I is also rewritten. The absolute I, for Novalis, is, again, paradoxically both a sphere in which the difference between the I and the Non-I is maintained and a realm in which such differences are overcome; the hovering of the imagination in the sphere of the absolute I both destabilizes the

Self and Other in Early German Romanticism 53

subject and moves it toward a point of wholeness, or nondifferentiation. The subject projects the absolute I as a transcendent point and strives to approximate it through the hovering movement of the imagination, but is, at the same time, aware of the impossibility of ever reaching it: "We can only recognize this given absolute negatively, by acting and finding that we cannot reach what we are searching for through any action" (FS 566). It is the originary ideal-real point that is sought after by the subject (FS 17). Thus he maintains Fichte's central notion of the absolute, but redefines it as a paradoxical moment in a reflective movement in which differences are both maintained and erased. A double moment of difference and nondiffcrence also occurs in the determination of the I. In order to be constituted, the I must be in relation to something other, or different than, itself, as well as to a realm of chaos: "In order to determine the I we must refer it to something. Referring occurs through differentiating—both occur through the thesis of an absolute sphere of existence, which is mere being—or chaos" (FS 3). The notion of mere being, or chaos, in Novalis is similar to Schelling's notion of the "highest being," or "absolute indifference," a realm of being in which there are no oppositional differences. The subject in early Romantic thinking desires an absolute sphere of chaos in which it can overcome differences. As it moves toward a realm of indifference, a chaotic space beyond dualistic. differences, the subject paradoxically preserves its differentiation into self and other, or I and Non-I. In Novalis's Fichte Studies the subject longs to be suspended between extremes in an absolute realm of hovering, or free being (FS 555). This realm of hovering is similar to his notion of feeling, which he describes as an originary moment, the beginning of philosophy (FS 15). He also posits the absolute I, the state of hovering, as an a priori moment: it is the point of indifference or wholeness from which differences, or dualisms, such as subject and object, are engendered (FS 555). In doing so, he critiques the idealist concept of transcendence by indicating the impossibility of reaching the absolute I, by describing it as a point of instability in which the real and the ideal merge, rather than as an ideal moment that centers and stabilizes the subject. It is important to note, however, that he falls back into the structure of idealist thought with his discussion of the absolute I as an a priori point of wholeness. With his paradoxical notion of the ab-

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solute I he thus makes the double move of both undercutting and reestablishing the possibility of transcendence. Absolute hovering is beyond the subject in the sense that it is prior to consciousness; it is posited as a precondition for the development of consciousness. Thus, after an impossible, originary moment of absolute indifference, consciousness occurs as the subject begins to reflect upon itself, to see itself as differentiated, or split in two. What defines consciousness is, then, the representation of the other, or nonbeing, within the self: "Consciousness is therefore an image of being within being. . . . Sign. Theory of the sign. Theory of representation or of the nonbeing that is within being in order to allow being to be there in a certain way for itself (FS 2). Consciousness occurs as the subject sees itself as an image, a sign of otherness, the nonbeing. As Manfred Frank has shown, a reversal occurs in this process of reflection, as in a mirror.16 Azade Seyhan points to the visual nature of this process: "Novalis posits the necessary existence of an eye for the representation of the I."17 In consciousness, the subject is split into self and other as the "eye" sees the I as an image of otherness. The nonbeing is the first specular image of the self; the subject sees this image of itself as separate from itself, and thus becomes conscious of the split within itself into self and other. One reason the early Romantics are so interesting today is that they address issues that are being debated intensely in many disciplines. Novalis's notion of a specular image of the self, for instance, is not at all far removed from Jacques Lacan's poststructuralist, psychoanalytic theories. Lacan associates consciousness with an "image in the mirror."18 Consciousness is based on a specular relation between the ego and an object in "an imaginary space"; real otherness, the "real object," does not enter consciousness.19 The subject only sees an image of the real object in his/her mind. In Novalis's discussion of consciousness, the other, the nonbeing, is also merely an image formed by the self. The subject forms an image of the otherness that is beyond the mirror of consciousness: "The image is reality for the I that is conscious of itself (FS 63). The I creates a world of images. Although he begins to question Fichte's assumptions about the self in his thinking on identity and positing, Novalis simultaneously tends to reestablish the self-enclosed aspect of Fichte's idealist notion of the self in his work on consciousness: the self constructs images of the other, the nonbeing, from within itself and is not affected by real oth-


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erness outside of itself as it experiences consciousness. As he shifts between working within Fichte's paradigms and challenging them, a tension arises between his notions of otherness: his concept of the nonbeing, the internal other, is similar to Fichte's Non-I, while his new notion of the Non-I and the You—outside others that have an effect on the I—calls Fichte's thoughts on otherness into question. Novalis assumes that there is a realm of feeling—which is associated with hovering reflection and the imagination—out of which the subject unfolds into differential systems and thus begins to relate to the outside world. The wall of isolation, which can enclose the I as it experiences consciousness, is then broken down as the I encounters others outside of itself. Although Schelling also challenges Fichte's idealism in his discussion of the I's relation to the outside world, to the realm of nature, he too tends toward a Fichtean idealism in his thinking on consciousness. In his letter to Fichte of May 24, 1801, he calls consciousness the "center" (Mittagspunkt) of absolute identity and refers to idealism as "the true all-encompassing, inclusive and penetrating sun." This is one of the letters in which he attempts to reconcile some of his differences with Fichte by accepting certain elements of his system. As will become evident in our discussion of signification later in this essay, a comparative reading of Lacan and the early Romantics can help clarify some of the contradictions within Romantic thought. Novalis's idea that the world beyond the subject is a construct is also addressed in his reading of the Kantian thing-in-itself in The Universal Brouillon: "It is dogmatic if I say—there is no God, there is no Non-I— there is no thing-in-itself. Critically, I can only say—for me there is now no such entity—other than a fictitious one. All illusion is as essential to the truth as the body is to the soul" (UB 601). Givens, such as God and the thing-in-itself, are illusory, because they appear to be transcendent, or beyond the subject. When Novalis thinks critically about these givens, he finds that they are merely constructs of the I, although necessary ones, like the sign of otherness, the Non-I. To completely reject the possibility of the transcendence of God or the thing-in-itself, however, would be "dogmatic," or without proof. The subject may live in a world of signs; even the givens that are supposedly beyond its realm of experience may actually be images that it has created. As in his thinking on the absolute, he walks a razor's edge here, simultaneously maintaining and undermining the possibility of transcendence.

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If consciousness, then, is an infinite process of making images in the mind,20 the basis of subjectivity is continually in motion; consciousness as the center of the subject is thus not fixed, or stable, but rather a fluid series of images of otherness. In "Anamorphosis," Lacan uses the phrase "I see myself seeing myself in order to express the relation between consciousness and representation.21 Philosophy, for Novalis, is the representation of this visual process of self-reflection; it is the reflection on the action of forming images in consciousness, or more precisely, a double reflection, a reflection on a reflection: "Philosophy is thus . . . transcendental image of our consciousness" (FS 46).22 In her discussion of this fragment, Seyhan remarks: "Novalis infinitely postpones the closure of Fichte's system by opening it up to the endlessness of representational forms."83 The "hieroglyphical power" of the I—its power to make signs—keeps Novalis's philosophy in motion (FS 6). Reflection overcomes the fear of an infinite regression; the signifying activity of the I does not stop when it reaches an image of wholeness, or unity. Instead, it disrupts the illusion of a selfsame identity. Working to destabilize such static images once they are created, the I continually re-presents itself, its split identity, as well as its signifying activity, to itself in images. The subject forms images of the other in itself and in the world infinitely, as well as images of this endless activity.

Feeling, Reflection, (Intellectual) Intuition Novalis pursues these reflections on the split nature of the I and consciousness further, in terms that bring us a step closer to understanding his vision of a philosophical practice (see especially FS 16, 17, 20, 22, 31, 32, 38). In order to understand the terms of this discussion, it is important to return briefly to Kant, Fichte, and the concept of the intellectual intuition, which plays a vital role in the Fichte Studies.24 For Kant, the existence of the subject is the necessary presupposition upon which all knowledge is based; that is, there must be a subject that is given as the site from which cognitive processes can proceed. The limits of knowledge are defined by that which we can access through the senses and that which we can access through the intellect. Both are inadequate when it comes to "grasping" (in the sense of the German begreifen) the subject itself, for knowledge requires the construction of some kind of object: either one that is perceived as


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present by the senses (in a process called intuition), or one that is cognized by the intellect, which, with the power of the imagination, itself creates concepts. The subject can thus (re)cognize consciousness as an appearance, as a constructed object; it cannot, however, reach its own pure existence—or: the prepredicative being of itself—for this is given, as free, before sensory perceptions, and indeed before concepts that can be schematized by the intellect. The problem then remains: how do we know that we exist? Kant never answers this question completely; the closest he comes is in his positing of a kind of presensory sensation of unity. He rejects the possibility, however, of an "intellectual intuition," that is, an intuition before sensations, for he finds it crucial that the duality of sensibility and intellect be maintained. Collapsing the distinction between sensing and thinking would lead to a kind of radical idealism under which the subject would be the producer not only of the form, but also of the content of sensory events. And consciousness is the product of reflection upon the subject, yet not as an object, for that would undermine the presupposition of self-identity that defines the subject for Kant, and that serves as the necessary motor of all activity and thought. It is at this point that Fichte steps in with his notion of a subject that is engaged in a thoroughgoing process of (self-)positing; he "solves" Kant's problem of the subject's self-knowledge by introducing an object within the subject, as it were. The dualism introduced in the Tathandlungis, for Fichte, a kind of intellectual intuition, a consciousness of otherness before sensory perception. If identity can be described as a process of continual self-positing, then consciousness is not the mediated construction of a subject-object relationship, but rather a presensory (and thus "intellectual"), prereflective act (thus an "intuition").25 But, as Novalis demonstrates in his critique of Fichte, this still leaves the Kantian problem of presupposed identity unresolved, for Fichte has no language for explaining the introduction of subject-object dualism (A equals A) in the originary act of self-positing, and, like Kant, he ultimately retreats to a transcendental subject as well. More precisely, he anchors the transcendental subject in a transcendent subject, namely, the absolute I. As we have seen, Novalis performs an effective critique of Fichte's collapsing of subject and object, or self and other, by revealing the illusory nature of his "pseudopropositioii" of identity. But rather than simply returning to Kant's position and claiming that the I cannot

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know itself—that self-consciousness is no more than an "x," an accompanying, ever-present feeling of our existence—Novalis finds productive potential in Fichte's paradox and suggests instead that the subject has extraconceptual ways of knowing itself, the hovering reflection that he refers to as "belief or "feeling" (FS 3, 15). He discusses the distinction between feeling and consciousness in the first fragment of the Fichte Studies: Because the I is a thoroughly determined I, it can only recognize universal content within itself [i.e., in consciousness]. To the extent that it displaces universal content outside of itself, it has to believe in it. The I cannot know it, as a determination, for otherwise the universal content would have to be in the I. What I do not know, but rather feel (the I feels itself, as content), I believe. (FS i)

Consciousness is the reflection upon that feeling and is thus already one step away from the undivided self to which the subject can never return, the impossible goal of selfsame identity, which it constantly strives toward yet always "misses" (see especially FS 3a). 26 This is the productive and ironically faulty function of the intellectual intuition for Novalis. In other words, Novalis appropriates Fichte's notion of the intellectual intuition, which enables the subject to overcome the split between subject and object and reach Oneness; but Novalis also revises this notion of the intellectual intuition to include the recognition that what it achieves is not Oneness but something like "twoness" within the horizon of Oneness, a double moment arising from the split origin of self-consciousness. Novalis uses this insight as the productive basis for a reflective philosophical practice. Intellectual intuition becomes the problematization of the search for identity, for the knowledge of being—that which Kant sought but could not find. Novalis doesn't find it either; instead, he puts fortli a hypothesis as to why it cannot be found. The bifurcation of consciousness is implied within intuition itself: "There is no specific drive underlying intuition" (FS 16); that is, intuition is always already split, involving both subject and object. Feeling is the movement toward unity, reflection is the movement toward duality. Feeling, as that element of intuition which allows space for thinking beyond oppositions because it exists outside of their structure, is the birthplace of reflection, which takes feeling into the world as a consciousness of difference. When Novalis problematizes two differ-


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ent levels of this triadic structure of feeling—reflection—intuition (FS 17), he is acknowledging the absurdity of any attempt to utilize reflective thought as a means of reaching a state of indifferentiation. As we have noted, Novalis employs visual imagery in order to conceptualize consciousness; if, along with Manfred Frank, we take the image one step further, we find that the process of reflection itself carries for Novalis the implications of specular or mirror (as opposed to purely mimetic) reflection: things appear in reverse, nothing "is" as it seems and hence is destined to mislead us always.27 It is important to note Novalis's use of the terms thesis—antithesis— synthesis in the Fichte Studies fragments concerning feeling and reflection. Far from being employed in the Hegelian sense, as carrier of teleological implications, this triadic structure is explicitly denied closure or sublation: "that which is intuited can be opposed to the intuition itself, and this opposition is the only possible synthesis for the one who intuits. Reflection and feeling are at their limits here" (FS 20). Synthesis is not the absolute merger of two formerly separate entities; rather, it is the state of constant tension between the two. The absolute is thus the productivity of reflection, which is the material of philosophy. Early Romantic philosophy exceeds the bounds of disciplinarity to propose itself as a practice that is nothing less than a reflective, critical systematization of the workings of consciousness (FS 19). The new space that Novalis creates for philosophy with the introduction of feeling into the realm of reflection is central to the project of the Jena Circle. What they seek is a mode of thinking that escapes the strictures of scientificity—a form of alienated thinking that has lost itself in a mere thinking of objects—that they regarded as permeating all realms of knowledge. The "plodding physics" referred to in the "Earliest Program" is to be given new wings in its new, Romantic incarnation, and its aim is to turn constantly the terms of (any given) discourse—including, and perhaps above all, philosophy itself—back upon themselves, using the tools of reflection and nonidentity: "1 = Non-I: highest statement of all science and art."28

Signification Novalis's articulation of new spaces for philosophy also involves an investigation into how people communicate through signs. The question of the role of the other that is raised in his work on conscious-

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ness, identity, and positing is also addressed in his work on signification. His interests in signification and otherness lead inevitably to the question of whether consciousness and identity are at all possible outside of signification and thus whether his thinking shows traces of similarity with contemporary theories, such as those of Lacan. In his chapter "The Subject and the Other: Alienation" Lacan says: "The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in a process of gap."29 Novalis discusses the gap, or split, in the subject in a similar way—the split, mentioned earlier, between the I and its other (nonbeing) in the process of signifying identity. Although their notions of the other appear at first glance to be similar, they are ultimately quite different. In Novalis's discussions of identity in the Fichte Studies, the self's other is a sign created by the I and is thus to some extent subordinated to it. For Lacan, on the other hand, it is the subject that is subordinated to the signifier in the realm of the Other, which is the unconscious.3" The Other takes on many forms in Lacan's texts; in his early work in the igGos, for instance, he associates the term "Other" with his notion of the unconscious and its language and suggests that the subject is dependent on language in the realm of the Other.31 The subject, he maintains, is "determined" by language as the Other.32 It is taken over by the unconscious, the realm of the Other, and subordinated to the signifier as it is constituted in language: "What we find once again here is the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other.... If he is apprehended at his birth in the field of the Other, the characteristic of the subject of the unconscious is that of being, beneath the signifier that develops its networks, its chains and its history, at an indeterminate place" (Lacan, Four Fundamentals, 208). The subject is "beneath" the signifier in the sense that it is continually re-formed by language, the unconscious. But while Lacan emphasizes the subject's loss of control over language, the subject in Novalis's Fichte Studies retains some control over language in the sense that it has the power to form signs.33 In the "Soliloquy" (1798), however, his thoughts on language contradict his work on signification in the Fichte Studies, for the "Soliloquy" shows how the subject loses its hold on language. He demonstrates an acute awareness of the power of language in this short piece. The subject here is not aware of what he is saying; language can be "capricious" and make him say "mixed-up things."34 It is "mischievous" and can undermine the subject's intentions.35 Novalis's


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descriptions of language in this text bear striking resemblance to some of Lacan's theories on language in the 19505: "The subject doesn't know what he is saying, and for the best of reasons, because he doesn't know what he is."3fl In Novalis's text the narrator even calls into question his own ability to express his ideas understandably through language. The notion that words have the power to "confuse everything" is also addressed in Friedrich Schlegel's "On Incomprehensibility." Both Novalis and Schlegel indicate that language destabilizes the subject with its autonomous force. As words so often betray their users, the signifying power of the I that appears to be intact in the Fichte Studies begins to work against the subject in the "Soliloquy." In the "Soliloquy" the subject is thus subordinated to a language that speaks through him. Although language fools people who do not follow its rhythms, it has profound effects in those who have a sense for its spirit, who feel "the tender effect of its inner nature and [move] tongue or hand accordingly." It thus moves through the subject. Lacan uses a similar formulation in "The signification of the phallus" by suggesting that language "resounds" in the subject: "in man and through man it [the signifier] speaks."37 Novalis calls a person who allows language to move through him a "prophet," or someone who speaks with divine inspiration. Language, then, both emerges from the realm of "God," which is another name for the absolute, and, in mystical moments of inspiration, speaks through the subject and moves him closer to that absolute. Novalis can thus suggest that language works in a realm beyond consciousness. The subject's words become "poesy" when he surrenders his conscious control over what he is saying and allows language to become effective in him: he thus speaks "without (his) knowledge or belief." The "drive to speak" is also beyond the subject's conscious control: he has to speak without knowing that he does so, as his "will" is taken over by language. There are, of course, significant differences in Novalis's and Lacan's notions of the relation between language and a transcendent realm. For instance, an absolute point of indifference from which the differential structure of language arises would be unthinkable for Lacan. His subject is always caught within the structure of language and can only escape from it in death; it cannot move beyond the world of differences into a realm of absolute "hovering," as it does for Novalis.

6a


Signification and the Other Although Novalis begins to articulate a notion of the other as the language of the unconscious and links it to a divine realm in the "Soliloquy," he remains tied to a more empirical notion of the other in his work on signification in the Fichte Studies: he addresses the issue of otherness within the subject in terms of the subject's relation to another person outside of himself, to the You, or another signifying agent. The subject must recognize the otherness within himself, or what he calls the homogeneity of the foreign being with himself, in order to be able to communicate with him/her, to choose signs that make sense to him/her: "In order to communicate, the first signifying person needs only choose such signs as exist in a relationship of necessity to the signified within the homogeneous being of the second signifying person. In this communication, the first signifying person will thus have to study the homogeneity of the foreign being with himself in this relationship" (FS 11). The use of the word "homogeneity" in connection with the foreign being in this quote suggests that there is a common point between different signifying agents; the foreign other is, then, simultaneously similar to and different from the self.38 An originary point of feeling, of shared "humanity," makes it possible for people from different differential systems to understand each other. The first signifying person must develop a sense for what a sign means for another person or, more precisely, he must recognize that a second signifying person attaches different signifieds, or concepts, to signs than he does.39 His focus shifts, then, in the Fichte Studies from the other within the self, the nonbeing, to the other outside of the self, the You, which is part of what he calls the "external world" in The Universal Brouillon (UB 820). How does the transition from viewing ourselves as other to recognizing the world as other occur? Novalis's thoughts on communication offer one possible answer: in interacting with other people, the subject recognizes the otherness within himself as a link to the outside world. By negotiating his similarities and differences with other people, the otherness within himself meets the otherness outside of himself: he is transformed into a You, a different person than he was before, in his encounters with other signifying agents, as well as through his experiences with the otherness of the outside world. By


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"making our self foreign—changing our self," we move beyond the confines of a self-enclosed subjectivity. The boundaries between self and other, I and You, are broken down as the subject becomes receptive to the world around him, anticipating the differences of others and allowing them to affect him (UB 820). "Selfhood" becomes synonymous with "the principle of greatest multiplicity—(You)" as the subject is transformed into an other, a foreign being, in the process of interacting with the outside world (ibid.). Recognizing differences in others involves realizing that signs mean different things to different signifying agents. Novalis indicates that signs ax'e inherently arbitrary and ambiguous.40 He also refers to both "the first signifier" (das erste tiezeichnende) and "the first signifier as a person" (der ersle Bezeichnende) with the same word (but different genders—in the first case neuter, in the second masculine), thus suggesting that the signifier and the signifying person function in a similar way: they both exist in a free relationship with a second signifier or signifying person (FS 11). Although associating the signifying activity of the subject with that of the signifier itself may seem at first glance to suggest that the subject's power over language is limited or uncertain, the relation between the signifier and the signified is not questioned, indicating that the subject's hold on language is indeed secure (see note 39). Novalis calls the relationship between signifying agents a "quasi-free contract," because they "both desire [wollen] the interrelationship freely" (FS 11). Thus, the desire of the other is recognized in a free relationship of communication. The other's will is also taken into account in the process of signification: the first signifier imagines the "will of the other [das Andere}" in connecting a sign with a signified (FS 11). A recognition of the other as a being with her/his own will is then crucial to the process of communicating through signs. The subject does not assume that the other signifying agent is exactly the same as himself, but rather acknowledges her/his difference, as well as similarity, in communicating with her/him. The focus on otherness in Novalis's thinking indicates a break with Enlightenment thought, which had emphasized the sameness of human beings. Novalis presupposes a notion of shared humanity that does not exclude difference, but rather makes it possible for both similarities and differences between signifying agents to be recognized.

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The (Poetic) State If the process of signification is the mode through which selfsame identity is revealed to be an illusion, the Romantics' theory of representation can be seen as the corresponding aesthetic strategy that calls such illusions of wholeness into question. The Romantics find, moreover, that a purely mimetic mode of representation—as opposed to a specular or "mirror" approach that would allow the gap between sign and referent to become visible—causes the relationship between an object and its representation through signs to become static. The illusion of identity between a sign and its referent freezes the potential for reflection (productive mirroring), and the subject/object split deepens. In the realm of aesthetic representation, poetic or nonliteral language acts out and acts upon that moment of difference—the gap that, as we have seen, is contained within the very structure of consciousness itself. On the other hand, the appeal of the equal sign, of Oneness, in Fichte's insoluble equation of identity (A equals A) remains. Following his own conclusions about the I's constant striving toward the absolute (identity and unity), Novalis takes representation's paradox as an opportunity to construct fictitious relationships around the attraction of that equal sign. The figurative language that marks so many early Romantic texts thus performs a double function: it simultaneously allows for the projection of radical, unexpected images or ideas and admits a moment of reflexivity, of self-reflection, upon the structure of representation itself. Novalis often invokes the structure of analogy in his work, taking the relationships established in one realm of thought and applying them to other realms, perhaps as an affirmation of and contribution toward the early Romantic idea that the world can and must be made one again, that all knowledge be united. Thus he applies the insights of the Fichte Studies regarding the structure of consciousness to language and signification, and to aesthetic representation. The irony of this universalizing gesture is perhaps obvious, given the radical-critical conclusions Novalis draws about disunity and nonidentity in precisely these areas of his thinking, and it reminds us of the tensions that arise again and again in early Romantic thought, between critique and affirmation, between the desire to transgress all differential systems and the desire to create a new system. Both the "Earliest Program" and Friedrich Schlegel's "Fichte's Basic


6^

Characteristics of the Present Age" (1808) offer an explicit critique of a rationalistic, Enlightenment notion of the state. The "Earliest Program" sets the state in relation to the "absolutely free being": it "necessarily manipulates free people like machinery, and it should not do so; hence it must cease to exist." Schlegel later echoes this critique, emphasizing the pernicious nature of a system that does not merely reduce human beings to utility and function, but seeks to "penetrate" them with its will to a "single purpose." It is noteworthy that Schlegel writes this within the context of a critique of Fichte, who, according to Schlegel, aligns himself with just such system-affirming forces in a rejection of fantasy. For the early Romantics, the state is indeed one of the strongest metaphors for the instrumental, rationalistic thinking they reject; and it is precisely in and through their poetic practice— the deployment of fantasy—that they seek not only to condemn but also to transform the political realities around them. Novalis's "Faith and Love" (1798) is the clearest example of such an effort in this volume. In contrast to the "Earliest Program" and Schlegel's critique of Fichte, Novalis's allegorical text leaves a straightforward critique of existing structures aside almost entirely41 and creates, with its fantastic idealization of the existing Prussian royal house, a radical, political-poetic vision of what might be. Because mimetic forms of representation—both in the conceptualization of identity and in aesthetic practice—do nothing but ossify the relationship between any given I and its world, the early Romantics consciously and intensively use and develop other forms of language in their attempts to break apart the agonistic duel, rehabilitating allegory and inserting the imagination into political discourse.42 Indeed, it is the impossibility of the narrative of Novalis's "Faith and Love" that makes the text as radical as it is. Novalis published "Faith and Love" in the newly founded 'Jahrbiicher der Preufiischen Monarchic unter der Regierung von Friedrich Wilhelm III" (Yearbooks of the Prussian monarchy under the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm III), thereby inserting his poetic text into a politically denned realm and disrupting the discourse of the latter. Although by all accounts the king did not understand the text, its subversive potential was apparently recognized, for soon thereafter the Prussian censors forbade him from further publication. For this reason the "Political Aphorisms" that follow "Faith and Love" here remained unpublished at the time. What is particularly interesting in this text is the convergence of

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two of its layers—one external (form-related), the other internal (content-related)—in the issue of representation. If the mode of representation deployed here is nonmimetic—that is, reflective, fragmentary, elusive—and thus implies the rejection of the classical aesthetic tradition, the concept of "representation" within the political context of the state is also put into question and revised within the narrative. In a Brouillon fragment, Novalis plays with these intermingling possibilities: POLITICS. . . . the monarch—or the government officials—are state representatives—state mediators. . . . The cleverer and livelier its members are, the livelier arid more personal the state is. The genius of the state shines forth from every genuine citizen—just as in a religious community a personal God, so to speak, reveals itself in a thousand forms. The state and God, like every spiritual being, do not appear individually, but in a thousand, manifold forms. (UB 398)

Novalis thus radically revises the structure of representation, in keeping with the structure of consciousness and signification that he developed in the Fichte Studies. The power of reflection is unleashed in the construction of a reciprocal relationship between the signifying subject and its object of signification, as they are striving toward (unattainable) union. Thus, when Novalis says elsewhere that "the whole state comes down to representation" (UB 782), the statement is no longer legible in the conventional political sense.43 Power and authority do not inhere in the king himself as the symbolic embodiment and hence the one true representative of the state, nor does the structure of representation itself fulfill a legitimating function for that state's static system; quite the contrary. With the power of poesy, the representational power of the king and queen in "Faith and Love" is no longer based on a mechanistic relationship between the ruler and the ruled, but rather on an exemplary, transformative one: "All human beings must become capable of ascending the throne" (FL 18). By undoing the chimera of referentiality in the structure of representation, and by suggesting that the state (and its constituent parts) be taken up into the realm of the imaginary, Novalis challenges the monarchy's existing claim to authority. Thus, while "Faith and Love" may, when read most literally, be seen to be a reactionary affirmation of monarchist structures, it can just as easily be seen as undermining that structure in a radical, even anarchistic gesture.


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Equally important is Novalis's representation of the state in terms of a marriage: "A true royal couple is for the whole human being what a constitution is for the understanding alone" (FL 15). By adding, on this personal level, the representation of another relationship of mutuality, namely, the movement of the I toward its other—the Non-I (signified here as a You)—Novalis effectively doubles the poetic power of the move toward the absolute in "Faith and Love." In a continuation of the Brouillon fragment on politics quoted earlier, Novalis reiterates this connection between the personal and the political: "We are not at all I—we can and should, however, become I. We are kernels of the I. We should transform everything into a You—into a second I. It is only in this way that we elevate ourselves to the absolute I— which is simultaneously One and everything" (UB 398). Novalis's transposition of the image of love—the idealized I-Yoti relationship that signifies the suspension of ego boundaries—onto the instrumentalized notion of state relations in "Faith and Love" is a highly politically charged demand for the impossible.11 As the title of this collection of political fragments indicates, faith, or belief, is the basis upon which radical illusion operates; it is that belief that fuels the I in its persistent if never-ending search for itself (FS 3), and that same belief that drives the fantasy in new directions, making us receptive to the unexpected and transforming our realities: "All of representation is based on a making-present—of the nonpresent and so on—(marvelous power of fiction.) My 'Faith and Love' is based upon representational faith" (UB 782). For Novalis, the presentation of the nonpresent will release an undefined power—the power of fiction. For the Romantics, this power is simultaneously the weakness of all "illusions," or products of the imagination. For while they are not bound into the empirical world and hence can never be consumed by its binary logic, these illusions are acted out in an aesthetic realm that is itself idealized: "Belief is the operation of illuding—the basis of illusion—all knowledge, at a distance, is belief—any concept that is outside of me is a thing. All knowledge ends and begins with belief" (UB 601). Ultimately, the project remains a matter of "belief." And, as we have seen in both the Fichte Studies and "Faith and Love," belief can inspire the ultimate acknowledgment of difference as well as the desire to sublate that difference in the realm of art. The Romantics' critique of society has often been discarded as essentially aesthetic, apolitical, ahistorical. But, as we have seen in the

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case of Novalis, they were concerned more than anything else with escaping the web of either reformative or revolutionary political discourse in the traditional sense. In "Faith and Love," Novalis wants to address politics as one sphere within society that is—perhaps more visibly than others, but not in contrast to others—marked by agonistic relationships, by objedification and the reduction of people to "machinery," as stated in the "Earliest Program." When Novalis takes the king and queen of Prussia and turns them into representations of something besides authority, he not only undermines their abstract legitimating function, but also uses them and the language of the monarchy to project Romantic ideals, such as those formulated in the "Earliest Program" of a "moral world, divinity, immortality," onto a new kind of state that, under the signs of "love" and "marriage," would carry with it a completely different economy of human relations. The problem remains, of course, that "love" and "marriage" as Novalis engages them are highly idealized constructs. Although they are meant to aid in the transformation of an instrumentalized, rationalized society, one cannot help, two hundred years later, but ask whether Novalis merely overlooked the implicitly patriarchal mechanisms at work in these imagined relationships. In the attempt to escape one system, Novalis, like others in the Jena Circle, becomes caught in another.45

Notes to Introductory Essay 1. Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents. The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 113. 2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Rnmantifism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 28. 3. See Manfred Frank's insightful discussion of ihe critique of the slate in the "Earliest Program," Der kommende Gott. Vorlesungen uber die Neue Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 155—56, 161—62, 176. 4. See the other introductory essays in this volume for more extensive elaborations of some of these concerns, in particular Lisa Roetzel on science and Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff on aesthetic philosophy. 5. Novalis was familiar with several versions of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of scientific knowledge). When Novalis was a student at Jena, Fichte was lecturing there. For more information on the origins of Novalis's "Fichte Studies," see Hans-Joachim Malil's introduction to the "Philosophische Studien der Jahre 1795/96 (FichteStudien)" (Philosophical studies of 1795/96 [Fichte Studies],) Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mahl, and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammcr, 1981), 29-37. "Fichte Studies" is abbreviated "FS" in references in the text, along with


6g

the number of the fragment. The Universal Brouillon is abbreviated VB, and "Faith and Love," "FL." 6. Simone dc Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxii. 7. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschafislehre): With the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Healh and John Lachs (New York: Meredith, 1970), 94. We have chosen to translate the word VKssenschaftslehre as "Theory of Scientific Knowledge" instead of as "Science of Knowledge," as in Heath's and Lach's translation of the title, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre). The term Lehre (theory) in the word Wissenschaftslehre is obscured in their translation, which emphasizes the terms Wissen (knowledge) and Wissenschaft (science); we therefore have chosen the phrase "Theory of Scientific Knowledge" in order to express all three terms included in the word Wissenschaftslehre. 8. For an extremely helpful exposition of Novalis's critique of Fichte's sentence of identity see Geza von Molnar, Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 29—33. See a'so Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, 37—39. 9. We use von Molnar's translation here, but replace his term "Ego" with "1" (ibid., 29). Novalis's notion of the Ich is primarily a philosophical concept, which is why we chose to translate it as "I" rather than as "Ego," which might lead the reader astray, calling to tnind the use of the term in the American field of ego psychology. See Winfried Menninghaus's explanation of Fichte's notion of absolute sell-positing in "Die fruhromantische Theorie von Zeichen und Mctapher," German Quarterly 62.1 (1989): 54-55. For a lucid discussion of Fichte's inability to think of identity and differentiation together as "co-original," see Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of SelfConsciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55-58. 10. Novalis transforms the traditional concept of God by defining it not as a personalized, theological term, but as a general principle that is at work in all aspects of life; for instance, here God is equated with the absolute I (see also The Universal Brouillon 005.314,398,775). 11. See von Molnar's discussion of the relationship between "1" and "Thou" in Novalis Romantic Vision, Ethical Context, Ga.We chose to translate the word Du as "You" in order to avoid the religious connotations and formality of the word "Thou." 12. For an insightful discussion of the "radical otherness" of the absolute in early Romantic thinking, see Menninghaus, "Die fruhromantische Theorie," 51. 13. Manfred Frank points to this paradoxical simultaneity of opposites when he says that for Schelling, "the Absolute is both unity and the manifold" (What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wrilke and Richard T. Gray [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 263). 14. This fragment is crucial for Menninghaus's reading of the early Romantics' critique of transcendence in "Die fruhromantische Theorie," 51. 15. In an effort to appease Fichte in his letter of November 19, 1800, for instance, Schelling indicates that he plans to come back to Fichte's system and "add breadth" to it. 16. For an insightful discussion of the "Grundstruktur rellexiver Inversion" in Novalis's thinking, see Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz's "Ordo inversus. Zu einer Rcflcxionsfigur bei Novalis, Holderlin, Kleist und Kafka," in Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift fur Arthur Ilenkel, cd. Herbert Anton et al. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), especially 77-79. See also the General Introduction to this volume and note 29 to the texts in Part I. 17. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, 38.

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18. Jacques Lacan, "A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness," in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli and John Forrester (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1991), 46. 19. Ibid. See Frank's reading of Lacan's notion of reflection and the narcissistic subject, in What Is Neostructuralism?2Q2. 20. Novalis says, "Consciousness has to be simple and infinite" (FS 317). 21. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 80. 22. See Scyhan's lucid discussion of this activity of "representing the process of representation itself in Representation and Its Discontents, 45. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. For an excellent discussion of the development of this term in eighteenthcentury philosophy, see Manfred Frank's article, '"Intellektuale Anschauung': Drei Stellungnahmen zu einern Deutungsversuch von SelbstbewuBtsein: Kant, Fichte, Holderlin/Novalis," in Die Aktualitdt der Friihromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Horisch (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1987), 96-126. 25. See Frank, "'Intellektuale Anschauung,'" 114-15. 26. Frank comes to a similar formulation: "the being of absolute identity can only be expressed in forms that do not befit it, indeed are opposite it: as 'nonbeing, non-identity, sign,' . . . substitute forms of that which is actually meant, but which is missed" (ibid., 123; our translation). 27. See ibid., 123-24. 28. Novalis, LogologischeFragmenteS^, N 2: 542. On this level, early Romanticism is an eminently social practice and issues a transformative challenge to all disciplines, as formulated in Novalis's own never-completed project of an encyclopedia of knowledge, the notes for which are contained in his Universal Brouillon (see Andreas Michel's and Assenka Oksiloff s introduction to Part II of this volume). 29. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 206. 30. In "The Freudian Unconscious and Ours" in the Four Fundamentals, Lacan says: "the unconscious is structured like a language" (20). For a discussion of this statement and for references to Lacan's association of the Other with the unconscious and language, see Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 108-9, ll&31. Lacan, "The Subject and the Other: Alienation," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 206. 32. Lacan, "From Love to the Libido," in ibid., 198. For a discussion of how Lacan's notion of the letter "pre-scribes" the subject in place of the signifier, see Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 108. For insights into the subject's subjection to the letter in Lacan, see also the Translators' Preface to this book (x-xi). 33. For an insightful discussion oi how the subject in Lacan is split and torn asunder by language, see Slavqj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 173-74. Frank suggests that the subject vanishes or ceases to exist "as subject" within the symbolic order in Lacan's theories (What Is Neostructuralism ? 305). 34. We use male-gendered terms such as "he" here and in our translations in order not to obscure the sexism of the early Romantics' language. 35. See Kristin Pfefferkorn's discussion of how language in Novalis's "Monologue" (here translated as "Soliloquy") misleads the speaker or writer, in Novalis: A Romantic's


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Theory of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 65, and Zizek's references to how language subverts the subject's intentions in Lacan, in The Sublime Object of Ideol-

ogy, !7536. Lacan, "Introduction of the Big Other," in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2, 244. 37. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1977), 284. 38. For a helpful discussion of the early Romantics' attempts to appropriate foreign cultures, yet maintain their difference, see Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, 80-81. 39. Novalis does not question the possibility of signification, as Lacan does in his poststructuralist work. In Lacan's theories on signification, which are much more radical than Novalis's, the subject cannot merely choose a sign that makes sense to another person and thus successfully communicate with him or her, as in Novalis's thinking, because the signified, or concept that the subject attempts to attach to the signifier, always slides away, leaving a chain of signifiers without a fixed reference point, or meaning. For Lacan's thoughts on this aspect of signification, see "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," Ecrits, 153-54. See also Nancy's and LacoueLabarthe's excellent readings of Lacan's notion of the bar and significance, the nonsignifying, resistant aspect of signification (The Title of the Letter, 36, 61—64, 112). 40. For an insightful discussion of the relation between the work of the early Romantics and Saussure on arbitrary signs, see Menninghaus, "Die fruhromantische Theorie," 48-49. 41. Novalis clearly shares their view, however, and does make occasional direct references, such as the characterization of Prussia's administration as that of a factory ("Faith and Love" 36). 42. See Paul de Man's discussion of Romanticism and allegory in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228. See the discussion of this essay in Jochen Schulte-Sasse's General Introduction to this volume. 43. Fragment 782 of the The Universal Brouillon is of central importance for an understanding of "Faith and Love." 44. King Friedrich Wilhelm III ascended the Prussian throne in 1797, and was accompanied by a popular wife, Luise; Novalis was clearly counting on a moment of young hope in a new administration to add to the political force of his text. See note 73 to the texts in Part I for more information on Queen Luise. 45. For more on the complex relationship of Romanticism to patriarchy, see Lisa Roetzel's introduction to Part IV of this volume.

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i. Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism (1796)' —an ethics. Since all of metaphysics will henceforth fall under morality, of which Kant with his two practical postulates provided only an example, but did not exhaust anything, this ethics will be nothing other than a complete system of all ideas, or, which is the same thing, of all practical postulates. The first idea is naturally the notion of myself as an absolutely free being. Together with the free, self-conscious being, an entire world emerges out of nothingness—the single true and thinkable creation out of nothingness. Here I will descend onto the fields of physics. The question is this: How must a world for a moral being be constituted? I would like to restore wings to our plodding physics, which is weighed down by laborious experiments. So if philosophy provides the ideas, and experience the data, we can at last arrive at a general physics, something which I expect from future generations. It does not seem that present physics could satisfy a spirit as creative as ours is, or should be. From nature I come to human artifice [A-lenschenwerk], First, the idea of humanity—I want to show that there is no idea of the state, because the state is something mechanical, just as there is no idea of a machine. Only that which is a matter of freedom can be called an idea. Thus we must transcend the state as well! For every state necessarily manipulates free people like machinery [ mechanisches Rdderwerk], and it should not do so; hence it must cease to exist. You see for yourselves that here all ideas of eternal peace, and so on, are only subordinate ideas to a higher idea. At the same time, I would like to lay down the principles for a history of humanity, and to lay bare the whole wretched human artifice of state, constitution, government, legislature. At last the ideas of a moral world, divinity, immortality are developing—overthrow of all superstition, persecution of the priesthood that recently has been feigning reason, through reason itself, and the absolute freedom of all spirits that carry the intellectual world within themselves and must seek neither God nor immortality outside of themselves. Finally, the idea that unites all, the idea of beauty, taken in the higher Platonic sense. I am now convinced that the highest act of reason is an aesthetic act, in that reason embraces all ideas, and that in beauty alone are truth and goodness joined together, The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet. The people with no aes-

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thetic sense are our philosophers of the letter. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. Without an aesthetic sense, one cannot be ingenious in anything; one cannot even reason ingeniously about history. Here it must become evident what those people are lacking who do not understand ideas and who admit frankly enough that they are in the dark when it comes to anything beyond graphs and charts. In this way, poesy attains a higher level of dignity, it becomes again what it was in the beginning—the teacher of humanity? for there is no more philosophy, no more history'—the art of poesy [Dichtkunst] alone will outlive all other sciences and arts. At the same time, we hear so often that the masses must have a sensuous religion. Not only the masses, but also the philosopher is in need of it. Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of imagination and of art, that is what we need! First, I will speak of an idea that, as far as I know, has not yet occurred to anyone—we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must serve ideas, it must become a mythology of reason* Until we make ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they are of no interest to the people and, conversely, until mythology is reasonable, the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus, in the end, enlightened and unenlightened must shake hands, mythology must become philosophical, and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make the philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity will reign among us. No longer the scornful glance, no longer the blind trembling of the people before their sages and priests. Only then will we find the equal cultivation of all powers, those of the single person as well as of all individuals. No power will be suppressed any longer; then, universal freedom and equality of the spirits will reign!—A higher spirit sent from heaven must found this new religion among us, it will be the final, the greatest work of humanity.

2, Selections from Fichte-Schelling Correspondence (i8oo-i8oi) 4 i. Fichte to Schelling, November 15, 1800 [ . . . ] ! still do not agree with your opposition of transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature.5 It all seems to rest on a confusion between

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ideal and real activity, an error which both of us have made on occasion and which I hope to rectify once and for all through my new presentation. In my opinion, the object is not joined to consciousness, nor consciousness to the, object, but rather both are immediately united in the I as the ideal-real and the real-ideal. The reality of'nature is another matter. Nature appears in transcendental philosophy as fully given [gefunden], that is, finished and complete, and furthermore it is discovered not according to its own laws but according to the immanent laws of the intellect (as ideal-real). Science, which, through a skillful abstraction, makes nature alone its object, must certainly posit nature as absolute (precisely because it abstracts from the intellect), and must have nature construct itself by means of a fiction; similarly, transcendental philosophy has consciousness construct itself through the same type of fiction. I do not have your deduction of the three dimensions of space before me as I write this letter and I have no time to look it up. My personal thoughts on the matter are as follows: ( i ) The original space or space as intuition has no dimensions whatsoever. In each instance, whether large or small, it is a sphere; and any activity of the imagination with respect to it is only an attempt to expand or contract this sphere. Thus the deduction of the three dimensions is not the task of the pure theory of scientific knowledge6 but rather that of the philosophy of mathematics, on the basis of which the philosophy of nature assumes that deduction. (2) The three dimensions come about through the process of abstract thought in space and are nothing other than the general forms of thought themselves. First there is the point, abstraction from the infinite number of points that surround the point in the sphere (from which will later follow squareness, since everything is round in the intuition); this is the form of positing in general. Then the line, the abstraction made in the point continues; otherwise there would be a concrescence of an endless number of points at each point of the line: form: Kant's determinant judgment. Plane (I will not refer to the part on abstraction anymore)—its form: Kant's reflective judgment. Body: Kant's reason, which posits totality and comes closest to intuition. The body is thus actually a space as desired by the intuition. Only through squareness does it divulge the work of thought and abstraction. [. , .]

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a. Schelling to Fichte, November 19, 1800 [. . .] The opposition between transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature is the main concern here. I can only assure you this much: I do not draw this opposition in order to differentiate between ideal and real activity; my aims are somewhat higher. I describe the object that is joined to consciousness and consciousness that is joined to the object in the introduction, where I first attempt to rise above the common point of view to a philosophical one.7 In the latter that unity appears, to be sure, as a joining together. You most likely do not believe me capable of thinking that the same is also true of the system itself. But if you nevertheless want to check where, in the context of the system, I allow for ideal and real activity to become simultaneously objective, that is, productive (in the theory of the productive intuition), you will find that I, as do you, posit both as activities of one and the same I. Thus, the reason for making this opposition cannot be found here. Rather, the reason lies in the fact that precisely this I as idealreal, as only objective (and for this reason simultaneously productive) I is nothing other in its producing but Nature, of which the I of intellectual intuition, or that of self-consciousness, is only a higher power [Polenz]. I can by no means imagine reality in transcendental philosophy as merely discovered, not even as discovered by the immanent laws of the intellect; for reality is discovered according to these immanent laws only by the philosopher, but not by the object of philosophy, which is not that which finds, but rather precisely that which produces. In fact, even the philosopher does not consider reality as merely discovered. It is only common consciousness that does so. I will present to you briefly the development of my thinking over the years up until the present. First of all, I am omitting anything concerning the theory of scientific knowledge for it is entirely selfcontained, there is nothing to change or to do with it; it is complete, and so it must be according to its nature. But the theory of scientific knowledge (namely the pure one, as it was set up by you) is not yet philosophy proper; for you claim, if I understand you correctly, that the theory of scientific knowledge functions logically throughout but has nothing at all to do with reality. It is, as far as I can tell, the formal proof of idealism, hence the science as such. On the other hand, what I want to call philosophy is the materialproofof idealism. Here, nature must indeed be deduced, with all of its determinations, in its objectiv-

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ity, in its independence, not from the I, which is itself objective, but from the subjective and the philosophizing I. This takes place in the theoretical part of philosophy. It develops through an abstraction from the general theory of scientific knowledge; for one abstracts from the subjective (intuitive) activity, which posits the subject-object in self-consciousness as identical with itself, by which positing of identity the subject-object first becomes equal to the I (the science of knowledge never sublates this identity and is precisely for this reason ideal-realistic). What remains after diis abstraction is the concept of the pure (only objective) subject-object; this concept is the principle of the theoretical, or, as I believe I can rightfully call it, the realistic part of philosophy. The /that is the subject-object of consciousness, or as I also call it, the subject-object to the second power [das potenzirte Subject-Object], is only consciousness taken to a higher power. The I is the principle of the idealistic (what has been called the practical until now) part of philosophy, which first obtains its grounding through the theoretical part. The sublation of the antithesis that was posited through this first abstraction brings about not just a philosophical, but a truly objective, ideal-realism (art); this sublation takes place in the philosophy of art, in the third part of a philosophical system. Now, I do not know if i ) you would argue against me that the Theory of Scientific Knowledge equals philosophy, philosophy equals the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, that the terms cancel each other out; then we would be quibbling over words. If you call science of knowledge philosophy and allow me to call what I previously termed theoretical philosophy, physics (as understood by the Greeks),8 and what I called practical philosophy, ethics (likewise in the Greeks' sense), then I will be satisfied. What I call philosophy of nature is precisely for this reason, as I claim, a completely different science from the theory of scientific knowledge. Philosophy of nature can never stand in opposition to the theory of scientific knowledge, but it can stand in opposition to idealism, and to transcendental philosophy if that is how one terms idealism (as I have done in the above-mentioned introduction). Now, however, as you most likely can see, I no longer regard natural and transcendental philosophy as opposed sciences but merely as opposite parts of one and the same whole, namely, of the system of philosophy. They are opposed to each other in exactly the same way that theoretical and practical philosophy have been up to now.

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If, however, you 2) claim that what I call purely theoretical philosophy is thus precisely that science to which you refer in your letter, the one, namely, which, through free, abstraction, makes nature alone its object and allows it therefore to construct itself by means of a (permitted) fiction, then I am fully in agreement, provided you do not take this abstraction to mean one from which something merely real remains, for that would be completely useless. After such an abstraction an ideal-real remains, only as such merely objective and not comprehended in its own intuition. In a word, what remains is the same as that which appears in a higher power as the I; only you may well notice that it does make a difference in the result whether the philosopher immediately takes up his object in the highest power (as I), or in the lower power. In the theory of scientific knowledge, precisely because it is a theory of knowledge (since knowledge already indicates this highest power), the philosopher must certainly take up his object as 7 (that is, as something that is a knowing I from the outset, therefore not merely objective). This is not the case in the philosophy of nature, which (as a theoretical part of the system) comes about through abstraction from the theoretical-practical theory of scientific knowledge. Transcendental idealism is therefore only valid for those who originally take it upon themselves to start out from knowledge in the highest power, which is at once theoretical and practical; idealism is also valid for those who start out from the practical standpoint alone, but not for those who start out from the purely theoretical. From the perspective of theoretical philosophy, then, transcendental idealism cannot be sustained; rather, from it proceed those results for which I will, for brevity's sake, refer you to the last paragraphs of my discussion on the dynamic process in the enclosed second issue of my journal.9 I do not know if we can come to an agreement here since, in the end, by raising myself together with the object to the highest power where I am entirely One with it, I have to return to transcendental idealism. This may seem unnecessarily complicated to you. However, I have believed, and I still do, that this is the surest way of clearing up all misunderstandings concerning idealism once and for all. Be that as it may, please rest assured that if I seem to distance myself from you it is only in order to move even closer to you. Let me proceed on a tangent from the circle that you have drawn to enclose yourself with your theory of scientific knowledge; I will sooner or later, enriched with many

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treasures, I hope, return to your center and thus add breadth to your system in a manner that, in my opinion, it cannot achieve otherwise. This difference, which I predict will be resolved and result in the most perfect agreement, cannot therefore prevent us from publishing something together. It will stir up activity all the more if the public, without comprehending how this is possible, sees us move from seemingly different directions toward One goal. This will keep in check any type of criticism. And since you are too far above desiring for someone to be a mere disciple, you will surely look with favor upon the path that I want to take and, once you are convinced that it will lead to its goal, further me on my way. I need not tell you that I agree with you in all essential points of your system and that I therefore believe I understand you entirely. Wherever I disagree with an essential point (e.g., concerning the philosophy of religion), I assume that I do not yet understand you. This, however, is a point that at least until now has not prevented us from agreeing on the first principles; thus, it is an essential point, but notwith regard to first principles. I agree, at least to some extent, with what you say about the deduction of the three dimensions. Pure space has no dimensions, but for this very reason it is not a sphere, for the sphere, although it does not have length and width, does have depth. As a reflection on infinite space, the notion of space as sphere is therefore already a limited intuition. The philosophy of mathematics is, in my opinion, an abstraction of the philosophy of nature, just as the philosophy of merely formal thought, that is, logic, is an abstraction of the theory of scientific knowledge. The line, as that which expands and contracts only in one dimension, is the schema of arithmetic, whose series also has only this one dimension; the plane is the schema of geometry, and so on. But line, plane, and body come into being originally only in the philosophy of nature, and are introduced into the philosophy of mathematics only through abstraction. The philosophy of nature therefore cannot assume them as given. I admire the profound nature of the remainder of what you wished to impart to me. And it is quite possible that there is some point here on which we could agree. For the time being, however, I am certain about this much, namely, that—if it is not too much to ask of you, in light of your busy schedule, to read the essay On the Dynamic Process in the enclosed journals—you, too, will surely consider it proven that the three acts in nature (the acts of magnetism, of electricity and of the


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chemical process) correspond to the three dimensions and that these three in turn correspond to the acts of self-consciousness, sensation, and productive intuition in the I. From the point of view of reflection, however, it could be just as true that these three dimensions emerge again for us through determinantjudgment, reflective judgment, and reason, after having been posited without consciousness in those first acts. [. . .] ga. Fichte to Schelling, December 27, 1800 (from draft of letter, not used in actual letter) I wrote to you about some of our differences of opinion, my dear friend, not because I consider them obstacles to a common project (and I trust you did not take it this way either), hut rather so as to provide you with proof of my attentive reading of your works. However, I would charge anyone but you, whose truly godlike gift of divination I know, with being obviously wrong here. The matter stands as follows. After all that has so far been clearly presented, the subjective element of your subjective-objective nature can be nothing other than the analogon of our self-determination that, through thinking, we put into (undoubtedly our) creation of the imagination (i.e., nature, as noumenon)}" Now, the I cannot, inversely, be explained by that which has formerly been explained through the I itself. But I cannot imagine you capable of such an error; furthermore, I have known for a long time the real reason for this and other differences between us. It is the same reason why others are uncomfortable with transcendental idealism and why Schlegel and Schleiermacher prattle about their muddled Spinozism and the yet more muddled Reinhold about his Bardilianism.11 ft lies in the fact that I have not yet gotten to constructing my system of the intelligible world. [. . .] gb. Fichte to Schelling, December 27, 1800 (from actual letter) I believe that I understand you quite well, and that I already understood you in this way before. But I believe that these statements12 cannot be deduced from the existing principles of transcendentalism, but are, rather, contrary to them; and that they can only be grounded by further expanding transcendental philosophy in its very principles, a task that no doubt is urgent at the present time. I have not yet had time to systematically work out these expanded principles; the clearest indications of such a project can be found in the third book of my

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Destiny of Man [Bestimmung des Menschen}. Its elaboration will be my first priority as soon as I have finished the new presentation of my Theory of Scientific Knowledge. In a word: what is missing is a transcendental system of the intelligible world. I can only agree with your claim that the individuum}1' is only a higher power of nature, under the condition that I posit nature not just as phenomenon (and as such clearly engendered by the finite intellect, therefore not engendering it), but that I find something that is intelligible in nature of which, in a general sense, the individuum is the lower power; however, in relation to somethingwithin the intelligible (that which is only detertninable), the individuum is the higher power (the determined). It is in this system of the intelligible alone that we can understand each other and agree upon these and other differences. [...] 4. Schelling to Fichte, May 24, 1801 [...]! gather from this work of yours,14 as you will have gathered from the presentation of my system,15 which you must have received by now, that both of us admit but this one and only absolute Knowledge [Erkenntnis], which is the same and ever recurring in all cognition, and which it is our common task to present and to reveal in all knowledge [ Wissen] ,16 It is impossible to arrive at a common understanding with regard to this One Knowledge unless this Knowledge is also of the same nature; for it is precisely the unique nature of this Knowledge that allows for the unique certainty that comes with it. Once one attains this Knowledge, there is no possibility of error. We might express ourselves differently with respect to this Knowledge, seek to present it in very different ways, but we can no longer disagree about its nature, and if we ever did, I will gladly and willingly accept the blame. Once this Knowledge is formally established and rooted as the sole theme and principle of philosophical speculation, divine philosophy will have regained its complete freedom, and, like the object that it presents, it will repeat and bring to light in infinite forms and shapes only the one, the absolute. Whatever it touches will immediately become holy by virtue of its touch, and this Knowledge will transform everything into the divine itself. Thus, from now on there will be only one object, and one spirit, one cognition, one knowledge of this object; and from this first world of revelation, a second will arise through philosophy and art, as rich and manifold as the first, and yet it will be only a presentation, in thought and in works, of the One.


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I ask you, my dearest friend, to share your thoughts regarding the nature and the form of my presentation, for it is necessary to inquire as best one can into the original form through which the absolute must be presented; although, to be sure, the absolute will be unmistakable regardless of its form, as long as it is real. In the next issue, I hope to demonstrate conclusively how consciousness, or the /, evolves as the center [Mittagspunkt] of the existing absolute identity from this presentation. And since the I is the only identity that really exists, and all of nature is nothing but precisely this absolute identity insofar as it contains the ground of its own existence, idealism rises at this point as the true all-encompassing, inclusive, and penetrating sun. It becomes clear to what extent everything lives and dwells in the same, and in what an elevated sense all = I and only =!.[.. .] 5. Fichte to Schelling, May 31, 1801 (mailed on August 7, 1801) [...]! received your system of philosophy and the accompanying letter.17 In the introduction you say a number of problematic things with respect to my idealism and in your letter you speak of a common view of idealism. If you understand my idealism in a categorical manner, and hold that /share what may well be the common view of idealism, you continue to misunderstand my system. I do not have your earlier letter at hand, but you said there, if I remember correctly, that I admitted that certain questions had not been resolved by the principles developed thus far. However, I do not admit this at all. The Theory of Scientific Knowledge is not at all lacking in principles, but rather in completion; for the highest synthesis has not yet been reached, the synthesis of the spirits' world. When I undertook to perform this synthesis, people accused me of atheism.18 From what I gather about your system, we might agree with respect to the subject matter, not at all, however, with respect to its presentation, and this latter is an essential part of the matter. I believe, for example, and I think that I can prove, that your system on its own (without tacit elucidations from the Theory of Scientific Knowledge) is not, and never will be, conclusive. Your very first sentence proves this. I believe that this will become entirely clear to you in the new presentation (of the Theory of 'Scientific Knowledge). For the moment, only this. Questions as to whether the Theory of Scientific Knowledge conceives of knowledge subjectively or objectively, whether it is idealism or realism, make no sense, for these distinctions

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will be made only within the theory of scientific knowledge, not outside of it and before it. Indeed, they remain unintelligible without the theory of scientific knowledge. There is no special idealism or realism or philosophy of nature or the like that would be true; rather, there is only one science everywhere. This is the theory of scientific knowledge; all other sciences are but parts of the theory of scientific knowledge and are true and evident only to the extent that they are grounded in it. One cannot start out from being [Seyn] (everything toward which mere thinking is directed and, consequently, to which the real ground [Realgrund] can be applied, is being, even if one were to call it reason); rather, one must start out from seeing [Sehen]. In addition, it must be established that the identity of the ideal and the real ground = the identity of intuition and thinking. For example: consider that between two points there is only one straight line. Here you have first of all the act of self-apprehension, selfpenetration, the act of evidence [Akt derEvidenz], and this is my point of departure [ Grundpunkt]. One presupposes and states apodictically that this statement is true o/all possible lines and for all possible intellects; and one arrives at this in the following manner: one posits oneself with respect to the former as determined (as material), with respect to the latter as determinable. The former, that is, the form of selfapprehension, eventually results in the self as individual; the latter, where, in order to posit it as determinable, one posited the empty form of the I [Ichheit], eventually leads one to the spirits' world. The general (finite) consciousness is thus the absolute union of the consciousness of the world of spirits arid of the individual. The latter is the ideal ground of the former; the former is the real ground of the latter (though it can never be cognized and. penetrated through [the act of] evidence). I said that one posits oneself, that is, one's self-apprehension, one's collapsing of subject-objectivity, as determined. This happens within the absolute consciousness (which cannot be grasped and in turn reflected by any other consciousness); this determinedness, which is therefore absolute determinedness (not to be reflected and penetrated by any consciousness) = absolute determinedness of given reality, of being. (Being is—seeing that does not penetrate itself.) If, however, one posits this determinedness (we will approach it from another angle in what follows) as a quantum of the determinability [Bestimmbarkeit] that is opposed to it, then the real ground underlying the separation


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of precisely this quantum (and not more or less) lies beyond all consciousness; it is = X, forever impenetrable to evidence. Let us posit that absolute consciousness = A. Within it, then, the form of consciousness as that which is delerminable = B—I—C determinedness of consciousness, and within it there would be portrayed an ideal passage from C to B arid a real passage from B to C, the latter of which, however, can only be described in terms of form. In "a," we have the point of transition and the turning point [Wendepunkt] of opposing directions. (Here lies the ground for synthesis.) Let's leave aside consciousness A and move to C. Evidence is true o/all (in consciousness C) and for all (in consciousness B), which gives rise to the following question: where is the point of confluence and the turning point of this twofold validity? Answer: C itself is an in with respect to B, and a/orwith respect to itself. Nothing is true o/all that would not for this very reason be true for all, and vice versa: for the o/is nothing but the for, only understood as determined; and the for is nothing but the of, understood as determinable. The of has its real ground in the/or (and therefore the world of the of, the world of the senses, in the world of the for, the spirits' world [Geislerwelt\} precisely for the reason that, in the absolute consciousness, the former is the determined of the latter, the delerminable. It is true that the o/is the ideal ground of the for, the general is cognized through the particular, the spirit world through the world of the senses. We can have no determined (individual) consciousness at all without determinable consciousness (the universal one of finite reason), and vice versa. This law is the basic law of finitude, and this interplay [Wechselpunkt] is its standpoint [Standpunkt]. Nobody thinks himself, nor does he even suspect that he thinks himself, as certain as it is that he—thinks. This fact is also consciousness; and it comes to consciousness through the form of evidence, but in such a way that detemiinedness remains. An immediate consciousness of this sort (I am merely laying down some conclusions here) is the consciousness of activity, which in turn presupposes a concept of purpose as that which determines it, and this concept of purpose presupposes a concept of the object-as determinable: and it is only here, in this small region of consciousness that there lies a world of the senses: a nature. All of consciousness C is thus merely object of consciousness A. How-

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ever, it is absolutely binding for everyone, insofar as it is within the original form of consciousness A. This completely closed consciousness C,19 when taken up again by A, results in a system of the spirits' world (the above B) and in an incomprehensible real ground of the separateness of particular entities, and an ideal link of all = God. (This is what I call the intelligible world.) This last synthesis is the highest. If one wants to call that which remains impenetrable even to this gaze, being, and I mean absolute being, then God is pure being. This being as such, however, is not at all compression, but is agility through and through, pure transparency, light, not the light of reflecting bodies. It only appears this way to finite reason: it is therefore being only for reason, and not as such. The synthesis of consciousnesses A and C (A + C = A -t- C in X = absolute comprehension, and therefore the incomprehensible within every individual act of comprehension) is the principle of finite reason. The Theory of Scientific Knowledge develops its system on the basis of this principle; thus it indeed presents the universal consciousness of the entire spirits' world as such, and it is itself this consciousness. Each individuum is a particular perspective of this system on the basis of an individual ground [Grundpunkt] but this ground is impenetrable, that is, = X, to the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, which is itself science, that is, penetration of universal consciousness. It is not merely that the Theory of Scientific Knowledge cannot start from the individual as such; it cannot even arrive at it. Life, however, can factually (not genetically) penetrate this X. Every individual is a rational square of an irrational square root that is found in the entirety of the spirits' world; and the entire spirit world is, in its turn, the rational square of what—for it and its universal consciousness that everyone has and can have—is the irrational square root = the immanent light or God. [...] The world of the senses, however, or nature, is indeed nothing but appearance, precisely the appearance of the immanent light. (A philosophy of nature may start from the preestablished and accepted concept of nature. But this concept itself and its philosophy must, within the system of all knowledge, be deduced from the absolute X, determined by the laws of finite reason. An idealism, however, that would tolerate the existence of a realism alongside it would be meaningless; or else, it would have to be universal formal logic.) The latter, in particular, suggests how my philosophy stands in rela-


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tion to yours, as well as to the conjectures, wishfulness, and misunderstandings of our contemporaries. To the extent that one attributed any sort of individuality to my I, one had, to be sure, to account for the way in which this individuality was deduced from the I. As you can gather from the above, I deduce, too (this is where we agree); but God forbid it should be from nature, or a comprehensible universe, or anything whatsoever that functions as real ground. [. . .] 6. Schelling to Fichte, October 3, 1801 [. . .] The identity of ideal and real ground = the identity of thought and intuition. With this identity you are expressing the highest speculative idea: the idea of the absolute, where intuition is thought and thought is intuition. (For the sake of brevity, I refer to Kant's Critique of Judgment, § 76, Comment.)20 Because this absolute identity of thought and intuition is the highest principle, it is, if actually understood as absolute indifference, also necessarily the highest being. In contrast, the finite and conditioned being (the individual physical object, for instance) always expresses a specific difference between thought and intuition. Here, ideal and real are obscured by each other. The unobscured indifference of both exists only in the absolute. To arrive most expediently at the intuition of this absolute indifference and of the highest being that is necessarily and directly connected to it, I would ask you to think of absolute space, which is precisely the highest indifference (which is also intuited) of ideality and reality, the highest transparency, clarity, the purest being we intuit. To you, being is essentially synonymous with reality [Realitdt], or even with the phenomenal world [ Wirklichkeit]. However, being as such no longer has an opposite, for it is itself the absolute unity of the ideal and the real. You insist that this highest being, which is no longer reality in opposition to ideality, be thought of as pure agility, as absolute activity. But you of all people certainly cannot overlook the fact that absolute activity = absolute stasis ( = being), and that one cannot therefore attribute action to the true absolute any more than to absolute space, which is, as was demonstrated above, its universal model and of which one can only say that it is, but never that it is active. (I thus hope you will come to the opposite conclusion, namely, that what can be truly attributed with having action is precisely for this reason not the true absolute.) This absolute, I claim in my "Presentation,"21 exists in the form of

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quantitative difference (this is intuition that must always be a determined one) in the particular, and in the form of quantitative indifference (this is thought) in the whole. (Taken as a unity, it is the absolute identity of thought and intuition. There is as much in thought as in intuition and vice versa; the one is equal to the other.) Your final synthesis is similar: it is that which is simultaneously the incomprehensible real ground of separate individual entities and the ideal ground of the unity of all. You thus raise yourself to that being which is not reality—not the phenomenal realm—but rather, beyond all opposition of ideal and real, is the identity of the two. But, according to you, this being is the final synthesis. I would assume, however, that if it is also the highest, then it is precisely for this reason the absolute, the unconditioned itself, and at the same time unquestionably the first, from which everything must proceed. Either you must never go beyond seeing, as you call it (that is, beyond subjectivity itself), and each individual's 1 must be and remain, as you state in the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, the absolute substance; or, if you do go beyond it to even a single incomprehensible real ground, all this reference to subjectivity remains merely provisional until the true principle is found. Furthermore, I do not know how you can defend your position if, after you have reached the final synthesis, others step in who, treating this synthesis as the first, set out in the opposite direction and claim that your principle is only a provisional one and that your philosophy, like Kant's, is merely propaedeutic. Surely an undertaking in which the highest principle is a result, a final synthesis, is merely propaedeutic. Forgive me if I come to this conclusion in advance without waiting for you to make your point, and if I have dared to assume that once you have made it, such a conclusion will be inevitable. When you say that "with respect to subject matter, we may be in general agreement, even if our presentations are very different—these, however, are essential," you make it clearer than I ever could that, in order to preserve your system, one must first decide to proceed from seeing and to end with the absolute (that which is truly speculative) approximately in the same manner that, in Kant's philosophy, moral law must come first and God last for the system to remain in place. The necessity to proceed from seeing confines you and your philosophy to a thoroughly conditioned series in which nothing of the absolute remains. The awareness or feeling that you must have already had about


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this led you, in the Destiny of Man, to transfer the speculative to the realm of belief since you certainly could not find it in your notion of knowledge. To speak of belief in philosophy is, in my opinion, as unacceptable as it is in geometry- You explained in the same essay in so many words that the ur-real, by which you must mean the genuinely speculative, is not to be found in knowledge. Is this not sufficient proof that your notion of knowledge is not the absolute, but rather that it remains in some way conditioned knowledge, which would reduce philosophy, if your notion of knowledge were predominant, to a science like any other? What is now your highest synthesis was fortunately absent from your previous presentations, for, according to these, the moral world order (without doubt what you now refer to as the real separation of the particular entities and the ideal unity of all) was God himself; if I judge it correctly, this is no longer the case and this changes considerably the whole face of your philosophy. [...] Your approach is such that you must consider your philosophy as absolute-true simply because it is not false. Spinoza posits thought and extension as the two attributes of substance. He does not deny that everything that exists can also be explained through the simple attribute of thought and through simple modes of infinite thought. He would not consider this manner of explanation false—he simply would not consider it absolute-true, but rather as itself contained within the absolute. Our case is somewhat similar; from which you might gather, among other things, why, despite our difference from the very beginning, I have been able to make use of idealism as a tool, and even, as you yourself said, to say so much about it that is clear and deep. You add that the real ground of the separation of particular entities is incomprehensible. It is certainly incomprehensible to the reflection of the understanding that works its way up from the bottom and finds itself caught, through the opposition of the finite (your notion of separation) and the infinite (your notion of the unity of all), in an insoluble contradiction (Kant's antinomies). However, it is not incomprehensible to reason, which posits absolute identity, the inseparable coexistence of the finite with the infinite as original, and proceeds from the eternal, which is neither finite nor infinite, but eternally both. This eternity of reason [Vernunftewigkeit\ is the genuine principle of all speculation and of true idealism. It is that which destroys the causal chain of the finite and which precedes the finite according to

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its nature (natura) in every moment of time, just as it originally did, and just as, in another sense, it never came before the finite, since reason, according to its nature, still exists now and will always exist. [. . .] I wish very much that you had been consistent in observing what you articulate in your last letter: "one can only determine what idealism and realism are from within the Theory of Scientific Knowledge," (It follows directly from this that the true theory of scientific knowledge, that is, genuine speculative philosophy, is neither idealism nor realism. Have you not, however, clearly described your philosophy asddealism?) If you had observed this, you would have been more receptive to my claim that the genuine system of philosophy can be fully indifferent externally, but differentiated internally. This concept of the absolute indifference of the true system on the outside was alone sufficient in preventing you from regarding my system as two philosophies placed side by side. In my letters concerning dogmatism and criticism,22 I may have been quite clumsy in expressing that first, still raw, and undeveloped conviction that truth lies on a higher plane than idealism. Nevertheless, I can point to these letters as a very early document of that feeling which played no lesser a role in your work at the time of the atheism dispute and which forced you to recover the ur-real (speculative) that was missing in knowledge (in idealism, that is) through your notion of belief. My idealistic and realistic philosophy interact in precisely the same manner as your notions of knowledge and belief. Furthermore, you too failed to sublate the opposition between these two, and if you had your doubts about me there, I for my part certainly can no longer follow you here. [.. .] If I make the claim that there are myths in the Old Testament and someone responds by asking how that could be if it teaches the unity of God, would it be my fault if this person cannot hear the word "mythology" without associating it with the trivial notion of a theory of the gods? Many react to my use of the term "philosophy of nature" in nearly the same manner. Is it my fault if one attributes to me no concept of nature other than the one used by every chemist and pharmacist? But it is too easy for Fichte, who has all kinds of other weapons at his disposal, to think he is doing my workjustice by simply taking me to task on this term alone. It surprises me even more that you turn the philosophy of nature into such an arbitrary term since you yourself admit that you are still completely ignorant of this part of my system.


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You claim that "the sensual world, or (??) nature, is nothing but the appearance of the immanent light." When I read this I asked myself if it did not perhaps occur to Fichte that the purpose of the philosophy of nature was to prove precisely this. What a shame it is that your reading of my latest presentation could not persuade you of this! Clearly, you are convinced that you have annihilated nature through your system, although for the most part you never break out of nature. It makes absolutely no difference from a speculative point of view whether I identify- the series of conditioned objects as real or ideal, for in neither case do I break out of the finite. By concentrating on the finite, you believed to have answered all the demands of the speculative; and this is a main point of difference between us. [. . .] 7. Fichte to Schelling, October 15, 1801 [...]! can indicate the point where we differ in a few words. You say that I claim in my presentation that "the absolute" (about which and about whose determination I am in complete agreement with you, and the intuition of which I have possessed for a long time) "exists in the form of quantitative difference." To be sure, this is what you claim; and ita is for this reason that I have found your system to be erroneous and have put aside your presentation; for no amount of reasoning and argumentation can right what is in principle wrong. Spinoza does the same thing, as do all dogmatists, and this is the fundamental mistake. The absolute would not be the absolute if it existed in any specific form. Where, however, the form (and the quantity, to be sure—here again I am in agreement with you) under which it appears stems from, where this form originally dwells, or how the One becomes the Infinite and then the totality of the manifold, this is the question that a completed speculation has to solve; a question that you must necessarily ignore since you discover this form along with the absolute itself. Here, thus, in an area that you have closed off through your new system and that, one might safely say only now, has never been known to you, lies the idealism of the theory of scientific knowledge, and of Kant—not in the depths where you locate it. If you would be so kind as to reflect upon this point that cannot escape you, and, at the same time, determine how it was possible that you overlooked it (because, I think, you approached the absolute directly with your thinking, without taking account of your thinking and of the fact that it might be nothing but this latter that, through its own

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immanent laws, formed the absolute unbeknownst to you), then you would soon come to know true idealism and recognize how you constantly misunderstand me. [. . .]

3. Novalis: Fichte Studies (1795-96)" i. The statement a is a is nothing but a positing, a differentiating, and a linking. It is a philosophical parallelism. In order to make a more distinct, a is divided. Is is put forward as universal content [ Gehalt], a as determined form. The essence of identity can only be put forward in a pseudoproposition [Scheinsatz]. We leave the identical in order to represent it: either this happens only apparently, and we are led by the imagination to believe it—what already is, happens—naturally through imaginary separating and uniting; or we imagine [vorstellen] it by means of its nonbeing, through something not identical—a sign—a determined sign for a uniformly determining one—this uniformly determining sign must actually determine the communicated sign immediately, through precisely the same movements as the I—free and yet just like the I. Taste and genius. The former, if it occurs by a form of mediation—a mental image [ Vorstellung] of my act of producing the sign or merely my intention, my meaning', the latter, if it produces it directly, without this mediation, the mental image of my causality— like the I. The former is mere taste; the latter, the taste of genius. This is contained within the statement: if A exists, then A exists. The rest can be explained out of the category of relations. Application of that which has already been said to the statement: 1 am I. Grammatically it contains the same thing three times over. There can be no more content within the statement "I am I" than there is in the pure concept of the I. What is I? Absolute thetic faculty. The sphere of the I must encompass everything for us. As content, the self can recognize content. This recognizing points toward its being /. As the ground of all determination for the I, or of all form, it is thus the ground of its own determination or form. In short, it is a self-sufficient determination of the content, and with this, it has given itself all determination. Spontaneity of its determination: it presupposes A, for example, because it presupposes a.

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Why must the first act be a free act? Because it presupposes no other act—it is because it is, not because another one is. Thus the determination of the I, as I, is free. An act that is not free can only be so because of another act, and so on. Identity. Because the I is a thoroughly determined I, it can only recognize the universal content within itself. To the extent that it displaces universal content outside of itself, it has to believe in it. The I cannot know it, as a determination, for otherwise the universal content would have to be in the I. What I do not know, but rather feel (the I feels itself, as content), I believe. The act of placing outside must be free, but only indirectly. It is dependent on the first act, of which we are not aware, hence we feel the former as not free. Why we are not aware of the first act: because it is this act alone that makes awareness possible; awareness thus lies within its sphere. Therefore, the act of awareness cannot leave its own sphere and try to embrace the mother sphere. Dividing and uniting. Pure and empirical I. Concerning Consciousness

2. Knowledge comes from something—it always refers to some thing— in general, it is a reference to being, within the determined being, namely, within the !.[...] What kind of a relation is knowledge? It is a being outside of being that is nevertheless within being. Dividing—uniting. Consciousness is a being outside of being that is within being. But what is that? Outside-of-being need not be a proper being. An improper being outside of being is an image—thus, outside-ofbeing must be an image of being within being. Consciousness is therefore an image of being within being. A more detailed explanation of image. Sign. Theory of the sign. Theory of representation or of the nonbeing that is within being in order to allow being to be there in a certain way for itself. Theory of space and time with respect to the image. 3. [• . .] In order to determine the I we must refer it to something. Referring occurs through differentiating—both occur through the thesis of an absolute sphere of existence, which is mere being—or chaos. If there is yet a higher sphere, it would be the one between being

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and nonbeing—the hovering between the two—something unspeakable, and with this we have the concept of life. [. . .] Here philosophy stops in its tracks, and must do so—for life consists precisely in the fact that it cannot be comprehended [begriffen]. Philosophy can concern itself only with being. The human being feels the boundary that encompasses everything for him, including himself: the first act. He has to believe in it just as certainly as he knows everything else. Consequently, we are not yet transcendent at this point, but rather in the I and for the I. In order to conceptualize itself, the I must imagine another entity like itself, must anatomize, so to speak. This other, equal entity is nothing other than the I itself. Similarly, the I becomes aware of this act of alienation and respective production only by means of this conceptual aid—it finds that the same must hold for itself; the act that precedes reflection occurs in no other way. [. . .] 4. Is not all philosophy meant only for the use or purpose of reflection? Therefore it must be dogmatic and appear transcendent. 5. What do we understand by "the I"? Didn't Fichte place everything too arbitrarily into the I? on what authority? Can an I posit itself as /without another I or a Non-I? In what way can I and Non-I be opposed to each other? 6. The I has hieroglyphical power.34 7. There must be a Non-I in order for the I to posit itself as I. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 8. The act in which the I posits itself as I must be connected to the antithesis, an independent Non-I, and the relationship to a sphere that encompasses them both—this sphere can be called God and I. 11.1. Theory of the sign or what can be true through the medium of language? 2. On philosophy as a whole—the possibility of a system, etc. 3. System itself. What is thought? Free, successive isolation outside of space. Speaking and writing? The same, only in a determined way within space. Determined representation of thought within space—Therefore


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space and time signify, determine, and hold each other in a mutual exchange—determined signs of thought. Relationship of the sign to the signified. Both exist in different spheres that can mutually determine one another. The signified is a free effect, as is the sign. Thus they are both the same in the signifying person—otherwise they are not at all the same—but this only for the signifying person— it is only in the signifying person that they refer to one another at all. 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 its referent] are interrelated for the signifying person alone, and neither of them has a relationship of necessity to the other for another signifying person. They are completely separate for a second signifying person. But thought, like everything else that is external, can only be communicated to a second signifying person through space, by means of an intuition or a feeling. (Space is the external condition, time the internal condition for sensual intuition or feeling.)25 Hence only through a sign. But if, as above, sign and signified are completely separate, if their relationship exists in the first signifying person alone, then it is only by chance or miracle that the signified comes across to the second signifying person by means of such a sign. Objectively and subjectively necessary signs, which are basically one and the same, are therefore the only ones through which something that is thought can be communicated. In order to communicate, the first signifying person need only choose such signs as exist in a relationship of necessity to the signified within the homogeneous being of the second signifying person. In this communication, the first signifying person will thus have to study the homogeneity of the foreign being with himself in this relationship. The necessity of the reference of a sign to a signified must lie in a signifying person. But in the latterboth are freely posited. Therefore, a relationship of free necessity for both must exist in the signifying person. The relationship must be free with regard to this signifying person—it can thus only be necessary with regard to the, signifying agent [der Bezeichnende] in general or to other signifying persons. One could

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call free necessity self-determination—consequently self-determination would be the character of the signifying agent in general or other signifying persons. Accordingly, the essence of self-determination would be synthesis: absolute positing of spheres—thesis: determined positing of spheres—antithesis: nondetermined positing of spheres. Each of these three is all three at once and this is the proof that they belong together. The synthesis is (or can be) thesis and antithesis. The same for the thesis, and for the antithesis. Originary schema. One in all, all in one. Each understandable sign must therefore stand in a schematic relationship to the signified. In order to make this clearer we must examine the originary schema more closely. The schema stands in a reciprocal relationship with itself. Each element is only what it is in relation to the others. The first signifier [das erste Bezeichnende] thus has found an originary schema in the second signifier—and accordingly it chooses the signs that will be communicated.26 The second signifier is only free insofar as it is necessary, and, conversely, it is only necessary insofar as it is free—in short: it is necessarily free. "Free" must be the last term because freedom came to the second signifier first, or appears last in the process of its being thought. It is free in the thesis (the opposite and the sphere only make up the predicate), and it must be this way so that in the schema the thesis is the thesis—as it must be. An antithesis [Gegensatz] must be distinguished from a nonthesis [Nichtsatz]. Antipodes and antivectors. Here in the application as well, the schema's character of all-unity becomes apparent. What is free can only be determined, and thus necessary; what is necessary can only be undetermined, arid thus free. Without sphere, thesis and antithesis must be interchangeable, must be able to be One or nothing—which are one and the same here. Thus I and NonI, without absolute I! Which is, however, only sphere, only on the presupposition (simultaneous supposition) [Voraussetzung (Milsetzung)] of thesis and antithesis.

We came this far in gaining knowledge of the second signifier and we now continue with it. Question: How can the first signifier recognize this schema and act accordingly? The first signifier will have painted its own image, unperceived, in the


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mirror of reflection, without forgetting to include that feature which shows that the image is painted from such a position that it paints itself. The first signifier is free according to the originary schema. If I give it a sign that is schematically related to the signified, then it will find— or rather, it will itself signify—the signified in its necessarily free manner. The first signifying person stands in a reciprocal relationship with the second. The first signifying person acts in accordance with the second in the sign, and the second signifying person acts in accordance with the first in the signified—a quasi-free contract. They must both desire [wollen] the interrelationship freely in order for the effect to take place. The signified precedes the signs, and hence the first signifier desires before the second, as it were. But he is only an "as it were" (for as soon as he thinks of sign and signified in relationship to one another, he anticipates the will of the other in the imagination . ..). The will of the other must decidedly and immediately join the actual act that takes place in the first signifying person—even if this determination is not clearly thought. [. . .] 12. [. . .] The highest representation of the incomprehensible is synthesis—union of the irreconcilable—positing of contradiction as noncontradiction, f. . .] We are speaking here only about the grounding of the possibility of reflection, or of systematic thought. [. . .] 15. Philosophy should not answer more than it is asked. It cannot create anything. It must be given something. Analysis. Philosophy organizes and explains this, which is to say, philosophy assigns it its place in the whole—where it belongs as cause (i) and effect (2). But what is philosophy's actual sphere of effectivity? Philosophy cannot be a learned skill. It must not depend on objects and knowledge that must be acquired, nor on a quantity of experience; otherwise every science would be philosophy. If these are sciences, then philosophy is not one. What, then, could it be? Philosophy deals with an object that is not learned. But we must learn all objects—thus it does not deal with any object at all. What is learned must, after all, be different from the learner. What is learned is an object; thus, the learner is not an object. Could philosophy, then, perhaps deal with the learner, that is, with us, when we learn objects? Philosophy itself is, however, in the learner. At this point, philosophy becomes self-contemplation. All! how the learner begins to eaves-

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drop on himself during this operation. He would then have to learn himself—for by learning we mean nothing other than looking at the object and impressing its features upon us. The learning process would thus become an object again. It cannot be self-contemplation, for then it would not be that which is required here. Perhaps it is a feeling of the self. What, then, is a feeling?27 Philosophy is originally a feeling. The philosophical sciences conceptualize the intuitions of this feeling. It must be a feeling of inner, necessarily free relations. Philosophy always requires, therefore, something given—it is form—and yet rea/and ideal at the same time, like the originary act. Philosophy cannot be constructed. The limits of feeling are the limits of philosophy. Feeling cannot feel itself. That which is given to feeling appears to me to be the originary act, as cause and effect. The differentiation of philosophy from its product—from the philosophical sciences. What, then, is a feeling? It can only be contemplated in reflection—the spirit of feeling is, then, gone. Following the schema of reflection, the producer can be inferred from the product. 16. The intuitive faculty [Anschauungsvermogen]. There is no specific drive underlying intuition [Anschauung]. For feeling and reflection, intuition is divided. Outside of application, intuition is unified. Once intuition is applied, it becomes tendency and product. Tendency belongs to the realm of feeling, product to that of reflection. The subjective belongs to feeling, the objective belongs to reflection. [.. .] Feeling and reflection together bring about the intuition, which is the unifying third element; however, the third element is unable to enter into reflection and feeling. Because substance can never creep into the accidence, synthesis can never completely appear in the thesis and the antithesis. Thus an object arises out of the interaction between two nonobjects. Application to the originary act. Feeling appears to be first—reflection appears to be second. Why? 17. In consciousness, it must appear as if the movement is from the limited to the unlimited, because consciousness must proceed from itself as that which is limited. This happens by means of feeling, not taking into account that feeling, viewed abstractly, is a progression from the


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unlimited to the limited. This reversed appearance is natural. As soon as the absolute, as I shall call the originary ideal-real or real-ideal, appears as accidence or incomplete, it must appear reversed—the unlimited becomes limited and vice versa. Application to the originary act. If feeling is located within consciousness and is to be reflected—a process caused by the drive toward form—then an intermediary intuition must precede it. This intermediary intuition is itself created by means of a preceding feeling and a preceding reflection, which, however, is unable to enter into consciousness; the product of this intuition becomes the object of reflection. This appears to be a progression from the unlimited to the limited, but it is actually precisely the reverse. [...] Up to now, what we have found about feeling is that it plays a part in intuition; it gives the tendency toward it, namely the subjective; it corresponds to reflection, half of the sphere of the human being. In consciousness, a progression from the limited to the unlimited—fundamentally, however, it is the opposite, in that something must already be given, and this given seems to be the originary act, as cause and effect. 19. A need for philosophy, or a conceptualized, systematic connection between thinking and feeling, is found by reflection—for the need exists in feeling. [. . .] The originary act connects reflection to feeling. Its form belongs to reflection, as it were, its matter to feeling. [. . .] It is impossible to represent the pure form of feeling. They are One, and form and matter, as composed concepts, are not at all applicable here. Reflection could represent its pure form if one calls its partial function together with feeling "form," and assigns this name to its abstract effectivity. Only within feeling can reflection establish its pure form. New data concerning the prevailing reciprocal relationship between opposites, or the truth that everything that is presented by means of reflection, is presented according to the rules of reflection. In order to discover the opposite, one must abstract from this. For its share, feeling gives reflection the matter of intellectual intuition.28 Just as feeling had to assist reflection in the establishment of its first forms, reflection too must have an effect in order to have something with which it can work; this is how the intellectual intuition comes into being. This becomes the matter of philosophy in reflection. Now reflection has a pure form and matter for the pure form, that is, that which it sought as a basis: the immutable and solid. And now the potential arises for a philosophy that would be a conceptual-

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ized and systematic (this is a tautology) connection between thinking and feeling. Now, how do we find the matter, the object that is not an object, the area of mutual rule of feeling and reflection, to be determined? The connection between thinking and feeling must always exist— we must be able to find it everywhere in consciousness—but how can we find it systematically? From the pure forms of reflection we have learned the way in which reflection deals with matter. Reflection has a determined matter with which it will deal accordingly. This determined matter is the intellectual intuition. In accordance with the law of the originary act, it is divided. It falls into its two parts—into feeling and into reflection—for it is composed of these two. [...] The human being thinks and feels—he delimits both freely—he is determined matter. This is, supposedly, Fichte's intellect. The absolute I is this determined matter, before the originary act enters into it, before reflection is applied to it.

In our deduction of philosophy, we have thus observed the most natural path—the need for a philosophy in consciousness—the apparent progression from the limited to the unlimited—the reflection on that—the apparent progression from the unlimited to the limited—the results of this reflection—the results of the feeling of this reflection—the reflection on these results according to those results— discovered connection or philosophy. i. Feeling 4Reflection

2. Reflection 3Feeling

Direction back and forth,

The sphere is exhausted—the connection is there. This is the basis of all philosophizing. 1.

SO

An apparent given

Therefore

2.

Why?

4. Thus 3. Presented in an answer—Found in us.

The connection between "so" and "therefore" is mediated through and in the subject—in the sphere—in the absolute or relatively absolute sphere.


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20. Before, however, said matter is divided, it must be opposed— that which is intuited can be opposed to the intuition itself, and this opposition is the only possible synthesis for the one who intuits. Reflection and feeling are at their limits here—moreover, the intuited is opposed to the intuition only as a part of the whole. We must run up against the synthesis of feeling and reflection everywhere, to which nothing is or can any longer be opposed. [. . .] 22. Feeling and reflection are One in the originary act. An originary need to create opposites arises here. A feeling of reflection, a reflection of feeling. Both drives are effective in unison. They cannot posit anything beyond themselves. Their effectivity is limited to their sphere. Reflection occurs within itself—a gratification of this need within itself—an apparently mediated interaction of the I with itself. This is the intellectual intuition. It interacts with the originary act, namely, in reflection, thus in the sphere of the originary act. The I encompasses both of them. In the I they are one. In reflection they are separate. The originary act is the unity of feeling and reflection, within reflection. The intellectual intuition is their unity outside of reflection. To be sure, since everything that is thought is reflection, the intellectual intuition is also thought only in the forms of the originary act; but we must abstract beyond this here. Originally, the intellectual intuition precedes the originary act. It provides the basis for this act; secundario, it is reversed. This relationship is similar to that between pure and reflected consciousness. [. . .]

In order to form an absolute reality (with relation to the 1)—as opposed to the relative reality and negation of the mere originary act—intellectual intuition and the originary act must therefore coincide. Each of them alone is neither real nor ideal—but together they can be both. Intellectual intuition only provides simple reality—but this reality is as good as Nothing within reflection; it ought to be for reflection but it is not—that is, it cannot be opposed. Consequently, it is Nothing for reflection.

The application of the originary act to the intellectual intuition happens by means of the drive in general. For the drive as such is the uniting of both known drives, in the originary act and the intellectual intuition taken together, or in the absolute I. This causes a mutual striving—the determined declination of both drives.

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The first application of this declination is the discovery of their mutual connection in the I. The originary act cannot advance any further here, because its drive directs it solely toward the intellectual intuition. Product—absolute I. The second application is performed on itself. The intellectual intuition undergoes division. Product—subject and object. 23. [...] Concerning the drive? The drive to be I: the first drive. I is I. This is the drive and everything. [. . .] 31. Further observations on the categories and the composition of the whole. Drive. Time and Space. Intuition. Feeling. Idea [ Vorstellung]. Consciousness. The faculties [SeelenVermogen]. Reflection and idea [Vorstellung] are one and the same. [. ..] The I is the synthesis of intellectual intuition. The originary act is merely the form of reflection to the extent that it presents itself in thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Its substratum, as life, Something and Nothing, contains the pure presentation of feeling or of matter in relation to form alone. Being posited by means of a nonpositing—is pure feeling. Nonposiling by means of a being posited—is pure form of reflection. or

Positing is contingent upon nonpositing. Nonpositing is contingent upon positing.

This is the purest representation of feeling and reflection. The unconditioned itself, which is positing and nonpositing, and yet at the same time neither, unites them within itself—it is their unconditioned union. Here we also see pure form established in this absolute originary act. Both drives are unsatisfied in the intellectual intuition, hence their need; at its limit, feeling needs form, form for vision, so to speak, and reflection needs matter so that it can be form. They are Nothing, both are Nothing without the drive to be I, which unites both within itself, is both and yet neither. Now each is something to the other. They have an absolute ground for interrelation. It is necessary to add that the form of reflection consists solely in creating opposites—the apparent nonpositing in the relative originary act is


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really just creating opposites as well. The feeling of the Non-I first arises in empirical consciousness. How? We shall see.

The originary form of the absolute originaiy act, as we have just discovered, determines or establishes the pure form of reflection. Thus, the I determines form in this way—but how does it determine matter? For the I provides for its children equally. Its form has been allocated; its matter is something conditioned and conditioning throughout. Therefore it makes its matter conditioned and conditioning. The pure matter of reflection cannot be thought without form any more than the pure form of reflection can be thought without matter. We can abstract from this, but such an abstraction involves imagination, and that is why we speak of pure matter and pure form. 32. How does the absolute I become an empirical I? The drive to be I is at once the drive to think and to feel. Both are expressed in matter and in form, in opposition to one another. With this, reflection has obtained Us specific mode of operation (its specific matter), and feeling has obtained its specific form. To one another they appear to be independent. The need of their drives is satisfied—how, they do not know; that is, that is not within their sphere. (That they are independent o/each other proves to everyone that they are altogether independent.) It seems to bodi of them that they are dependent on an I alone, and neither notices the influence the other has through that which is identical. Here, then, arc two I's, neither of them absolute. The I of feeling is matter; the I of reflection is form. Both feel that which depends on them. Feeling proceeds from the unlimited, which it is without knowing it, toward the limited, which for feeling is the unlimited: thus feeling proceeds from matter to matter, from what is conditioned to that which is conditioning; that is, it mistakes itself with itself and in itself. This mistaking arises out of the dependence, unknown to it, of feeling on the I, a dependence that is both conditioned and conditioning. In precisely the same way, reflection happens on form: it proceeds from what it believes to be dependent (form in general), which is really independent, toward what it believes to be independent, but which actually is dependent, that is, its form, or the form determined by matter; from the originary form to relative form, from one form to another. Reflection elevates its particular relationship with the absolute I, inverting [the original process] to the I. Feeling does this as well. Thus

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two mediated I's are present, the I that is felt and the I that is thought. The absolute I moves from the infinite toward the finite, the mediated I from the finite toward the infinite. But how does the absolute I enter into the finite, where it then becomes a mediated I in accordance with its own law? The absolute I is at once whole and divided. Insofar as it is divided, it must have an empirical consciousness; in short, it must be a mediated 1. The divided I must, after all, be connected—namely, through the drive to be I. The I must be divided in order to be I. It is only the drive to be I that unifies it. The unconditioned ideal of the pure I is thus the primary characteristic of the I. Nevertheless, the divided I is that which is divided; thus, in accordance with the laws of division as well as those of the pure I. But if the pure I does not exist, then there are no laws. Hence the pure I always exists: it is the unity of the all-ness [AUheit] of form and the divisibility of matter. We are I, thus identical and divided, simultaneously mediated and unmediated. The mediated I is indeed the divided I. The pure I is divided precisely insofar as it is whole, and it is whole precisely insofar as it is divided. This is the famous antagonism that characterizes the I, that, is already present in the absolute originary act, and that is nothing but a necessary illusion of the mediated T alone, which in turn wants to cease being a mediated I and in this respect resists itself. This antagonism is present as antagonism only in the mediated I and is necessary precisely because it is not originally an antagonism. One need only take into account the inverted order [ordo inversus]^ of the mediated I, for this is actually the basis of the contradiction. 36. General rule. What is whole in the absolute I is separated in the subject according to the laws of the absolute I—or, even more generally put, what holds true for the absolute I holds true for the mediated I as well, only ordine inverse. Reversed categories. Determination of the object. 38. The absolute originary act is organized in the following way: Absolute I. Absolute form—absolute matter.


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Its categories follow in this order: Synthesis. Antithesis. Thesis. The relative action of form— Thesis Antithesis Synthesis. Likewise for the simple forms of thought. The absolute originary act has neither thesis, antithesis, nor synthesis. It only resembles the form of reflection. For reflection, however, the originary act begins with synthesis and ends with thesis. Here too the subject and the pure I are visible, the latter proceeding from the infinite to the finite, the former proceeding from the finite to the infinite, from thesis to synthesis. Thesis and antithesis must be perfectly identical in the absolute categories. 193. Theory of Scientific Knowledge. The theory of the subject is the theory of accidentals [ Accidentiallehre]. Theory of the object is theory of substantialities. The former is theory of the person, the latter is theory of nature. The thetic (substance)—theory of the good; antithetic (accidence)— theory of the true; synthetic (accidence)—theory of the beautiful.30 197. It is not only the reflective faculty that establishes theory. Thinking, feeling, arid intuition are one. 198. Thesis is an idea [Vorstellung] without explicit reference. 199. Intuition. Idea [Vorstdlung] of intuition. There is nothing more than this—the latter is divided, of course. Everything that corresponds to the object is in the subject; or the object in general is intuition. The subject is idea. The intuition that is felt, thought, and received is idea. Intuition and idea are the necessary accidents of the person. Intuitions are not free, but ideas are. The person is merely immanent as well. Human beings only feel free when they feel themselves to be causalities—in the manifold, in ideas, in the particular, or in the subject—in the movement away. 201. The triad contains the laws of representation, the line moving away. The dyad contains the laws of intuition, the line moving toward. 278. [.. .] I do not exist to the extent that I posit myself, but to the ex-

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tent that I sublate myself—I do not exist to the extent that I remain within myself and turn myself in upon myself. 445. Every thing, like every ground, is relative. It is a thing inasmuch as its opposite is a thing. They are both not things inasmuch as they exist in the common area of the ground, which is then a thing. Each thing is present in a higher thing, or in a broader, more extensive and intensive thing. Extensive and intensive must actually be products of a single act, like positing and negating.

Only the whole is real—that thing alone would be absolutely real which was not in turn a component. The whole rests somewhat like the players of a game in which people sit in a circle without chairs, one resting on the other's knee. State [Zustand] and object [Gegenstand] are the components of consciousness. They both consist of matter and form.

The theory of state and object already belongs in the theory of consciousness. But here we must first search out the laws and facts that lie in the universal. But here we analyze theory in general. This can only mean that we examine how the human spirit goes to work on a theory in general. We regard the human spirit's act of positing without consideration for a specific content, although of course we regard it in reference to its specific content or even one specific content in general. But how do we learn, then, what a theory is? It must be the theory of the laws governing a thing. We must begin with the definition of the thing. But definition without laws? How is the anticipando possible? How do we begin? Undoubtedly with an act of separation. But we must certainly already be given something fixed, something distinguishing, if there is something distinct about it, and consequently as it exists among other things. It must have something in common with its surroundings—it must at least be a recognizable entity, yet also possess distinguishing characteristics. The most complete cognition of an object occurs when one can definitely distinguish it from everything else. But, as we know, both a commonly shared and a differentiating characteristic are integral to the ability to distinguish. In becoming acquainted with one thing, I also become acquainted with all things. But, in committing this act, I enlarge my consciousness, for I connect


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something new to it. Every cognition is thus differentiation and relation. Expansion, structuring, and increase in two respects: in an objective respect and a subjective one. In the former there is a separating of characteristics and a connecting of the being; in the latter there is a separating as thing and a connecting as property. [. . .] 555. The law of the concept and the law of the object must be one, separable in reflection alone. Concept and intuition are one when taken in relation to the I, and separate when both are reflected upon without reference to the I. When I reflect upon the I in a determined manner, there is no Non-I; when I reflect without reflecting in a determined manner upon the I, there is a Non-I. Free reflection approaches the Non-I—determined reflection approaches the I. The I is free and not free in both cases but in different ways. It is free in that it reflects upon itself as not free, and thus upon a Non-I; it is free in that it reflects upon itself as free, as I. In the former case, the I is free as a discerning power [Intelligent}; in the latter case, it is free as pure I. In the former, it separates its reflective activity from its essence—it goes outside of itself; in the latter it unifies the two—it goes inside itself. The I must do the former in order to do the latter. The latter is the goal, the former the means: the goal gives rise to the means, the means brings about the goal. All knowledge should bring about morality, and the moral drive, the drive toward freedom, should give rise to knowledge. It is the tendency of the I to be free—the capacity to be free is the productive imagination—harmony is the condition of its activity, of the hovering between opposites. "Be one with yourself is therefore the fundamental precondition of the highest goal: to be or to be free. All being, being in general, is nothing other than being free—hovering between extremes that must necessarily be both unified and divided. All reality radiates from this luminous point—everything is contained within it. Object and subject exist because of this luminous point, and not the other way around. The absolute I [fchheit], or productive power of imagination (in other words, hovering), determines, produces the extremes between which hovering occurs. This is an illusion, but only in the realm of the common understanding. Otherwise it is entirely real: for hovering, that which causes it, is the source, the mother [mater] of all reality. It is reality itself. On the nature of this hovering. 556. Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it

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wants to be for us. The ideal ofbeingmust be its goal and origin. An infinite realization of being would be the I's destiny. It would strive evermore toward being. The path of evil leads downward from "I am"; the path of good leads upward from it. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I. This goal—namely, totally free being—should be reached, or at least aimed at, through cognition in the broadest sense, as existence in the sensual world. The I appears to contain a contradiction if one is not familiar with the nature of its workings, the activity of the productive imagination, in that it appears to hinder the achievement of its own goal by the means it has chosen. But it is precisely in this way that the I acts in harmony with itself, with an internal consistency, so to speak. It has to act in this way by virtue of its nature, because it is nothing other than a hovering, and so on, and thus only produces and only can produce what it. seeks to produce. It cannot be productive at all without proceeding in this manner, for all production approaches being, and being is hovering, and so on. What is, must appear to contradict ilself insofar as we break it into its constituent parts. We are virtually forced to do so by the nature of our reflective faculty. Being, being I, being free, and hovering are synonyms: one expression refers to the other. There is only one fact at issue here; these are all simply predicates of the single concept of the I. But here concept and fact are one. The I is incomprehensible because it is already the concept of itself by virtue of its mere existence. In its being, the only possible concept of the I is already given. Fact is usually understood as an act, as something that is occurring or has occurred in time. The fact at issue here, however, is one that must be thought of purely in intellectual [geistig] terms. It is neither singular nor temporal, but quasi a fleeting moment that embraces, encompasses the eternal universe in which we live and breathe: an infinite factum that occurs in its entirety at each and every moment— identically, eternally active genius—being I. The relationship of consciousness to this mysterious being of things. Transition from this concept to the real world—application of the same. 558.1 and Non-I are abstractions. They do not act as whole entities in


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opposition to one another; rather, I and Non-I are operative in every empirical act without exception. The canon, the schema of every act, as well as the material of the act, is formulated in the Theory of Scientific Knowledge.^ 561. Man [der Mensch] isjust as much Non-I as I. 562. The I is only thinkable by means of a Non-I; for an I is only an I insofar as it is a NonT. Otherwise it could be whatever it wanted to be, it just wouldn't be an I. 564. If one speaks philosophically of what would come, for example, of the destruction of the Non-I, one should guard against the illusion that a time may come when this would actually occur. First, it is in and of itself a contradiction to say that something could occur within time that would sublate all temporality, such as those attempts to transplant the nonsensual, the thinkable, the subjective, to the sensual world of appearances. Whenever we act freely, such a triumph of the infinite I over the finite I occurs. In this moment the Non-I is destroyed in reality, but not in terms of its sensual existence. It is as it should and shall be—the thing remains eternally, the form alone changes constantly. Time can never cease—we cannot think away time, for time is indeed the condition of the thinking being. Time ceases only when thought does. Thought outside of time is an absurdity. 565. The world becomes more and more infinite to a living being. For this reason there can never be an end to the process of connecting the manifold—an end that would be a state of inactivity for the thinking I. Golden ages may appear, but they will not bring about the end of things. The goal of man is not the golden age. Man is meant to exist forever and to be a beautifully ordered individual and to persevere. This is the tendency of his nature. 566. Philosophizing has to be a unique way of thinking. What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. A striving toward the thinking of a ground is thus the ground of philosophizing. Ground does not, however, mean cause in the literal sense, but rather inner nature—connection to the whole. Thus all philosophizing must end at an absolute ground. If such a ground were not given, if this concept contained an impossibility, then the drive to philosophize would be an infinite activity. Thus it would be without end, because there would be an eternal need for an absolute ground, which could only be satisfied to a relative degree, and therefore would never cease. Through

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the voluntary renunciation of the absolute, infinite and free activity arises within us. This activity is the only possible absolute that can be given to us and that we find through our inability to reach and to recognize an absolute. We can only recognize this given absolute negatively, by acting and finding that we cannot reach what we are searching for through any action. This could be called an absolute postulate. Any search for a single principle would be like an attempt to find the square of a circle. Perpetual motion. Philosophers' stone.32 Negative knowledge [Negative Erkenntnis]. Reason would be the capability of positing and retaining such an absolute object. Understanding that is stretched by the imagination. Striving toward freedom would thus be this striving to philosophize, the drive for knowledge of ground. Philosophy, the result of philosophizing, comes about through the interruption of the drive for knowledge of ground, through suspension at the point where one finds oneself. Abstraction from the absolute ground and the advancing of the actual absolute ground of freedom by connecting to a whole (making whole) that which is to be explained. The more manifold the elements of this whole are, the livelier the sensation of absolute freedom is—the more interwoven, the more whole it is, the more effective, the more perceptible, the more explained the absolute ground of all grounding, namely, freedom. The manifold attests to energy, the liveliness of practical freedom. Connecting attests to the activity of theoretical freedom. The former comprises acts [Handlungen]. The latter comprises shaping [Behandlungen]. By this I mean the acts of actual reflection that concern simple acts of thought. (Reflection does not comprise all thought, but rather shaped, deliberate thought.) The I signifies that negatively recognizable absolute that remains after all abstraction, that can only be recognized through action and that manifests itself through eternal lack. Thus, eternity is manifested through time, despite the fact that time contradicts eternity. The I itself only becomes effective and determined in its opposite. By asking "What is that?" I demand the exteriorization of the thing-in-itself. I want to know: What is it? I know already that it is this or that thing, but what kind of a thing is it? This is what I want to know and here I step into the sphere of the subjective. I never find intuition because I have to search for it in reflection and vice versa. 567. What acts for me originally and from where do I borrow my


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concepts? Necessarily I, and necessarily from myself. For myself, I am the ground of all thinking, the absolute ground; I become aware of this only by acting. My I is the ground of all grounds for me, the principle of my philosophy. I can only make this I the ground of all my philosophizing through negation, by trying to recognize, and to act as much as possible, and to connect this as precisely as possible—the latter by means of reflection. The more immediately and directly I can derive something from the I, the more recognized, the more firmly grounded it is for me. Grounding [Ergriinden] is philosophizing. Inventing [Erdenken] is creating poetry. Deliberating and contemplating are one. Sensing, pure thinking is a mere concept—concept of the species. The species is, however, nothing but the individual; thus one always thinks in a specific way, one grounds or invents, etc.

I cannot come to know individuals through the species, but rather the species through individuals. Of course, in contemplating individuals one must always keep the idea of the species in mind. (Fichtean philosophy is a call to self-activity. I cannot explain anything to anyone thoroughly without referring him to himself, without telling him to take the saine action that I took in order to explain something to myself. I can teach someone to philosophize by teaching him to do it just as / have done it. By doing what I do, he is what I am, where I am.) All art proceeds from inventing or imitating. If the actions that I take are natural ones, then all other actions are unnatural and do not achieve the goal that they must and do have in mind—human beings contradict themselves. They do not contradict themselves if they act according to their nature. That is why evil people, for example, are in an eternal state of contradiction with themselves. Differentiated matter is that which initially brings about differentiation with respect to that whose ground is sought. That is why the ancients also called the theory of nature, etc., philosophy. We have limited it to the thinking of the ground of ideas and sensations—in short, to the changes in the subject. Concerning the expression "soul"—soul of the whole.

633. We awaken activity by giving it stimulating matter. The I must posit itself as engaged in representing. The essential thing in representation is essential, yet secondary [beywesentlich] in the object. Is there a specific representational power that represents, simply in order to represent? Representing for the sake of representing is a free representing. This merely suggests that it is not the object as such, but

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rather the I, as the ground of activity, that should determine activity. It is in this way that the work of art obtains its free, independent, ideal character—an imposing spirit—for it is a visible product of an \. But the I posits itself in a determined manner, because it posits itself as an infinite I, because it must posit itself as an infinitely representing I. Thus it posits itself freely, as an I representing in a determined manner. The object may only be the kernel, the type, the fixed point. The formative power then develops the beautiful whole creatively—on, in, and through this point. In other words, the object should determine us—as product of the I, not as mere object. Difference between oral and written presentation. Necessity of regular temporal divisions. The switching of spheres is necessary in a complete representation. That which is sensual must be represented as spiritual; that which is spiritual must be represented as sensual. Speech, like song, demands a completely different text than writing. Speech stands between music and writing. Science of declamation a priori. On what is to be distinguished and what is to be connected in a composition. How does one find the whole in the parts, and the parts in the whole? The secondary essence [das Beywesentliche] must be handled solely as a medium, as a means of connecting—thus, this encompassing and conveying characteristic alone must be distinguished. No word may be superfluous. We are now only in the beginning stages of the art of the writer. Wherever there are several individual entities, they must give up something of their claims, their freedom. Then a community exists. Generic similarity of all of the entities in general—of a state [Staat] and a composition, for example. 651. Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy. Man is altogether in a state of mutual exchange and intimate connection with himself. Every mistake, every virtue must have a universal sphere of effectivity, total influence. He cannot have a virtue, in the strict sense of the word, at one point and not at another. The categories are only a priori synthetic concepts. After all, shouldn't a priori synthetic ideas and synthetic intuitions and sensations exist? Our states [Staaten] are merely agglomerations. Can only a very idealist imagination conceive of states, in the strict sense of the word? Our states are states—they are not states. How can this be? Any statement that we view with the power of truth and elevate to an idea is true. Sphere of indifference—semper idem. Sphere of difference— change. Synthetic sphere—exchange. The infinite idea of our free-

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dom also involves an infinite series of our manifestations in a sensual world. We will not he bound to the single manifestation of our mortal body on this planet. There are three spheres everywhere. They are only determined with regard to themselves. Their effectiveness is as different as the parts of infinity, but they always remain the same. The matter and form of their manifestations may be as different as they like; they are completely undifferentiated with regard to their respective destinies. They are what they are, they do what they do, they suffer what they suffer purely for their own sake. In order to be realized, it must be possible to apply them one by one, that is, they must appear individually—but nevertheless they are and remain eternally undeflowered—eternally themselves—undivided and free. So it is with all ideas. It is only their manifestation that seems to transform them. So it is with humankind. Humankind is the same in the whole and in the particular. Ideas rise up to themselves. They do not lower themselves: principle of perfection in humankind. Humankind would not be humankind if a millennial rule were not to come. This principle is present in every detail of daily life. It is visible in everything. That which is true always survives. The good prevails. Man ascends again. Art develops itself. Science comes into being. Only the arbitrary, the individual, disappears. It is the struggle between the transitory and the everlasting. Hercules does finally learn to kill the ever-growing Hydra. Victory must finally become I'ordre dujour. Result of the most calculated, the most exact art. Art must triumph over raw matter. Practice makes perfect. The art of wisdom and the science of wisdom. Sphere of reality (of property). Common matter of opposites. Even' part of the opposed substances consists in turn of both. Totality is only the entirely of relations. How do the parts within substance come into being and become independent? We must continually reflect upon the synthetic connection between opposites and therefore too between the material and spiritual worlds. In the products of each world, the only thing that predominates is that which is unique to it. The idea depends on the world of senses as much as feeling depends on the spiritual world. I assert that analysis and synthesis are really opposite actions. What is their synthetic character, or their common sphere? All forms of pain must have a maximum—in short, all unpleasant conditions must have their determination, their limits, their order. They must submit to the same laws as the conditions of pleasure. The greatest pain can only last a moment—thetic and antithetic pain. Pleasure and nonpleasure

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are in a state of exchange: the tendency of human beings to seize often that which is ostensibly harmful—often par depit to corrupt themselves willfully. This is still the expression of freedom. Must something be opposed to all faculties and powers of the mind? What is that? In which sphere is everything that is whole a part and in which is everything that is a part a whole? There are only two originary elements and one sphere in which both appear. Love—as synthetic power. It only depends on whether we take something into the inner sphere of our free activity—that which impedes it—thus we suffer as well and are dependent on this suffering. Even the greatest misfortune must be taken into this sphere if it is really to affect us; otherwise it remains foreign to us and outside of us.

4. Friedrich Schlegel: Fichte's Basic Characteristics of the Present Age (1808)" [...] With respect to Fichte's characterization of the age it is sufficient to recall that simple division between the vast majority who cannot see beyond the basic tenets of Enlightenment and the small minority who somehow endeavor to reach, or believe to possess, a higher and highest supersensible above and beyond this limit—and whose spirit, because it is a latecomer from a past, a forerunner of a future time, or because it has raised itself beyond all time, no longer belongs to their own time exclusively. Fichte elaborates on the above-mentioned majority in the first part of his presentation.34 He then divides the minority into one that is true and authentic, and one that is false and inauthentic. The latter seems similar to his own way of thinking and philosophy, but is actually fundamentally different from it. We will address this last point in more detail, for here it will be easiest to determine the nature of the relationship between the spirit of the times and Fichte's doctrine and to what extent his thinking coincides with that of the majority or the minority. On the other hand, what is most essential for an initial, outside understanding of a system is to distinguish it carefully from a seemingly related, yet essentially different point of view. Here we will follow Mr. Fichte's own conclusions. In the age of complete sinfulness he finds a philosophy that resembles his own in the eyes of the public (in that it also tries to think the supersensible) but

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that is tainted with the fundamental evil of fanaticism [or enthusiasm: Schwdrmerei] ,35 The tendency toward fanaticism is said to be one of the essential characteristics of such an age. The tendency to search out and defend the old simply because it is old, the incomprehensible simply because it is incomprehensible, is, according to Fichte, this age's natural reaction against itself, one that is, moreover, characterized by the desire for concrete proof. In this regard, he attacks the philosophy of nature in particular. We will attempt to locate the actual points of contention in this dispute. Mr. Fichte claims that (i) nature as inanimate world of the senses and mere product of reflection is true nonbeing,36 an utterly null and entirely noridivine illusion [Scheinwesen], nothing but an obstruction and hindrance to the spirit projecting itself into the infinite. This is an essential part of his doctrine and can be found, although in slightly different form, in all of his writings including the early ones. In contrast to this, German physics or philosophy of nature proceeds from the idea not of an inanimate but rather of an animate or inspired, nature.37 And it is this that distinguishes German physics from the earlier notion of an inanimate and mechanical nature, which still partially obtains abroad. However, this apparent opposition is just that: an apparent one. In his pamphlet against Fichte,38 Mr. Schellinghzs demonstrated convincingly enough that nature, as understood by a philosopher of nature and any sophisticated physicist, has nothing in common with that objective world of the senses whose appearance [Schein] is the product of the form of reflection and whose nullity [Nichtigkeit] one readily admits. This nature, however, to the extent that it is a presentation of the deity (or however else one wants to express the claim that there dwells in it the divine) and therefore a part of the highest reality, does not appear in Fwhte's system at all, because knowledge, as the only possible kind of existence [Daseyn] or revelation of original being [Seyn], takes the place of nature. Fichte ignores and denies such a view of nature, but this is hardly sufficient grounds for a true dispute. From this perspective, Fichte's philosophy and the philosophy of nature are only seemingly opposed; in reality, however, they are not at all related. But if this criticism of Fichte contains the implicit demand to identify nature and the deity in the manner of Spinoza, then the blame and the attack are directed not only at him but at everyone who has acquired a name in philosophy since Plato— with the sole exception of the sect of the true pantheists.

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From another perspective, Fichte's contempt for nature and his rendering of it as lifeless pit not only all of the contemporary philosophical and all the more sophisticated physicists against him, but also the entire classical tradition without exception, as well as the as yet unspoiled natural men and the poets and artists of every age and nation. All of the above are, to a greater or lesser degree, hylozoists,39 and regard nature as a thoroughly living and animated being. On the other hand, several contemporary or recent physicists, for the most part foreigners, agree with Fichte in that they consider nature inanimate or mechanistic. Finally, there is that group of contemporaries who regard everything as a mere means, as inert matter, and as a vehicle in the service of a calculating reason. Those who because of age, gender, an unspoiled attitude, or livelier passions feel and think differently must be excluded from this group. It will become clear in what follows whether the Fichtean contempt for nature is truly or only seemingly similar to the Christian view of the nullity of the world. In any case, one would expect that to renounce, to recognize as futile, and indeed to destroy such a thoroughly impoverished and lifeless world is neither a difficult nor a worthy sacrifice. Let us return to the true point of contention here. Mr. Fichte charges (2) the philosophy of nature with deifying nature and with the sort of fanaticism he identifies as an essential feature of our present age, claiming that all fanaticism is basically a fanaticism for nature.40 Although this statement ties in with the one above regarding the nullity of nature, these two statements must be kept separate in our analysis. It is here that we regret most of all the manner in which he initiated the dispute. This critique, however, addresses solely the scientific aspect of the quarrel, if one can call it that, for the personal aspect does not concern us here. However, because the question of the relationship between fanaticism and true philosophy is of utmost importance for the entire age, we thought it necessary not to pass over this problem in silence. First of all, we do not at all agree with Mr. Fichte when, in connection with religion, he regards fanaticism as the basic evil of the age. We find the real evil to be all too evident in the various superficial and completely external ways of understanding religion. This may take the form of a merely political, state-serving religion, where inner irreligiousness is proclaimed openly enough, or of the somewhat higher but also superficial form of a merely aesthetic religion of unspecified emo-

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tions and intuitions of the divine without the proper inner seriousness. The latter form is most clearly predominant in the German spirit of the age.41 Mr. Fichte's observation is quite apt here: namely, that a higher level of life is only beginning to stir at the outermost limits, at the farthest reaches, but has not yet penetrated to the center. We would not call this fanaticism, but rather infirmity and weakness—a lack of religion, whereby nevertheless the conviction of its necessity, and here and there a stirring of inner need for it, is gradually making itself known. Here, too, we find a sign of decay—this false universality (an essential hallmark of all destructive and anarchic ages) that announces itself in the indifferent and impotent coexistence of opposites, and in all types of concoctions and merely external imitations, but that is neither capable of preserving that which should be permanent nor of establishing or forming something of its own. Surely it is unnecessary to substantiate this claim further, since nearly all of history exists as an ongoing document of this phenomenon of a merely political or a merely aesthetic religion. Now, if Mr. Fichte claims that no pantheistic approach or philosophy can lead to anything higher than such a merely aesthetic religion, because the basic principle of pantheism is only valid for and applicable to the world of phenomena and imagination, and that identifying nature with the divine in the manner of Spinoza results in an utterly objectionable system, then all those who have gone beyond the initial stages of speculative philosophy would likely agree with him. If he were to approach the philosophy of our age from this angle, then the only essential matter, the only thing of significance, rather than a general laying of blame, would be a detailed and thorough scientific critique of Spinoza. Everything Mr. Fichte would like to clear out of his path hinges upon this. It does not help matters at all to shrewdly evade Spinoza, as does Leibniz, or, like Kant, to remain completely ignorant of him. Such an approach will surely be counterproductive for any philosophy claiming to be metaphysical. If the dispute42 had taken this turn, not only would the personal nature of the debate have been avoided, but there would have been the considerable advantage of a formally and logically complete system, as opposed to a large number of presentations, some of which differ in essential ways from each other, others of which are as yet incomplete. Spinoza is also invaluable to critical philosophy because he represents a completely pure example of that pantheistic manner of thought that is so unique in the history of the human spirit. This is de-

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cidedly not the case with the newer philosophers, no matter how widespread notions and principles resembling Spinoza's maybe, where attempts have been made to amalgamate even Christianity with Spinoza into all kinds of strange religious combinations.43 Such stark simplicity of thought and system as is found in Spinoza's pantheism is always rare, but it is even harder to find in an age such as ours with its desire for universality and overwhelming fear of one-sidedness. This is confirmed by the most eminent examples of German philosophy. Let us mention, for example, Lessing's general predilection for Spinoza, or Schilling's for Spinoza's metaphysical principles, and see how they proceed to combine and adopt ideas from ancient oriental philosophy. This may alienate those who only focus on the great differences and the essential incompatibility of the two systems, rather than on the multitude of transitions and points of intersection that can and did arise in the development of Asian philosophy, and those who do not take into account the high level of apparent correspondence that systematic art can produce between even the most disparate elements. This much at least is evident—that none of the philosophers named is or can be called a real Spinozist in the strictest sense of the term. But we had best set aside these more recent philosophical systems, which are in part still caught up in a process of becoming and of development. Let us rather seek to determine in what way Spinoza's philosophy, or pure pantheism, actually relates to fanaticism, and to what extent Mr. Fichte's accusations against the present age can be confirmed by such a predilection for this manner of thought. One can conceive of the idea of the absolute (to use a current term) in two different ways, the first being reason, in the attempt to construct a totality of ideal and real activity from the first identity up to the last difference. It seems clear how, especially with imitators who are obsessed with form but do not grasp the spirit, this gives rise to an empty formalism, to metaphysical confusion, and, finally, to an entirely vapid dialectics. How fanaticism supposedly develops from this is, however, not clear. There is yet another notion of a transcendental reason's view of the absolute, one that may also be called absolute, where all constructing completely ceases and where the chaotic fullness that belongs to fantasy does not allow for any configuration or unity other than the ones that it provides. What is meant here will be completely clear when we add that such a pantheism of fantasy is at the root of all ancient mythology, which for the most part grew out of it.44 Spinoza's system-

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atic approach lies halfway between these two notions of the absolute and can be related to the one as well as to the other. Now, if Fichte claims that this pantheism of fantasy is the source of all fanaticism, then we agree with him fully, for there is indeed no source for it other than fantasy, which, if left unchecked, produces its effects separately and according to its own laws. But, with respect to our age, the danger of fanaticism is probably not so great here either, for it seems unlikely that one would find a trace of this notion of absolute fantasy anywhere, whereas each new fad in the art of dialectical reasoning easily draws a flock of superficial imitators. But if Mr. Fichte wants to eradicate fantasy itself from the human spirit for fear that it might deteriorate into fanaticism, then let it be said that this is neither possible, nor would such severity, if it were possible, be beneficial;45 for even the strictest Christian philosophers, who firmly rejected and detested ancient mythology as a form of religion, retained these mydis as beautiful symbolism in the realm of art and fantasy, and delighted in them as such. Indeed, Fichte's views are as injurious to art as they are to natural science, for along with animated nature, all of mythology would be discarded and with it the most significant portion of poesy and visual arts. According to Mr. Fichte, art is a presentation of reasonable life that provides at least an external image of its qualities to those who are not yet part of that life.16 The term "reason," in the parlance of the new philosophy, is admittedly used here as something like "dwelling in the realm of the idea," in which case even the deeds of Alexander, the Crusades, and whatever else can be the subject of heroic poetry fall under this term. But if the fact remains that life in the idea is nothing but reasonable life, and art is nothing but the presentation of reasonable life, and all animation of nature is to be banished from it, then Grandisori" will surely be preferred over the Iliad, or, at the very least, the well-known engraving of the death of General Wolfe will undoubtedly win the prize over the statue of the Venus of Medici.18 This view of aesthetics is by no means without a certain authority, paradoxical as it might seem in the leading circles of artistic life in Germany; three-quarters if not more of our contemporaries still hold such opinions—if not with respect to the above cases, then with respect to very similar ones. We are not mentioning this to unnecessarily belabor a minor point, but rather to stress that the author, indeed to a greater extent than one would expect, is in agreement with the thinking of this so-called age, that is, the

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majority of the spirit of the age, although he generally arrives at such views only after long, artificial detours. We would like to believe that this strange similarity is often only an apparent one, and that although he explicitly reflects the opinion of the majority, he means it in a different sense. In either case, however, this should be proof enough that Fichte is very much caught up in the age that he sets out to characterize. At the very least, those who Mr. Fichte claims run counter to the age as it is generally perceived and whom he describes as a natural reaction of the age against itself would retort that some otherwise very gifted men find it impossible to rise above the age: no matter how great their effort to overcome it, or how resolutely they oppose it, they soon fall back on it because they lack a solid hold outside of the age, a secure footing, and a notion of unity. They assume that these things come from within but their lack of success undermines this claim of independence [Selbstdndigkeit] ,49 The vast majority of the age, its true elite, considers, as does Mr. Fichte, art to be nothing more than a presentation of reasonable and moral life. They take nature to be nothing but inert matter, means and tools for purposes ordained by reason. The state that they consider most sophisticated is one in which the citizens are most thoroughly penetrated by the state and one in which all forces are utilized and channeled toward this single purpose.50 And finally, with respect to the history of the human spirit and to human fate, this same majority of the age perceives nothing but a symmetrical sequence of the progressive development of reason, wherein even Christianity can be easily inserted and recognized as reasonable. [. . .]

5. Friedrich Schlegel: On Incomprehensibility (i8oo) 51 Some objects of human contemplation—because of what lies in them or in us—entice us to an ever deeper contemplation, and the more we follow this enticement and lose ourselves in them, the more they all are united into a Single Object, which, depending on whether we seek it and find it inside or outside of ourselves, we characterize as the nature of things or as the destiny of human beings.52 If we, in monastic seclusion, devoted our contemplation singly and exclusively to this Object of all Objects, others would perhaps never be able to attract

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our attention. Nor would they, if we were not engaged in social interaction. Through reciprocal communication, social interaction engenders relations and concepts of relations that themselves become objects of contemplation. These, on closer reflection, in turn reproduce and entangle themselves, thus leading us away from this One Object. Concerning this reciprocal communication of ideas, what can be more compelling than the question of whether such communication is even possible? And what could be more suitable than to experiment with this possibility or impossibility by either writing a journal like the Athendum oneself or taking part in it as a reader?53 A healthy common sense, which is content to be guided by etymologies as long as they are not too complex, might easily be led to believe that the grounds for the incomprehensible must lie in incomprehension. Now, it is my own peculiarity that 1 cannot bear ignorance, nor the ignorance of ignoramuses, and even less the ignorance of the informed. Therefore, I decided long ago to converse with the reader on this matter, and to construct before his very eyes—and in his face, if necessary—a different, new reader, one constructed according to my own ideas, and even to deduce him should I find it necessary. I meant it seriously enough, and not without my old inclination toward mysticism. For once, I wanted to proceed methodically, through the whole chain of my attempts, to admit the often poor results with ruthless openness, and in so doing gradually lead the reader toward the same openness and honesty with respect to himself. I wanted to prove that all incomprehensibility is relative and to show, for example, how incomprehensible I find Carve.541 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 of spirits sprung forth too early, confuse everything, and exert the invisible force of the world spirit even on those who do not wish to acknowledge them. I wanted to show that one obtains the purest and most splendid incomprehensibility precisely from science and from art, whose very aim is to be understood [vmtdndigen] and to make understandable, and from philosophy and philology. And in order that this whole enterprise not keep turning in a much too vicious circle, I had resolved, at least this once, to be understandable. I wanted to point to what the greatest thinkers of ever)- age have suspected (admittedly only dimly) until Kant discovered the tablet of the categories and there was light

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in the souls of men. I mean a real language [reelle Sprache] ,r'5 so that we can quit rummaging through words and rather see in them the power and source of all activity.50 The great frenzy of such a cabala, where the human spirit would learn to transform itself, enabling it to fetter the changeable, ever-changed opponent: I would not now be able to present such a holy mystery in so naive and naked a manner as, in the rashness of youth, I presented the nature of love in Lucindezs an eternal hieroglyph.57 Consequently, 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 that an end could be put to all the understandable misunderstandings? At the same time, I had observed the progress of our nation with ardent pleasure; and what should I possibly say of our age? The same age in which we also have the honor to live; that age which has, in a word, earned the modest but highly suggestive name of the Critical Age, so that soon everything will have been criticized—except the age itself—and everything will become more and more critical, and artists can entertain the justified hope that humanity will finally arise en masse and learn to read. It was only quite recently that this thought of a real language [reelle Sprache] was aroused in me anew, and a glorious prospect opened itself up to my mind's eye. In the nineteenth century, Girtanner assures us, we will be able to make gold;58 and is it not more than just speculation that the nineteenth century will soon begin? With laudable conviction and with an interesting emphasis, the worthy man says: "Every chemist, every artist will make gold; kitchen utensils will be of silver, of gold." How gladly will all of the artists decide to starve for the small and insignificant remainder of the eighteenth century, and will no longer fulfill this great duty with heavy hearts; for they know that some of them personally, and most certainly their descendants, will soon be able to make gold. The fact that it is kitchen utensils that are mentioned here by that clear-sighted intellect arises from what he finds to be so particularly beautiful and great in this catastrophe: that we will no longer be allowed to swallow so many vile acid compounds of common, mean, and spiteful metals like lead, copper, iron, and the like. I saw the matter from a different point of view. I had often quietly marveled at the objectivity of gold, yes, I might even say I worshiped it. Among the Chinese, I thought, among


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the English and among the Russians, on the island of Japan, among the inhabitants of Fez and Morocco, yes, even among the Cossacks, Cheremis, Bashkirs, and Mulattoes, in short, wherever there is at least some education and enlightenment, silver and gold are understandable, and through gold, everything else. When each artist finally comes to possess these materials in sufficient quantity, then he will have to write his works in bas-relief, in gold letters on silver tablets. Who would ever reject such a beautifully printed text with the crass remark that it is incomprehensible? But all these are either chimera or ideals; for Girtanner is dead and, consequently, for the time being so far removed from being able to make gold that it will require the greatest skill to get enough iron out of him as would be necessary to immortalize him with a small medallion. Besides, the complaints concerning incomprehensibility have been so exclusively directed against the Athendum—this has occurred so often and has been so widespread—that the deduction had best begin where the shoe really pinches us. In Berlin's Archiv derZeit, a shrewd critic has amicably defended the Athendum against these accusations and chosen as his example the notorious fragment concerning the three tendencies.59 An exceedingly auspicious thought! This is precisely the way that one must tackle the issue. I will take the same route, and so that the reader can realize all the more easily that T think highly of this fragment, I will print the passage here once again. The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Scientific Knowledge, and Goethe's Meister-are the major tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offense at this combination, whoever cannot appreciate a revolution that is not loud and material, has not yet raised himself to the lofty, expansive view of the history of humanity. Even in our impoverished cultural histories— which, accompanied by a running commentary, generally resemble a collection of variants on a classical text that itself was lost—many a small book to which the noisy crowds paid little attention at the time has played a larger role than any activity of the crowd itself.6"

I wrote this fragment with the most honorable intentions and almost entirely without irony. The manner in which it has been misunderstood has surprised me unspeakably because I had expected misunderstanding from an entirely different quarter. That I consider art to be the core of mankind and the French Revolution an excellent

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allegory for the system of transcendental idealism merely happens to be one of my most subjective views. But I have indicated this so frequently and in so many different ways that I might have hoped that the reader would finally have grown accustomed to it. The rest is merely a language of ciphers [Chifftrrnsprache] ,M Whoever is not able to find Goethe's whole spirit in Wilhelm Mmferwill search for it elsewhere in vain.62 Poesy and idealism are the centers of German art and culture [Bildung]; everyone knows that. But 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, and if possible ever more paradoxically, so that it will not be forgotten that they are still there and that they can never really be entirely expressed. So far there hasn't been any irony and there shouldn't have been any misunderstanding; and yet this fragment has been so misunderstood that a well-known Jacobin, Magister Dyk in Leipzig, even thought he found democratic sentiments in it.63 To be sure, there is something else in the fragment that certainly could have been misunderstood. It has to do with the word "tendencies," and it is here already that the irony begins. Namely, it could be understood that I also regard the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, for example, as nothing more than a tendency, a preliminary sketch, like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which I myself might be better disposed to carry out and complete. Or, to put it in the artistic idiom that is the most common and also the most fitting for this mode of representation, it might seem as if I wanted to stand on Fichte's shoulders as he stands on Reinhold's shoulders, Reinhold on Kant's shoulders, and he on Leibniz's shoulders, and so on infinitely back to the original shoulder.641 realized this perfectly well, but I wanted to test whether anyone would ascribe such a base thought to me. No one seems to have noticed. Why should I offer misunderstandings if no one wants to avail themselves of them? Thus, I am giving up irony and declare point-blank: in the dialect of the Fragments, the word would mean that everything is still only tendency, that this age is the age of tendencies. Whether I am of the opinion that all of these tendencies could be ordered and resolved by me, or perhaps by my brother, or Tieck, or someone else in our faction, or by a son of ours, a grandson, a greatgrandson, a grandson twenty-seven times removed, or not until Judg-


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ment Day, or never: this I leave to the wisdom of the reader, to whom this question, strictly speaking, belongs. Goethe and Fichte: this continues to be the easiest and most fitting formula for all of the offense that the Athendum has given, and for all of the lack of understanding that the Athendum has aroused. The best thing would certainly be to make things even worse here; when the scandal reaches its peak, it ruptures and disappears, and understanding [ Verslehen] can then immediately begin. We still haven't gone far enough in giving offense; but what is not as yet, can still come to pass. Yes, these names may even have to be named more than once, andjust today my brother wrote a sonnet that 1 can't resist sharing with the reader because of its delightful puns, which he (the reader) loves almost more than irony: Marvel at your finely chiseled idols, But leave Goethe, as master, leader, friend, to us: After the rosy dawn of his spirit, Apollo's golden day will no longer delight you. No fresh green does he coax from barren stumps, But cuts them down when fuel for fire is needed. In days to come posterity will see all of the nonpoets Correctly petrified and completely stratified. Those who don't know Goethe are merely Goths, The imbeciles are blinded by even' new bloom, And, dead themselves, they bury the dead. The graciousness of the gods gave us you, Goethe, By such heralds, befriended with the world, Godly in name, vision, figure, and mind.

A large part of the incomprehensibility of the Athendum lies unquestionably in irony, which expresses itself more or less everywhere in it. Here too I will begin with a text from the Lyceum Fragments: Socratic irony is the only absolutely nonarbitrary and thoroughly deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it and to disclose it. This irony remains a puzzle to anyone who doesn't have it, even following the most open confession. It is not intended to deceive anyone but those who regard it as deception, and who either take pleasure in the delightful mischief of poking fun at the whole world or else become angry when they suspect that they themselves might also be meant. In Socratic irony everything should be in jest and everything should be in earnest, everything candidly open, everything deeply hidden. Socratic irony springs from the union of a sense for the art of living and a scientific

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spirit, out of the coming together of a completed philosophy of nature and a completed philosophy of art. It contains and arouses a feeling of the indissoluble conflict between the unconditioned [ Unbedingten] and the conditioned [Bedingte-n], between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. Socratic irony is the freest of all licenses, for by means of it one can transcend oneself; but it is also the most requisite, for it is unconditionally necessary. It is a very good omen if the harmonious, comfortably dull types have absolutely no idea how to take this constant self-parody, taking jest precisely for earnestness and earnestness for jest.65

Another of these fragments recommends itself still more in its brevity: Irony is the form of the paradoxical. Everything that is simultaneously good and great is paradoxical.66

Must not every reader who is used to the fragments in the Athendum find all of this to be extremely simple, even trivial? But at the time it appeared unintelligible to many because it was still rather new; for only since then has irony become the order of the day, following the dawn of the new century in which this multitude of large and small ironies of every type has sprung up, so that I will soon be able to say, as Boufflers has said of the different types of the human heart:67 J'ai vu des cceurs de toutes formes, Grands, petits, minces, gros, mediocres, enormes. (I have seen hearts in all forms, Large, small, minute, big, medium, enormous.)

In order to facilitate this overview of the entire system of irony, we would like to present some of its most exemplary kinds. The first and most distinguished of all is unrefined irony. It is most often found in the real nature of things and is one of its most universally widespread substances; unrefined irony is quite at home in the history of humankind. Then there is fine or delicate irony, then extrafine. This is the way in which Scaramouche works, when he seems to be conversing with someone in a friendly and serious manner, awaiting only the moment when he will be able to effectively administer a kick in the behind.68 This sort of irony is also found among poets, as is sincere irony, which, in its purest and most unspoiled form, is most appropriate in old gardens, where wonderful pleasant grottoes lure the nature lover, brimming with feeling, into their cool laps, only in order to spray him


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thoroughly from all sides with water and in this way to dispel his tender mood. Then there is dramatic irony, when the author who has written three acts unexpectedly becomes a different person and must now write the last two. Then there is double irony, when two lines of irony run parallel to one another without disturbing each other, one sort of irony for the gallery and the other for the boxes, though small sparks can still fly into the curtains. Finally, there is the irony of irony. In general, the most basic irony of irony is indeed the fact that one easily tires of irony if it is offered everywhere and time and time again. But what we above all want to have understood by the irony of irony arises in more ways than one. For example, if one speaks about irony without irony, as was just the case; if one uses irony to speak of irony without realizing that at that very moment one finds oneself in another, much more striking irony; if one is unable to escape irony, as appears to be the case with this experiment concerning incomprehensibility; if irony becomes mannerism and thus, as it were, ironizes the author; if one has promised to contribute to a superfluous journal without previously estimating one's reserves of irony, and now against one's will must produce irony, like an actor with a stomachache; if irony runs wild and simply won't let itself be governed at all. What gods will be able to save us from all of these ironies? The only solution might be if an irony could be found that had the characteristic of gobbling up and swallowing all those large and small ironies so that nothing more could be seen of them. And I must confess that I notice in my own a decided inclination toward exactly this. But even this would only be able to help for a short time. I fear that if I correctly understand what fate seems to indicate to me, soon a new generation of small ironies would arise: because, truly, the stars are signaling the fantastic. And even assuming that things remained peaceful for a long time, they could hardly be trusted to remain so. One simply cannot fool around with irony. It can cast an unbelievably long shadow. I suspect that some of the most intentional artists of earlier times are still engaging in irony with their most faithful admirers and followers centuries after their deaths. Shakespeare has such an endless number of levels, subterfuges, and inteiitions. Is it not also possible that he had the intention of hiding insidious snares in his works for the most ingenious artists of the future, in order to, before they know it, deceive them into believing that they are almost like Shakespeare? Certainly he could be much more intentional in this respect than one supposes.

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I've already had to admit indirectly that the Athenaum is incomprehensible, and since my admission was made in the heat of irony, I can hardly take it back since I would otherwise injure irony itself. But is incomprehensibility actually something so completely reprehensible, so base? I think that the welfare of families and of nations rests on it. If I am not utterly deceived, states and systems, the most artificial works of humankind, are often so artificial that one cannot admire the wisdom of their creator enough. An unbelievably small portion of incomprehensibility is adequate if it is only kept completely true and pure, and no heinous understanding dares to approach its holy confines. Yes, the most precious thing man possesses, inner contentment itself is, as anyone knows, ultimately connected to such a point, which must be left in the dark, but nonetheless carries and holds the whole. It would lose this power at the same moment that one wanted to resolve it into understanding. Indeed, you would all be quite apprehensive if the whole world, as you demand it, were for once to become entirely understandable. And has not this infinite world itself been constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos? Another ground for consolation as regards the generally recognized unintelligibility of the Athenaum lies in this recognition itself, because it is precisely this recognition that taught us that the problem will be temporary. The new age is heralding itself as fleet of foot and winged of sole; the dawn has put on seven-league boots. For a long time now a storm has been brewing on the horizon of poesy; all of the power of the heavens has been compressed in a mighty cloud; now it thunders powerfully and then it seems to disperse and lightning strikes in the distance, only to return soon in an even more terrible form. Soon, however, one will no longer be able to speak of a single storm. Instead, the entire sky will burn in one flame, and then all of your little lightning rods won't help you. Then the nineteenth century will indeed begin, and then ever)' little mystery regarding the unintelligibility of the Athenaum will be solved. What a catastrophe! Then there will be readers who know how to read. In the nineteenth century everyone will be able to enjoy the fragments with ease and pleasure in the after-dinner hours, and will not need a nutcracker even for the hardest, most indigestible one. In the nineteenth century every person, every reader will recognize the innocence of Lurinde, the Protestantism of Genoveva,^ and will find the didactic Elegies of A. W.


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Schlegel to be almost too easy and transparent. Here too it will prove to be the case what I, in a prophetic spirit, set down in the first fragments as maxims: A classical text must never be able to be understood completely. But those who are cultivated [gebildet] and cultivate [bilden] themselves must always want to learn more from it.70

The great separation between understanding and incomprehension will become increasingly universal, pronounced, clear. A great amount of hidden incomprehensibility will yet have to break out. But understanding will also show its omnipotence—understanding, which ennobles sensibility to character and talent to genius, and which refines feeling and intuition into art. Understanding itself will be understood, and it will finally have to be realized and admitted that everyone can attain the highest and that humanity was until now neither malicious nor dumb, but merely awkward and new. I am imposing restraint on myself in order not to desecrate the highest deity prematurely. But the great principles and sentiments that are of importance here may be communicated without any profanation, and I have attempted to express the essential aspects by joining in on the poet's verse, as profound as it is engaging, in that form of poetry that the Spanish call gloss. And there is nothing more to be desired than that one of our superb composers should find mine worthy of a musical accompaniment. There is nothing more beautiful on earth than when poesy and music work, in blessed harmony, toward the ennoblement of humankind." The same thing won't do for all, Let each man look to what he does, Let each man look to where he stands, And whoever stands, that he not fall. This one knows himself to be modest, That one blows his own horn loudly; This one is in earnest mad, Still that one must envy him. I can bear any foolishness, Whether it explode with genius or wave sweet as a flower; Because I'll never forget that Which the Master's power has decreed: The same thing won't do for everyone. In order to feed the fire, Many tender spirits are needed,

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Who are willing to do any service, In order to convert the heathen. Let the noise intensify, Let each man seek him whom he galls, Let each man know that which he writes, And if the stupid in horror From within their dark holes grumble, Let each look to what he's doing. We have inflamed a few, Who now burn by themselves; Yet the crowd holds together, A multiple rabble loyally united. Whoever fathoms incomprehension, Distances himself from all Who are born of woman. If that swarm of bees is once stirred up, Which is moved by the latest word, Each should look to where he stands. May they ever so freely chatter, About that which they still don't understand. Many must flail about, Many an artist will fall flat. Every summer sparrows fly, Taking pleasure in their own cries: Has this ever stirred your anger? Just let them all play without a care, Take care only that you take good aim, And those who stand, that they not fall.

6. Novalis: Faith and Love and Political Aphorisms (1798) 72 Flowers To the King Heaven gave you more than a kingdom in Louise,73 But you also brought her more than the crown—your heart. The Alpine Rose Seldom does a glimmer of heavenly life cling to high places, But, as queen, even the rose of the mountain flourishes.

Novalis: Faith and Love, Political Aphorisms

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The King Only he who is already more than a king can rule in kingly fashion, Thus should he who loves this most splendid woman be king. Earthly Paradise The earth adorns itself bridally where the lovers are, And heavenly air consumes evildoers all the more quickly. It Is Time The bridge stands now, radiant, its mighty shadow alone Is a reminder of time, the temple now rests here eternally, Idols of stone and metal with their terrifying signs of willfulness Have fallen and we see there only a loving couple— In their embrace we recognize the dynasts of old, Recognize the helmsman, know the blessed age again. The End of Discord Long lasted the dissension, none was able to set it right; Many a lovely piece of crystal broke in hostile blows. Only love possesses the talisman of eternal peace— There alone, where it appears, do the masses flow into One. The Dying Genius Welcome, beloved friend, now and never more does my voice (Jail to you; my farewell draws near. I have found what I sought And the bonds of enchantment melt away. This beautiful being—do you see the queen— Is breaking the spell; long did I fly in vain About every throne, but finally My native land beckoned me through Her. Already that mysterious fire burns mightily— My old being—deep in the formations of the Earth: You shall be the sacrificial priest, And sing the song of return. Take these branches, cover me with them, Then sing to the east the sublime song, Until the sun rises and ignites

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And opens the gates of the primeval world for me. The scent of the veil that surrounded me before, Will, then, gilded sink across the plains And whoever breathes it, will swear enraptured Eternal love to the beautiful princess. Land That heavenly couple swims high on the tide, like the dove And the olive branch; they too bear the hope of land. Novalis. Faith and Love or The King and the Queen PROLOGUE i. If a few people want to speak secretly to each other in a large, mixed party, and are not sitting directly next to one another, then they must speak in a special language. This special language can be foreign either in its tone or in its images. The latter would be a language of tropes and riddles. 2. Many have thought that we should speak of delicate, easily misused things in a learned language—for example, write in Latin of such things. We ought to experiment and find out if it is not possible to speak in the common vernacular in such a way that only he for whom it is intended can understand it. Every true secret must automatically exclude profane people. Whoever understands it is already, and rightly so, an initiate. 3. Mystical expression is yet another way of stimulating thought. All truth is ancient. The allure of newness lies only in the variations of expression. The greater the difference in appearance, the greater the joy of recognition. 4. What one loves, one finds everywhere, and one sees similarities everywhere to it. The greater the love, the broader and more manifold this similar world. My beloved is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe the elongation of my beloved. All of the sciences offer their friend flowers and souvenirs for his beloved. 5. But whence the earnest, mystical-political philosophemes? An en-


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thusiast gives voice to his higher life in all he does; thus he philosophizes as well, and indeed livelier than most, more poetically. This deep tone as well is part of the symphony of his powers and organs. But doesn't the universal gain through particular relations, and the particular through universal ones? 6. Let the dragonflies fly by; innocent strangers are they Who, with gifts, joyously follow the binary star hither.74 7. A flourishing land is, I dare say, a more royal work of art than a park. A tasteful park is an English invention. A land that satisfies heart and spirit could well become a German invention, and its inventor would be the king of all inventors. 8. The best of former French monarchs undertook to make his subjects so wealthy that every one of them could put a chicken with rice on his table every Sunday. But would we not favor a government where a peasant would prefer eating a piece of moldy bread over dining on roast in another, and thank God heartily for his luck in being born in this land? 9. If I became a prince tomorrow, I would first of all ask the king for a eudiometer like his.75 No instrument is more essential to a prince. I too would try to draw the life breath of my state more from blossoming plants than from saltpeter.76 i o. Gold and silver are the blood of the state. Accumulations of blood in the heart and in the head betray weakness in both. The stronger the heart, the livelier and more generously blood is circulated to the extremities. Ever)' limb is warm and invigorated, and the blood flows swiftly and powerfully back to the heart. 11. A collapsing throne is like a falling mountain that smashes the plains and leaves behind a dead sea where once there was fertile land and a pleasant dwelling place. 12. Make but the mountains equal, and the sea will let its thanks be known to you. The sea is the element of freedom and equality. Still, it warns against stepping onto flat beds of fool's gold, lest a volcano appear and with it the seeds of a new continent. 13. The mephitic vapors of the moral world behave differently than their namesakes in nature. The former tend to rise in the air, while the latter hang close to the ground. For those who reside at high altitudes, there is no better antidote than flowers and sunshine, which have rarely been found together at great heights. But at one of the

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highest moral altitudes on earth one can now enjoy the purest air and see a lily in the sun. 14. It was no miracle when the mountain peaks thundered down mainly on the valleys and laid waste the fields. Angry clouds circled around them, hiding from them their origin in the land below. Then the plain appeared to them as nothing but a sinister abyss, above which the clouds seemed to carry them—or as an indignant sea that gradually wore them down and carried them away, although nothing was really indignant toward them except for those clouds that seemed so devoted to them. 15. A true royal couple is for the whole human being what a constitution is for the understanding alone. One can only be interested in a constitution as one is interested in a letter. If the sign is not a beautiful picture or a song, then devotion to signs is the most perverse of all inclinations. What is a law if not the expression of the will of a beloved and venerable person? Does not the mystical sovereign, like any idea, need a symbol? And what symbol is worthier and more appropriate than a charming, excellent human being? Brevity of expression is surely worth something, and is not a person a briefer, more beautiful expression of a spirit than a committee? Whoever has a great amount of spirit is not hindered by barriers and differences; on the contrary, they entice him. Only someone without spirit feels burdened and hindered. Incidentally, a born king is also better than a made one. Even the best human being cannot endure such an elevation without changing. Whoever is born a king does not become dizzy, and is not overstimulated by such a position. And is not birth, in the end, the primitive form of election? Those who doubt the freedom of this election, its unanimity, cannot have felt themselves to be really alive. Whoever tries to approach me with his historical experiences here has no idea what I am talking about nor from what standpoint I am speaking. This will be Greek to him, and he will do best to go on his way and not to mingle among an audience whose idiom and customs are completely foreign to him. 16. As far as I am concerned, this may be the age of the letter. It is no great praise that the age is so far removed from nature, that it has so little sense for family life, and is so ill disposed toward the most beautiful, poetic form of society. How astounded would our cosmopolitans be if the age of eternal peace appeared to them, and they beheld the highest, most cultivated humanity in monarchic form!


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The papier-mache that now glues people together will then be turned to dust. The spirit will banish those ghosts that have usurped its place in the letters emanating piecemeal from quills and presses, and it will fuse all people like a pair of lovers. 17. The king is the genuine life principle of the state, just as the sun is for the planetary system. To begin with, the highest form of life within the state, the atmosphere of light, creates itself around this life principle. It is more or less cast in every citizen. Thus, the expressions of a citizen in the proximity of the king shine and are as poetic or as animated as possible. Now, the spirit is most effective when it is most animated, and the effects of the spirit are reflections; but reflection by nature is creative, and the greatest animation is thus connected to beautiful or perfect reflection.77 For this reason, a citizen's expression in the proximity of the king—an expression of greatest, restrained exuberance, an expression of the liveliest impulses, mastered by the most respectful prudence—is also a type of conduct that can be regulated. No court can exist without etiquette. But there is a natural, beautiful etiquette, and there is an artificial, fashionable, ugly one. Producing the former is thus of no small concern to a thinking king, since it has significant influence on the taste for and love of the monarchic form. 18. Every citizen is a civil servant. Only as such does he earn his income. It is very wrong to call the king the first civil servant. The king is not a citizen and therefore not a civil servant. That is what sets monarchy apart, namely, its belief in a higher-born human being, its voluntary acceptance of an ideal human being. Among my equals I can elect no superior, nor can I confer anything on someone who is entangled in the same question as I am. Monarchy is a genuine system because it is connected to an absolute midpoint, to a being that belongs to humanity rather than to the state. The king is a person who has been elevated to an earthly Fate.78 This fiction necessarily forces itself on man. It alone satisfies a higher longing of his nature. All human beings must become capable of ascending the throne. The pedagogical tool for achieving this distant goal is a king. He gradually assimilates the masses of his subjects. Everyone is descended from an ancient royal family, but how few still bear the stamp of this origin! 19. One of the great mistakes of our states is that we see too little of the state. The state should be visible everywhere; every person should be distinguished as a citizen. Could not insignia and uniforms be in-

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troduced everywhere? Whoever considers such a thing to be trivial is not familiar with an essential characteristic of our nature.79 20. At the present time, there is nothing that a regent can do for the preservation of his state that is more expedient than seeking to individualize it as much as possible. 21. The old hypothesis stating that comets are the revolutionary torches of the universe certainly pertains to another kind of comet as well, which periodically revolutionizes and rejuvenates the spiritual universe. Spiritual astronomers have long noticed the influence of such a comet on a considerable portion of the spiritual planet that we call humanity. Mighty floods, climatic changes, fluctuations in the center of gravity, a general tendency toward dissolution, and peculiar meteors are all symptoms of this violent incitation, the results of which will determine the content of a new age. As necessary as it perhaps is that everything periodically be brought into flux in order to bring forth new, necessary mixtures and give rise to new, purer crystallizations, it is nevertheless just as essential to temper this crisis and hinder total dissolution so that a stock remains intact, a core to which the new mass can attach itself and around which it can grow in new, beautiful forms. Thus, that which is solid must draw more solidly together in order to decrease the superfluous fuel, and no means may be spared in preventing the softening of the bones, the dissolution of the typical fibers. Would it not be foolish to make a crisis permanent, and to believe that a feverish condition is the genuine, healthy condition on whose maintenance alone man depends? On the other hand, who could doubt its necessity, its beneficent effect? 22. Soon a time will come when people will be universally convinced that no king can exist without a republic, and no republic without a king, that the two are as indivisible as body and soul, and that a king without a republic or a republic without a king is merely words without meaning. That is why a king has always emerged simultaneously with a genuine republic, and a republic with a genuine king. A genuine king will be the republic, a genuine republic will be king. 23. There are those today who decry princes as such and seek salvation in the new, French model alone, who recognize the republic only in its representational form and claim apodictically that republics only exist where there are primary and electoral conventions, directorates and councils, municipalities and freedom trees. These people


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are wretched philistines, empty in spirit and poor in heart, literalists who try to hide their insipidness and inner nakedness behind the bright flags of triumphant fashion and the imposing mask of cosmopolitanism, and who deserve opponents like the obscurantists so that they may fully represent the war between the frogs and the mice.80 24. Does not the king become king already through the ardent feeling of her worth? 25. The king's entire life will be what the first day was for other princes. Most rule only on the first day. The first day is the entire lifetime of these ephemerals. Then they die, and their relics are misused in manifold ways. Thus most so-called governments are interregna; princes are only the red, sacred wax that sanctions the commands. 26. What are medals? Will-o'-the-wisps or shooting stars. A ribbon of an order should be a Milky Way, but usually it is merely a rainbow, a frame for the storm. A letter from, or a picture of the queen: these would be the supreme medals and honors, honors that would stir men to the most excellent deeds. Deserving housewives should receive similar decorations. 27. The queen has a domestic, rather than a political, sphere of activity on a large scale. Above all, it is her duty to educate her sex, to supervise the younger children and the morals of the house, to tend to the poor and the sick (particularly those of her sex), to decorate the house tastefully, to arrange family celebrations, and to manage the life of the court. She should have her own chancellery, arid her husband would be her first minister, with whom she would ponder everything. Part of the education of her sex would consist of the abolition of the explicit establishments of its corruption. Shouldn't the queen shudder on entering a city in which the most profound degradation of her sex is a public trade? The severest of punishments would not be too severe for these genuine sellers of souls. Murder is far less reproachable. The lauded security intended by this practice is a peculiar promotion of brutality. As little as the government ought to interfere in private affairs, it should nevertheless most rigorously investigate each and every grievance, public scandal, denunciation, or accusation regarding an object that has been debased. And in whom is the protection of the rights of the offended sex more vested than in the queen? She must certainly blush when visiting a city that contains asylums and educational institutes of depravity. Moreover, her example will be infinitely effective. There will be an

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increasing number of happy marriages and domesticity will become more than a fashion. She will also be a genuine model for feminine behavior. Behavior is doubtless a very accurate ethometer.81 Unfortunately, in Berlin it has always had a very low reading, often below zero. What an effect the company of the queen would have on the young women and girls of Berlin! Her presence would already be an honorable distinction in and of itself and would necessarily make public opinion moral again—and public opinion is, in the end, the most powerful means of restoring and cultivating morals. 28. The conduct of the state depends on public sentiment. The ennobling of this sentiment is the only basis for genuine state reform. The king and queen as such can and must embody the principle of public sentiment. Monarchy no longer exists where the king and the center of intelligence of the state are no longer identical. Thus the king of France was already dethroned long before the Revolution, as is the case with most of Europe's princes. The New Prussian state would be in danger if the people were too insipid to recognize the beneficent influence of the king and queen, if in fact they lacked a sense for this classical human couple. This will be revealed shortly. If these geniuses accomplish nothing, then the complete dissolution of the modern world is certain, and this heavenly manifestation is nothing but a brief flash of a vanishing landscape, the celestial music of a dying person, the visible presentiment of a better world that is in store for nobler generations. 29. The court is actually the great model of a household. The large households of the state follow this model, the smaller ones follow that of the large households, and so on down the line. How very effective a reform of the court could be! The king should not live as frugally as a peasant or a member of the gentry; yet there is a kind of royal frugality as well with which our king seems to be familiar. The court should be classical, private life on a large scale. The housewife is the spring that sets domestic life in motion. Similarly, the queen is the spring that sets the court in motion. The man procures things while the woman arranges and organizes them. A frivolous household is usually the fault of the woman. Everyone knows that our queen is entirely antifrivolous. Therefore I do not understand how she can bear the life of the court in its present state. Her taste, which is so intimately at one with her heart, must find the stale monotony of the court unbearable as well.


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Apart from plays and concerts, and occasionally interior decorations, one meets with scarcely a trace of taste in common European court life, and how often are even those exceptions tasteless, how often are they enjoyed tastelessly. But how extremely varied it could be! Led by the queen's taste, a mailre des plaisirs with spirit could turn the court into an earthly paradise, could carry the simple theme of enjoying life through inexhaustibly many variations, and could thus enable us to behold the objects of universal adoration in ever new, ever delightful surroundings. What feeling is more heavenly than the knowledge that one's loved ones are truly enjoying life? 30. Ever)' educated woman and every conscientious mother should have a picture of the queen in her own or in her daughters' drawing room. What a beautiful and strong reminder of that original ideal that everyone would have resolved to attain. Similarity to the queen would be the distinguishing feature of the New Prussian women, their national feature. A charming being in thousandfold forms. A meaningful ceremony honoring the queen could easily be incorporated into ever)' wedding, and in this way one ought to ennoble ordinary life through the king and queen, just as the ancients did through their gods. There, genuine religiosity arose out of this unceasing intervention of the gods in mortal life. Thus could genuine patriotism arise here through this constant weaving of the royal couple into domestic arid public life. 31. Berlin's high society should try to preserve Schadow's sculpture, to establish a lodge of moral grace, and to display the sculpture in its assembly hall.82 This lodge could be an educational establishment for the young women of the cultivated classes, and then the purpose of worshiping the king would be the same as the purpose of religious worship should be, to acknowledge and reward the most excellent of their sex. 32. Until now it was necessary to flee with wife and children from the courts as from a contagious place. From now on one will be able to retreat from the general moral decay to a court as to a happy island. Until now, in order to find an excellent woman, a cautious young man had to go to the more remote provinces, or at least to those families that were completely removed from city and court; in the future he will go, as was originally intended, to the court as the meeting place of the best and the most beautiful, and will consider himself lucky to receive a woman from the queen's hand.

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33. This king is the first king of Prussia. Every day he puts the crown on his head himself and no negotiations are needed to confirm his authority. 34. The king and the queen protect the monarchy better than two hundred thousand soldiers. 35. Nothing is more refreshing than talking about our wishes while they are being fulfilled. 36. No state has been administered more like a factory than Prussia since the death of Frederick William I. As necessary as such a mechanistic administration may be for the physical health, strength, and efficiency of the state, the state does indeed essentially collapse if it is handled exclusively in this manner.83 The principle of the old, renowned system is to bind everyone to the state by means of selfinterest. Clever politicians envisioned an ideal state, as self-interested as its subjects were, that was nevertheless so artificially connected to the interests of its subjects that the two mutually promoted each other. A great deal of effort has been devoted to this political squaring of the circle, but crude self-interest appears to be entirely immeasurable and antisystematic. It has been impossible to restrain it, although that is precisely what the nature of every state institution necessarily demands. Thus, an enormous amount of damage has been wrought by tills veritable incorporation of common egoism as a principle, and the seed of the revolution of our days lies nowhere but here.84 As culture grew, needs necessarily became more manifold and the value of the means of their satisfaction had to increase all the more, as moral sentiment lagged further and further behind all these inventions of luxury, all refinements of the pleasures of life and comfort. Sensuality gained an enormous domain too quickly. To the degree that human beings developed this side of their nature and lost themselves in the most diverse activities and feeling of self-contentment, the other side of their nature necessarily seemed insignificant, narrow, and distant to them. They believed that they had chosen the correct path of their destiny, and that it was necessary to employ all of their forces here. Thus crude self-interest became passion, and its maxims simultaneously became the result of the highest understanding. This is what made passion so dangerous and invincible. How mahgnificent it would be if the reigning king truly convinced himself that on this path one could attain only the fleeting happiness of the gambler, which is determined by such an unreliable quantity as imbecility


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or the lack of routine and finesse in his partners. One learns deception by being deceived, and how quickly the tables are turned, the master becoming the pupil of his pupil. Lasting happiness is attained only by a righteous man and a righteous state. What good are all the riches in the world to me if they only serve me in order to acquire fresh horses and to travel more quickly around the world? Unselfish love in the heart and its maxims in the head are the sole, eternal basis of every true, inseparable union, and what is the union of the state but a marriage?85 37. A king, like a father, must show no favoritism. He should have not only military companions and adjutants. Why not also civilian ones? If he creates capable generals out of his military adjutants, why should he not want to create capable presidents and ministers in a similar way? All strands of the government converge in him. The entire mechanism of the state can only be assessed from that point of convergence. From that point alone one learns to regard the state and its detail on a large scale. Nowhere can one be trained for the occupation of directorial posts better than in the cabinet, where the political wisdom of the entire land is concentrated, where one finds all things dealt with thoroughly, and from which point one can track the course of business down to its smallest branches. Here alone any limited spirit would disappear: that pedantry of businessmen that allows them to place a unique value on their efforts, an infallible value on their suggestions, and that makes them judge all things according to their own sphere of influence, according to their own perspective, and often misleads the higher authorities themselves into taking onesided, unequal, partial steps. This provincialism is apparent everywhere and, more than anything else, prevents genuine republicanism, universal participation in the affairs of the whole state, intimate contact and harmony of all parts of the state. The king should have even more military and civilian adjutants. Just as the former would form the greatest military school in the state, the latter would form the greatest practical-political academy in the state. A position in both would be distinction and incentive enough. For the king, this dynamic society of the most excellent young men of his country would be most pleasant and advantageous. For these young men, however, these years of apprenticeship would be the most splendid celebration of their lives, the source of a lifelong passion. Personal love would bind them eternally to their sovereign, and the king would have the most

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perfect opportunity to become acquainted with his servants, to choose and personally to respect and to love them. The noble simplicity of royal private life, the image of this happy, intimately joined pair, would be the most beneficent influence on the moral education of this core of the Prussian youth. In this way the innate desire of the king's heart would most easily be granted, namely, to become the true reformer and restorer of his nation and his time. 38. Nothing should be closer to the king's heart than the desire to be as well-rounded, educated, oriented, and free of prejudice as possible; in short, to be and to remain the most complete human being possible. No man has more means at his disposal than the king to make this highest model of humanity his own with ease. He can always keep himself young through social contact and continuous learning. An old king makes a state as morose as he himself is. How easy it would be for the king to acquaint himself with the scientific progress of humanity! He already has learned academies at his disposal. Now suppose that he demanded of them complete, exact, and precise reports about the past and present state of literature as a whole— periodic reports about the most noteworthy events in everything that concerns human beings as such—excerpts from and comments on the most outstanding books, references to those products of fine art that deserve special consideration and enjoyment, and, finally, suggestions for the advancement of the scientific culture of his subjects, for the acceptance and support of promising, significant endeavors and of poor, promising scholars, for filling scientific gaps and for the development of new literary seeds; and suppose that he correlated them all. These things would put him in a position to survey his state among other states, his nation in humanity and himself on a large scale and in this way indeed to create himself into a royal human being. Spared the effort of an enormous amount of reading, he would enjoy the fruits of European studies in excerpts, and through diligent reflection on this purified and condensed material he would soon see new, powerful forces of his spirit unleashed, and himself in a purer element, at the peak of the age. How divinatory86 his gaze, how keen his judgment, how sublime his sentiments would become! 39. A true prince is the artist of artists, that is, the director of artists. Every human being should be an artist. Everything can become fine art. The artists are the prince's material; his will is his chisel: he educates, appoints, and instructs the artists, because only he can see the


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whole picture from the proper point of view, because the great idea that should be represented and executed by means of united forces and ideas is completely present only to him. The regent performs an infinitely diverse play, where stage and seats, actors and audience are one. and he himself is simultaneously poet, director, and hero of the play. How charming, if, as with the king, the directress is simultaneously the hero's lover, the heroine of the piece, if in her one sees even the muse who fills the poet with sacred flames and tunes his lyre to gentle, heavenly melodies. 40. In our times true miracles of transubstantiation have occurred. Isn't a court transforming itself into a family, a throne into a shrine, a royal wedding into an eternal bond of love? 41. When the dove becomes the companion and beloved of the eagle, then the golden age is near or already here, if not yet publicly recognized and widespread.87 42. Let whoever wants to behold and ingratiate himself with eternal peace now travel to Berlin and see the queen. There everyone can clearly convince themselves that eternal peace loves heartfelt righteousness above all else and can be eternally fettered by this alone. 43. What do I desire above all? Let me tell you: an ingenious representation of the queen's childhood and youth. Certainly, in the truest sense, female years of apprenticeship. Maybe nothing other than Natalie's years of apprenticeship. Natalie seems like the fortuitous portrait of the queen to me. Ideals must resemble each other.88 [Political Aphorisms] 44. The reason for all folly in sentiments and opinions is confusion of the goal with the means. 45. Most revolutionaries have certainly not known exactly what they wanted—form or unform. 46. Revolutions prove rather to be contrary to the true energy of a nation. There is an energy that comes from sickliness and weakness that works more powerfully than true energy, but unfortunately ends in yet deeper weakness. 47. If one judges a nation, then one judges largely only the particularly visible, the striking part of that nation. 48. Nothing is more damaging to the old government than the disproportionate strength of the parts of the state that comes to light in

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a revolution. Its administration must have been greatly flawed in order for many parts to have become flawed and for such a stubborn weakness to have taken root everywhere. 49. The weaker a part is, the more inclined it is toward disorders and infections. 50. What are slaves? Completely weakened, compromised human beings. What are sultans? Slaves incited by fierce stimuli. How do sultans and slaves end? Violently. The former easily as slaves, the latter easily as sultans, that is, frenetically, irrationally. How can slaves be cured? By being liberated and enlightened very cautiously. One must treat them like people frozen to death. Sultans? In the same way that Dionysus and Croesus were cured: beginning with shocks, fasts, and isolation, gradually increased with restoratives. Sultans and slaves are the extreme. There are yet many intermediate classes before one reaches the king and the genuine cynic: the class of perfect health. Terrorists and servile courtiers belong to the next class after sultans and slaves, and thus they blend into each other, as do the latter. Both are representatives of the two forms of sickness of a very weak constitution. 51. The king represents the healthiest constitution, given a maximum of stimuli; the genuine cynic represents the healthiest, given a minimum of stimuli. The more similar they are, and the more easily they can confuse their roles, remaining unchanged, the closer their constitution comes to the ideal of the perfect constitution. Thus, the more independent the king is of his throne, the more he is king. 52. All stimuli are relative, are quantities—except for the one that is absolute and is more than a quantity. 53. The most perfect constitution arises out of incitation and absolute connection to this stimulus. With this stimulus, it can do without all other stimuli, for initially the stimulus has a greater effect in proportion to the decrease in the relative stimuli, and vice versa. But once the stimulus has pervaded the constitution completely, the constitution becomes completely indifferent to the relative stimuli. This stimulus is—absolute love. 54. Without it, a cynic and a king are mere titles. 55. Every improvement of imperfect constitutions results in making them more capable of love. 56. The best state consists of indifferentists of this kind.S!l 57. In imperfect states they are also the best citizens. They take part in everything good, laugh silently about their contemporaries' foolish-


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ness, and abstain from everything evil. They do not change, because they know that every change of this kind and under these circumstances is only a new error and that the best cannot come from the outside. They allow everything its dignity, and just as they bother no one, no one bothers them, and they are welcome everywhere. 58. The current debate concerning forms of government is a debate concerning the respective advantages of maturity or blossoming youth. 59. A republic is thefluidum deferensm of youth. Where young people are, there is a republic. 60. With marriage the system changes. The married person requires order, security, and peace—he wishes to live as family, in a family—in a regular household—he seeks a genuine monarchy. 61. A prince without a sense for family is not a monarch. 62. But why have a single, unrestricted paterfamilias? To what arbitrary will is one exposed there? 63. In all relative situations, the individual is exposed once and for all to arbitrary will—and if I were to go into the desert, is not my essential interest still exposed to the arbitrary will of my individuality there? The individual as such is, in accordance with its nature, subject to chance. In a perfect democracy I am subject to very many, in a representative democracy to fewer, in a monarchy to one arbitrary fate. 64. But doesn't reason require that each person be his own lawmaker? A man should only obey his own laws. 65. If Solon and Lycurgus established true, universal laws, laws of humanity, from what did they take them?'-'1 Hopefully from the feeling of their humanity and the observation of that feeling. If I am a human being, as they are, from what do I take my laws? Certainly from the same source—and am I untrue to reason if I then live according to Solon's and Lycurgus's laws? Every true law is my law, regardless of who declares it and lays it down. This declaring and laying down, however, or the observation of the original feeling and its representation, must indeed not be so easy—otherwise, we would need no specific written laws. Is it then an art? And to apply the law thus appears indeed to presuppose lengthy practice and honing of judgment. How did classes and guilds come into being? By means of the individual's lack of time and strength. No one person has yet been able to learn and simultaneously practice all of the arts and sciences, to be everything to himself. Labor and the arts were divided. And not the art of

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government as well? Following the universal demand of reason, all men should also be doctors, poets, and so forth. In regard to the other arts, incidentally, people largely agree that this should be so—yet everyone believes the art of government and philosophy requires only audacity, and therefore everyone presumes to be able to speak as an expert, having pretensions with regard to their practice and virtuosity. 66. But the superiority of representative democracy is indeed undeniable. A natural, exemplary human being is a poet's dream. So what remains? The composition of an artificial one. The most excellent men of the nation complement one another. In such a society, a pure spirit of society catches fire. Its decrees are its emanations, and the ideal regent is realized. 67. I begin by placing in doubt the most excellent men of the nation and the sparking of the pure spirit. I will not even mention experience here, which so contradicts them. It is plain to see that no living body can be composed of dead matter, and thus no just, unselfish, and liberal person of unjust, selfish, and one-sided people. To be sure, it is the error of a one-sided majority, and much time will pass before we are universally convinced of this simple truth. A majority thus constituted will not elect the most excellent, but on average only the most narrow-minded and the most worldly-wise. By the most narrowminded I mean those for whom mediocrity has become second nature, the classical model of the masses. By the most worldly-wise I mean the most adroit philanderers of the masses. Here no spirit will catch fire, least of all a pure one. A great mechanism will be formed, a routine that is only occasionally interrupted by intrigue. The reins of government will sway back and forth between the letter and a multitude of people who instigate partisanship. The despotism of a single person still has an advantage over this kind of despotism in that one saves at least time and shoes if one is dealing with the government and the government plays with open cards, whereas with the latter kind of despotism one does not always know immediately at whose house the government is to be found on that particular day, and which paths are most helpful in getting there. If the representative is to become more mature and purified by the heights to which he is raised, how much more so the individual regent? If human beings were already what they should be and can be, then all forms of government would be one and the same; humanity would be ruled in the same way everywhere, everywhere according to

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the original laws of humanity. But then one would elect first the most beautiful, poetic, the most natural form—the family form—monarchy— several masters—several families—one master—one family! 68. Today, perfect democracy and monarchy appear to be caught up in an indissoluble antimony—the advantage of one is balanced by an opposite advantage of the other. The young people take the side of the former, the more staid patriarchs that of the latter. Absolute difference of inclinations seems to be the cause of this split. The one loves changes—the other does not. Perhaps we all love revolutions, free competition, contests, and similar democratic manifestations in certain years. But these years pass for most people—and we feel drawn to a more peaceful world where a central sun leads the dance, and one would rather become a planet than fight a destructive battle for the right to lead the dance. We should at least be politically and religiously tolerant—we should accept the possibility that another reasonable being can be differently inclined than we are. This tolerance gradually leads, it seems to me, to the sublime conviction of the relativity of every positive form, and to the true independence of a mature spirit from any individual form that is merely a necessary tool. The time must come when political entheism92 and pantheism are most intimately bound together in necessary reciprocity.

7. Novalis: Soliloquy (i7g8) 93 It's quite a peculiar thing about speaking and writing; a proper conversation is a mere word game. One can but marvel at the ridiculous error that people make in thinking that they speak about things. No one realizes the very particularity of language: that it is only concerned with itself. And this is why it is such a wondrous and fruitful secret: that when one speaks merely in order to speak, one gives voice to the most splendid, original truths. But if one wants to speak about something specific, capricious language makes one say the most ridiculous and mixed-up things. This is the source of the hate that so many serious people have for language. They notice its mischievousness, but not the fact that despicable chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If one could only make it clear to people that language is like mathematical formulas. Formulas comprise a world of their own: they play only with themselves, express nothing but their

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own wondrous nature and are for that very reason so expressive. For that very reason as well, the peculiar relational play of things reflects itself in them. It is only through their freedom that formulas are a part of nature, and only in their free movement does the world soul express itself and make them into a tender measure and outline of things. So it is too with language: whoever has a keen feeling for its application, its rhythm, its musical spirit; whoever perceives in himself the tender effect of its inner nature and moves tongue or hand accordingly will be a prophet. On the other hand, whoever is acquainted with this feeling but hasn't a good enough ear or sense for language to write truths like these will be tricked by language and ridiculed by the people just as Cassandra was by the Trojans. Even if I think I have indicated most clearly with this the essence and task of poesy, I am nevertheless certain that no one can understand it, and because I have wanted to say it, I have said something completely ridiculous, and no poesy arises in this way. But what if I had to speak, and this drive to speak were a marker for the inspiration, the effectivity of language in me? And suppose my will wanted only that which I had to do? Thus in the end my will could, without my knowledge or belief, be poesy and render a secret of language intelligible? Thus I would be a competent writer (for a writer is after all only someone enthused by language)? Notes 1. Source: Mythologie der Vemunft. Hegeh "altestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). Controversy has surrounded this first manifesto of German Idealism ever since its initial publication in 1917. Its first editor, Franz Roscnzweig, claimed that the manuscript, while in Hegel's handwriting, had really been authored by Schelling. Holderlin, who was a friend of Hegel and Schelling at Tubingen, has also been named as a possible author. Debates about the authorship of the manuscript, which has since become known as the "Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism," continued through the 19505 and 19605, with most scholars tending toward attributing it to Hegel. There can be no doubt, however, that the thoughts expressed in these few pages were on the minds of all three men and are probably a protocol of their discussions. 2. "Humanity" here replaced the earlier "history." 3. The concept of a new mythology ranks among the most important in the romantic theory of art. In his Philosophy of Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; originally delivered as a series of lectures in 1803-4), Schelling developed the most comprehensive version of this concept. To Schelling's mind, every art is mythological in the sense that it is an objectification or extcriorization of ideas. Art offers the individual (rhetorical) figures or configurations that serve as material or external occa-

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sions for reflection. To facilitate a comparison of Friedrich Schlegel's and Schelling's notions of mythology', we are reprinting here some of the crucial characterizations of mythology from Schelling's Philosophy of Art: "Mythology is the necessary condition and first content of all art. . . . The nervus probandilies in the idea of art as representation, by means of particular beautiful things, of what is absolutely beautiful in itself, and hence as representation of the absolute within limitation without suspension of the absolute. This contradiction is resolved only in the ideas of the gods, who themselves can have no independent, truly objective existence except in the complete development of their own world and of a poetic totality that we call mythology" (45). "The ideas, to the extent that they are intuited objectively, are therefore the substance and as it were the universal and absolute material of art from which all particular works of art emerge as mature entities. These real or objective, living and existing ideas are the gods. The universal symbolism or universal representation of the ideas as real is thus given in mythology. . . . Indeed, the gods of any mythology are nothing other than the ideas of philosophy intuited objectively or concretely" (17). "The idea of the gods is necessary for art. Our systematic construction of art leads us back precisely to the point to which instinct first led poesy at its inception. What ideas are for philosophy, the gods are for art, and vice versa" (35). "The world of the gods is the object neither of mere understanding nor of reason, but rather can be comprehended only by fantasy. It is not an object of understanding, since the understanding remains bound to limitation; nor is it one of reason, since even in scientific or systematic thinking reason can portray or present the synthesis of the absolute with limitation only ideally (archetypally). Hence it is the object only of fantasy, which presents this synthesis in images" (38). "Every truly creative individual must himself create his own mythology" (75). 4. Source: Walter Schulz, ed., Briefwechsel Fichte-Schelling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968). Selections from pages 105-43. 5. Fichte is responding to Schelling's differentiation, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) (trans. Peter Heath | Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978]), between a transcendental philosophy (of the subject) and an objective philosophy of nature. The two are harmoniously bound together in Schelling's notion of an "objective idealism." This constitutes a decisive break from Fichte who, in the Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1794), maintains that all reality, both the reality of the phenomenological world and the reality of the Absolute, must be traced back to the activity of the I. 6. "Theory of scientific knowledge" is the translation of Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte's designation for his project of transcendental idealism (sec note 7 to the Introductory Essay to Part I). When capitalized, the term refers to Fichte's treatise; otherwise, as in this case, it designates his specific discipline of inquiry in more general terms. 7. See the introduction to Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism, 3-14. 8. In the classical Greek model, Aristotle names physics as one of the theoretical disciplines alongside metaphysics (theology) and mathematics. Whereas metaphysics examines the general principles of being, physics is limited to "principles of motion," which designate all types of change in nattirc, above all growth and developmental processes in the organic world. 9. Schelling is referring to his essay "Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses" (General deduction of the dynamic process), first published in his journal, Zeitschrifl fur Spekulative Physik (Journal of speculative physics) (Jena and Leipzig: Gabler Verlag, 1800), vol. i , issue 2. The essay is reprinted in Schelling's Sdmtliche Werke, ed. K. Fr. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1859), 4: 1-77.

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10. For the role of self-determination in Fichte's thought, see the section titled "The Concept of Self-Consciousness" in the Ceneral Introduction to this volume. 11. The reference is to Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758-1823), who taught at Jena from 1787-1823 and became a proponent of the philosophical work of Christoph Bardili (1761-1808). Bardili, influenced by Kant, attempted to establish a notion of "rational realism" according to which thought is the principle of being. 12. Cf. Schelling's opposition between transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of nature from the beginning of the second letter in this exchange. 13. Schelling's note in margin: "I said, the /, which makes a difference." 14. J. G. FichU 's Antwortschreiben an Herrn Professor Reinhold aufdessen im ersten Hefte der Beitrdge zur leichteren Ubersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie etc. (Hamburg, bei Perthes 1801) befindliches Sendschreiben an den ersteren (Tubingen: Cotta, 1801). 15. The reference is to "Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie" (Presentation of my system of philosophy), which was first published in the Zeitschrifl fur spekulalive Physik,vo\. a,issues (1801). Reprinted in Schelling's Sdmtliche Werke, 4, 105-212. 16. The distinction between Knowledge (Erkenntnis) and knowledge (Wissen) indicates the transcendental character of the former and the empirical character of the latter. Erkenntnis is normally translated as "cognition," but as Schelling's is not referring to a particular empirical activity in this case, we have chosen to avoid the more commonly used term. 17. The reference is to Schelling's "Presentation of My System of Philosophy." Cf. note 15. 18. This refers to a debate surrounding theses by Fichte and F. K. Forberg, which, in accordance with Kantian philosophy, rejected a metaphysical concept of God. Fichte was accused of atheism because of his essay "Uber den Grund unseres Glaubens an einer Gottlichen Weltordnung" (Concerning the grounding of our belief in a divine world order), first published in 1798 in the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten (Philosophical journal of a society of German scholars), ed. Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer. After heated debates, Fichte was forced to leave the University of Jena in 1799. 19. Schelling's note in margin: "which is the only one that Fichte has dealt with up to now." 20. In § 76, comment, Kant maintains that the distinction between thought (understanding) and intuition can only break down in the transcendent realm of theoretical reason, which is beyond the grasp of the understanding. 21. "Presentation of My System of Philosophy." Cf. note 15. 22. "Philosophische Briefe uber Dogmatismus und Kriucismus" (Philosophical letters on dogmatism and criticism), first published anonymously in the Philosophise/its Journal (1795). Reprinted in Werke, ed. Hartmut Buchner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, and Annermarie Diepcr (Stuttgart: Frommann Holzboog, 1982), vol. i, Part III, 47-112. 23. Source: N 2: 104-296. Some useful cross-references regarding concepts and themes addressed in individual fragments: I/Non-I, Positing, Identity: nos. i, 3, 5-8, 23, 32, 36, 278, 555, 556, 558, 561, 562, 564, 565; Signification/Representation: nos. 2, 11, 12, 445, 633; Philosophy (Reflection, Feeling, Intuition): nos. 4, 15, 16, 17, 10,, 20,22,31,38, 193, 197-99,201,566,567,651. 24. The term "hieroglyphical power" refers to the aspect of externalization and figuration in representation. It is thus closely connected with the notion of mythology. Cf.Jochen Schulte-Sasse's discussion of mythology as figuration in the conclusion to his General Introduction to this volume. 25. Cf. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.


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Martin's Press, 1968). For Kant, time and space are a priori forms of intviition. They are both a priori conditions of all appearances (Erscheinungeri); that is, without space and time there could be no appearances. Kant divides their function in terms of conditions of external and internal appearances: "Time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state" (A 33, B 50). "Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer intuition is possible for us" (A 26, B 42). 26. On the significance of Novalis's distinction between das and der Bezeichnende, see the introductory essay to Part I, the section titled "Signification and the Other." 27. On feeling as "synthetical unity of apperception" and "inner sense," see the General Introduction to this volume and the introductory essay to Part I. 28. Cf. Schelling's letter to Fichte, November 19, 1800 (in "Selections from FichteSchelling Correspondence"), and the commentary on intellectual intuition in the General Introduction to this volume. 29. Ordo inversus (the idea that the order or direction of thought must continually be inverted or reversed) is an important, frequently used figure of thought in Novalis's and Friedrich Holderlin's writings. The figure refers to a shifting motion between two exclusionary, opposite states of mind—namely, between consciousness (knowledge) and self-consciousness (feeling) in the individual's attempt to ground knowledge in his or her "pure" self-consciousness. Although the absolute is the only possible ground of knowledge, it can never be achieved by the empirical I. Not even "pure" selfconsciousness, which differs from the absolute, can be achieved. The empirical I may approximate a state of selfsame identity ("pure" self-consciousness). It either "knows" by reflecting on an object or content (in the act of knowing, it disperses itself as identity), or it tries to be "centered" within itself, to be a selfsame identity. Striving for identity, it shifts from "knowledge" or "consciousness" to "feeling"; striving for "knowledge," it shifts from "self-consciousness" to "consciousness." According to Holderlin, the "poetic spirit" must be careful that its striving for unity does "not cancel itself as something undifferentiable" and thus "become an empty' infinity"; he insists that "it is necessary that the poetic spirit in its unity and harmonious progress also provide for itself an infinite perspective for its transaction, a unity where in the harmonious progress and alternation everything move forward and backward and, through its sustained characteristic relation to that unity, not only gain objective coherence for the observer (but) also gain (a) felt and tangible coherence and identity in the alternation of oppositions" (Friedrich Holderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987], 70—71). Cf. Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, "Ordo Inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, Holderlin, Kleist und Kafka," in Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift fur Arthur Henkel, ed. Herbert Anton et al. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), 75-97. 30. Cf. Schelling's theory of the beautiful as symbol of the infinite in his Philosophy of Art. Ill the mirror of the beautiful symbol, the individual may overcome his or her dispersal and approximate himself or herself as "pure" self-consciousness. 31. Regarding the concept of knowledge in Fichte's Theoi-y of Scientific. Knowledge, and in Kant and Schelling, see the General Introduction to this volume. 32. See UniversalBrouillan ^14. Philosophers' stone (also called elixir): a substance that was believed to have the power of transmuting base metal into gold. 33. Source: KA 8: 67-73. 34. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, "The Characteristics of the Present Age," in The, Popular Works vfJohann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. William Smith (London: Trubner and Company, 1889), 2: 1-288.

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35. Fanaticism/enthusiasm [Schwarmerei]: Enlightenment thinkers label fanaticism or enthusiasm what reason cannot explain. Enthusiasm: from Greek enlhousiasmos, which in turn derives from enlhousiazein, to be inspired by a god. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "enthusiasm" was the precise equivalent of German Schwarmerei. Cf. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: "When the English philosopher Henry More stated in a work published in 1660 that 'If ever Christianity be exterminated, it will be by Enthusiasme,' he clearly used the word differently from the way we do now. He was also using a meaning that differed from the first sense, 'possession by a god,' recorded in English (1603). Enthusiasm and this sense of the word go back to the Greek word mtkousiasmos, which ultimately comes from the adjective enlheoi, 'having the god within,' formed from en-, 'in, within,' and them, 'god.' Henry More in 1660 was referring to belief, either mistaken or unsupported by evidence, in one's own inspiration by the Christian God." Cf. also note 4 to the texts in Part II. 36. A "mere product of reflection is true nonbeing" because "being" is defined as that which is not determined, that is, not defined by structural relations. 37. The Romantics distinguished between empirical physics and higher physics. Only empirical physics is what we would call physics today. The notion of (higher or speculative) physics is related to the notion of a new mythology (see note 3). In his Philosophy of An, Schelling notes: "We have often heard of late that it might well be possible to acquire the content of a new mythology from physics—naturally to the extent that we mean speculative physics.. .. Every truly creative individual must himself create his own mythology, and this can occur using virtually any material or content, thus also from that of a higher physics" (74-75). To a certain extent, then, higher physics as mythology amounts to the use of natural objects as "gods," that is, as external and material objectifications of ideas. See also Michael F.lsasser's excellent introduction to Friedrich Schlegel's Transcendentalphilosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1991). 38. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Darlegung des wakren Verhdltnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserlen Fichte 'schen Lehre (1806). 39. Adherents of the philosophical doctrine according to which life and matter are inseparable, or that matter possesses a spiritual component. 40. Again, the German original uses Schwarmerei. Cf. Fichte, "The Characteristics of the Present Age": "[The fanatics] set to work to invent some imaginary theory as to the hidden principles of Nature—for it is the invariable habit of the [fanatic] to place Nature before him as his object; he admits whatever fancies may occur to his mind, and entertains those among them that are most agreeable to him; stimulating himself, should such fancies not flow so readily as he desires, by means of physical appliances (135)." 41. Schlegel might be referring here to Franz von Baader (1765-1841). Professor of philosophy and speculative theology in Munich, Baader turned against Kantian transcendentalism and developed a theosophical approach according to which human creation, activity, and knowledge are but emanations from God, who resides in the human will. See also note 39 to the texts in Part II on Sturm und Drang. 42. Schlegel refers here to the so-called Spinoza debate of the 17805. In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) published "Uber die Lehre des Spinoza, in Briefen an Moses Mendelssohn" (On the teaching of Spinoza, in letters to Moses Mendelssohn). In a conversation in July 1780, Jacobi had discussed theological matters with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81). His work on Spinoza is supposedly the verbatim account of this conversation. In response to one of Jacobi's inquiries, Lessing allegedly had declared himself an adherent of Spinozism. Lessing's friend Mendelssohn, claiming to know the thoughts of his late friend better than anybody, assailed Jacobi publicly while questioning the authenticity of the dialogue. Mendelssohn clearly had a


i51

vested interest in the debate because he presumed pantheism to be politically dangerous. Jacobi's account of his conversation with Lessing became the basis for Spinoza's considerable influence on German letters; for instance, it encouraged Goethe and Herder to explore Spinoza's work in more detail; Herder published his own reading of Spinoza's pantheism in 178*7 in a piece entitled "Gott" (God). 43. A reference to Fricdrich Hcinrich Jacobi's reading of Spinoza in his "Uber die Lehre des Spinoza." 44. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel's "Speech on Mythology" (included in the "Dialogue on Poesy" in Part II of this volume) for his discussion of the power of ancient myth. 45. This reveals a conflict between enlightened premises in Fichte and romantic premises in Schlegel. In the eyes of the Romantics, Fichte is a philosopher of reflection and difference, whereas the Romantics strived to overcome difference through fantasy; seejochen Schulte-Sasse's General Introduction to this volume. 46. This should not be read in the context of Hegel's well-known notion of art as appearance/semblance of essence (Schein des Wesens); it should, rather, be read as a reference to Novalis's, Schelling's, and Schlegel's notion of mythology. Cf. note 3. 47. Sir Charles Gmndison is the title of one of Samuel Richardson's (1689—1761) sentimental novels. In it he depicts a man of ideal moral character, a perfect Christian and gentleman, a character who is insufferably good. The book is also insufferably didactic. 48. General James Wolfe (1727—59) died when the British conquered Quebec. The engraving of Wolfe's death is by Benjamin Wrest. 49. The German term Selbstdndigkeit draws attention to the entire history of modernity that Schlegel critiques here. In a literal sense, the claim lo be self-standing is that of a subject that has recognized itself as existing (Descartes's cogito, ergo sum) and as different from everyone else, and has taken this self-knowledge to be the indisputable ground for the cognition of self and others, that is, for the deployment of Reason. Kant's transcendentalism and Fichte's idealism develop this methaphysic of Reason and the Subject further. For Schlegel, this enure enterprise of Reason's self-grounding is unsuccessful because it forgets its implication in that which it cannot know, in the other of knowledge, to which the Romantics give the name nature. 50. For a similar critique of the rationalist conception of the state, see "Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism" (the first text in Part I). 51. Source: KA 2, 363-72. Conceived of in 1798 and substantially rewritten in 1799, this essay was added to the final edition of the Athendum to replace essays by Novalis and Schelling that were cut on Goethe's advice. 52. This bifurcation, outside/inside, refers to a distinction such as that between the materialist position of Spinozism and the idealism of Fichte, for example. Thus, two of the three "logical maladies" of the Philosophical Fragments inform this essay, though under slightly different rubrics. Schlegel's texts, particularly On Incomprehensibility, suggest how discursivily makes such a disjunction impossible to sustain. 53. The journal Athendum was founded by A. W. Schlegel and Fricdrich Schlegel in 1798, with the intent that both brothers be not merely editors, but the writers of the journal, with occasional contributions of "mastcrworks of higher critique and polemics." 54. Christian Garve (1742-98), popular moral philosopher, translated Edmund Burke and Adam Smith a.s well as Aristotle and Cicero into German. Schlegel's recurring polemic against Garve can perhaps be explained by the reliance of Garve's epistemology on an imported British empiricism impatient with the possibility that "communication" might not be possible and that is quick to conflate "is" with "ought." 55. The English rendering of ree/le Sprache as "real language" is extremely problem-

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atic unless something like the predicate calculus of Russell and Whitehead's Prindpia Mathematica is understood by it. The term occurs in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, B 105, where he claims that this "tablet" contains die forms of all possible synthetic judgments of nature. Important to note here is that the "tablet" is discovered and not received, as with, for example, Moses. Given the tense of Schlegel's sentences, perhaps he is describing his own intellectual position after encountering the first Critique, but before his encounter with the third; for the necessity attaching to "real language" that was held out by the discover)' of the categories in the first Critique was dashed by the third Critique's insistence on the pivotal role of reflection and the paradigm of art or techne in positing an experiential unity in which such categories could function systematically. For an interesting history of "real language" in the empiricist tradition, see Joelle Proust's Questions of Form: Logic and the Analytic Proposition from Kant to Carnap, trans. Anastasios Albert Brenner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); occurrences of the term are also to be found in later fragments of Walter Benjamin. 56. The reference here is to Goethe's Faust, Part I, verse 383. This juxtaposition of Kant and Goethe is one of the earliest indications of what became for nineteenthcentury German aesthetics the truism that Goethe's literary production fulfilled the aesthetic program laid out in Kant's Critiques. Such delusions of philosophy's preeminence could be sustained, however, only by suppressing Faust, Part II, which'effectively unsutures the first Critique's Transcendental Aesthetic and the Categories to which it gives rise. 57. Friedrich Schlegel's novel Lucinde (1799), which thematized romantic poesy in terms of a relationship between a man and a woman, was received as a scandalous text. 58. Christoph Girtanner (1760-1800) was a German physician and author of various essays on medicine and chemistry. 59. The reference is to the journal Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmackes, which in 1800 published an anonymous review of the Athendum (possibly written by August Ferdinand Bernhardi, brother-in-law of Tieck). 60. Athendum Fragment 216. 61. Chiffemsprache, unlike reelle Sprache, would be an artificial constmction dependent on preexisting meaning for its transformation rules. It would be, in principle, decipherable but would require translation. 62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelni Meister's apprenticeship) (1795—96). 63. Johann Dyk (1750-1813), proprietor of the Dyk Bookstore in Leipzig and translator of a number of French light comedies. 64. Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758-1823) was offered a chair of philosophy at the University ofJena, which he held from 1787 to 1794, largely on the basis of his popular explication of Kant's first Critique, published in the Merkur between 1786 and 1787. Because of his success as a lecturer, Jena became a center for the study of Kant's work. 65. Critical (Lyceum) Fragment 108. 66. Critical (Lyceum) Fragment 48. 67. Stanislas, Chevalier de Boufflers (1738-1815), French poet, noted primarily for his vers de societe. 68. In the commedia dell'arte, generally in French versions, Scaramouche was one of the versions of the cowardly soldier—all braggadocio with no bite, usually dressed in black. 69. Ludwig Ticck's Leben und Tod der Heiligen Genoveva (Life and death of Saint Genevieve; 1799), a play based on a medieval Catholic legend. 70. Critical (Lyceum) Fragment 20.


' 53

71. Schlegel's poem takes off from the last stanza of Goethe's poem "Beherzigung." 72. Source: N 2, 483—503. 73. Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1776-1810) became Prussia's most popular queen. In 1793 she married Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who ruled Prussia as Friedrich Wilhelm III from 1797 to 1840. Her life was the subject of countless legends and myths in nineteenth-century German literature; cf. Wulf Wiilnng, "Die heiligc Luisc von PreuBen. Zur Mythisierung einer Figur der Geschichte in der deulschen Lileratur des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Bewegung und Stillstand in Metaphern und Mythen, ed. J. Link and W. Wulfing (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 233-75. 74. Binary star: a pair of stars revolving around a common center of gravity. 75. Eudiometer: originally, an instrument for measuring the amount of oxygen in the air. 76. Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, is an ingredient in gunpowder; this statement is thus an open challenge to a militaristic Prussian state. 77. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel, for whom reflection is identical with poetic reflection, which consists of divination, understanding, characterization, and critique (see Atlienaum Fragment 116). See also note 86. 78. Fate (Faturn): The Fates of classical mythology were thought to determine the destiny of human beings' lives. Although often regarded as the impartial representatives of the government of the world, they were also sometimes conceived as cruel and jealous, because they remorselessly thwarted the plans and desires of men and women. 79. Cf. Novalis's notion of "representing the slate" in his Universal Bruuillon 782 (in Part II) andjochen Schulte-Sasse's discussion of this fragment in regard to nationalism in the General Introduction to this volume. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1978). 80. The war between the frogs and the mice refers to the Greek satiric epic Batrachomyomachia, a parody of the Iliad that inspired Georg Rollenhagen's political-satiric epic Der Froschmausler (1595). 81. A device for measurement of morality; one of Novalis's neologisms. 82. In 1797, Johann Gottfried Schadow created a marble sculpture of Luise and her sister, entitled Kronprinzessin Luise und Prinzessin Friederike van Preujien. 83. Cf. the critique of machinery in "Earliest Program." 84. This is a reference to Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). 85. This paragraph contains numerous references and allusions to Schiller and the Enlightenment. Sensuality (as opposed to morality) is a central term in Schiller's theoretical writings. Economic self-interest as a motivating force of human behavior (Schiller speaks of Eigennutz) indicates that "sensuality" dominates "morality." Schiller tried to construe modernity as a social system in which humans lack unity, that is, in which their "sensual" nature is not reconciled with their "moral" nature, but in which the one dominates the other. Cf. in particular the sixth letter of his On the Aesthetic, Education of Man in a Series of Letters (i 794), where Schiller writes: "As soon as enlarged experience and more precise speculation made necessary a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the more intricate machinery of States made necessary a more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations, the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. . . . That zoophyte character of the Greek States, where ever}' individual enjoyed an independent life and, when need arose, could become a whole in himself, now gave place to an ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. State and Church, law

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and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was separated from labour, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity on his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science" (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell [New York: Ungar, 1965], 39-40). Novalis wants the king to turn himself into a harmonious human being and, thus, to serve as a symbol within society. Cf. his remark: "Nothing should be closer to the king's heart than the desire to be as well-rounded, educated, oriented, and free of prejudice as possible; in short, to be and to remain the most complete human being possible" ("Faith and Love" 38), a demand the court perceived as impertinent. 86. According to Webster's dictionary, "divination" is the act of foretelling future events, or discovering things secret and obscure by supernatural means. In early German Romanticism, the term gained great importance in designating the highly valued faculty and practice of combining or relating remote elements with each other. It is a faculty that is closely related to "divine imagination," "fantasy," "irony," "wit," and so on (on these terms, cf. the General Introduction to this volume). As a mode of thinking, "divination" resembles the premodern thinking in affinities that Michel Foucault described in The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970). 87. In contrast to Enlightenment philosophies of history, Novalis does not believe that a "golden age" can actually be realized within history; "golden age" remains a regulative idea for him (cf. his notion of symbol). 88. Reference to Goethe's Wilhelm, Meisterf, I.ehrjahre (1795-96). During their first encounter, Wilhelm Meister views Natalie as a "saint." Novalis is, in a sense, proposing the entrance of woman into history and temporality with "her own" bildungsroman. 89. "Indiffcrentists" refers to those who adhere to indifferentism, the attitude of mind that perceives or acknowledges no differences between the true and the false in religion or philosophy. 90. A material that acts as a conductor for electricity. 91. Solon was a celebrated Athenian legislator and poet, born around 638.8.0. He framed the democratic laws of Athens in a constitution that was a compromise between democracy proper and oligarchy. Lycurgus was a Spartan legislator of the ninth century B.C. Like Solon, he remodeled the constitution of his city-state. After completing this task, he left Sparta to finish his life in voluntary exile, but was honored as a god at Sparta with a temple and yearly sacrifices. 92. "Entheism" is one of Novalis's neologisms; he seems to oppose en- (within/in) to pan- (all) and then associates enthcism with monarchism, and pantheism with republicanism. 93. Source: N 2: 672-73.

II Theory of Aesthetics


Introductory Essay Romantic Crossovers: Philosophy as Art and Art as Philosophy Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff

In Early German Romanticism, reflection on art and its philosophical role in society reached a peak. Around 1800, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis (as well as the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling) fundamentally rearticulated the relationship between philosophical and aesthetic investigation. In their writings, the fine arts and, in a more general sense, the aesthetic attitude as such are held up as the fulfillment of philosophical reflection. Until the eighteenth century, art had primarily been a means for the dissemination and reproduction of the values and tastes of the ruling culture. To guarantee the perpetuation of this culture, arbiters of taste and technique attempted to establish rules concerning the proper use of a particular craft. Fine art (schone Kunst) had not yet been distinguished from craft and therefore had as much to do with technical skill and ability (Krinnen) as with beauty and social norms. Through such rule-governed exercise, the arts were assigned the role of producing beautiful works whose perfection could reflect the glorification of God or, in a secular universe, of a patron, the worldly ruler. A properly philosophical theory of the arts only became possible once the defining feature of the fine arts had been identified with beauty exclusively. It was on this basis that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the fine arts took on a new function. The philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who first elevated sensual perception to the status of knowledge, founded the new field of aesthetics (Greek: pertaining to the senses). Baumgarten linked the beautiful, because its occurrence is related to the senses, to this philosophical investigation into sensual knowledge. This was the starting point for a genuinely philosophical theory of the arts. However, it also gave rise to the debate concerning the exact na!57

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Theory of Aesthetics

ture of such a merger between a theory of beauty and the fine arts on the one hand, and the philosophical inquiry into sensual perception on the other.1 With respect to the Romantics, we might distinguish between two different philosophical conceptions of aesthetics, one representing a more ontologically and poetologically oriented concentration on the metaphysical properties of art (A. W. Schlegel, Schelling), the other constituting an epistemological and sociohistorical practice that Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel refer to as poiesis or aesthetic production. A poetics will thus be opposed to poiesis. For A. W. Schlegel as for Schelling, the two theoreticians who concentrated on a poetics, the beautiful work of art stands in the center of reflection. It exists as a symbolic presentation that points beyond its finite, empirical manifestation to the infinite or intelligible world.2 A. W. Schlegel makes this point in his Theory of Art'1' when he refers affirmatively to Plato as having reached a measure of philosophical insight into the nature of the beautiful that has been matched by few philosophers since: "[Plato] recognized the symbolic nature of the beautiful, namely, that it is the sensual appearance of something spiritual; and by assuming the existence of a highest heavenly archetype [ Urbild\ of the beautiful he posits it as an idea, that is, as something toward which our spirit is directed in an infinite striving" (209). Although the Romantics are united in this endeavor to combine within one critical gesture the dualism of the finite and the infinite, a dualism stemming from the philosophical tradition, they differ with respect to the definition and the emphasis they give to works of art in this respect. For A. W. Schlegel, only the contemplation of beautiful art can transcend the limitations of worldly existence. In this form, art, through its philosophical function, acts as a substitute for religious experience. Schlegel's Theory of Art is therefore an attempt to sketch out the theoretical ramifications of viewing art in such a way— as well as to provide the reader with a poetics, that is, a taxonomy and a critique of the different fine arts and their systematic cohesion. In the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, on the other hand, the "aesthetic turn" takes a different form. In the texts collected here, these authors are not so much concerned with establishing a poetics, the nature of the beautiful, or its place in systematic philosophy. Rather, they concentrate on the concrete possibilities of poiesis, that is, the creation and production of new forms of reflection. It is their express desire to confound, and thus break open, established lines of

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demarcation between philosophy and art, between science and morality. In their pursuit of an eternal poiesis, they do not so much posit art as the crowning achievement and overcoming of reflexive thought; rather, they regard aesthetics as a merging of the finite and the infinite; they engage in the "gay science" of mixing and relating the most heterogeneous discourses at their disposal. They are guided in this pursuit by the one principle that Plato considered most dangerous (or socially pernicious) with respect to art: mimesis. Through the mimetic gesture, one assumes roles that are not one's own; one plays with and thus disturbs notions of the proper, of what belongs rightfully in a place. The possibility of mimesis points to the discursive nature of the universe, to the fact, that is, that representations become attached to things, and that these representations can also be detached from things and used differently. An artist can usurp the words of others. S/he can be anarchic. Poiesis in Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel refers to this anarchy, to the production of an aesthetic chaos. The purpose of such chaos is to reconceptualize social and discursive hierarchies. I

In his Theory of Art, a lecture course given in Berlin in 1801-2, from which we include an excerpt here, A. W. Schlegel gives an account of the history of philosophical aesthetics. He is no impartial observer, though, and his narrative is interspersed with a critique of this tradition. From the outset, he is concerned with developing a theoretical foundation for the autonomy of the fine arts. In light of this goal, he seeks to establish a theory of the beautiful in which the beautiful in art can be clearly distinguished from the beautiful in nature. According to Schlegel, beautiful art needs to be independent of nature in order to fulfill the transcendental role that he wants to assign to it. In the process, he comments on three crucial stages for the emergence of philosophical aesthetics: the valorization of the senses in Baumgarten, the shortcomings of an empirical theory of sensual knowledge in Burke, and Kant's use of aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment. With his Aesthetica (1750-58), Baumgarten introduced the term "aesthetics" in its modern usage. He did so in a way, however, that did not find much support with the very people he might have been addressing: artists and critics. For although it is true that Baumgarten

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elevates sensual perception to the status of philosophical seriousness [analogon rationis], he does so by making "sensual reasoning" a lower form of knowledge, modeled on, yet inferior to, logical reasoning. Despite this considerable drawback, A. W. Schlegel praises Baumgarten because he was able to gather the formerly heterogeneous elements of (i) sensual intuition, (2) beauty, and (3) the fine arts into one coherent vision. According to Baumgarten, representations sensuales, phantasmata, figmenta vera el heterocosmica, and divinationes are "muddled" forms of sensual perception that can, nevertheless, produce their own form of knowledge: sensual knowledge. He views aesthetics, as "ars analogi rationis," as akin to but inferior to logical knowledge. In this framework, Baumgarten can connect the sensual intuition to a theory of beauty and of the fine arts. An object of art or of nature is judged to be beautiful by a subject on the basis of a sensual intuition receiving "muddled" representations that combine to produce a feeling of perfection and harmony. The task of the fine arts is to produce such perfection in and through works of art. Although Schlegel embraces certain aspects of Baumgarten, in the end he finds his approach wanting. He is dissatisfied in particular with Baumgarten's theory of beauty, the key to a theory of the fine arts, and believes that Baumgarten's exclusive concentration on the sensual sets narrow limits to a theory of the beautiful. In Schlegel's estimation, the notion of perfection, fundamental to the theory of beauty, is not an effect of sensual apprehension alone; rather, it stems from the realm of reason or understanding. The beautiful can thus not simply be a matter of the senses (K, 223). Schlegel launches a similar attack against Burke's theory of the beautiful, claiming that he finds it equally wanting in light of a foundation for the autonomy of fine art. In Schlegel's view, Burke's conception of the beautiful is identified so closely with the sensual and physiological level of experience, with passions and drives, that the beautiful is not distinguishable from the merely pleasant. Schlegel notes that, in order to describe the specificity of the beautiful, Burke must supplement his exposition of the beautiful with notions of similarity and mimesis, notions that are quite foreign to his basic approach (K, 225). For Schlegel, all of these attempts to conceptualize beauty remain unsatisfactory for a philosophical theory of art. On the other hand, Schlegel is at least partially satisfied with Burke's exposition of the sublime, because the notion of terror that

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induces the sublime feeling contains within it something that goes beyond the level of the senses and of the merely pleasant. The subject experiences this feeling of terror despite the fact that it does not find itself in any real danger. Mere sensual perception cannot account for this terror, and therefore Schlegel assumes the interference of some spiritual, or intellectual, element (etwas Geistiges; K, 228) in the representation of this danger. This "spiritual element," thus, points to some connecting link between the world of the senses and the world of ideas, a link that is required for the elaboration of a properly philosophical theory of beauty. This link has to do with the nature of the sublime. Kant's third Critique is of course the locus classicus of modern aesthetics—and this despite the fact that his is by no means primarily a theory of the fine arts, or even of beauty. Even so, its influence has been all-pervasive ever since the close of the eighteenth century: Schiller's aesthetic writings during the i ygos are heavily influenced by Kant's "aesthetics," and Kant's conception of "disinterested pleasure" (interesseloses Wohlgefallen) became for a long time the canonical way of describing aesthetic enjoyment. Kant himself, however, was not so much concerned with aesthetic enjoyment as he was with finding the a priori conditions under which knowledge, morality, and reflective judgment operate. In other words, he was concerned with outlining a coherent theory of the Subject of knowledge. The third Critique holds a very crucial position in the entirety of Kant's architectonics. It represents the attempt to give final consistency to the whole system by endowing the singular judgment, through the concept of purposiveness, with an a priori rule designed to guarantee that the rules of logic and those of the senses are compatible. Only if this is accomplished will the theory of the Subject be complete. This preoccupation with the Subject overshadows Kant's exposition of the beautiful and the sublime from the outset. It is therefore not surprising that Schlegel is dissatisfied with Kant's exposition of the beautiful and the fine arts, too. Schlegel agrees with Kant's general definition of the beautiful, namely, that it represents a feeling originating from an object that pleases us without any concept, that the pleasure evoked by the beautiful is free, disinterested, and contemplative. The beautiful object is an occasion for the Subject's faculties of imagination (Einbildungskraft) and understanding (Verstand) to interact with each other during sen-

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sual perception: "Through this playful activity of our faculties [Geisteskrafte], namely, imagination and understanding, we first make the beautiful our own [sich aneignen]; and the pleasure we feel is nothing but the feeling for their harmonious interplay wherein they give life [beleben] to each other" (K, 230). However, Schlegel disagrees with Kant's radical distinction between the beautiful and the sublime whereby the beautiful is limited to the finite. For him, the essence of the beautiful cannot be discovered until it is put into some relation with the infinite. The infinite, however, entertains a natural relationship to the sublime. Voicing his disappointment, Schlegel says: "Up to this point (in Kant's elaboration of the beautiful) no mention has been made of a natural affinity between the beautiful and the infinite—the understanding being a power that deals only in finitudes [lauter Endlichkeiten]—no mention of a harmonic consciousness of our whole nature, but only of us as cognitive [erkenntnisfahig] beings" (£231). Schlegel is more satisfied when he turns to Kant's elaboration of the feeling of the sublime. The sublime is evoked in the presence of something so vast (usually in the realm of nature) that the interplay of the imagination and the understanding (which, in the case of the beautiful, synthesizes the manifold chaos of impressions) fails to produce a form. Nevertheless, through ideas of reason (the idea of the infinite when confronted with the mathematical sublime; the idea of freedom when confronted with the dynamic sublime) the subject is able to deal with the powerlessness of its faculties. Rather, human beings are thrown into an unresolvable state of pleasure and pain. The initial feeling of pain, because of the impossibility of giving a form to the sensual impression, is supplemented by a feeling of pleasure resulting from the fact that the subject can "deal with" the glitch through an idea of reason. The feeling of the sublime thus represents an ambiguous mixture of pleasure and pain. For Kant, the beautiful and the sublime are entirely different states: the beautiful leaves the subject in a state of calm and contemplation, the faculties of imagination and understanding in a state of harmony; in the event of the sublime feeling, on the other hand, the subject is agitated, imagination and understanding in a state of nonresolvable disharmony. Resolution, if it occurs at all, is possible only through reason, a faculty that is foreign to sensual perception. It is this clear distinction between the beautiful and the sublime

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that Schlegel finds so limiting with respect to a theory of the fine arts. In his view—and this would be the only "authentic" theory of the beautiful for Schlegel—sublime and beautiful permeate one another in the work of art. In fact, he claims lhat such iiiterpenetration is the fundamental characteristic of the work of art: the beautiful work of art includes within its boundaries the unboundedness of the sublime. Intent on the definition of a theory of the fine arts, Schlegel harnesses the disruptive power of the sublime and encloses it within the contemplative work of art. Beautiful and sublime are able to enter into a union "to such an extent that one cannot determine which of the two predominates" (195). As a consequence, we are dealing here with two different ways of looking at aesthetics. For Kant, aesthetics primarily needs to address the question of how the subject is being affected by the empirical world. This has repercussions for the coherence and consistency of his critical project as a whole. For Schlegel, on the other hand, the theory of the beautiful is a fundamental requirement in establishing the autonomy of the fine arts. From this perspective, Schlegel's dismissal of Kant's theory of the beautiful can be seen as a direct consequence of the attempt to merge aesthetics as sensual perception with aesthetics as a theory of the fine arts that we discussed earlier. What is more, art, in A, W. Schlegel's view, also has a constitutive role to play in philosophy, a role that Kant did not recognize. For Schlegel, "Kant's system is unsatisfactory because he stopped halfway in his elaboration of transcendental idealism" (208). Whether he critiques Kant's exposition of taste or the idea of reason, the notion of genius or the aesthetic idea, or the idea of the supersensible, Schlegel's desire is, in each instance, to demonstrate that Kant, through his misconception of the nature of beauty, is unable to come up with a theory of the fine arts, and to recognize the fundamental role of art for philosophy. The problem with Kant's definitions, according to Schlegel, can be demonstrated most succinctly if we contrast him with the philosopher who, in Schlegel's opinion, fundamentally understands the ramifications of a theory of the beautiful: "According to Schelling, the beautiful is the infinite represented in finite form under which definition the sublime is already included," Schlegel writes. And he adds his own rephrasing of Schelling's dictum: "the beautiful is a symbolic representation of the infinite" (209). Schlegel thus finds in Schelling's

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philosophical reflections on art the theoretical underpinnings for his theory of the beautiful. II

A. W. Schlegel is drawn to Schelling's theories of the beautiful and the sublime because, more than any other philosopher in the wake of Kant, Schelling employs these terms in an attempt to conceive of a complete philosophical system in which opposing elements—the finite and the infinite, the ideal and material realms—are merged. Schelling seeks to dislodge the sublime and the beautiful from the context of a mere reception or production of artworks on an empirical level, in order to examine the philosophical potential of the aesthetic as a material, sensual force. The sublime as a focal point within Schelling's system can be viewed in terms of a twofold strategy: first, to critique a Fichtean idealist tradition that is grounded in subjective activity as the sole source of creativity; and second, to establish the inquiry' into the nature of knowledge within a unified transcendental system that was ultimately denied by Kant. Schelling outlines the relevance of the sublime in particular, and of the aesthetic as a whole, in his Philosophy of Art (1802-3) >4 claiming that "the intuition of the sublime, in spite of its kinship with the element of the ideal and ethical, is an aesthetic intuition, to use this word here finally. The infinite is the predominating element within it, yet it predominates only to the extent that it is intuited within the physically infinite, which to that extent is itself merely finite."5 Schelling conceives of the sublime in terms of an interplay between an ideal realm and the natural, or physical, realm. The theory of the sublime is crucial because it brings into play a materiality that links the world of the subject with that of physical nature. Through the intuition of the sublime in art, the infinite finds expression in concrete material form. Schelling's notion of the sublime provides one avenue from which to question the boundaries of philosophy as established by idealism in the wake of Kant. It is precisely the material element, according to Schelling, that remains bracketed in Fichte's system and thus determines the absolute limit of a purely idealist philosophy. This limit to the philosophical enterprise can be overcome, Schelling claims, through an understanding of the "transition of the aesthetic idea into the concrete work of art" (PhoA, 98). Schelling, like A. W. Schlegel, upholds art as the locus for a union

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between the subjective and the objective, the infinite realm of "ideas" and the "concrete." Art straddles the ideal and the real as an "ideal unity, as the resolution of the particular into the universal, of the concrete into the concept" (PhoA, 99). In their critique of the sublime, both Schelling and A. W. Schlegel recognize in art a revelatory function that extends beyond the parameters of a purely empirical experience of the artwork. Through the merging of the infinite with the finite, art points to a fulfillment of the philosophical system, for it can unite elements that had necessarily remained separate in the idealist tradition. It is through this that art becomes the vehicle for the development of a transcendental philosophy, which has as its goal an absolute form of knowledge, or what Schelling refers to in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) as "self-consciousness." Schelling's and A. W. Schlegel's theories of art can be viewed in the light of a systematic mode of philosophical inquiry whose ultimate aim is the "highest" form of knowledge, a self-reflective "concept of a concept."6 This form of knowledge, according to Schelling, cannot be attained simply through reason itself, for the objectified "act" of knowing necessarily escapes consciousness. The philosopher, Schelling claims, can only strive after knowledge as a whole (in its highest "potency") if he takes into account the two poles that determine it: the subjective, or ideal, and objective nature. Rather than maintain these two as polar opposites, art unites them through the objective, concrete representation of the infinite. Art as subobjective unity, in Schelling's view, becomes the organon for the development of a transcendental philosophy, which can only be realized through an aesthetic act. Aesthetics, which had previously been subordinated by thinkers like Baumgarten to a secondary and inferior role, is thus elevated by Schelling and A. W. Schlegel to a central position within philosophical critique. Although A. W. Schlegel's conception of art is closely linked to Schelling's philosophy, it is actually Friedrich Schlegel who attempts to rearticulate the relationship between aesthetic and philosophical pursuits within a Romantic context. As in Schelling, the object of inquiry in Friedrich Schlegel's Transcendental Philosophy is knowledge (Wissen). Friedrich Schlegel, like Schelling, realizes that knowledge cannot be regarded as a mere object attained through reason, and that the "striving" (Streberi) after knowledge demands an investigation

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into the conceptual tools employed in the inquiry. This attempt to question the very grounding of philosophy through a critical, selfreflective method leads Friedrich Schlegel to a critique of aesthetics as well. Unlike his brother and Schelling, however, Schlegel focuses on aesthetics in order to question the established boundaries between art, philosophy, and other "scientific" discourses. Although A. W. Schlegel attempts to radicalize the potential of the aesthetic, he limits his project to a discussion of the fine arts. Art essentially acts in service of a higher philosophical goal and thus cannot destabilize the philosophical enterprise as such. For Friedrich Schlegel, however, aesthetics is not confined to the production or reception of artworks. Rather, aesthetics is understood as a creative impulse in the broadest sense, which extends to the "subjective" and "objective," finite and infinite, and can actually produce new, ever-changing forms of philosophy. Although this understanding of aesthetics is never articulated in detail, its effects are revealed through the method Friedrich Schlegel seeks to develop in the Transcendental Philosophy. At the outset, he claims that he will proceed according to models established by mathematics and physics, which rely on "experimentation" and "construction." This is a first attempt by Schlegel to dislodge logic as an "organon of truth," replacing it with a broadly defined experimental, creative method. The modes of experimentation and construction that Schlegel refers to at the beginning of these lectures, although never clearly defined, link up to an artistic impulse—what Schlegel calls a "divining" and "combining"—that plays a central role in his study. This creative combination marks his own critical enterprise in the merging of the philosophical with other discourses. Schlegel claims that the method of idealism is a "combinatory experimentation," a creative mixing that becomes an imperative in striving toward an "absolute" knowledge. The aesthetic mode understood in this broader sense of experimentation and creation is, for Friedrich Schlegel, not simply an organon of philosophy, but rather a new critical methodology that has the potential to critique and repeatedly redefine the very ground of philosophy. It is perhaps for this reason that the Transcendental Philosophy might pose a problem for readers who would view the work against the backdrop of the German idealist tradition and would attempt to determine its inherent systemic "logic." Although Schlegel's attempt to determine a "philosophy of philosophy" evolves out of a rigorous critical

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discourse, the terminology and categories he employs are often quite fluid in his work. Ultimately, the Transcendental Philosophy does not seem to cohere in a manner that the "Introduction" we include here would seem to promise. This might be in part because of the- fact that the project never evolved into a complete work in the traditional sense. The Transcendental Philosophy in its present form is a series of transcribed lectures delivered at the University of Jena during the winter semester of 1800-1801. In fact, no original notes by Schlegel have been preserved and he did not pursue this project for publication.7 At the same time, the seeming confusion of the presentation cannot be dismissed as a product of mere historical circumstance. Rather, it is precisely this factor that brings the power of the aesthetic, or "combinatory," spirit to the fore in its capacity to question the bounds of philosophy as a discipline. In a paradoxical turn, the Transcendental Philosophy alludes to a systemic critical inquiry at the same time that it resists a notion of work as system and seeks to break out of the more narrowly defined parameters of idealist philosophy. Like Schelliiig, Friedrich Schlegel finds the Fichtean philosophy of the self insufficient for grasping reality as a whole. Idealism contains a significant flaw, namely, that it considers "all being [Dasein] constant and rejects all that is active." One could also turn this equation on its head and claim that Fichtean thought "assumes only activity and rejects all that is substantial." Schlegel takes issue with a clear-cut division in both instances: with that of "being" and "all that is active" in the first; and of "activity" and "all that is substantial" in the second. Fichte attempts to secure a foundation for the identity of the self through a notion of subjective activity, the positing of the iion-I by the I. Because all reality finds its source in this act, all "objects," whether material or spiritual, only exist for Fichte within a subjective realm. What results from this philosophical mode, Schlegel maintains, is a privileging of subjectivity and consciousness, and the elevation of the idealist philosopher as "a new Prometheus, who wishes to place the power of the divine solely within his own I" (KA 2: 316). Through its grounding of reality in the subject, Fichtean idealism cannot take into account the "material" reality that, according to Schlegel, exists alongside consciousness but can never be fully comprehended by it. In his view, Fichte's idealism necessarily cordons off material nature or "world" from the subject in an attempt to establish a philosophy of identity. Like Schelling, Schlegel introduces a notion

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of physical nature into idealist philosophy in his attempt to conceive of a connection between the "ideal" and the "real," the finite and the infinite. In the Transcendental Philosophy, Schlegel assigns a "being" and an activity to what he calls "infinite substance," borrowing from Spinoza the notion of a "substantia infmita." This substance appears as the symbol "x" in the "Introduction," and he elaborates on this notion later in the lectures, referring to it as indivisible "matter" that remains unrepresentable as a whole to the subject: Matter is not an object of consciousness. This statement is identical with the following: the object is a product of creative imagination [Einbildungskraft]. It [matter] is, namely, characteristic of chaos, that nothing can be distinguished within it; and that which cannot be distinguished cannot enter into consciousness. Only form enters empirical consciousness. What we consider matter is actually form. Matter must remain formless. (KA 12: 38)

Matter, the "one, eternal, and infinite" (the Spinozan notion of the material unity of the universe) must, in its entirety, remain radically other to the subject, who can only perceive finite objects. The infinite is the source of existence from which all individua, both objects and subjects, are formed. This origin must remain unrepresentable, for it can only manifest itself as finite form on an empirical level. Schlegel draws a distinction, then, between infinite matter and finite forms, which are accessible to the subject. Significantly, what links these ideal and real realms is the notion of a "creative imagination." This productive capacity can be likened to Fichte's notion of a creative positing of objects by the subject. Friedrich Schlegel's notion of imagination is unique, however, in that it is never located solely within the subjective realm. Rather, Schlegel assigns an agency to nature as well, which he refers to as an "infinite consciousness" that constantly produces new forms and configurations. According to Schlegel, nature is in a constant state of becoming and this creative aspect is made manifest through a material aesthetic practice: the activity of creating representations and allegories of the whole through the production of finite forms. Schlegel conceives of a universal spirit (Geisf), an agent that produces images (Bilder) of the infinite substance as it creates determined objects of the physical realm. Thus, creative imagination is an aesthetic activity that links the finite with the infinite realm. The universal spirit or consciousness is a dynamic force that, in a paradoxical and antisystemic fashion, is whole yet constantly in a state of becoming.

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This creative imagination is ultimately also the point of synthesis between the real, the physical world, and the ideal, that of the subject. Through thought, subjects partake of the creative activity constitutive of nature as a whole. In the "Introduction," Schlegel draws a distinction between two forms of knowledge, understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunfi). Although these terms will be familiar to readers of Kant, they do not in this case refer to conceptual categories (Verstand) on the one hand, and regulative principles (Vernunft) on the other. Rather, Friedrich Schlegel identifies understanding and reason as two opposing activities that together form the whole of knowledge. Reason is a mechanism that limits, orders, and forms connections between discrete objects; it is a logic that establishes rules in securing identities and relationships. Understanding, on the other hand, is something that surpasses the narrow confines established by reason. As Ernst Behler describes it in the German critical edition of Schlegel's works, understanding is a "capacity of knowledge, whose power and goal it is to grasp reality" (KA 12: xvi). Although Schlegel does not provide a clear definition of understanding in the "Introduction," he elaborates on the nature of this activity through his description of "fantasy" in subsequent sections of the lectures (see KA 12: 57-60). Fantasy, according to Schlegel, is diametrically opposed to reason: it dismantles the rules and boundaries established through the latter activity. Schlegel identifies fantasy as a force that "drives" finite identities back into the infinite through the dissolution of rationally determined boundaries. This disruptive activity repeatedly introduces chaos back into the logical system that grounds consciousness. Thus, situated within true "knowledge," as Schlegel conceives it, is both a rational mechanism that acts as an ordering device and an anarchic element that repeatedly disturbs this order. It is in the opposing impulses of reason and fantasy that the "real" and the "ideal" realms merge. As in the creative "infinite consciousness" of nature, the subjective act of positing and displacement is identified by Schlegel as an aesthetic activity. Through reason and fantasy, the subject constantly produces new symbols of thought and forms connections between disparate entities, in what Schlegel refers to as the power to draw "analogies." Knowledge as a whole is a creative, poetic process that links the subject with the objective spirit of infinite consciousness.

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Toward the end of the Transcendental Philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel attributes true knowledge to a creative "genius" or "combinatory spirit" (KA 12: 101-2). Like A. W. Schlegel, he critiques the notion of genius, but he does so in order to separate it from the sphere of the fine arts. Genius, for Friedrich Schlegel, is never simply attributable to the artist as producer of artworks. Rather, it is an agency, shared by subjects and nature alike, for creating symbols. This production is the allegorical activity of forming finite representations of the whole. It is necessarily endless, for the whole can never be grasped in a single, finite object, but it is precisely through unceasing production that the infinite reveals itself. Through this aesthetic activity, human thought, the realm of the ideal, is inextricably tied to the material realm. The merging of the ideal and the real, what Schlegel calls das Reelle or the midpoint (Indifferenzpunkt) between two poles, is absolute knowledge, the goal of philosophy. Schlegel's own unique philosophical endeavor is necessarily implicated as both a critical mode that strives toward absolute knowledge and a product of fantasy. The philosophical text, rather than representing one logical system of thought, draws its creative strength from heterogeneous discourses that resist a reified logic. Philosophy, according to Schlegel, is a "magical" production ol a combinatory spirit, and as such it is an artwork that surpasses the realms of philosophy, art, science, and religion as distinct disciplines. At the conclusion to the Transcendental Philosophy, Schlegel makes reference to a new aesthetic "discipline" of philosophy: "A discipline that combines politics as well as religion, that combines all arts and sciences into one, that would thus be the art of producing the divine, this could only be called MAGIC" (KA 12: 105).

Ill Friedrich Schlegel's closing remarks in the Transcendental Philosophy are very similar to numerous formulations by Novalis on magic and a creative spirit. Indeed, this "discipline" of philosophy, which remains for Schlegel an ever unrealized goal rather than a fait accompli, is practiced by Novalis in his encyclopedic project, The Universal Brouillon. At the end of the Transcendental Philosophy Schlegel mentions a "classical" notion of encyclopedia that must demonstrate "the organic unity in the differences between the arts and sciences" (KA 12: 104),

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a notion that informed Novalis's project as well. Before turning to the Novalis text, however, we would like to indicate briefly some of the connections between Schlegel's "philosophical" endeavor and his analysis of a particular aesthetic practice—mythology. If, as Schlegel claims in the 'transcendental Philosophy, philosophy finds its true expression as art, then the realization of an aesthetic mode must be central to this endeavor. In the Jena lectures, he claims that a true philosophy cannot remain on the level of theory, if theory is understood as an abstract systematic analysis. Rather, if philosophy is theory, the latter term must bear affinities to the notion of critique as outlined by Schlegel a few years later in the essay "Concerning the Essence of Critique"—namely, as a creative unfolding that is intricately linked to artistic activity. In Schlegel's "Speech on Mythology," which was published in the Athenaum the year before the Jena lectures were delivered, he explores the potential for fulfilling the goal of a "material real" form of knowledge through an aesthetic practice that, according to Schlegel, remains central to creative processes in general. The "Speech on Mythology" is situated within a greater text dedicated to an inquiry into aesthetic production, the Dialogue on Poesy.8 In the "Speech," Schlegel refers to mythology as a desired "midpoint" for poesy, which he feels existed in classical mythology. His reference to antiquity can be read as a structural component in his argument, a unity that can never be fully realized in the present. In a classical artistic mode, "everything interlocks, and one and the same spirit is expressed everywhere, only differently" (KA 2: 313). Schlegel's description of ancient poesy as a "single, indivisible poem" is very close to that of the material universe in the Transcendental Philosophy. Like the indivisible substance that Schlegel conceives of via Spinoza, this poesy is a whole toward which the modern subject strives without ever grasping it in its entirety. This finds its expression, according to Schlegel, in the production of a "new" mythology. Schlegel formulates two seemingly opposing notions regarding the nature of this new mythology. At one point in the "Speech," he refers to it as a "true artwork of nature." On the other hand, he also considers it to be "the most artificial of artworks." These two contradictory elements of myth point to the extreme poles that concern Schlegel in the Transcendental Philosophy, namely, the real, or material nature, and the ideal, the realm of the human and of "artifice." The production of a new mythology opens up an aesthetic space in which these two

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realms merge. In linking the real and the ideal, mythology constitutes the "midpoint" of poiesis, what he refers to as an Indifferenzpunkt'm the Transcendental Philosophy. As in the latter work, Schlegel seeks here as well to combine a theory of the subject with that of substantive nature, the representatives of these two tendencies being Fichte and Spinoza, respectively. A passage from the second edition of the "Speech on Mythology" highlights the central position that theories of idealism and realism play for Schlegel in his conception of aesthetic production. Schlegel maintains that a new realism must and will emerge out of the lap of idealism. Thus, idealism must not and will not merely become a model for the new mythology based on its own mode of development, but rather will indirectly be the source of it. I, too, have long carried the ideal of such a realism within me, and if it has not been communicated until now, it was simply because I still sought the proper forum for it. But I know that I can only find it in poesy, for realism will never again be able to appear in the shape of either philosophy or even a system. (KA 2: 315) This footnote, which was added after the first publication of the "Speech" in 1800 and after the lectures on transcendental philosophy, characterizes the notion of an aesthetic practice not just as a series of institutionalized genres, but as the essential activity that goes beyond the limits of philosophy as systemic analysis. Mythology, the material expression of a creating spirit that engenders or divines (divinieren) finite signs, can transform idealism because it secures an insoluble link between the creative activity of the subject and nature. Myth is defined as the "hieroglyphic expression of the surrounding nature in the transfiguration of fantasy and love." It is thus simultaneously the expression of the creative power of the subject and of nature, or, in other words, the instance where subject and nature are one in the creative act. Through myth as the expression of spirit, Schlegel seeks to overcome the division between a philosophy that would ground reality solely in the productions of the subject, and a universalizing objectivism. In doing so, he echoes even more emphatically than in the Transcendental Philosophy Schilling's notion of a "real-ideal" that comprehends the subject's creative activity as part and parcel of a productive, transformative nature. As in his conception of an absolute philosophy in the Jena lectures, this nature philosophy points to a subobjective unity. In

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the "Speech," Friedrich Schlegel emphasizes that such a unity can only be realized through aesthetic practice. In myth "the highest is truly formed within its weave" and "everything is relation and metamorphosis, accreted and transformed" (KA 2: 318). Myth can never simply offer itself up as a unity, as in the ancient practice of poesy. It is a process of securing ties, assembling, and interweaving that produces an interplay of multiplicities. As such, myth, like philosophy in the Jena lectures, is in a state of becoming. A work of shifting assemblages, it is intimately tied to the heterogeneous philosophical text that creatively mixes different discourses.

IV The merging of the philosophical and nonphilosophical discourses suggested by these texts has perhaps left the most radical traces in a collection of posthumously published notes by Novalis known as The Universal BrouiUon? Novalis, too, sets out with the goal of overcoming the limitations of Kantian and Fichtean philosophy. The Fichte Studies (see the Introductory Essay to Part I of this volume) is a rigorous critique of Fichte's philosophy of consciousness. The Universal Brouillon in turn is evidence of his desire to put into practice some of the theoretical insights gained in his studies of Fichte's Theory of Scientific Knowledge. In Novalis's view, Fichte's idealistic grounding of self and self-knowledge in a foundational activity [Talhandlung] needs to be surpassed in the direction of a more adequate—that is, more encompassing—aesthetic practice. The Universal Brouillon is a collection of notes that Novalis took between September 1798 and March 1799 as a result of extensive reading iri scientific wTorks of the time.10 These notes represent wrhat is generally referred to as his encyclopedic project. In the course of this project Novalis envisions nothing less than a systematic philosophical inquiry that tries to combine the known sciences into one universal science (UB 176). To some degree, this project seems to share the aspirations of German idealism, of Kant's, Fichte's, or Hegel's endeavors to describe the parameters or map out the boundaries of a universal science. However, Novalis's attempt differs from their systematic inquiries in that it assigns a productive role to fantasy in the construction of knowledge that these other systems expressly exclude. Like Fichte, for example, Novalis is concerned with overcoming the

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division between the faculties of reason and understanding (in the Kantian sense of the term). But he differs decisively from Fichte in the manner by which to achieve this. Whereas Fichte grounds the unity of the mind in the self-consciousness of the reflective Subject, Novalis strives to achieve this goal through an aesthetic activity in which the most disparate elements are brought into contact. Aesthetic, or poetic, activity is conceived here as an endless, necessary process in which meanings are constantly made and remade. According to Novalis, the human imagination as productive fantasy can relate and synthesize the most heterogeneous realms. The Universal Brouillon is the record of his attempt to prove this. The primary mode of these notes is to establish, in a fairly resolute manner, analogies between disciplines and fields that traditionally have no common features whatsoever. Because this volume does not include any of the more detailed passages of Novalis's analogic activity, we would like to provide a sample here (LIB 782): strange, opposed theories of religious sentiment among pietists and Herrnhuter11—their relationship to mechanics, electricity, and chemistry (crushing, melting, breakthrough) Kant's legalistic spirit [Advokatengeist] What is mysticism—what needs to be treated in a mystical (secret) manner? Religion, love, nature, state— everything chosen [Auserwdhlte] refers to mysticism. If all humans were a pair of lovers, the difference between mysticism and non-mysticism would disappear Hemsterhuis's theory of moral sense—his conjectures about perfectibility and the infinitely possible use of this sense—philosophical ethics—poetic ethics.12 Beauty and spirituality are almost like light and warmth in the spirit world—through more accurate knowledge—their relationships—their analogy—as the second (opposition) does with respect to the scientific knowledge of the world of the stars—so the first (opposition) may ground and practice a theory of the spirit world Does mysticism kill reason? Kant equates dogmatism with mysticism. Dogmatism sublates relationships, etc. Activity or inactivity. The theory of religion is scientific poesy. Poesy is to sensations what philosophy is to thoughts. (N 3: 420)

Faced with such a notebook entry, a reader with a background in the history of European philosophy up to Kant must feel challenged to the utmost. For how, indeed, can Novalis relate and reconcile these very different subjects and fields—for example, religious beliefs and

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concepts from physics, mysticism, and something as rational as the state? How can he employ, seemingly without the slightest hesitation, paradoxical formulations such as poetic ethics? Clearly, because he has a different set of theories and beliefs that enable him to relate such fields.

Like Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis seeks to reconnect mind and nature. The early Romantics want to achieve this goal by subverting Kant's transcendental philosophy, which had made this connection an impossibility. According to Kant, we are forever trapped in a world of representation; according to Fichte, we posit our world from out of ourselves as Subject. In both conceptions, we are divorced from intuiting, representing, or forming the true state of the whole of nature, such as it is, independent from us. Novalis's magical idealism is the attempt to reconnect the "spirit world" (Geisterwelt), that is, the world of consciousness, or idealism, with the world of nature, or realism. In order to do this, however, Novalis has to step beyond the framework of the transcendental or Idealist philosophy of consciousness. In a first step, Novalis dismisses the purely cognitive truths of transcendentalism or critical philosophy. He views the philosophical systems, and their rejection of an entity called God, as dogmatic rather than critical, claiming that "critically, I can only say—for me there is no such entity—other than a fictitious one" (UB 601). Here Novalis alludes to Kant's differentiation between a "dogmatic" and a "critical" philosophy, the former, in Kant's view, being an unwarranted, the latter a legitimate, form of reflection. "Critical" philosophy is concerned with the transcendental laws of human knowledge, not with "mere" beliefs. But Novalis invokes Kant only in order to contradict him, for he has very different goals in mind. Whereas Kant used the term "critical" to ban all "metaphysical fictions" from cognition, Novalis, on the contrary, brings fiction and fantasy—and hence the aesthetic—back into the purview of knowledge. When Novalis says that, critically speaking, we can say that there is a fictitious entity called God, he effectively introduces the notion of human artifice, or illusion, into the heart of the process of knowledge; for, as becomes clear in the remainder of this note 601, Novalis maintains that fiction, illusion, and fantasy are the necessary means of all synthesis, that is, of all knowledge. Into every relationship to an entity outside consciousness there enters a moment of fiction, of poetic activity, that expresses the uneasy merger of the Subject's imaginary pro-

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jection with the "foreign entity." Thus, rather than excluding fantasy from the realm of knowledge, as Kant had done, he makes it a cornerstone of his notion of magic idealism. The introduction of fantasy into the center of the philosophical enterprise is, in a second step, supplemented by the theory of universal harmony. Novalis believes that the practice of magical idealism, which he likens to cabalistics (UB 137), can merge the distinct spheres of idealism and realism, spheres that Kant and Fichte considered separate. Magical idealism, through analogy and through "reciprocal representation of the universe" (ibid.), aims to link again what the judgment of Reason had shown to belong to separate realms. This warrants a new kind of imaginative practice. In the excerpt from UB 782 cited earlier, we saw how Novalis linked the adherents of different religious beliefs to a concept stemming from physics—with the intention that knowledge in the one sphere could further knowledge in the other. In terms of a theory of signification, the notion of "reciprocal representation" means that everything, every object, sign, or explanation, can be a sign for everything else—what Novalis refers to as the "mutual attraction of the sign and the signified" (UB \ 37). A precondition for this mutual attraction, especially for the notion of reciprocal representation, is the postulate of a universal harmony. Novalis has to start from this premise in order to conceive of the different fields, disciplines, and human faculties as reciprocally illuminating each other. Clearly Kant's transcendental philosophy did not set out from this premise. It is here that both Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel reconnect with a tradition of "metaphysics" that Kant and Fichte had explicitly rejected.13 It is no coincidence, then, that the name of Spinoza appears so frequently in the writings of the early Romantics, and that he is essential to the debate between Fichte and Schelling. Within the parameters of this postulate of universal harmony, Novalis sees his task as that of a magician. He maintains that "we must seek to become magicians in order to be properly moral" (UB 61). The magician is, of course, the artist par excellence, the one whose activity is most clearly identified with fantasy and initiation into higher powers. The magical act Novalis is referring to is the infusion of the world of mechanics, mathematics, and science in general with the "Moral Sense . . . the sense for union . . . the sense for the thing-initself" (ibid.). He admits that the term moral sense is inaccurate as it

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"suggests mediated cognition, touch, mixture" (ibid.). This is because sense alludes to the empirical realm of subjective experience. Moral sense, however, derives from beyond the realm of the senses and is embodied in a construct of fantasy that in turn derives from the possibility of universal harmony. The positing of a moral sense is therefore the second prerequisite for establishing magical idealism as an aesthetic practice. The assumptions of universal harmony and moral sense are the preconditions of the poetic activity that Novalis pursues with his aesthetic creations. His merging of philosophy, science, and morality in the work of art finds expression in his preferred genre: the fairy tale ("A fairy tale is the canon of poesy, as it were—everything poetic must be like a fairy tale" [ UB 940]). This is the case because a fairy tale embodies, as genre, the (for us) disparate unity of the world most ingeniously. A fairy tale can be "without coherence," and therefore like "nature itself (UB 986). It can be a "prophetic representation" of the future which, according to Novalis, is going to be "reasonable chaos" (UB 234). The fairy tale leaves the concept of the self-sufficient "work" of art behind—for, by borrowing from any and all discourses of the world, it can mix them up in a magical way. The fairy tale is the embodiment of the magician poet's dreams, and therefore the most "authentic" expression of his vocation. In this sense, the fairy tale is the primary vehicle for Novalis's practice of poiesis. However, the fact that universal harmony is the precondition for Novalis's project does not mean that such a project culminating in a "golden age" can ever be reached. On the contrary, Novalis, very much like Friedrich Schlegel, conceives of the pursuit of his encyclopedic project arid of magic idealism as a never-ending aesthetic activity. The cause for this infinite striving must be seen in the Romantics' toppling of the distinctions that Kant and Fichte had erected between the realms of finite and infinite human pursuits. And this is what unites A. W. Schlegel's and Schelling's concentration on the work of art, on the one hand, with Friedrich Schlegel's and Novalis's conception of aesthetic activity on the other. In fact, Romantic theorizing, whether it is concerned with art or with society as a whole, turns aesthetic, and more specifically, sublime. In their toppling of the distinction between beauty and the sublime, finite and infinite, the Romantics attempt to merge art and philosophy into an infinite activity in which discursive differences can be forever made and unmade.

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Notes to Introductory Essay 1. How problematic this merger of a theory of sensual knowledge with a theory of the fine arts still is today can be seen in recent controversies regarding the status of Kant's aesthetics (see especially the works by de Man, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarlhe and Nancy). In a nutshell, such a merger is problematic because the requirements of a theory of sensual knowledge and those of a transcendental theory of art, the two sides of the aesthetic coin, are, for some commentators at least, fundamentally at odds with one another. 2. In this sense, the Romantic concept of the work of art (Werkbegriff) is different from the one developed in German classicism, especially by Friedrich Schiller. In Romanticism, work of art and interpreter together constitute a continuum of infinite reflection, whereas in German classicism the work itself m its finitude came to foreshadow the eventual resolution of theoretical and social antagonisms. 3. The Theory of Art (1802) was presented as part of a series of lectures. It is included in "Vorlesungen {iber schone Lileralur und Kunsl (1801-2). Ersler Teil: Die Kunstlehre," in August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungtn, vol. i: Vorlesungen liber Asthetik I (1798-1803), ed. Ernst Behler (Padcrborn: Schoningh, 1989), 181-463. Further references to passages of this text not included in the present volume are indicated by Kfollowed by the page number. 4. The Philosophy of Art was first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Jena. During the lime that Schelling was formulating his lectures on aesthetics, he maintained close contact with A. W. Schlegel and became acquainted with Schlegel's lectures on Schone I.iteratur und Kunst, in which the Theory of Art was presented in 1802. 5. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed., trans., and introd. Douglas W. Stott, foreword by David Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 86. Further references to this text will be indicated as PhoA followed by the page number. 6. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (i 800), trans. Peter Heath, introd. Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, i97 8 ). 97. By most accounts, Schlegel's course was not a success and he claimed that this was in part because of the intellectual laziness of the students. On the other hand, the poor reaction might also have had something to do with Schlegel's unique lecturing style. His ad-lib presentation of complex notions was most likely awkward for someone who was more accustomed to writing than to lecturing. The present published form stems from a compilation of notes by an unknown auditor, which were discovered by Josef Korner. (Cf. note 78 to the texts in Part II for more details regarding the existing text.) See Neue Philosop/usche Schriflen, ed. Josef Korner (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Gerhard Schulte-Bulmke, 1935). 8. This "dialogue" appeared in the Athenaum and consists of a series of exchanges between friends, interspersed with presentations by individual "voices" in the group. Various allusions made by these individuals suggest that these voices represent members of the Jena Circle and their differing viewpoints. The formal aspect of the "dialogue," if understood as a "chain or a garland of fragments" (Athenaum fragment 77), is a significant contribution to the Romantic notion of "poesy." 9. "Das Allgemeine Brouillon—Materialien zur Enzyklopiidistik, 1798-99," N 3: 205-478. 10. For detailed information concerning the sources of Novalis's readings, see HansJoachim Mahl's introduction to The Universal Brouillon (N 3: 207-41).


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11. Pietism represents a particular religious movement within German Protestantism in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pietist sects moved away from official Protestant doctrine and structures in order to embrace a simpler and more direct belief. In what was sometimes referred to as a "new reformation," they searched for a more individualistic and subjective faith. A distinguishing feature of pietist sects is the practice of a new baptism. The Hernnhuter Brethren (Brudergemeine) founded by N. L. Count /.inzendorf in 1722 represent one of a number of different strands of pietism. In 1740, the sect gained a foothold in the United States (Bethlehem, Pa.) as the Moravian church. Novalis's father had close ties to the Herrnhuter Brethren and this influence is very pronounced in Novalis's thought. 12. For Hemsterhuis (or Hemsterhuys), see note 32 to the texts in Part III. 13. At thisjuncture, an engagement with Michel Foucault's The Order of Things (NewYork: Random House, 1970) would seem to suggest itself. In terms of Foucault's book, Novalis employs here a thinking in equivalences that Foucault claims belonged to the preclassical period (i.e., before the seventeenth century). Questions to pursue might entail the exact nature, the function, and the effect (the politics) of such thinking in the overall context of the early Romantics' reaction to European rationalism in general and German idealism in particular.

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i. Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poesy (1799)' Poesy befriends and bonds all those who love it with indissoluble ties. In their separate lives they may seek utterly different things: one may completely despise what another holds most holy; they may not recognize, may not hear one another, may even remain strangers; yet in this region they are united by a higher, magical power and are at peace. Each muse seeks and finds the other, and together all streams of poesy flow into the great, universal sea. Reason is unitary and is the same in everyone; but just as each person has his own nature and his own love, so too does he carry his own poesy inside himself. This poesy must and should remain his, as certainly as he is who he is, as certainly as there ever was anything originary in him. And no critique can or may rob him of his own being, of his innermost strength, in the attempt to ennoble and purify him into a general image with neither spirit nor sense—this is what those fools who do not know what they want would like to do. But the high science of genuine critique should teach him how he must construct [bilden] himself within himself, and above all it should teach him to grasp all other independent forms of poesy in their classical strength and richness, so that the blossom and the heart of foreign spirits may become nourishment and seed for his own fantasy. Following this path, the spirit that knows the orgies of the true muse will never make its way to the end or believe that it has reached it, for it can never satisfy a yearning that constantly renews itself in the abundance of satisfaction. The world of poesy is as immeasurable and inexhaustible as living nature is rich in plants, animals, and creations of every kind, shape, and color. Even the most all-encompassing spirit cannot easily encompass all of those artificial works or natural products that carry the form and the name of poems. And what are these compared to the formless and unconscious poesy that stirs in a plant, shines in light, that smiles in a child, shimmers in the bloom of youth, glows in the loving breast of women? But this is the first, originary poesy without which there would surely be no poesy of words. Indeed, there will never be an object, a source of activity or happiness for all of us who call ourselves human beings, other than that one poem of divinity of which we are both part and flower—the earth. We are capa-

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ble of hearing the music of infinite chimes, capable of understanding the beauty of a poem, because a part of the poet, a spark of his creative spirit, lives in us as well and never ceases to glow with a mysterious force deep beneath die ashes of self-made unreason. It is unnecessary for anyone to preserve and propagate poesy with their reasonable speeches and teachings, much less to create it, invent it, set it up, and give it punitive laws, as poetics [Theorie derDichtkunst] would so like to do.2 Just as the core of the earth spontaneously clothed itself in formations and plant life, just as life spontaneously sprang forth from the depths and the world was filled with joyously multiplying creatures, so too does poesy spontaneously blossom forth from the invisible, elemental force of humanity when the warming ray of the divine sun meets and impregnates it. Shape and color alone are capable, by means of imitation, of expressing how man is formed [gebildet], and thus it is really only possible to speak about poesy with poesy. Any view of poesy can be true and good if it is poesy itself. However, since one person's poesy must be limited, precisely because it is his own, so too must his view of poesy be limited. The spirit cannot bear this, doubtless because it knows, without knowing it, that no human being is merely a human being, but rather can and should be, really and in truth, all of humanity as well. Therefore a person keeps going outside of himself, ever certain of finding himself again, in order to seek and find the completion of his innermost being in the depths of a stranger. The game of communicating and approaching is the business and the power of life; absolute completion occurs only in death. Therefore the poet should not be satisfied to leave the expression of his own unique poesy—as it was born and formed within him—behind him in lasting works. He must constantly strive to expand his poesy and his view of poesy, and to approximate the highest point possible on earth by striving to connect his part to the great whole in the most determined manner possible. The deadening power of generalization has exactly the opposite effect. He can do this if he has found the midpoint through communication with those who have also found it in another way, from another direction.3 Love requires love in return. Indeed, for the true poet, even traffic with those who merely play on the colorful surface can be healing and instructive. He is a sociable being. I have always found great stimulation in speaking with poets and poetically minded people about poesy. There are many conversations of

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this kind that I have never forgotten. In other cases I do not exactly know what belongs to fantasy and what to memory: many things in them are real, others are invented. Such is the case with the conversation at hand, whose purpose it is to oppose completely different views, each of which presents the infinite spirit of poesy in a new light from its own standpoint and strives more or less to penetrate into the actual core, first from one direction, then from another. My interest in this many-sidedness led me to the decision to communicate what I had noticed among a circle of friends—and at first had thought of only in connection with them—to all who sense love in their own bosom and who are inclined to initiate themselves into the holy mysteries of nature and of poesy by virtue of their own inner abundance of life. [. . .] LUDOVIKO: What I have to give to you and what seemed to me a very timely matter for discussion is a

Speech on Mythology I call on you, my friends, to ask yourselves, with the same earnestness with which you revere art: Shall the power of enthusiasm continue to be splintered even in poesy, and finally fall silent, alone, when it has fought itself wear)7 against the hostile element?4 Shall the highest and holiest remain forever nameless and formless, left to chance in the darkness? Is love really invincible, and can there be an art that deserves the name if it does not have the power to captivate the spirit of love with its magical word, so that the spirit follows it and inspires beautiful creations [Bildungen], both at its command and in accordance with its necessary arbitrariness? You, above all, should know what I mean. You yourselves have written poetry, and, in writing, must often have felt that you were lacking a firm foothold for your work—maternal soil, a heaven, living air. The modern poet must work this all out from within, and many have done it magnificently—each, however, alone until now; each work anew, a new creation out of nothing. I will get directly to the point. Our poesy, I maintain, lacks a midpoint as mythology was for the poesy of the ancients, and modern poetic art's inferiority to classical poetic art can be summarized in the words: we have no mythology. But I would add that we are close to at-

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taining one, or rather, it is time that we try earnestly to take part in producing one. For the new mythology will approach us from an entirely different direction than the old one, where the first blossom of youthful fantasy immediatelyjoined and accreted to [anbilden] the nearest arid most animated part of the sensual world. On the contrary, the new mythology must be formed from the deepest depth of the spirit. It must be the most artificial of all artworks, for it is to encompass all others, it is to be a new bed and vessel for the ancient, eternal wellspring of poesy, and even the infinite poem that enshrouds the seeds of all other poems.5 You may well smile at this mystical poem and at the disorder that may emerge from the throng and abundance of poetic works. But the highest beauty, indeed the highest order, is only that of chaos, namely, of a chaos that waits but for love's touch in order to unfold into a harmonious world, a chaos such as ancient mythology and poesy were. For both mythology and poesy are one and inseparable. Poems of antiquity are all joined one to the other until the whole is formed from their ever-growing masses and members. Everything interlocks, and one and the same spirit is expressed everywhere, merely differently. And thus it is truly not an empty image when one says: ancient poesy is a single, indivisible, completed poem. Why should it not become again as it once was? Obviously, in a different way. And why not in a more beautiful, greater way? I beg you not to yield to unbelief regarding the possibility of a new mythology. I welcome doubts from all sides and in all directions, that the investigation may be all the freer and richer. And now lend an attentive ear to my speculations! I cannot possibly offer you more than suppositions, given the state of affairs. But f hope that, through you, these suppositions may become truths, for they can, if you will, be suggestions for experiments. If a new mythology can only create itself out of the innermost depths of the spirit as if out of itself, then we find a very significant hint and a significant confirmation of that which we seek in the great phenomenon of the age—in idealism! Idealism emerged in precisely this way, as if out of nothing. There is now a fixed point in the spirit world as well from which the strength of humankind can spread in all directions, ever increasing, sure of never losing itself or its way out. The great revolution will seize all of the sciences and all of the

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arts. You can already see it at work in physics, where idealism itself actually already erupted before physics was touched by the magic wand of philosophy.B And you can also take this wondrous, great fact as a clue about the secret coherence and inner unity of the age. From a practical point of view, idealism is nothing other than the spirit of that revolution whose great maxims we ought to practice and propagate with our own strength and freedom. From a theoretical point of view, however, and regardless of how grand it appears to be, it is only a part, a branch, one expression of that phenomenon of all phenomena, namely, the fact that humanity wrestles to find its center with all of its strength.7 As things stand, humanity must either perish or rejuvenate itself. Which of these is more probable, and what more can be hoped for in such an age of rejuvenation? Gray antiquity will come back to life, and the most distant future of human culture [Bildung] will make itself known by means of omens. But that is not my primary concern here; for I would rather not skip over anything, but would like to lead you step by step to the certainty of the holiest mysteries. Just as it is the essence of the spirit to determine itself, to go outside of itself and return to itself in an eternal exchange, just as every thought is nothing but the result of such activity, so too the same process is visible in the whole of every form of idealism. Idealism itself is nothing but the acknowledgment of that law unto itself [Selbstgesetz] and the new life that is doubled by this acknowledgment, which reveals most magnificently the secret power of this process in the limitless abundance of new discovery, in universal communicability, and in lively effectiveness. Naturally, the phenomenon takes a different shape in every individual, where success often lags behind our expectations. But our expectations cannot be disappointed by that which necessary laws lead us to expect for the path of the whole. In every form, idealism must go outside of itself in one way or another in order to be able to return to itself and to remain what it is. Therefore, a new and equally unbounded realism must and will emerge out of the womb of idealism.8 Thus, idealism must not and will not merely become a model for the new mythology based on its own mode of development, but rather will indirectly be a source of it. You can already perceive the traces of a similar tendency nearly everywhere, particularly in physics, which no longer seems to be lacking anything but a mythological view of nature. I, too, have long carried the ideal of such a realism within me, and


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if it has not been communicated until now, it was simply because I still sought the proper forum for it. But I know that I can only find it in poesy, for realism will never again be able to appear in the shape of either philosophy or even a system. And even according to a universal tradition, we can expect that this new realism—because, after all, it is of idealist origin and must hover over idealism's own ground—will appear as poesy, which must of course rest on the harmony of the ideal and the real. It seems to me that Spinoza shares the fate of good old Saturn in the fable.9 The new gods toppled that magnificent figure from the high throne of science. He receded into the holy darkness of fantasy, where he now lives and dwells with the other Titans in venerable exile. Keep him there! May the memory of his ancient rule fade into a quiet yearning in the song of the muses. May he strip himself of the warlike trappings of the system, share with Homer and Dante the temple of the new poesy, and join the Lares and intimate friends of every divinely inspired poet.10 Indeed, I scarcely comprehend how one can be a poet without revering and loving Spinoza and becoming completely his. Your own fantasy is rich enough for the invention of the particular: nothing is better suited to entice your fantasy, to stimulate and nourish it, than the poetic creations of other artists. But in Spinoza you find the beginning and the end of all fantasy, the universal ground on which your particularity rests—and you should welcome precisely this separation of that which is originary and eternal in fantasy from everything particular and specific. Seize the opportunity and look! You will be granted a clear view of the innermost workshop of poesy. Spinoza's feeling is like his fantasy: not excitability for this and that, not passion that swells and subsides. Rather, a clear fragrance hovers, invisibly visible, over the whole; everywhere eternal yearning resonates in the depths of the simple work that, in silent greatness, breathes the spirit of original love. And is not this gentle reflection of the deity in man the actual soul, the spark that ignites all poesy? It is truly not a matter of the mere representation of human beings, of passions and actions, any more than it is a matter of artificial forms, even if you toss and roll the old stuff about a million times. This is only the visible, external body and, if the soul is extinguished, nothing but the dead corpse of poesy. But if that spark of enthusiasm bursts into works, then a new manifesta-

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tion stands before us, alive and in the beautiful glory of light and love. And what is any beautiful mythology but a hieroglyphic expression of the surrounding nature in this transfiguration of fantasy and love? Mythology has one great advantage. What otherwise eternally flees consciousness can be seen here sensually-spiritually and held fast, as is the soul in its surrounding body through which it shines in our eye and speaks to our ear. This is actually the point: because of the highest, we do not depend so entirely on our mind alone. To be sure, springs will never flow from arid minds—an accepted truth against which I am least inclined to rebel. But we should join everywhere that which has been formed [das Gebildete], and we should develop, ignite, nourish—in a word, form [bilden] even the highest by connecting those things that are analogous or similar, or hostile if they are equal. But if the highest is truly incapable of intended formation [Bildung], then let us immediately give up all claims to any free art of ideas, which would then be an empty name. Mythology is just such an artwork of nature. The highest is truly formed within its weave; everything is relation and metamorphosis, accreted and transformed [angebildet und umgebildet], and this accreting and transforming is its own unique process, its inner life, its method, if I may say so. Now it is here that I find a striking similarity with the great wit of romantic poesy, which presents itself not in individual moments of inspiration, but rather in the construction of the whole, and which our friend has already developed for us repeatedly with respect to the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare.11 Indeed, this artificially ordered confusion, this charming symmetry of contradictions, this wondrous, eternal exchange of enthusiasm and irony—which itself lives even in the smallest elements of the whole—already seem to me to be an indirect mythology in themselves. Their organization is the same, and the arabesque is surely the oldest and the original form of human fantasy. Neither this wit nor a mythology can exist without something originary and inimitable, which is absolutely indissoluble, which after all transformations still allows the old nature and power to shine through, where naive profundity allows the glimmer of the absurd and the crazy, or of the simpleminded and the stupid, to shine through. For this is the beginning of all poesy: the sublation of

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the course and the laws of reasonably thinking reason and our transportation again into the beautiful confusion of fantasy, the original chaos of human nature for which I have yet to know a more beautiful symbol than the colorful swarm of ancient gods. Why do you not want to rise up in order to give life to these magnificent figures of great antiquity? Just try once to contemplate the old mythology, filled with Spinoza and with those views that modern physics must arouse in any reflecting person, and see how everything appears to you in a new light and life. But the other mythologies must also be reawakened according to the measure of their profundity, of their beauty and their formation [Bildung], in order to hasten the emergence of the new mythology. If only the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of antiquity! What new source of poesy could flow to us from India if a few German artists with universality and depth of mind, with their genius of translation, were given the opportunity—which a nation that is becoming increasingly dull and brutal does not know how to use. It is in the Orient that we must seek what is most romantic, and when we are finally able to draw from the source, the impression of southern ardor, which we currently find so charming in Spanish poesy, will perhaps appear to us again, occidental and austere. In general, one must be able to reach one's goal by more than one path. May each one follow his own, with cheerful confidence and the greatest individuality. For the rights of individuality (if it is what the word signifies: indivisible unity, inner lively coherence) are nowhere more valid than here, where the highest is at issue—a point at which I would not hesitate to say that the actual value, indeed the virtue of man, is his originality. And if I place such a heavy accent on Spinoza, then it occurs truly not out of a subjective preference (the objects of which I have, rather, expressly kept at a distance) or in order to elevate him to the status of the master of a new autocracy, but rather because I have been able, with this example, to show most obviously and clearly my thoughts on the value and dignity of mysticism and its relationship to poesy. I chose him because of his objectivity in this respect as a representative of all others. This is what I think. Just as the Theory of Scientific Knowledgehas, at least the merit of complete form—a general schema for all science in the view of those who have not noticed the infinity and immortal abundance of idealism—so too is Spinoza in a similar

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way the general ground and mainstay for each individual kind of mysticism; and I think that even those who do not understand particularly much about either mysticism or Spinoza will acknowledge this readily. I cannot close without calling once again for the study of physics, out of whose dynamic paradoxes the holiest revelations of nature are now bursting forth everywhere. And so let us then—by light and by life!—hesitate no longer, but rather hasten the great development to which we are called, each according to his own sense. Be worthy of the greatness of the age and the fog will be lifted from your eyes; it will become light before you. All thinking is divining, but man is onlyjust beginning to become aware of his divinatory power.12 What immeasurable expansion will this power experience—right now! It seems to me that whoever understands this age—that is, that great process of universal rejuvenation, those principles of eternal revolution—would have to be successful in seizing the poles of humanity and in recognizing and knowing the actions of the first human beings as well as the character of the golden age that is yet to come. Then the chatter would cease and man would awaken to what he is and would understand the earth and the sun. This is what I mean by the new mythology. ANTONIO: During your lecture I was reminded of two remarks that I have often heard and that are now much clearer to me than they were before. The idealists assured me repeatedly that Spinoza may be good, but is thoroughly incomprehensible. In the critical writings, however, I found that every work of genius was clear to the eye, but eternally hidden to the understanding.13 According to your view, these statements belong together, and I take great pleasure in their unintended symmetry. LOTHARIO: I would like to call our friend to account for appearing to focus so exclusively on physics, considering that he implicitly bases everything on history, which may indeed be the actual source of his mythology just as much as physics is, if I may use an old name for something that does not yet exist. I still find your view of the age to be something that deserves to be called a historical view in my sense. LUDOVIKO: We should begin where we find the first traces of life. Currently that is in physics.


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MARCUS: Your pace was rather brisk. There are many specific points about which I would have to ask you for clarification. On the whole, however, your theory gave me a new perspective on the didactic or, as our philologist calls it, the didascalic genre.14 Now I see how the cross borne by all previous classification is a necessary part of poesy; for the essence of poesy is unquestionably this higher idealist view of things, of man as well as of external nature. It is conceivable that it could be advantageous to isolate this essential part of the whole in the development of your theory as well. ANTONIO: I cannot accept didactic poesy as an actual genre any more than romantic poesy. Every poem should be truly romantic and every poern should be didactic in that broader sense of the word that signifies the tendency toward a deep, infinite sense. And without calling it by name, we make this demand everywhere. Even in quite popular genres such as drama we demand irony; we demand that events, people—in short, the entire game of life—really be taken as a game and represented as such. This appears most essential to us, and indeed what does it not include? Thus, we abide by the meaning of the whole alone; that which charms, touches, occupies, and delights the sense, the heart, the understanding, and the imagination individually appears to us as nothing but signs, means for the intuition of the whole at the moment when we lift ourselves up to it. LOTHARIO: All of the holy games of art are only distant imitations of the infinite game of the world, of the work of art that is forever forming itself.15 LUDOVIKO: In other words: all beauty is allegory. Precisely because it is inexpressible, one can only express the highest allegorically. LOTHARIO: Therefore the deepest mysteries of all arts and sciences belong to poesy. Everything emanated from there, and everything must flow back there. In an ideal state of humanity there would be only poesy; the arts and sciences would then be one. In this state of affairs, only the true poet would be an idea) human being and a universal artist. ANTONIO: Or, the communication and representation of all arts and sciences cannot exist without a poetic component. LUDOVIKO: I agree with Lothario that the power of all arts and sciences converges at a central point, and I hope to the gods to provide you with nourishment even from mathematics for your enthusiasm, and to inflame your spirit with the miracles of mathematics. But I

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also gave preference to physics because it is here that the connection is most visible. Physics cannot perform an experiment without a hypothesis. Any hypothesis—even the most limited one, if thought through completely—leads to hypotheses about the whole, and actually rests on such hypotheses, though he who uses them may not be conscious of them. It is in fact amazing how physics, as soon as it is concerned not with technical purposes, but rather with producing general results, turns unwittingly into cosmogony, astrology, theosophy, or whatever you want to call it—in short, into a mystical science of the whole. MARCUS: But didn't Plato already knowjtist as much about this as Spinoza did, who is utterly unpalatable to me because of his barbaric form? ANTONIO: Even if Plato were just as objective in this regard as Spinoza is, which he is not, it is still better that our friend chose the latter in order to show us the wellspring of poesy within the mysteries of realism, precisely because a poesy of form is unthinkable for Spinoza. For Plato, on the other hand, representation and its perfection and beauty arc not, means, but rather an end in themselves. That is why, strictly speaking, his form is already thoroughly poetic. LUDOVIKO: In the speech, I myself said that I was introducing Spinoza purely as a representative. If I had wanted to be more extensive, I would also have spoken of the great Jakob Bohme.16 ANTONIO: With whom you simultaneously could have demonstrated whether ideas about the universe in a Christian form come off less favorably than those of the ancients whom you would like to reintroduce. ANDREA: I would ask you to maintain reverence for the gods of antiquity. LOTHARIO: And I would ask you to remember the Eleusinian mysteries.17 I wish that I had put my thoughts regarding them on paper so that I could present them to you with the order and detail demanded by the dignity and importance of the subject. It is only through the traces of the mysteries that I came to understand the sense of the ancient gods. I suspect that the view of nature that prevailed there would ignite a bright light in today's researchers, if they are ready for it. The boldest and strongest—indeed, I am tempted to say the wildest and fiercest—representation of realism is the best one. Remind me, at the


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very least, Ludoviko, to acquaint you sometime with the Orphic fragment that begins with Zeus's hermaphroditism. MARCUS: I am reminded of a reference in Winckelmann18 from which I suspect that he thinks as highly of this fragment as you do. CAMILLA: Would it not be possible for you, Ludoviko, to present Spinoza's spirit in a beautiful form, or, better yet, to present your own view, that which you call realism? MARCUS: I would prefer the latter. LUDOVIKO: Anyone who had something like that in mind could only do it in the manner of Dante and try to emulate him. Like Dante, he would have to have but one poem in his spirit and in his heart, and he would often have to despair of its representability at all. But if he succeeded, then he would have done enough. ANDREA: You have put forth a worthy example! Dante is surely the only one who, to the extent that it was possible at that time, and given few favorable and unspeakably many unfavorable conditions, invented and formed a kind of mythology entirely on his own and with his own Herculean strength. LOTHARIO: Every work should actually be a new revelation of nature. A work only becomes a work insofar as it is One and All. Only thus can it be distinguished from a study. ANTONIO: But I could name studies for you that are simultaneously works in your sense. MARCUS: And are not those poems that are meant to be directed outward without being so mystical and all-embracing, such as excellent plays, distinguished already in their objectivity from studies, which are initially directed toward the inner education of the artist alone, and are but a preparation for his final goal, that objective outward effect? LOTHARIO: If they are merely good plays, then they are only means to an end; they lack that autonomy, that inner completion for which I can find no other word than works, and which I would therefore like to retain for this purpose. Compared to that which Ludoviko has in mind, drama is nothing but applied poesy. Nevertheless, what I call a work can, in individual cases, very well be objective and dramatic in your sense. ANDREA: Thus, among the old genres, it is only in the epic that a work in your sense would be possible. LOTHARIO: A remark that is correct insofar as the single work

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tends to be the only one in the epic. The tragic and comic works of the ancients, on the other hand, are only variations, different expressions of one and the same ideal. They remain the greatest models of systematic structure, construction, and organization, and are, if I may say so, the works of all works. [.. .] Letter on the Novel [. . .] There is yet another facet to the definition of the sentimental that concerns precisely that which is unique to the tendency of romantic poesy as opposed to that of classical poesy. The definition does not at all account for the difference between appearance and truth, between play and earnest. Herein lies the great distinction. As a rule, ancient poesy follows mythology closely and even avoids material that is genuinely historical. In fact, ancient tragedy is a game; a poet who staged a true event that seriously affected the people as a whole was punished. Romantic poesy, on the other hand, is entirely grounded in history, far more than one knows or believes. The very best drama that you might see, a story that you might read—if there is a clever intrigue in it, you can count almost with certainty on the fact that genuine history is at its basis, even if altered many times over. Boccaz19 is almost entirely genuine history, and the same holds for other sources from which all romantic invention is derived. I have established a specific characteristic of the opposition between the classical and the romantic. I would nevertheless ask you not to assume immediately that I consider the romantic and the modern to be completely identical. I think that the difference between the two is as great as that between the paintings of Raphael and Correggio, and the copperplate engravings that are now in fashion. If you would like to make the difference clear to yourself, then read, for example, Emilia Galotti,*0 which is so inexpressibly modern and yet not in the least romantic, and then recall Shakespeare, in whom I would like to situate the actual center, the core of romantic fantasy. I seek and find the romantic here, among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, in Italian poesy, in that age of knights, love, and fairy tales out of which the thing itself and the term originate. This has been, until now, the only thing that can offer itself as the opposite of the classical writings of antiquity; only these eternally fresh blossoms of fantasy are worthy of crowning the ancient images of the gods. It is certainly true


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that all the most superb of modern poesy tends toward that direction in spirit and even in its style; modern poesy must thus be a return to antiquity. Just as our poetic art began and ended with the novel, that of the Greeks began and ended with the epic. There was but one difference, namely, that the romantic is not so much a genre as an element of poesy that may predominate and recede to a greater or lesser extent but may never be completely absent. In my opinion, it must be obvious to you that I demand that all poetry be romantic but loathe the novel insofar as it is a particular genre, and why I do so. Yesterday, when the debate was at its liveliest, you asked for a definition of the novel, as if you already knew that you would get no satisfactory answer. I do not consider this problem irresolvable. A novel is a romantic book.21 You will claim that this is a meaningless tautology. But I want to draw your attention to the fact that one thinks of a book already as a work, a whole that can stand on its own. This being the case, it is in significant contrast to the drama, which is meant to be watched; the novel, on the other hand, was meant since the earliest times to be read, and it is from this contrast that almost all differences in the manner of presentation of both forms derive. The drama should be romantic as well, as is all poetic art. But the drama is a novel, an applied novel, only under certain conditions. By contrast, the dramatic coherence of the story does not by any means make the novel a whole, a work, if it does not achieve this through the reference of the whole composition to a higher level of unity than the unity of the letter, which it often can and may disregard, through the chain of ideas, through a spiritual center. Apart from this, there is so little difference between the drama and the novel that the drama is rather the basis of the novel, when it is used and treated thoroughly and historically, as, for example, in the case of Shakespeare. Indeed, you claimed that the novel is most closely related to the narrative, even to the epic genre. In response, I will remind you first of all that a song can be just as romantic as a story. Indeed, I can hardly conceive of the novel as anything but a mixture of narrative, song, and other forms. Cervantes never wrote in any other way, and even the otherwise prosaic Boccaccio embellishes his collection by framing it with songs.22 If a novel exists in which this does not and cannot occur, then that has to do with the individuality of the work and not with the character of the genre; on the contrary, this is

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already an exception to the rule. This remark, however, is only a preliminary one. My actual objection is as follows: there is nothing more contrary to the epic style than when the influences of the author's mood are in the least bit visible, to say nothing of him letting his humor get the best of him and toy with him, as is the case in the most superb of novels. Later, you forgot your statement again or you rescinded it and wanted to claim that all of these categorizations led to nothing; that there exists only one poesy, and it is just a matter of whether it is beautiful; that only a pedant could ask for a rubric. You know what I think of the classifications that are currently so widespread. Nevertheless, 1 agree that it is utterly necessary for every virtuoso to limit himself to a well-defined goal, arid, looking back into history, I come up on numerous original, irreducible forms. Thus, for example, even novellas and fairy tales appear to me, if I may say so, infinitely opposed to one another. Further, I wish nothing more than that an artist might rejuvenate all of these forms by tracing them back to their original character. If such examples were to come to light, I would take heart for a theory of the novel, one that would be a theory in the original sense of the word:23 a spiritual contemplation of the object in a serenely clear, whole state of mind, as is proper for the contemplation of the meaningful play of divine images in festive joy. Such a theory of the novel would itself necessarily be a novel, one that would echo fantastically every eternal tone of fantasy and that would entangle once again the chaos of the world of chivalry. Then the old beings would live in new forms; then the holy shadow of Dante would rise out of the underworld and would transform Laura divinely before us, and Shakespeare would have intimate conversations with Cervantes; then Sancho would jest anew with Don Quixote.

2. A. W. Schlegel: Theory of Art (Selection)

(i 798-18o3)»

In brief, the essence of the sublime according to Kant is: a conflict with the interests of our sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] that dissolves in harmony with higher faculties. The exposition of the sublime in the Critique oj"Judgment seems to be

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much more satisfactory than that of the beautiful.* In the sublime, a relation to the infinite is expressed that we claim to be operative in the beautiful as well. This is in contrast to Kant, who, precisely because he does not acknowledge the relationship (between the beautiful and the infinite), does not consider the judgment about the sublime to be a pure aesthetic judgment.25 To be sure, once one has assigned the highest value to taste, it would sound awkward to subject the sublime to its rule, for there is more to the feeling of the sublime than what one would normally understand under the term taste. Therefore, I take greatest issue with the sharp division between the sublime and the beautiful, which leaves no room for conceiving of a gradual passage from one into the other. Kant's examples of the sublime are taken for the most part from objects of nature (indeed, he occasionally includes the concept of nature in denning the sublime). This led him to the common notion of formlessness and unboundedness of that which produces this impression. However, the boundlessness that is necessary to the sublime also exists within strictly limited forms, as is the case with the beautiful in a different manner. Furthermore, we find that the beautiful and the sublime mutually permeate works of art (for instance, the presentations of poesy and sculpture, of an Electra or a Laocoon) to such an extent that one cannot determine which of the two predominates. We can even observe this intimate fusion of the beautiful and the sublime in serene creations of art—for instance, in the colossal figure of a Jupiter or a Juno. This occurs in such a manner that the overall impression of it becomes contemplative, for which reason Winckelmann assumes the existence of a higher Grace, and the ancients praised even the terrifying Graces of Aeschylus.2" In my opinion, what Kant delineates as the entire essence of our feeling of the sublime is only affect, matter for the poetic reception of the sublime, just as, on the other hand, the stimulus we receive is refined into beauty by our fancy. Remaining within his definition of the sublime, Kant is admittedly right to seek the sublime in the realm of nature alone and to assign it more to moral sense than to taste. However, this restricts the domain of the beautiful greatly, and serves beautiful art poorly. * Kant's success in this matter is his reward for producing the more genuine concepts of reason and morality—for his exposition of the sublime is nothing but their synthesis together with the empirical characteristics staled well enough by Burke among others.

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In what follows, we will look at all of the other ways in which Kant robs taste of its jurisdiction, and how he isolates it and disposes of it as a highly specialized power. Kant claims: "There are two types of beauty: free beauty, which does not presuppose a concept of what the object is supposed to be; and accessory beauty, which does presuppose such a concept as well as the perfection of the object. Flowers are free natural beauties, as are many types of birds, crustaceans, and so on, and certain types of artistic works: decorative foliage, including ornamentation, fantasias in music, and, in fact, any type of composition not set to words. In contrast, the beauty of a person, a horse, or a building presupposes a notion of purpose, and the judgment about any accessory beauty is thus no longer a pure and free one, but rather is dependent on ajudgment of reason."27 We would like to illuminate this point in greater detail. It is difficult for anyone besides a botanist, says Kant, to know what a flower is supposed to be; therefore, it is a free natural beauty. If this means that we cannot comprehend the connection between its particular form and the entire internal organization of plants in general, then this would be the case for all organic creations, and anything falling under this category would be a free beauty. But we do have a good enough idea of what a flower is supposed to be, not only because we carry in us a general image of a flower in accordance with the different types of flowers we have seen, but also through our physiognomic sense (if I may call it that) for all of organic nature, which would enable us to recognize the very first flower we ever laid eyes on precisely as a flower, as the delicate apex of the plant world. One can also establish that beauty is not free here by the fact that completeness and correctness of form are demanded. We recognize when a flower is deformed; a missing petal in a tulip or missing feathers in a peacock's tail would detract from their beauty even if these species were completely unknown to us. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to name as free natural beauties atmospheric phenomena, with their ever-changing colors and forms, such as sunset, sunrise, clouds, northern lights, etc.—as well as the motion of waves on the sea, or marvelously intricate patterns of frost—because they, unlike organic forms, are not classified according to species. Nevertheless, we only consider these phenomena beautiful because, by alluding to something higher, they conjure up the illusion of life where in fact there is none. These phe-


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nomena are not anything in themselves, but they come to acquire a meaning for us. As far as the examples taken from art are concerned, even ornamentations, which at first may appear to be so, are in fact not free beauties in Kant's sense. They are intended as ornamentation, that is their purpose, and we judge them according to how appropriate they are as such, both in general terms and in each individual case. To refute Kant's example of music not set to words is not worth our while here. I categorically deny that any artistic product whatsoever can be included as a free beauty, for such a product must have some meaning, some intention, and thus it must exist in a determined manner. We see to what extent Kant degrades taste since the judgment about accessory beauties, which are infinitely more important, is not exclusively, but rather only conditionally, under the domain of taste, and since, furthermore, it is highly questionable whether free beauties exist at all. We denounce this entire distinction as invalid and as springing from too narrow and too low an assessment of the beautiful. Our general concept of an organic species and of its perfection does not at all diminish our feeling for the beauty of an individual. It is another matter when this concept exhausts the entire essence of language. In this case, there is no freedom for fancy, and thus no beauty at all. No one circle or cube is more beautiful than any other; they are all simply perfect, and they become beautiful only when we regard them not in and of themselves, but as symbols of something else. On the other hand, the general features of a particular species leave room for the infinite play of a multiplicity of beautiful forms. To be sure, beauty can never stand in contradiction to perfection, for it is nothing but the symbolic expression of it. The judgment about the beautiful is nevertheless unmediated and in no way bound to cognition and to the measure of perfection. Just as space is infinitely divisible, living nature finds a boundlessness in every boundary; in fact, this boundlessness seems to grow the more narrow and circumscribed these spheres become. It is precisely in the human species—the most determined and described of them all—that the most diverse play of individual creations becomes manifest. This naturally leads us to the notion of the ideal, which, as Kant correctly observes, pertains in its most proper sense to the human species alone since man alone, as a reasonable being, provides himself with

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the law of his destiny. It is for this reason that Kant deprives the pure sense for beauty (taste) of any judgment about this ideal, and thereby makes this sense dependent on principles of reason. Here we will see yet more clearly what is lacking in Kant's notion of the beautiful. There are two parts to the ideal: the aesthetic standard idea [Normalidee], an original image of the human figure, since man belongs to a specific animal species; and the idea of reason, which judges the human figure according to the purposes of humankind. These influence the idea of reason and manifest themselves as such in the appearance. According to this schema, the first would merely be a model of the body, while the second would be the actual spiritual ideal.28 Although the elements of the standard idea are taken, according to Kant, from experience, this idea can never be found in its totality in any one, real individual; for it is, as it were, the model that nature follows in its individual creations, and to which only the species as a whole is adequate. From there, Kant attempts to explain how the imagination brings this standard idea into being through a dynamic effect (that is, not mechanically through calculation, but rather through the gradual effect of the impressions that are recorded by the imagination). For the imagination allows for the superimposing of the image of one perceived individual entity onto another and, from the congruence of the most images, it draws up its own image. In a word, this is nothing other than an average. "This standard idea is not derived from proportions that are taken from experience as determined rules. Rather, it is in accordance with this idea that rules for judging become possible in the first place. Neither is the standard idea by any means the archetype of beauty within this species, but only its indispensable condition, thus establishing the correctness of form. Nor is it because of its beauty that we like its presentation, but merely because it does not contradict any of the conditions of beauty: this presentation is merely academically correct."29 Kant cites the Canon of Polyclitus here, a statue depicting a lancer, which, because of its incomparable perfection of proportions, was called a canon or rule.30 Judging from the great admiration felt by the Greeks, this work of art must have indeed been regarded as a truly superb production. According to Kant's explanation, this work would actually be spiritless and nothing extraordinary, for every person would carry such a canon within him, and it would simply be a ques-


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tion of skill in rendering it in stone or bronze. If the rule is abstracted from experience, as Kant would like it even though he contradicts himself, then it certainly could not be a rule; for the average would vary depending on what individual entities a person has just seen, and hence the model that is based on this would be arbitrary as well. One could also argue that Polyclitus's model turned out so splendidly because he had carefully observed and recorded more numerous and more beautiful figures than the others. But then we ask ourselves, how did the others come to acknowledge this? Why did they not reject it, based on their specific experience, as exaggerated? Such an average derived, according to Kant, from common reality (for it is clearly this that occurs most often in everyday experience) would at most lead to quite meaningless perfection. Ideal perfection of proportions can, however, be nothing other than the most succinct expression of the character of the species. Nature, rather than having attained this, seems to have missed the mark at this point or that with each individual—as can be easily demonstrated in certain examples of ancient Greek statues. Thus, Kant does not decree an absolute in artistic production with respect to the model image of the body. His explanations are entirely empirical. In our opinion, in such a work the artist does not say, this is how nature is, for the nonartist would take issue with this claim because each person sees nature differently, according to his limited perspective. Rather, the artist says, This is how nature should be, and then it so happens that nature really is this way, not in its individual creations, but in the direction of its general striving, which can never be known through external experience, but only through inner spiritual contemplation. Let us see if Kant's discussion of the presentation of the ideal itself is satisfactory. "The normative ideal," he states, "differs from the ideal of the beautiful, which takes place solely in the human figure and which consists in the expression of the moral [das Sittliche]. The visible expression of moral ideas can only be taken from experience. Yet, in order to make visible their connection with everything that our reason links with the morally good in the highest idea—goodness of soul, or purity, or serenity in bodily expression (as an effect of what is internal)—pure ideas of reason and great force of imagination must be united in the artist."31

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These last lines amount, in our opinion, to the description of genius. In claiming that the presentation of the ideal is the task of the genius, Kant would not be saying anything new. However, he does not include the loftiness of reason in his description of artistic genius, and thus he demands something foreign, something besides genius, for the production of the highest in art, just as he does not assign to taste alone the task of judging according to the ideal of beauty. These are nothing but divisions, stemming from an all too narrow conception of the beautiful. Although this seems to suggest the elevation of the ideal even above the sphere of the purely aesthetic, Kant actually devalues it, to the extent that he addresses this at all, through the way he conceives of its origins. For if, as Kant claims, it is only through experience that one can learn how moral qualities are expressed in a figure, then our physiognomic sense is merely empirical, based on observation, and there is nothing original or absolute about it. This would be correct if the relation between expression and character were one of cause and effect, for only from experience can one ascertain the cause of each specific effect. The figure, however, to the extent that it is characteristic, has a symbolic meaning: this is the very reason we can understand it immediately without reference to experience. Here, too, we are led to the symbolic nature of the beautiful, a concept that unfortunately eludes Kant entirely in these inquiries. Physiognomy as a science has frequently been ridiculed. This was easy enough, given the way in which its proponents set out to turn it into a science, be it with Lavater's rhapsodic spiritualism or with Gall's crude materialism.32 Nevertheless, physiognomy exists, not in the realm of science, but in the plastic arts. The great sculptors and painters are physiognomists par excellence, and one can claim that in antiquity a rigorously scientific, rational system of physiognomy was established whose various ideals of gods can be considered its categories. To what extent this might be translated from intuition into concepts and filtered down to the individual does not concern me here. This much is certain: a scientific treatment of physiognomy must start from the general, not from the particular, for when the individual is considered first, it remains forever unsolvable and irrational. But we will return to this in discussing the plastic arts. Thus, although Kant wants to find something absolute (autonomous, unlimited) in the ideal, he allows it to emerge empirically, and

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constructs it from two disparate parts, one of which presents the perfection of animal nature, the other that of reasonable nature—and the latter must supposedly be grafted onto the former. In this awkward and deadening form of representation one can discern the basic defect of the Kantian system in general, which does not, as true philosophy must, separate in order to connect again, but fixes the divisions of the understanding as insurmountable and posits original separation where there is, rather, unity. This is why he also does not acknowledge the absolute indivisible act by which the genius brings forth an artistic creation; for the ideal consists in the inability to distinguish any longer between the perfection of animal nature and reasonable nature. A single example can clarify our reasons for praising art in general when we claimed that it accomplishes for intuition what the highest philosophy accomplishes through speculation. Transcendental reflection teaches us that body and soul are originally not opposed but rather one, and it reveals organization to be a mere emanation of the spirit. Now, if, in an artistic formation, body and spirit are fused into one to the point of complete harmony, then animal nature as well as mere reason vanish, and the ideal, the purely human, the divine, or whatever else one may wish to call it, emerges. Understood in this sense, the gods and the heroes in the plastic arts of antiquity, and the tragic persons in poesy, can truly be called ideal [ idealisch}. In the same way, one may also justly call a poem or any work of art ideal if its matter and form, letter and spirit have penetrated each other to the point of being completely indistinguishable. This also explains why there can be inverse ideals of human creation—namely, when the spirit has been brought down to a level of complete harmony with animal nature, so that animal nature, as that which peacefully predominates, appears not to stand in opposition to reason. Examples of this include satyrs and silens in the plastic arts and the masks of Aristophanes in poesy.33 These figures have the right to be immoral, precisely because, in fact, they are not; in these works, morality has been sublated, in the same sense that the gods exceed morality. In other words, they, too, have been freed from the binding dictates of duty. Kant's classification is accurate insofar as human beauty is judged according to an architectonic as well as a physiognomic principle: there is beauty of form and there is beauty of expression. This is already manifest in everyday opinions when, depending on whether the one or the other predominates, one speaks of regular features that

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are uninspiring, or else of irregular physiognomies that are interesting. But philosophical inquiry must not stop here; rather, it must demonstrate how the one influences the other and is in turn determined by it, how bodily form is always expressive, and how expression modifies formal proportions. If Kant were right, all animal species without exception should be capable of the first part of the ideal, namely, of the model of the body, and yet, we find that only those whose perfect form already carries a physiognomic meaning for us, because of their closer kinship to human organization, actually attain the ideal. Let us bypass some other points and address Kant's theory of genius, This is, according to him, "the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art."34 Let us not take these words too literally, for this would suggest that the distinctive feature of genius is not that it freely satisfies the laws of art laid down in the human spirit, but rather that it dictates its law to art. Thus, whatever the genius brings forth would henceforth have to be considered beautiful. This would place dominion over the entire species in the hands of a favored few and the highest principle of art would become the ultimate authority. Kant very likely did not mean it in this way; this entire, apparently quite sensible, definition seems to stem from some all too subtle usage of the word rule. Let us also not enter into the complicated inquiry concerning what is innate to man, although I believe that, from a philosophical point of view, one can only say that either nothing is innate and everything in man is determined by his own actions (no matter whether it occurs within the realm of consciousness or beyond it), or else everything is always already innate to man, that is, his actions are at every instant determined by his position in the universe. Both propositions are equally true. However, all of this is clearly only due to the fact that Kant makes genius a blind instrument of nature. His definition can, almost without any changes, be applied to the artistic drives of animals: in their productions, nature does indeed give the rule to art; the regularity of honeycomb, of beaver dams, of cocoons of silkworms, is not the free work of these animals, but of nature within. To make matters worse, Kant even confirms this himself: "The author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how he came by the ideas for it; nor is it in his power to devise such products at his pleasure, or by following a plan, and to communicate (his procedure) to others in precepts that would


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enable them to bring about like products."35 And: "No Homer or Wieland can show how his ideas, rich in fancy and yet also in thought, arise and meet in his mind; the reason is that he himself does not know, and hence also cannot teach it to anyone else."36 The second example is an unfortunate and rather naive choice because Wieland knows very well from which French and non-French authors his ideas have come—and if he has forgotten, there are others who know and who can name them. It is furthermore quite correct to claim that beautiful art has something of the unlearnable about it. However, to claim that intention and all motives that can spur free activity have no impact on the exercise of art goes against experience, which shows us works of true genius that were brought forth through a competition of forces, as is the case with the Greek tragedies, with a great number of statues, and so on. According to Kant, genius is a natural talent to such a degree that its use does not depend on freedom at all. What this really means is that man does not have genius, but genius has him. Up to this point, Kant makes genius the spoiled darling of nature, but does not, however, attribute any value to it in terms of freedom, with the result that, in the fine arts, humanity would have to renounce its central feature—namely, that it is its own creation. In the passages that follow, however, the tables are turned and Kant treats genius quite poorly; one could almost say he gives it a thrashing. For Kant claims that "genius can only provide rich material for products of fine art; the processing of this material and the form require a talent that is academically trained."37 And, he continues, "taste, the disciplining or training of genius, severely clips its wings and makes it civilized or polished."ss Thus, in and of itself, genius would be uncivilized and unpolished. It would seem to me that the folly that has been committed in connection with the term "genius" during a certain period in Germany has had a significant impact on Kant's conception of it. During that period of ridiculous poetic anarchy, which nevertheless did herald an advantageous turning point and a renewed sense of vitality, it appeared that the spirit, which had long been reined in by conventional rules and the yoke of authority, wanted to throw off all the inner codes of conformity along with external constraints. Hence, undue licentiousness and eccentric originality became the essential and sole trademarks of genius.3" Kant does not seem to think much better of genius when he speaks

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explicitly of a conflict between genius and taste. To be sure, he cannot escape this unfortunate division once he has turned genius into a totally blind and passive natural drive for art. To put it bluntly, he first plucks out genius's eyes and then, to remedy the matter, he provides it with the eyeglasses of taste. He defines taste as the capacity to judge the beautiful, genius as the ability to create it—as if, in the spirit of the true artist, creation did not always involve judgment as well, as if there were not a constant self-reflection bound up in the expression of creative power. Kant would have it that genius, like a bear, brings only crude offspring into the world, which must in turn be refined through taste, a contention that does not hold well with the claim that genius gives the rule to art. We must get away from this self-canceling one-sidedness. The whole organism of art is destroyed when that which the understanding isolates as the artistic is taken away from the unmediated effectiveness of artistic ability, only to be replaced by something foreign to it. True taste is as inseparable from true genius as the poetic is from what is called the artistic in a genuine work of art. This is precisely the most intimate union between unconscious and self-conscious activity in the human spirit, between instinct and intention, freedom and necessity. Because the original split in which man as a finite being finds himself forever caught is sublated in the spirit, genius appears to us as something superhuman, as a divine power, and its pronouncements as true revelations. Thus, genius is not simply a matter of giving prominence to the powers of the mind that enable cognition, namely, imagination and understanding, which Kant designates as its constitutive parts. Rather, genius encompasses the whole inner person and can consist of nothing less than the energy and the most intimate union of that which is, in terms both of man's sensuality and of his spirituality, an autonomous and unlimited capacity—namely, fantasy (which can still be distinguished from imagination in this sense)—with reason. After broadening the concept of genius in a manner that does not constitute its fragmentation but rather a tracing back to a higher unity, we certainly have no further need to call on any foreign power in order to bring about the ideal. Rather, we come to the realization that the ideal must necessarily be created by genius, that we comprehend the one through the other: for the ideal is precisely the objective appearance of that lively [energisch] harmony of human nature that expresses itself subjectively in genius through the activity of the spirit.

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Toward the end it does seem that Kant arrives at a higher concept of the beautiful when he begins to speak of aesthetic ideas as that which is central to art,40 so that the capacity to present these ideas also becomes a constitutive part of genius. He praises the inexhaustible character of the aesthetic idea in various ways, describing it as a counterpart to the idea of reason: just as the idea of reason is a concept for which no adequate intuition exists, the aesthetic idea is an intuition for which there exists no adequate concept. The latter is thus an expressible idea [Vontellung] of the imagination, that is to say, one that gives rise to much reflection and yet cannot be fully grasped in any one specific thought. One would think that here Kant really is referring to the inexhaustible activity that the spirit finds in the beautiful because of its infinite inner nature, but closer examination reveals that his remarks are quite ambiguous. He draws his examples from poetic images and shows how a visual representation associated with a concept elicits a great number of sensations and secondary representations for which no expression in language can be found. According to Kant, the ability to communicate aesthetic ideas reveals its true self in poetic art in its entirety and consists of the ability to express a mood associated with a specific representation, and to render the unnameable within it accessible. I suspect that the unnameable is nothing other than the acknowledged inadequacy of language to ever reach an inner intuition completely, since it only has general and arbitrary signs at its disposal, which the understanding tries to appropriate as much as possible. From this, it becomes clear that it is necessary not to treat language in poesy as a mere instrument of the understanding. We do not even do this in everyday life when we want to describe something more vividly or to express a passion—although this is still far from being poesy, despite the presence of poetic elements. One could even say that language, as a collection of conceptual signs [Begriffszeichen], can never completely exhaust even a single individually determined representation of an external object, and consequently every such representation (for instance, of this or that tree) would be an aesthetic idea. We certainly would be deceiving ourselves with such a hope and we must abandon it. In one of the closing passages, Kant says that in the judgment of taste (in our manner of speaking, the feeling for the beautiful) there exists a relation to the pure concept of reason, or to the idea of the supersensible, to which he makes the most mysterious

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allusions.41 It seems that we have finally arrived at a breakthrough, for what is the supersensible but the absolute, the unconditioned, the infinite, or whatever else one wants to call it, which we claim must have a relation to the beautiful, and which relation we demand to see explained? But Kant retreats again at this point, for, in the final analysis, he regards the beautiful as the symbol (symbol is, according to Kant, the unmediated presentation of an idea by means of an analogy or a metaphor) of the morally good, and he defines precisely this as the supersensible, toward which taste strives. So, this is all it is! To be sure, it is far truer and better to say that the sense for the beautiful enhances the receptivity of the human mind for moral feeling only in general than to expect moral edification from each particular beautiful work of art. But the human spirit is no more originally predisposed toward morality than toward art and the beautiful; and if one finds beauty's highest value to be that it educates a person to the morally good in general, then why not also demand of the morally good that it educate us to the beautiful, since both have the same status? Morality is a necessary direction of the human mind; but it is only brought about through a series of inner actions, which, because they are the conditions for consciousness, lie beyond it. Morality is the endeavor to direct our sensual drives toward an agreement with reason. As such, it presupposes a split and consequently cannot be that which is most original and first in us: absolute unity. Morality enters the scene only after the Fall, to use a figure of speech. In striving toward the beautiful, we desire to return to the state before the Fall and to restore, in playful illusion, the state of innocence, that is, of the complete unity of inner and outer man. Hence the blessed satisfaction that accompanies it in its true form (one should not forget on what unworthy objects the name of the beautiful is squandered) and that momentarily releases us from the oppressive nature of our mortality. Thus Kant delivers what he promised in the beginning, namely, to make the Critique of Judgment the connecting link between theoretical and practical philosophy; for he begins his discussion of the beautiful by declaring it to be a need of the understanding, and he concludes by regarding it as a preliminary step toward morality. To be sure, this connection is very precarious. We want to illuminate Kant's starting point in more detail, because it determines the entire place of the sciences in his system.


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"The understanding," says Kant, "gives the rule to nature only to the extent that is required for the possibility of experience in general. Everything else it leaves undetermined. Now, in light of the understanding's contingent arrangement of nature, this experience might be such as to make it impossible to bring nature, through cognition, into an order that we can grasp. But the experience will not be such if there is an understanding that has devised its particular laws to the benefit of our modes of experience [ernes Erfahrungssystems]. The un-a derstanding works in accordance with purposes—this way of looking at nature—that is, as if it had acted in accordance with purposes, is thus a principle that we do not derive from experience, but rather already presuppose in experience, and that is merely a need of the understanding. We do not hereby prescribe a rule to nature, nor do we learn about its laws. Rather, this principle is prescriptive for acts of judgment when we contemplate objects of nature."42 "The understanding applies its general laws to perception necessarily and thus unintentionally. Therefore, the harmony between nature and these laws cannot engender a feeling of pleasure in us. However, to cognize nature in its contingency through experience is an intentional act, and the harmony between nature and our need must therefore (because our intention has been fulfilled) arouse a feeling of pleasure. Now, if an object of intuition arouses, through the mere apprehension of its form, a feeling of pleasure in us, which stems not from specific cognition but rather from mere apprehension, then we must conclude that the object possesses purposiveriess with respect to our cognition in general."13 Kant's entire theory of the beautiful rests on this conclusion. We do not see how he can feel justified in making this sudden reversal: purposiveness for our cognitive powers arouses pleasure in us; thus, what causes immediate pleasure must be purposive for our cognitive powers. It seems natural to us to judge nature in accordance with purposes, an attitude from which we must radically abstract in order for natural sciences to develop at all. This attitude is nothing but an inversion of order, which we achieve by thinking the effect before the cause. There is, to be sure, a class of creations, the organic ones, where, even in scientific judgment, we cannot dispense with the principle of purposiveness; however, we constantly have to keep in mind that this principle does not lie within the creations themselves, but rather in our method

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for comprehending them. One might call this a purposiveness without purpose, a definition that Kant gives of beauty. But what in the world do these judgments about nature according to purposes have in common with the search for the beautiful within nature? The search is supposed to be consonant with the needs of the understanding, but even according to Kant in a very different way from the manner in which the judgments about nature serve us. We can well imagine that the particular arrangements of nature might be very favorable for our cognition of it—without being in the least beautiful. And yet, according to Kant, "aesthetic judgment is supposed to ground its reflection on nature a priori in the principle of formal subjective purposiveness."44 This would mean that we might expect beauty from nature. But what law of our mind gives us the right to presume that nature, in the form of specific creations, would even seemingly act in accordance with our way of apprehending them? Furthermore, experience shows that those products of nature that we must indeed judge as purposive, the organic ones, are not automatically beautiful simply because they are organic. Whenever one begins with nature, the existence of the beautiful will appear as merely contingent. Its necessity can only be deduced from the claim that it should exist, namely, through human art. It is the predisposition for art that first drives man to look for and find beauty in nature. If one imagines the beauty of nature and the beauty of art as two sisters, then the latter, contrary to popular opinion, is the firstborn. Beauty in nature was possible only after the predisposition for art had begun to develop. Thus, in Kant, there is also no necessity for beautiful art. He would put the matter to rest with that which nature freely offers us for the benefit of our cognitive powers. It is self-evident that nothing fruitful will come of his system with respect to the theory of art, of whose purpose he seems to have a very limited understanding. And he needlessly assures us with empty words that, with regard to this matter, there exists no theory or science other than his own critique of judgment. Having duly received this piece of advice, we will politely take our leave from him. (General remark on this system and comparison with the Copernican system) Kant's system is unsatisfactory because he stopped halfway in his elaboration of transcendental idealism. A more thorough view and presentation of the latter should therefore lead to a deeper penetra-


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tion into the essence of the beautiful and of art. This has already been clearly confirmed. Fichte, in his ethics, has only remarked on these subjects in passing, but in a manner that warrants the highest expectations once he submits them to a more extensive analysis. Schelling was the first to connect explicitly the fundamentals of a philosophical theory of art with the principle of transcendental idealism and to dedicate a separate section in his system to art.45 He elevates art to its proper place as the resolution of an infinite contradiction in human beings and as the reconciliation of the divided tendencies of the human spirit in the last instance. Since philosophy asserts the original unity of these tendencies and proceeds from this assumption to make the entire appearance of our existence comprehensible, art must be at once the only true and eternal organon, as well as a document of philosophy. It would be impossible to analyze at this point how these results were derived without addressing the question of the structure of the entire system down to its most basic principles. We will content ourselves, therefore, with providing the reference to a passage that describes the essence of art in easily accessible terms.46 We see, then, how far a philosophy that one has tried to denounce as a set of dissatisfying empty musings is from stifling the inner life; in fact, it is this philosophy's most urgent business to protect life from the stifling influences of the understanding once and for all.47 According to Schelling, the beautiful is the infinite represented infinite form under which definition the sublime is already included, as well it should be. I entirely agree with this definition, but I would prefer to define the expression in the following mariner: the beautiful is a symbolic representation of the infinite. Stated in this way, it becomes clear at. the same time how the infinite can appear in the finite. One should not consider the infinite a philosophical fiction, one should not look for it in the beyond: it surrounds us everywhere, we can never escape it; we live, breathe, and dwell in the infinite. It is true that we are assured of the infinite only through our reason and fantasy; we can never capture it with the outer senses or the understanding, for these exist only through a constant positing of things finite and a negation of the infinite. The finite constitutes the surface of our nature, otherwise we could have no definite existence; the infinite constitutes the foundation, otherwise we would have no reality at all. How, then, can the infinite be brought to the surface? How can it be made to appear? Only symbolically, in images and signs. According to

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the unpoetic view, sense perception and the activity of the understanding determine things once and for all; the poetic view, on the other hand, continually interprets things and sees a figurative inexhaustibility in them. (Kant speaks at one point of a cipher—writing through which nature figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms.)48 Only in this way can everything come alive for us. Poesy [Dichten] (taken in the most general sense as that which underlies all the arts) is nothing but an eternal act of symbolization: we either seek an outer shell for something spiritual or we relate an exterior to an invisible interior. Because spirit and matter, according to the understanding, are completely opposed to each other, so that no gradual passage from the one to the other occurs, the question is how we can reveal the spiritual materially and, on the other hand, how we can recognize the spiritual in the material. Undeniably, through an absolute act that is not grounded in our experiences and logical conclusions; it is through the deed that we immediately, or unconsciously, acknowledge the original oneness of spirit and matter, which can only be speculatively demonstrated. Without this, communication among human beings, through which the development of all their talents first becomes possible, could never have occurred; for not even the desire to communicate could be communicated if human beings did not always already understand each other prior to any agreed-upon mode of communication. It is a known truth that emotive sounds and passionate gestures are understood directly in the intuition without the mediation of any previous knowledge, just as they also unwittingly, often involuntarily, reveal most succinctly what is happening within us. The term "expression" is quite accurate here: the inner is, so to speak, ex-pressed [herausgedriickt: literally squeezed out] as if by a power unknown to us; or the expression is an imprint on the exterior emanating from the inside. The capacity for verbal language [Worfsprache] rests on the involuntary use of this natural tendency to communicate with similar beings who are immediately recognized as such. If something is to be signified arbitrarily, then it must first of all (even if it is only a feeling about our condition) be posited outside of us as an object; thus, language is not so much expression as representation. We express ourselves, but objects we represent. All representation in language is symbolic in origin. First there is the linkage of certain sounds to certain inner sensations as their immediate signs; from


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these, signs of signs are first of all formed, and these are modified in the most diverse ways and then continually transposed from one sign to the next. This is not possible without each representation serving as the image or sign for another. This universal symbolization or image making can be traced very clearly in the construction and etymology of languages, however distant from their origins they may be. As we have just seen, language develops through arbitrary use from mere expression to representation; if, however, arbitrariness becomes its dominant feature, then representation, or the connection between sign and referent, disappears. Language, then, becomes nothing more than a collection of logical ciphers [logische Ziffern] suitable only for performing the calculations of the understanding. In order to make language poetic again, its figurative quality must be restored, and it is for this reason that the rhetorical, the metaphorical, the tropological are generally viewed as essential to poetic expression. According to the rules of poetics, however, the understanding alone usually judges the propriety of what are considered permissible adornments: images and analogies must be employed; however, they must not be too bold but should only just rise above straightforward prose. One does not acknowledge that poesy is effusive and absolute in this respect, that poetry can, according to its prevailing characteristics at each given moment, bind together and merge even what is most distant. The mutual concatenation of all things through an uninterrupted act of symbolization on which the first formation of language is founded should be produced in the renewed creation of language, of poesy. Poesy is not a mere makeshift creation of our still childish spirit; it would be its highest intuition if the spirit could ever completely attain it. For every thing represents first and foremost itself, that is, it reveals its inside through its outside, its essence through appearance (it is thus a symbol for itself); subsequently, it reveals that to which it is closely related and by which it is influenced; and, finally, it is a mirror of the universe. In those boundless transpositions of poetic style lies, then, as idea and obligation, the great truth, that one is all and all is one. Reality lies between truth and us and continuously pulls us away from it; fantasy removes this disruptive medium and immerses us in the universe by enabling it to revolve in us like an enchanted realm of eternal transformations where nothing exists in isolation, but rather, everything is marvelously created from everything else. Research into the symbolic [das Symbolische] in our cognition would

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lead to the most surprising discoveries about the secret of poetry; discoveries that are equally interesting for science, in that they demonstrate how poetic fantasy had heralded long ago what is now being revealed by the most extensive studies concerning the laws of nature. We will go deeper into the issue of the symbolic in language [Symbolik der Wortsprache] when we view it as the medium for poesy. Then we will see that the power that refines poesy into a true fine art is the same as that which is at the origin of language, except to a higher degree. Here we would like to remark provisionally that, since the beautiful must necessarily be a meaningful manifestation and since the ability to signify is part of human nature, there can only exist as many forms of art as there are types of natural expressions whereby man reveals the inner in an outer form. This happens through forms and gestures, through sounds and words. The fine arts are limited to these means of representation as well, as we shall soon see in our outline and organization of them according to this principle. We will now turn to the relationship between nature and art, set straight the conflicting opinions on this subject, and expound on the terms that are to be derived from it. Aristotle has posited as fact the proposition that the fine arts are mimetic.49 This was correct to the extent that it merely indicated that there is something mimetic in them; incorrect, however, when it meant what Aristotle actually understood by it—that mimesis was their essence. Moreover, architecture and rhetoric were already thereby excluded. For this reason, Aristotle does not seem to have included them among the fine arts, nor did many others after him. Many modern thinkers have transformed this proposition into the following one: "Art must imitate nature." The vagueness and ambiguity of the concepts nature and imitation have, in this context, caused the greatest misunderstandings and given rise to a variety of contradictions. Many people understand nature simply as that which exists without human artifice. If this negative concept of nature is linked to an equally passive one of imitation, where it is reduced to a mere mimicking, copying, repeating, then art would be an unprofitable undertaking indeed. One might ask, since nature already exists, why one should agonize over producing a second, quite similar copy through art that would offer no satisfaction to our spirit aside from the comfort of a certain pleasure. Thus, for example, a painted tree would be


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preferable to a real one because no grubs or other insects live on it. Villagers in northern Holland actually do not plant the small courtyards of their houses with real trees, but, for the sake of cleanliness, content themselves rather with painting trees, hedges, and bowers on the surrounding walls which, moreover, stay green even in winter. The only purpose of landscape painting was to provide a piece of portative nature in one's own room so that one could contentedly look at the mountains without having to climb them or be exposed to the raw elements. The nature of the prince's travels in Goethe's "Triumph der Empfindsamkeit" (Triumph of sentimentality) comes to mind here.50 But however one looks at it, only the unfortunate plastic arts may be reduced in this fashion to a mere imitation of nature; the manifestations of the other arts cannot be treated in this way. For one may claim that music is the imitation of the natural expression of the emotions through sounds or that it was gleaned from the singing of birds, as do the Chinese, who tell of one of their emperors who one day, after hearing songbirds, arranged the first human concert by following their example. However, one could never derive from this the necessity for a beat, for a steady rhythm, nor be able to explain its emergence. Rather, one would be left to consider these things as extraneous adornment, and, in favoring an arbitrary opinion, deem coincidental and invalid that which people from all corners of the world have agreed on since time immemorial. This in turn gives rise to the most absurd rules. Some have realized that the principle just mentioned is far too vague and have feared that art would lose itself in the mundane and the grotesque if art were defined so broadly. They have therefore claimed that art should imitate beautiful nature, or that art should make nature beautiful by imitating it (Batteux) .51 This is like sending one from Pontius to Pilate.52 For either one imitates nature as one finds it, in which case it would perhaps not turn out to be beautiful, or one makes nature beautiful, in which case it is no longer imitation. Why do they not say right off that art should represent the beautiful, and leave nature out of it entirely? Then one would be relieved of the torment of making artistic manifestations accord with such a definition of nature, which is not possible without the utmost violence. Since mistaking the represented for the real thing is considered the best proof of well-executed imitation, it follows from this crassly understood principle of mimesis that art must aim at deception and that

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everything that impedes deception is flawed. The playful illusion [spielender Schein] that art strives for—to which the enchanted mind, though well aware of the fiction, submits freely, and by which it can momentarily, as well as through mere inner musings, forget its immediate surroundings—this illusion has been confused with the material error, with the entirely passive fascination where the spirit would be robbed of all freedom of contemplation because it would be truly burdened by reality. This principle of deception is so foreign to the essence of genuine art that it has been applied almost exclusively to painting and to poetry in dramas. Song and dance require a fixed art form—rhythm is a constant reminder that they are only free representations that rearrange natural emotive expressions; to call this deception would be the grossest misuse of terms. It is a known fact that sculpture gives up all claim to deception. If deception determined the value of a work of art, it would be acceptable to paint statues, and a wax figure with natural hair and perhaps the actual clothes of the person represented would be preferable to even the best statue. Even if one did not go to such extremes, one still held that sculpture, for the sake of deception, should not work in colossal forms. Once art is approached in this way, one has no right to mock the person who does not find a resemblance in a bust because a real person has hands and feet. Painting has more of an illusory quality [Schein], yet its proper aim cannot be deception either, since it does not use real light, but instead produces light and shade through the skillful use of white and the blending of the remaining colors (Zeuxis, Parrhasius) .53 Other measures would have to be employed for the purposes of deception, such as, for instance, in a panorama, or when one gives a moonlit landscape a transparent quality. The fact that the Chinese, in viewing English portraits, wondered whether the people were really as blotchy as they appeared through light and shadow is an indication that paintings do not actually deceive, that judgment and habit are involved in finding the truth of appearance [ Wahrheit des Scheins] in paintings. This principle has caused the greatest harm in dramatic poetry and the art of acting. This will be discussed in detail later. The preceding examples demonstrate how things always degenerate into the trivial and the disagreeable when one takes deception seriously. This brings to mind the amusing story of the artist in ancient Rome who could grunt as naturally as a pig. A peasant wanted to outdo him by hiding a real pig under his coat but he was hissed at, and he put the deceived


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experts to shame when he pulled out the pig. Who knows, maybe these people were not so wrong in preferring the artist, but they derived their pleasure from the wrong source of deception: perhaps it stemmed much more from the fact that a voice, while remaining distinctly human, could so closely imitate an animal. Closely related to deception is the demand for verisimilitude, which has been made mainly in poetry, above all in dramatic poetry, and has led to the banning of all that is daring, great, fantastic, and extraordinary as well as to the valorization of the trivial and the mundane as its true object. Exactly the opposite is the case: true verisimilitude is based on calculations of the understanding that cannot be applied to a beautiful work of art. In poetry, one cannot speak of verisimilitude except in the sense that something appears true; and something might well appear true but never become true. All that is required is that the poet know how to transport us into a foreign world through the magic of representation; after that he can operate within it according to his own laws. Verisimilitude is, moreover, connected with the excessive attention to motive, where one substitutes a psychological analysis for the depiction of a character because one is incapable of representing it directly, or else one fears that, thus represented, the character might not be intelligible to the spectators or readers, or might not be appealing enough. Psychology is not worth much as a science, and it is absolutely deadly in poesy—indeed, it is the most disgusting putrefaction, which occurs only when the living organism is destroyed. Nature, taken in a different sense, refers to that which appears in man of its own accord and without any exertion as opposed to what was artificially learned. This view of nature has been recommended for art in a twofold manner: with regard to the represented people and to the artist himself. As far as the other arts are concerned, it is all too clear that their practice, because of their entirely artificial means, demands a thorough and methodical training. This bad advice, then—namely, that one should let oneself be blindly carried along by one's natural disposition and wild enthusiasm to produce not only seemingly, but truly artless outpourings—has led people astray, especially in poetry. This principle of naturalness, which really eliminates art completely, stands in opposition to artfulness, which values a work of art only with respect to the level of skill and effort apparent on the surface. It states accordingly: the overcoming of (technical) difficul-

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ties is the main source of pleasure in beautiful works of art. For this reason, a tragedy in rhymed verse, for example, whose plot unfolds in the same room within twenty-four hours, is deemed an admirable achievement. These kinds of remarks demonstrate most clearly the pervasive narrow-mindedness and incompetence in the practice of art. For fulfilling technical requirements is but a trifling matter to a master who has gained command of the great and the essential; but if technical difficulties are still noticeable in the work, then they have not really been overcome. Once they have been overcome, however, they are not noticeable anymore, but can only be deduced by experts. This has nothing to do with the enjoyment of art. Boileau was not ashamed to compare poetry with the art of throwing millet seeds through a small hole, and he has thus indeed done justice to his own poetry;54 if, however, this is all there is to poetry, then poets would only deserve to be rewarded the way Alexander rewarded the man who wanted to recommend himself to him by solving the problem of the millet seeds. As regards the naturalness of the characters represented, it is correct that the representation must have truth and depth, which is made impossible by the rigidity of conventional forms (Fontenelle's shepherds).55 The characters have to be freed from these forms. But the demand for naturalness has been far too restrictive; in the best cases. one has turned to the naive and the simple, most often the common and the flat. (GeBner.56 Compare, however, the Spanish and Italian pastoral novels and plays.) As a rule, the natural is not judged according to humanity in general as it has taken shape all over the world throughout different ages, but according to a one-sided nationality in a spoiled age where the most unnatural has often become natural. The greedy holds generosity, the coward courage to be unnatural, and everything truly poetic must appear unnatural to an entirely unpoetic nation, as is the case with the French. Despite their emphasis on the principle of artfulness, they constantly make reference to naturalness as well. What is to appear natural to them must have clarity and precision, but must be dispassionate at the same time. They can even find the cold, reasoning rhetoric of passions in their tragedies natural, as long as it lacks image and fantasy. Any other rhetoric they would consider as exaggerated grandiloquence, even if it contained the greatest truth. Because of the most flagrant confusion of concepts, one considered


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form, the medium of representation, to be part of content and, for example, declared it to be unnatural when characters in a play speak in verse, as if the writer intended to put nothing but improvising poets on stage, and as if poetic style were not directed toward the meaning of the work as a whole. Such is the case with Diderot, for example, to whom we will return in what follows. The objections that have been raised against opera claiming that it is an improper and reprehensible genre can, for the most part, be reduced to this invalid argument. If one once again expands the word nature, taken in this most subjective, narrow sense, so that it encompasses the quintessence of all things, it becomes apparent that art must take its objects from the realm of nature, for in this case, there simply exists nothing else. Fancy can perhaps become supernatural in its daring flights but never extranatural [aufiernaturlich]: the elements of its creations, no matter how transformed by its marvelous activity, must always be borrowed from a given reality.57 Therefore, one need not at all prescribe for art the function of imitating nature, for art must do so; indeed, it cannot do otherwise. Thus, the statement would more accurately read: art must form nature, which would be a simple fact and serve as a corrective to Aristotle's statement. If one says that the artist must study nature, that he must have it constantly before him, and so on—quite commendable maxims, by the way—then once again nature is not understood as the totality of things, but rather as specific isolated objects in the outside world. How, then, do these objects become endowed with such a worthy name? Clearly, because general laws of nature reveal themselves in these phenomena. One says that a painting of a drapery—the work of human hands—is an imitation of nature if, with respect to the folds, the rules of gravity are observed as they manifest themselves in accordance with the particular form of the thing and the way it conforms to the body, and in how, in the coloring of the painting, the laws of the distribution of light are respected. But here, too, the word "nature" has again caused the greatest confusion in that it suggests that the isolated natural object is already the absolute model, the insurpassable, even the unattainable for the human spirit. A number of great artists have supported this lunacy through their views [Ansehen]; precisely because they had the most distinct intuition and deeply felt the unfathomable nature of every phenomenon, they believed to have incorporated the model object only in an incomplete, but otherwise unchanged, manner in their

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work. Precisely because the activity whereby the thoroughly unformed object became a fitting part of their representation was so natural to them, they were not conscious of it and attributed everything to nature. As evidence, one need only think of the most extreme case—how, for instance, a Raphael, and how a microscopic insect painter view nature; or a Denner,58 who views humans as he would microscopic insects. Through mere imitation, copying, one will always lose out to nature. Hence, art must strive for something else in order to compensate for this deficiency, namely, the pure selection of that which is significant in the appearance, while omitting distracting details. The dead, empirical view of the world holds that things exist; the philosophical, that everything is caught up in an eternal becoming, in a never-ending creation, a fact that is revealed to us through a multitude of phenomena in everyday life. For this reason, man has, since time immemorial, brought together into the unity of an idea the creative power that pervades everything, and this is nature in the highest and most proper sense. This universal power of creation cannot be exhausted in any single product, and we can never perceive it with our external senses. We recognize it most clearly from that point where we carry our own share of this power in us as organic beings and according to the degrees of relationship between other organizations and our own. All of nature is organized likewise but we do not recognize this; nature is an intelligence like us—we can only sense this and can achieve clear insight only through speculation. If nature is taken in this most worthy of meanings, namely, not as a mass of products, but as the productive agency itself, and the term imitation is taken in its more noble sense, where it does not mean aping the superficial features of a person, but rather making the principle of his action one's own, then there is nothing more to criticize or to add to this fundamental principle: art must imitate nature. That is to say, art must, like nature, be independently creative, organized and organizing, must form living works that are held in motion not through a foreign mechanism, like a pendulum, but rather through an inner force, like the solar system, and, completed, return to themselves. Prometheus imitated nature in this way when he formed the human being from earthen clay and brought him to life with a ray of sunlight.59 This is a myth that at once provides us with a beautiful example of how creative symbolism grasps truth, for the human being is, as higher physics is now capable of explaining, actually composed of earth and sun.60


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As far as I know, only a single writer has established this principle of imitation for the arts in this highest sense. It is Moritz in his short piece "Uber die bildende Nachahmung des Schonen" (On the creative imitation of the beautiful).61 The shortcomings of this piece stem from the fact that Moritz, with his truly speculative spirit, found no support in the philosophy of his day, and thus lost himself, in the manner of a recluse, in mystical labyrinths. He describes the beautiful as that which is complete in itself, that which can be comprehended by our imagination as an independent whole. Now, the great interconnectedness of all of nature that exceeds the limits of our intuition is the only true independent whole; every individual whole within it is, because of the undissolvable concatenation of things, only imaginary. But taken as a whole, each had to be similar to that great whole in our imagination and to form itself in accordance with precisely those eternal fixed rules by which the whole assures that its center links up with all sides and thus rests on its own being. Every beautiful whole from the hands of a creative artist is therefore a miniature imprint [Abdruck] of the highest beauty in the great whole of nature. How splendid! Both the relationship to the infinite within the beautiful and art's striving for inner completion find here the most felicitous expression. But if she is not to be found in any external phenomenon, where should the artist find his sublime mistress, creative nature, in order, as it were, to consult with her? He can only find her, if anywhere, in his inner self, in the center of his being, through spiritual contemplation [geistige Anschauung]—or nowhere at all. Astrologists have called man a microcosm, a small world, which, from a philosophical standpoint, is well justified; for, because of the universal rule of the reciprocal determination of all things, every atom is a mirror of the universe. But the human being is the first being known to us who can not only act as a mirror of the universe for a foreign intelligence, but who can, because his action reflects back onto him, act as a mirror for himself. Now, the clarity, the energy, depth, and versatility with which the universe is mirrored in the human spirit, and with which, in turn, that which is mirrored is mirrored again in him, determine the degree of his artistic genius and put him in the position to create a world within the world. One could therefore also define art as nature, which, having passed through the medium of a complete spirit, is transfigured and concentrated for our observation. The principle of imitation, as it is usually

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understood in the empirical sense, can thus be simply reversed. Art must imitate nature means: nature (the separate natural entities) is the norm for man in art. However, precisely the opposite is true: in art, man is the norm of nature. Plato's great theory that man is the measure of all things thus holds good for art as well, and is hereby made visible. Now we come to the discussion of the extremely important concepts of manner and style, which are closely connected to the relationship between nature and art. These words were first common in the plastic arts; from there, they began to be carried over to the other arts, and justifiably so, for they can be put to good use. Let us begin with manner as it is the simpler of the two terms. At times, one uses this word for purposes of praise: one says of a painting, for instance, that it was executed in a grand manner. In this case it means as much as style or character in general. Normally, however, manner diminishes the value of a painting. This is always the case when one calls a painting mannered. A representation is considered mannered if manner is perceived as dominant; it has reached the height of mannerism when the essence of the thing is lost and everything dissolves into mere manners. In the colloquial, manners refer to types of outward behavior, insofar as they have become habit. It is thus easy to see that manner in the sense above means a faulty practice of the artist that may lie either in his method of execution and treatment or already in his way of conceiving his objects. Manneredness is thus an unacceptable interference of the person doing the representing and his individual qualities in the artistic representation. In light of this description, one could be led to consider manner, which often imposes itself in such a brazen way, as something positive. One could then explain its opposite, style, negatively as the total absence of manner, just as one commonly criticizes water if it has a taste, since the purity of water lies in its having no taste at all. It would follow from this that there can be only one single style. Nevertheless, one hears art experts speaking of different styles and, in fact, one is supposed to recognize the era from which a work derives or even its specific creator by the work's style, as well as by its manner. The question then is by what right this occurs. Must one relinquish either the claim that there are different styles or this merely negative view of style? How are these two compatible?


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If we adopt a loftier point of view, then we will recognize thai the particular forms itself [sich bildet] out of the general by limiting and opposing. Thus in art, which must be regarded as something general and valid for all, the inclusion of the particular, the subjective, would be limiting and negative, and its omission would be positive, an expansion of art to its true scope. But then we are all simply individuals; we are born as such and cannot cease being so. Consequently, we possess qualities that determine specific modes of action as the easiest and most appropriate. Through the repetition of these modes, habits and special inclinations develop that are necessarily imprinted to a greater or lesser degree on works that should emerge from the innermost recesses of our being, as is the case with those of the fine arts. We do not see things at all as they are in themselves, but rather according to their relationship to us, which is naturally determined by our personality as a whole. How is it possible not to be mannered in art, indeed, even to notice that we have a manner of our own? It is possible because we are not just individuals, but also human beings; that is, we carry within ourselves something sound, selfdetermining, and universally valid that we can use as a measure against thai which is variable, arbitrarily determined, and exclusively unique. Just as morality demands that we bridle our ego in obedience to a higher law, so too must artistic virtue (virtu, as the Italians also call a consummate artistic skill) consist of the artisl knowing, in accordance with the laws of the beautiful and of representation, how to relinquish his individuality in, so lo speak, giving himself up lo the work. And thus one realizes how, even though there is not a complete cleansing from all personal influences, it is possible to approach a state of perfection in which manner can no longer be perceived by the viewer of an artwork. In this way, an elevation beyond mannerism is possible through a maxim of the will. The effect of such a maxim alone cannot achieve this when mannerism springs from the insurmountable limitation of our cognition. The object of art, as we have seen, is necessarily nature. We have the idea of nature in us but, historically speaking, as we know it through experience, nature remains immeasurable and impenetrable to us. Because we can only fix that which we carry within us—the idea, the spirit, the poesy of a work—through specific external manifestations, the inadequacy of our cognition of nature, both in its scope

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and in its depth, will also be noticeable with respect to these manifestations. The science of the painter is the observation of the visible: one painter progresses further with respect to the appearance of colors, light, and shadow, while another does so with respect to the forms of specially organized bodies. Thus, both excel in their respective areas of art and will declare the other to be mannered in that area; and before the all-seeing eye of nature, neither would remain free of manner, even in that which each understands best. In short, it is impossible to be completely true to nature. Art should not even attempt to do so, for it will certainly lose sight of its own higher purpose in the process. As the object of representation, nature is merely a means toward attaining the revelations of art. By striving to be true to nature, art would elevate nature to its ultimate goal arid would, at best, even if successful at this, once again fall back into mere nature, whereas art should really be a continual transformation of nature according to the laws of the human spirit. There is necessarily something that stands between art and nature and keeps them apart. It is called manner if it is a colored or opaque medium that throws a false light on all represented objects; it is called style if it does not impinge on the rights of either art or nature, which is only possible through a declaration that is, as it were, imprinted on the work itself, namely, that it is not nature and has no desire to pass itself off as such. Freedom from manner is thus only possible by having a style and not, as many have claimed, by achieving complete uniformity with nature. It goes without saying that we mean something different here by the word "style" than the mere absence of manner, or this statement would be tautological and mean nothing. Rather, style is a transformation of individual, unavoidable limitedness into voluntary limitation according to an artistic principle. Winckelmann has a most fitting expression for this, in that he calls it a system of art. He speaks of a fundamental principle of elevated style and says: "The older style was built on a systema that consisted of laws taken from nature that later had distanced themselves from it and had become ideal [idealisch]. One worked more according to the stipulations of these laws than according to nature, which was to be imitated, for art had formed itself [gebildet] into its own nature. The reformers of art are those who raised themselves above this accepted systema and came closer to the truth of nature."62 We do not want to test every aspect of these words, especially that which has to do with laws being taken


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from nature and becoming ideal. Rather, we would simply like to remark that even after approaching the truth of nature, art formed [bildete] its own nature once again, and that this is always the case for true art, only in a more or less obvious sense. Style is thus a system of art, derived from a true fundamental principle; manner, in contrast, is a subjective opinion, a bias, expressed in practical terms. Nevertheless, the doubt surfaces yet again: how can there be more than one style since truth is only One? We must first of all remember that art is an infinite whole, an idea, which no single person can completely possess: thus, art can also be grasped from many diverse sides without missing its true essence. And the specific perspective on art that every artist can have according to his unique character, the fundamental outlook, so to speak, of his artistic world, is the principle that, developed with freedom and consciousness, forms itself [sich bildet] into a practical system, a style. Furthermore, art, like nature, divides, because of its inner organism, into strictly separate and opposing spheres. In other words, there are different arts, each having a different principle of representation. Each thus has its own style that is already proper to it, regardless of those who practice the art: there is a plastic and a picturesque, a musical and a poetic style. If different spheres are necessarily determined in advance within one of these forms of art because of its essence—that is, if it includes different genres—then these have their own styles as well. Poesy, for instance, has an epic, a lyric, and a dramatic style that are all opposed to one another, yet all can be constructed out of the essence of poesy. Finally, art develops as something to be realized by human beings only gradually in time. As we have already demonstrated in our general remarks on the history of art, this indisputably occurs according to certain laws, even if we cannot show proof of them within any specific period of time. However, when we have an overview of a great quantity of art as a selfcontained whole and perceive how it progresses according to set principles, we are justified, through the designation of various epochs as well, in alluding to this as style. Thus, style refers to a necessary stage in the development of art. Understood in this way, there can also be incomplete styles. They are incomplete only when viewed in isolation; when viewed historically, we see in them the stages immediately preceding or following them. Consequently, they cannot be passed over as mere manners—in other words, as chance episodes in history. There is a clear division of nature in the principles governing the

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development of art [Kunstbildung] as well, as is evident in the history of classical and modern art. The latter has, to be sure, only just begun, and we are caught up in it, so that we only have a very incomplete insight into and overview of it, and it is more a matter of guesswork than knowledge. The confusion and chaos, at first glance, could easily lead someone whose spirit is filled with the simple, great models of classical antiquity, and who is accustomed to comparing them, to claim that there are no definite stages of development or styles to more recent art. On the other hand, one could make the opposing claim that, according to the principles of classical art concerning irrational genres, says: modern poets and artists have no style, just manners. However, this claim, one that is actually advanced, must by all means be withdrawn after closer examination; it will be our aim to do justice to modern as well as classical art. Who can deny, for instance, that Shakespeare has a style, a system to his artistic discipline, one that is, moreover, astoundingly thorough and profound and that modifies itself in the most manifold ways as required for the various objects of his dramas? Indeed, one can also point out nicely the systematic nature of the course of his artistic life, his various epochs or styles. Calderon can serve as an example of a style that, although very different from the Shakespearean, is equally perfect in romantic drama.63 The judgment of style and manner, especially of the point where the former passes over into the latter, the objective into the subjective, the general into the individual, is one of the most difficult points of expertise and it is for the sake of presuming to make these judgments that these words are used so frequently, and often incorrectly. Furthermore, I would like to draw attention to how extraordinarily fitting the images are that underlie both of these terms. Maniera apparently derives from manus and originally meant the guidance of the hands. These are part of our person and thus it is easy for physical habits to take over in the process. Stylus, on the other hand, is the slate pencil with which the ancients wrote on tablets of wax: it is not part of us, but rather it is the tool of our free activity. To be sure, the nature of the stylus determines our strokes, but we have chosen this stylus of our own free will and could trade it for another. If one regards creative nature as the great universal artist, especially in her production of organic natures, then one can also attribute to her a style and manners. Perhaps it is from this standpoint that the common point of contention can be resolved, namely, whether the


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only archetypes for human beauty are national ones, or whether there is a notion of beauty that is universally valid. We immediately recognize that the paintings of an artist in which the same heads, proportions of figures, hands, feet, and so on, constantly recur are mannered because we see that he has unduly curtailed the richness and multiplicity of nature because of a personal inadequacy. Nature reveals an infinite fullness and variety in the totality of her products; viewed only in part, however, she often limits herself to the point of an obvious uniformity, in the character of various forms of organization and in particular in the human species: nature forms [bildet] not only extremely one-sided national physiognomies, but even deformities, such as clubfeet and the like, become widespread in some areas. In such narrow spheres, we can certainly admonish nature for being mannered, for that is what it is called when a foreign, disturbing element is incorporated into an artistic project that should be pure. It is in the character of organic forms of nature to be their own cause and effect: a sharp-witted physicist has compared them to vortexes or whirlpools in the general stream of causes and effects. They cannot exist, however, without a nonorganic world surrounding them and are constantly compelled to admit foreign influences. If the freedom of selfdetermination that appears to its highest degree in the human being as the most perfect form of organization is not to be disturbed, but rather is to retain the greatest latitude, then the powers that exert an influence on the individual must achieve an equilibrium. Further, since the two main factors of organic existence are sun and earth, this will occur in temperate climates where admittedly the most beautiful human forms are to be found. Winckelmann recognized this conclusion, but he expressed it in a muddled manner. To be sure, we have not yet fully explored the laws according to which human form is determined by climate in this description. The structure of the earth is not just polarized into north and south, but into east and west as well, and it is with regard to this that the most beautiful forms are apparently found within one specific latitude. Because of polarity, the southern hemisphere has far more water than land, with the exception of the continent of Africa. Thus, in the southern hemisphere— for example, on the South Sea islands—the most beautiful forms are to be found nearer to the equator than in the northern hemisphere, and so on. Suffice it to say that where nature builds [bildet] the human form

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beautifully, there is style; that is, the limiting of possible multiplicity rests on a principle inherent to the human form of organization, not a principle foreign to it. Here, the nature of being human articulates itself in the purest way. Thus, there is something universally valid in human beauty as well, even if it is not recognized by those nations that have been formed in a mannered way. This should not deter us, even if those who are most mannered in art do not recognize the simple style of the great masters either. It goes without saying that nations that cannot get beyond such a one-sided national physiognomy forced on them by nature are unable to progress in the plastic arts, whose greatest object is the human form; nor do these nations have a talent for the plastic arts. By contrast, the arts necessarily flourished in a most preferable manner in a nation such as Greece, which was so singularly favored in this respect. Gymnastics has often been regarded as the main cause for the flourishing of the plastic arts among the Greeks. I regard both, however, as effects that flow from the same source. The Greeks invented gymnastics, which lent the greatest freedom and harmony to all of their movements, for the same reason that they invented the plastic arts in all their perfection. They thereby merely assisted that which was already clearly indicated in nature.

3. Novalis: The Universal Brouillon (lygS-gg) 64 14. [. . .] Praxis must become more theoretical. 49. PSYCHOLOGY AND ENCYCLOPEDIST'S. A thing only becomes intelligible through representation. One understands something most easily when one sees it represented. Thus, one understands the I only insofar as it is represented by the Non-I. The Non-I is the symbol of the I, and its sole purpose is to serve the I's understanding of itself. One understands the Non-I similarly, that is, only insofar as it is represented by the I, which becomes its symbol. This observation can be related to mathematics by saying that, in order to be understandable, mathematics must be represented. A science can only be truly represented by another science. The pedagogical rudiments of mathematics must therefore be symbolic and analogical. A known science must serve as a simile for mathematics, and this fundamental equation must become the principle for the representation of mathematics. Just as anthropology is the basis of human history, so too is the physics

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of mathematics the basis of the history of mathematics. Physics, in the broadest sense, is the original, actual history. That which is usually called history is only derived history. God himself is only understandable through representation. PHILOSOPHY. Originally knowing and doing are intertwined—then they separate, and ultimately they are to be united again, cooperating, harmonious, but not intertwined. One wants simultaneously to know and to do in a reciprocal fashion—knowing, how and what one does, doing, how and what one knows. [. . .] 50. [...] PSYCHOLOGY. Love is the ultimate purpose of world history— the unum (unifying principle) of the universe. 51. ENCYCLOPEDISTICS. Transcendental Poetics is concerned with the mind before it becomes mind. In chemical and mechanical psychology, a constant destruction of apparent individualities dominates. In transcendental poetics, there is only one general, raw individual. In practical poetics, one speaks only of educated [gebildet] individuals— or of one infinitely educated individual. 59. ENCYCLOPEDISTICS. If human psychology, rather like the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, were to regard the human being merely as a whole, as a system (and merely looking down from above), and psychology were to concern itself merely with wholes. Then psychology and physiology would seem to me to be wholly one— and the soul nothing other than the principle of the system, substance— and their dwelling place would be heaven. Physiology in the broadest sense would be world psychology—and nature and soul would also be one—since what is meant by nature is, after all, only the spirit of the whole, substantive principle. Go. COSMOLOGY. According to this, God and nature must be separated—God has nothing at all to do with nature—He is the goal of nature—that with which it should some day harmonize. Nature must become moral, and thus, the Kantian moral God and morality will indeed appear in a completely different light. The moral God is something far greater than the magical God. 61. THEOSOPHY. We must seek to become magicians in order to be properly moral. The more moral, the more harmonious with God— the more divine—the more allied with God. God becomes perceptible to us only through our Moral Sense—the moral sense is the sense for existence, without external stimulation—the sense for union—the sense

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for the highest—the sense for harmony—the sense for freely chosen, invented, and yet communal life—and Being—the sense for the thingin-itself—the genuine sense of divination. To divine, to perceive something without cause or touch. The word "sense"—which suggests mediated cognition, touch, mixture—is, to be sure, not quite appropriate here—more appropriate is an infinite expression—just as there are infinite quantities. The actual can only be expressed approximando, provisionally. The actual is non-sense, or sense, in contrast to which the expression is non-sense. Now do I want to set God or the world soul in heaven? It would probably be better if I declared heaven to be the moral universe—and left the world soul in the universe. 69. MATHEMATICS. In the end, all of mathematics is not a particular science at all—but merely a general scientific tool—a beautiful tool is a contradiction in terms. It is perhaps nothing more than the faculty [Seelenkraft] of the understanding that is made exoteric, turned into an external object and organ—a realized and objectified understanding. Is this perhaps the case with several or possibly all faculties—that through our efforts they should become external tools? Everything within us should become external and visible—our soul should become representable—The system of sciences should become the symbolic body (system of organs) of our interior—Our mind should become a sensually perceptible machine—not in us, but outside of us. The same task in reverse with the external world. 73.

FORMATIVE THEORY [BILDUNGSLEHRE] OF NATURE.65 Nature

must become moral. We are its educators—its moral tangents—its moral stimuli. If morality, like understanding, and so on, can be objectified and organized—visible morality. 76. [. . .] PHILOSOPHY. The beginning of the I is merely an ideal—If it had begun, it would have to have begun thus. The beginning is a concept that comes later. The beginning originates later than the I; therefore, the I cannot have begun. From this we can see that we are in the realm of art—but this artificial supposition is the foundation of a genuine science, which always arises out of artificial facts. The I must be constructed. The philosopher prepares, creates artificial elements, and in this way goes about the construction. This is not the natural history of the I—I is not a product of nature—not nature—not an historical being—but rather an artistic one—an art—a work of art. The nat-


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ural history of human beings is the other half. The theory of the I and human history, or nature and art, are united in a higher science—(the moral formative theory [moralische Bildungslehre])—and completed in a reciprocal fashion. Through morality, nature and art are armed against each other into infinity. 78. THEORY OF THE FUTURE. (cosMOGOGY.) Nature will be moral— when, out of genuine love of art—it devotes itself to art—does what art wants—art will be moral when, out of genuine love of nature—it lives for nature, and works in accordance with nature. Both must do this simultaneously of their own choosing—for their own sake—and of the other's choosing, for the other's sake. Within themselves, they must meet the other, and within the other, themselves. When our intelligence and our world harmonize—then we are equal to God. 79. THEORY OF HUMAN BEINGS. A child is a love that has become visible. We ourselves are a kernel that has become visible of the love between nature and spirit or art. THEOSOPHY. God is love. Love is the highest reality [das hochste Reale]—the originary principle [Urgrund]. ENCYCLOPEDISTICS. The theory of love is the highest science—natural science—or the nature of science. Philielogia66 (or philology).

PHYSICS AND THEORY OF THE FUTURE. A single act of generation is the kernel of the infinite generation that will conclude the world drama. Genuine generation is our human becoming. Ordinary acts of generation are merely conditioning processes for genuine generation. [. . .] THEORY or THE FUTURE. This legal condition must become a moral one—and then all barriers, all determinations will disappear on their own—and everyone will be, and have, everything without detriment to others. Mathematics refers only to law—legal nature and art—not magical nature and art. Both become magical only through moralization. Love is the foundation for the possibility of magic. Love works magically. All being should be transformed into a having. Being is one-sided— having is synthetic, liberal. So. ROMANTICISM. All novels in which true love appears are fairy tales—magical occurrences. 137. MAGIC, (mystical theory of language)

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Mutual attraction of the sign and the signified. (One of the basic ideas of cabalistics.) Magic is completely different from philosophy, etc., and constitutes a world—a science—an art in itself. Magical astronomy, grammar, philosophy, religion, chemistry, etc. Theory of the reciprocal representation of the universe. Theory of emanation, (personified emanations.) [...] 138. At the bottom of everything, it seems to me, there is a grammatical mysticism—which was very easily able to arouse the initial amazement at language and writing. (Savage peoples still regard writing as magic.) Inclination toward the wondrous and the mysterious is nothing other than a striving—for nonsensual—spiritual stimulation. Mysteries are nourishment—inciting potencies. Explanations are digested mysteries. 153. PHILOLOGY. Allusions are indirect quotes. PHILOLOGY. An opinion is greatly strengthened as soon as I know that someone is convinced of it—truly accepts it—to be sure, this must be done in such a way that its cause does not immediately catch the eye— the weight of authorities—an authority makes an opinion mystical—enchanting. The rhetorical force of assertion. Secrets are accoutrements, condensators of the divinatory—the cognitive faculty. 234. ROMANTICISM, ETC. Fairy tales. Nessir and Zulima. The romanticization of Aline. Novellas. Thousand-and-One Nights. Ginnistan. The Beauty and the Beast. Musaeus's folk fairy tales.07 The romantic spirit of the modern novels. Meister. Werther. Greek folk fairy tales. Indian fairy tales. New, original fairy tales. In a genuine fairy tale, everything must be marvelous [wunderbar]6S—mysterious and unconnected—everything animated. Each in a different way. All of nature must be intertwined with the world of spirits in a peculiar [wunderlich] way.™ The age of universal anarchy—lawlessness—freedom—the natural state of nature—the age before the world (the state). This age before the world provides, as it were, the scattered characteristics of the age after the world—-just as the state of nature is an odd image of the eternal kingdom. The world of the fairy tale is the complete opposite of the world of truth (history)—and precisely for that reason so completely similar to it—-just as chaos is similar to the completed creation. (On the idyll) In the future world everything is as it was in the former world—and yet everything is completely different. The future world is Reasonable Chaos—


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chaos that has permeated itself—that is inside and outside of itself— chaos2 or °°. The genuine fairy tale must simultaneously be Prophetic Representation, ideal representation, absolutely necessary representation. The genuine creator of fairy tales is a seer of the future. Confessions of a true, synthetic child—an ideal child. (A child is far cleverer and wiser than an adult—this child must be a thoroughly ironic child.) A child's games—imitation of adults. (In time, history must become a fairy tale—it will be again as it was when it began.) 314. ENCYCLOPEDISTICS. Every science has its God that is at once its goal. Thus mechanics lives through perpetual motion; at the same time, the attempt to construct perpetual motion is its highest task. So it is too with chemistry and the menstruum universal [universal solvent]70— and spiritual matter, or the philosophers' stone.71 Philosophy seeks a first and single principle. The mathematician—the squaring of the circle and a fundamental equation. A human being—God. The medical man—an elixir of life, a potion of eternal youth, and a body that feels perfect and functions perfectly. The politician—a perfect state— Perpetual Peace—Free State. (Every expectation that meets with disappointment and is renewed again and again points to a chapter in the theory of the future. See my first Pollen fragment.)72 Concerning the obstacles to the solution of each of these problems. (Principle of approximation. The absolute I belongs here as well.) The only reason why these problems are not solved lies in the incomplete nature of their objects, the imperfect relations between their chosen elements of construction themselves (elements are accidents). The tasks are theoretically true and are identical (pleonastic) statements, such as perpetual motion, eternal life—the measured circle. Philosophy of these tasks. 347. PSYCHOLOGY. Everything new acts like something external, foreign, poetic. Everything old acts like something internal, belonging to one's self, romantic as well—Both in contrast to the ordinary—or to each other. The newness of the old—the oldness of the new. Common life is prosaic—speech—not song. The quantity of the ordinary merely intensifies its ordinariness—hence the fatal impression of the world from the common (indifferent), useful, prosaic point of view.73 394. STATE ECONOMY. [. . .] The greater the taxes and the greater

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the needs of the state, the more perfect the state. There should be no tax that is not a profit for the individual. How much more a person who lived outside of the state would have to spend in order to obtain security, justice, good roads, and so on. Only a person who doesn't dwell within the state, in the sense that a man dwells within his beloved, complains about taxes. Taxes are the greatest benefit. One can regard taxes as the salary of the state, that is, of a very powerful, very just, very clever, and very entertaining person. Politics. The need of a state is the most pressing need of any human being. In order to become and remain human, one needs a state. The state has natural rights and responsibilities, as does every individual human being. A human being without a state is a savage. All of culture issues from the relations a human being has with the state. The more educated [gebildet] one is, the more one is a member of an educated state. There are savage states—there are civilized states—moral and immoral—ingenious and philistine states. Upbringing and education [Bildung] of the state. States raise themselves, or they are raised by other states. [. . .] 395. MEDICAL POLICE. Culinary art belongs within the purview of the police. Concerning the diet of the different classes. The medical police of poesy have control over popular revels. 398. POLITICS. The theory of the mediator may be applied to politics. Here, too, the monarch—or the government officials—are state representatives—state mediators. What is valid there is valid here. Here the physiological statement is reversed. The cleverer and livelier its members are, the livelier and more personal the state is. The genius of the state shines forth from every genuine citizen—just as in a religious community a personal God, so to speak, reveals itself in a thousand forms. The state and God, like every spiritual being, do not appear individually, but in a thousand, manifold forms—only pantheistically does God appear complete—and only in pantheism is God complete everywhere, in every individual. For the absolute I, therefore, the ordinary I and the ordinary You are supplements. Every You is a supplement to the absolute I. We are not at all I—we can and should, however, become I. We are kernels of the I. We should transform everything into a You—into a second I. It is only in this way that we elevate ourselves to the absolute I—which is simultaneously One and everything. 401. PHILOSOPHICAL TELEOLOGY. Philosophy cannot bake bread—


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but it can provide us with God, freedom, and immortality. Which is more practical now—philosophy or economy? (Providing is doing— doing expresses nothing else.) 412. PHILOSOPHY. The genuine principle of true philosophy must be one that makes us healthy—free, cheerful, and young—powerful, intelligent, and good. 413. PHILOSOPHY. Every general, indefinite statement [Satz] is somehow musical. It arouses philosophical fantasies—without expressing any definite philosophical train of thought, any individual philosophical idea. 601. PHILOSOPHY. It is dogmatic if I say—there is no God, there is no Non-I—there is no thing-in-itself. Critically, 1 can only say—for me there is now no such entity—other than a. fictitious one. All illusion is as essential to the truth as the body is to the soul. Error is the necessary instrument of truth. With error I make truth. Complete use of error—complete possession of truth. All synthesis—all progression—or transition begins with illusion. I see outside of me that which is in me—I believe that what I am doing has happened, and so on. Error of time and space. Belief is the operation of illuding—the basis of illusion—all knowledge, at a distance, is belief—any concept that is outside of me is a thing. All knowledge ends and begins with belief. Forward and backward expansion of knowledge is deferment—expansion of the realm of belief. The I believes it sees a foreign entity—a different, intermediate entity arises through the approximation of the latter—the product—which belongs to the I, and which at the same time does not appear to belong to the I. The intermediate results of the process are of primary importance—that thing which has, through chance, come into being or been made—is (an effect) contrary to the intended one. 688. Poesy is immediately related to language. "Aesthetics" is not as incorrect an expression as the gentlemen think—"Theory of beauty" is the best way of expressing it, it seems to me. Poesy is one part of philosophical technique. The attribute [Prddikaf] "philosophical"—always expresses internal motivation [Selbstbezweckung]—namely, indirect internal motivation. Direct internal motivation is thus a monstrosity—from it there arises a destroying, and thus destructive, potency—which must be destroyed—crude egoism. In general, one can include all levels of rhetoric [ Worttechnik] in the expression "poesy." Accuracy, clarity, purity, completeness, order are

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attributes or characteristics of the lower genres of poesy. Beauty is the ideal, the goal—the possibility—the purpose of poesy altogether.—If real poesy (speech)—is treated according to the necessary schema of poesy (speech)—of necessary poesy—then ideal poesy (speech) results, beautiful poesy (speech). Harmony—euphony, etc., beauty includes all of these altogether. Beautiful soul. 717. Philology and philosophy are one. Every beginning is an act of freedom—a choice—the construction of an absolute beginning. Fichte's I—is a Robinson—a scientific fiction—to facilitate the presentation and development of the Theory of Scientific Knowledge—like the beginning of history, etc. Depiction of the philosophical state of nature—of an isolated principle—or concept. Every concept is an I. The I is a universal thought molecule. Treatment of each concept—according to the Fichtean formula of the I. (Individual attempts at thought with regard to the Fichtean Theory of Scientific Knowledge.)

The more immeasurable and manifold the horizon (the sphere) of consciousness becomes, the more individual greatness disappears and the spiritual, reasonable greatness of humankind grows more perceptibly, becomes more evident. The greater and higher the whole, the more noteworthy the particular becomes. The ability to set bounds grows with boundlessness. The Goethean philosopher or thinker. With the thinker's education [Bildung] and proficiency, (freedom and love are one) his freedom grows. (Degrees of freedom.) The variety of methods increases—in the end the thinker knows how to make everything out of each thing—the philosopher becomes poet. Poet is simply the highest degree of the thinker, or senser, etc. (Degrees of a poet.) The separation of poet and thinker is only a semblance—and to the disadvantage of both. It is sign of a sickness—and of a sick constitution. (Appearance is associated with reality, nonappearance with negation—or ideality, the synthesis of appearance and nonappearance with limitation, as correlates.)

724. Producing ideas and assimilating ideas excessively both enfeeble. (Destiny of the scholarly organism.)


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Reading and working. Critically reading and

working. (Reading and working simultaneously.) Philologizing is the truly scholarly occupation. It corresponds to experimenting. (Sometime I must perform a complete experiment.) Out of laziness, man demands mere mechanisms or mere magic. He doesn't want to be active—to use his productive imagination. [. . .] 730. [. . .] About the Fichtean problem—how things are connected to mental images [Vorslellungen]. The connection between the marvelous and natural worlds. Marvels should occur according to rules— natural effects without rules—the marvelous world and the natural world should become one. (Rule and nonrule.) Nonrule is the rule of fantasy—the rule of arbitrariness—the rule of chance—of marvels. Rule—direct law—Indirect, (twisted) law = nonrule. The rule of productive imagination—synthesis of direct and indirect law. [. . .] 733. [...] There is no true difference between theory and praxis. [...] 765. [. . .] Should the fundamental laws of fantasy be the opposite (not the reverse) of logic? Inconsistency of fantasy. Magism. Unification of both fantasy and power of thought. 769. f- - •] Appetitus sensitivus and rationalis—the appetitus rationalis is a synthetic desire. Limitation within synthetic desire—boundary—circumscription. (I desire everything at once.) Elective freedom is poetic— therefore, morality is fundamentally poesy. The ideal of wanting everything. Magical will. Should every free choicebe absolutely poetic—moral? In opposition to this: statement of contradiction—and of adequate grounds for the will. Desiring and not desiring simultaneously = thinking and not thinking simultaneously. Evil and good are absolute, poetic concepts. Evil is a necessary illusion, in order to strengthen and develop good—just as error is necessary for truth. Thus also pain— ugliness—disharmony. These illusions can only be explained by the magic of the imagination. A dream educates us, as in that remarkable fair)' tale. Scientific treatment of fairy tales—they are exceedingly instructive and full of ideas. 775. Truly abstract or universal concepts are differences in the sense of differential calculus—mere copulas. The creative imagination is divided into reason, judgment, and the

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power of the senses. Each mental image [Vorstellung] (expression of the productive imagination) is composed of all three—to be sure, in different proportions, types, and sizes. And if there are certain intellectual limits or imperfections because of religion—such as helplessness because of love. We have ordained ourselves to be human beings, in order to be joined together infinitely, even with the most distant peoples,74 and have elected a God like a monarch. (Poetic world form.) Deduction of spirits from the essence of reason—our relationship with them. We have no limit to intellectual progress, etc., but we should set some transitory limits in each act for ourselves. To be limited and unlimited at once—able, but not wanting, to perform miracles—able, but not wanting, to know everything. Together with the proper education [Bildung] of our will, the education of our ability and knowledge proceeds. At that moment when we have become completely moral, we will be able to perform miracles—that is, when we do not want to perform any miracles, or at the most moral ones (see Christ). The greatest of marvels is a virtuous deed—an act of free determination. In his statement—the I cannot delimit itself—is Fichte to be understood as being inconsistent and yielding to the statement of the adequate grounds? The possibility of self-delimitation is the possibility of all synthesis—of all miracles—and a miracle started the world. (Are synthetic judgments a priori possible? = Is there a magical intelligence, that is, Reason?) 782. [...] Does mysticism kill reason? Kant equates dogmatism with mysticism. Dogmatism sublates relationships, etc. Activity or inactivity. The theory of religion is scientific poesy. Poesy is to sensations what philosophy is to thoughts. (Self-thought—self-sensation.) Religion is the synthesis of feeling and thought or knowledge. The theory of religion is thus a synthesis of poetics and philosophies. This is where genuine dogmata emerge, genuine statements of experience: that is, out of statements of reason (direct)—philosophemes; and out of statements of belief (indirect)—poems, truly compound statements, not mutually limiting, but rather mutually strengthened and expanded statements.


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(Reason is a direct poet—direct productive imagination; belief is an indirect poet, indirect productive imagination.) What reason is for philosophers, belief is, in its stricter sense, for poets. Free use of belief. State religion. There is much to be said against Kant's Conflict of the Faculties.75 (Relation of the will to the productive imagination.) The whole state comes down to representation. All of representation is based on a making-present—of the nonpresent and so on— (marvelous power of fiction). My "Faith and Love" is based on representational faith [belief],76 Thus the assumption—Perpetual Peace is already here—God is among us—America is here or nowhere—the Golden Age is on us—we are magicians—we are moral, and so on. 820. [. . .] We view ourselves within the system, as members—consequently, in an ascending and descending line, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large—human beings of infinite variations. We naturally understand everything that is foreign only by making our self foreign—changing our self-—observing our self. Now we see the true bonds that link the subject and the object. We see that there is also an external world inside of us that is connected to our internal side [Innern]—which is analogous to the connection of the external world outside of us to our external side [Aujlern]; and we see that the former and the latter are connected just as our internal and external sides are. Thus, it is only through thoughts that we can perceive the internal and the soul of nature, just as we perceive the external and the body of nature through sensations. So-called transcendental philosophy—the move toward the subject—idealism and the categories—the connection between object and mental image [ Vorstettung]: all of these now appear in a completely new light. Demonstration of why something belongs to external and internal nature. Demonstrability of every existence and its modification. Nature is the ideal. The true ideal is at once possible, actual, and necessary. The principle of the / is, as it were, the genuine and communal principle, the liberal and universal principle—it is a unity that is without boundary or determination. On the contrary, it makes all determina-

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tions possible and fixed—and gives them absolute coherence and meaning. Selfhood, as the ground of constancy in change, is the ground of all cognition—also the principle of greatest multiplicity— (You). (Instead of Non-I—You.) Commonality and particularity. Everything can be I and is I or should be I. 826. A pure thought—a pure image—a pure feeling are thoughts, images, and feelings—that have not been awakened by a corresponding object, etc., but have originated outside of the so-called mechanical laws—the sphere of mechanism. Fantasy is just such an extramechanical faculty. (Magism or synthesism of fantasy. Philosophy appears whole here, as magical idealism.) 832. Passion and character are mixtures of thoughts and affects (sensations) with productive will—creative will. Naturally, consciousness or productive reason comes into play here. Self-consciousness is action whereby reason, ratio, comes into play. Self-consciousness in the broader sense is a task—an ideal—it would be that state in which time stood still, a timeless—constant, neverchanging state. (A state without past or future, and yet changeable.) In a state of true self-consciousness we would simply be changing, without going forward. In this state, all conditions and changes in our empirical self occur simultaneously—At the same time, we are as good both as we were two years ago and as we are in this instant—we are not /indirectly, by means of conclusions—but rather directly. (It is largely through the calculations of instinct that we are I.) All of our memories and occurrences link together to form a mystical unity that we call I. Inasmuch as we look around us in the world, we find a multitude of sensations of all kinds marvelously [wunderbar] chosen, mixed, ordered, and coherent. We feel ourselves to be miraculously [wundersam] attracted by this phenomenon—the phenomenon appears to pull us in—the world has disappeared—we see nothing but the phenomenon in the place of the world—and now the concept of the empirical I comes into being. 906. Mere analysis—mere experimentation and observation—leads to unfathomable spaces and directly into infinity. If it is poetic in nature and intention, so be it—otherwise one must either have or posit absolutely one end—rightfully called "finis," so that one doesn't lose oneself in this speculation as in a labyrinth—entirely like a madman.


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This is the seat of infamous speculation—of notorious, false mysticism—of the belief in the ability to fathom the things-in-themselves. Criticism shows precisely the necessity of delimiting—determining, arresting—points toward a specific end, and transforms speculation into a useful and even poetic instrument. This endless continuation of an activity is the character of souls or spiritual inertia. [. . .] 924. Plotinus was already a critical idealist and realist in terms of most results. Fichte's and Kant's method has not yet been presented thoroughly and precisely enough. Neither of them knows yet how to experiment with lightness and multiplicity—not at all poetically. Everything is still so stiff, so fearful. The free method of generation of the truth can still be greatly expanded and simplified—improved overall. There is now this genuine art of experimentation—the science of active empiricism. (Tradition has turned into theory [Lehre].) (All theory relates to art—practice.) We must be able to make truth present [vergegenwdrtigen] everywhere—to represent it (in the active, productive sense) everywhere. 934. Conscience itself is already proof of our relationship—link— (the possibility of crossing over) to another world—an inner, independent power and a condition apart from common individuality. Reason is nothing other than this. The etat de raison is ecstatic. (Through the connection to the father one can work wonders.) The possibility of active empiricism rests on this proof. We will only become physicists when we make imaginative matter and power into the regulative measure of natural matter and power. 940. The fairy tale is the canon of poesy, as it were—everything poetic must be like a fair}' tale. The poet worships chance. 943- The ordinary theory of nature is necessarily phenomenology—grammar—symbolistics. We see nature as perhaps we see the world of spirits, en perspective. The sensible imagination is accorded the business of signifying in general—of signalizing—phenomenologizing. Linguistic signs are not specifically differentiated from other phenomena. 945. Every part of my book, which may be written in extremely different ways—in fragments—letters—poems—scientifically rigorous essays, etc.—dedicated to one or some of my friends. 953. The poet uses things and words like a keyboard and all of poesy is based on the active association of ideas—on self-activating, in-

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tentional, ideal production of chance—(chance—or free catenation). [...] 959. Dreams are often meaningful and prophetic, because they are a natural effect of the soul—and thus are based on the rules of association—They are meaningful, like poesy—but therefore also inconsistently meaningful—completely free. 986. A fairy tale is actually like a dream image—without coherence— An ensemble of marvelous [ wunderbar] things and occurrences—for example, a musical fantasy—the Harmonic Sequences of an aeolian harp—nature itself. The introduction of a story into a fairy tale is already a foreign intrusion—A series of polite, entertaining experiments—a lively conversation—a redoute77—all these are fairy tales. A higher form of fairy tale comes into being when some kind of understanding—(coherence, meaning—etc.) is introduced without banishing the spirit of the fairy tale. A fairy tale could perhaps even become useful. The tone of a simple fairy tale is filled with variety—but it can also be simple. Components of fairy tales. 988. If we also had a fantastic, as we have a logic, then the art of invention would be—invented. Aesthetics also belongs to the fantastic, to some extent, as the theory of reason belongs to logic. 990. The concept of causality refers to a real fulfillment of time—in that a specific object is thought of in a moment prior to the present, and this prior object is to an object of the present moment as the prior moment is to the present moment. In the concept of purpose, a causative, following moment (object) is added by thought to the present (object or) moment. The means are contained in the present moment—substance is also contained in the present moment—it is a personified—a figured present. 993. On the Phenomenon of Reflection—Reflective power jumping onto its own shoulders. [. . .] (Compression of time—concentration of thoughts.)

4. Friedrich Schlegel: Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy (i8oo) 78 We philosophize—this is a fact. Thus we begin; we begin with something. Namely, a striving toward a knowledge of an entirely singular kind, a

F. Schlegel: Transcendental Philosophy

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knowledge that should concern itself with the whole person. Thus it should not concern itself solely with human activity—because activity is, so to speak, only one pole of mankind—but also with human knowledge. This will necessarily be a knowledge of knowledge. This could be, as it were, a definition of philosophy. But when we begin to philosophize, it cannot serve as the guiding principle. Because if I wanted to proceed from the statement, Philosophy is a knowledge of knowledge, a knowledge would always be presupposed. Philosophy is an experiment, and thus anyone who wants to philosophize must always start again from the beginning. (Philosophy is not like other sciences, where one takes what others have already achieved and builds on it. Philosophy is already a self-sufficient whole, and anyone who wants to philosophize must simply begin anew.) And so we, too, will simply begin. Philosophy should be a knowledge, namely, an absolute knowledge; we must therefore strive to make every step we take be a necessary one, containing nothing hypothetical. The method we employ will be therefore the method of physics or mathematics. For our investigations will be an experimenting, as in physics, or a constructing, as in mathematics. The method of these sciences is thoroughly independent; thus, we will also employ it here. Logic, as an organon of truth, gives us the statements of noncontradiction and those of adequate grounds. To be sure, we gain nothing from these statements with regard to the materiality of truth. But we must nevertheless use them as we proceed, as the expression of what we find through philosophizing. But for us the source of truth lies much higher than in these statements, to the extent that skepticism takes them into consideration. We do not find these statements sufficient, even with respect inform; we must seek something higher. Of course, Fichte uses these statements in his philosophy as well, but in such a way that they are in fact no longer these statements. Logic also offers a definition of truth, namely, that truth is the correspondence of the, perception with the object.™ This says nothing more, and indeed shouldn't say anything more, than what a sign says of that which is to be signified. PROBLEM i, determining the character of philosophy. (Character is something other than a definition. Definitio specifies the genus, and the differentiam specificam. But in philosophy we neither

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want nor are we able to do this since the differentia specifica would be infinite.) If we set ourselves the task of determining the character of philosophy, this does not mean determining it exactly, for this would be defining; rather, only inasmuch as it is possible for our purpose. Aphorisms to Problem i. First Aphorism: Philosophy begins with skepticism. This is a thoroughly negative condition. If we employ the method of mathematics and want to construct philosophy, then here we already have one factor, namely, the negative one. The other factor, the positive one, will be enthusiasm. It is characteristic of philosophical skepticism that it concerns itself with the whole person. And enthusiasm must have a determined direction toward knowledge. Second Aphorism: The tendency of philosophy is toward the absolute. Not toward a relative absolute, but toward an absolute absolute. We also divide the absolute itself into two factors according to the mathematical method. We find the negative factor if we take the opposite of the unconditioned [unbedingt], and that is the conditioned [bedingt]. This is connected, so to speak, in an infinite chain whose original or first link, and indeed each link, is simply something individual. The originary [das Ursprungliche] is also called the primitive, and its opposite is totality. A knowledge of the originary or the primitive gives us principles. And a knowledge of totality gives us ideas. A principle is therefore a knowledge of the originary. An idea is a knowledge of the whole. We say principles instead of foundational statements because it is possible that principles are not statements but rather facts. In this way, for example, the principle of Fichtean philosophy "/ am I" is not a statement, but rather a fact. Thus, in physics the principle of life would be a fact if (we are only assuming this) all life arose out of the reciprocal effects of oxygen and hydrogen. We therefore say idea instead of concept, because what it is supposed to signify cannot be grasped in a concept in its usual meaning, and is inconceivable, namely, in the intent of the expression. For example, Non-I is equal to I. Third Aphorism: The matter of philosophy is principles and ideas. We have accordingly found the matter of philosophy. The question now arises: What is the form of philosophy ? Philosophy should pertain to the whole person and should be a knowledge of the whole person. Whoever acts according to a knowledge acts according to a purpose or


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rule pp.m In this way he differentiates himself from those who do not act according to a knowledge. That he acts according to a purpose, according to a rule he must express; and the expression is consistency. Consistency presupposes harmony, and together, both are unity." Therefore, Fourth Aphorism: The form of philosophy is absolute unity. We are not thinking here of the unity of a system, because this unity is not absolute. As soon as something is a system, it is not absolute. Absolute unity would, for instance, be a chaos of systems.81 PROBLEM 2. To seek the commonly shared midpoint of all principles and ideas. The commonly shared midpoint that we are seeking will have to be something that is the principle of all ideas, and the idea of all principles. Now, in order to find this, we have to abstract from everything that is not absolute. We do this, however, not simply by thinking away what is not absolute. No; we must constitute what is opposed to that which we abstract. We must therefore simply posit the infinite. Now, if we posit the infinite, however, and thereby sublate what is opposed to it, then something always remains for us, namely, that which abstracts or posits. There remains, therefore, besides the infinite, a consciousness of the infinite. Thus consciousness is, as it were, a phenomenon of the infinite. And now we have the elements which could give us a philosophy; namely, consciousness and the infinite. These are the two poles around which all philosophy turns. Fichtean philosophy pertains to consciousness. But the philosophy of Spinoza is concerned with the infinite. The formula for Fichtean philosophy is /= I, or what we would like to say, NonT= 7.82 The latter is probably a better formulation, because there the statement is, even in its expression, the most synthetic possible. The formula for the philosophy of Spinoza would be something like this: If one takes "a" to represent what is representable, and "x" what is not representable, then "a" = "x." Through combination, two more formulas are derived, namely, NonT= x;' and a = I. The latter formula, namely, a = I, is the formula of our philosophy. " Consistency is the positive factor of unit)', harmony the negative factor. ' Non-I = x is the formula for all nonphilosophy.

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The statement is indirect and seeks to sublate the error of the finite, so that the infinite can arise by itself. Our formula, from a positive point of view, reads more or less as follows: the minimum of the I equals the maximum of nature; and the minimum of nature equals the maximum of the I. That means, the smallest sphere of consciousness equals the largest of nature, et contra. The consciousness of the infinite in the individual is the feeling of the sublime. This is present completely unrefined in the individual. And this feeling of the sublime is enthusiasm, which we had earlier as a factor of philosophy. The feeling of the sublime should therefore be raised to a science. The elements of philosophy are consciousness and the infinite. These are also the elements of all reality. Reality is the point of indifference [Indifferenzpunkt] between the two. Only for consciousness does consciousness have reality outside of consciousness. Consciousness is necessary because by positing a possible consciousness, I posit at the same time a real one. I call that necessary which is real by virtue of its possibility. One cannot possibly abstract from the infinite. For only the infinite could destroy the infinite. That means, therefore: the infinite has reality for consciousness. The infinite can only be posited. The sole object of consciousness is the infinite, and the sole predicate of the infinite is consciousness. Both elements constitute a closed sphere in whose middle reality is present. One must think of synthesis as lying between the two extremes of consciousness and the infinite. We arrive at these extremes only through abstraction, and the tendency of abstraction is synthetic. Out of this results for our philosophy: Theorem I. ALL IS IN ONE, AND ONE IS ALL.

This is the principle of all ideas, and the idea of all principles. We have come to this theorem by abstracting from everything opposed to the absolute. We thus posited the infinite as such; at the samea time, however, we also possessed a consciousness of the infinite; and it is from this that all philosophy proceeds. We must still consider this phenomenon a bit more closely. If we abstract from knowledge and will in man—and we must do this because this is the focus of our search for knowledge—we still find something more, that is, feelings and striving. We want to see whether


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we will perhaps find something here that is analogous to the consciousness of the infinite. First we will look at feelings. If we disregard the multiplicity of single feelings, those that changes in human life bring about, we are left with one feeling. This is the feeling of the sublime, and in this feeling we find an analogy to the consciousness of the infinite. Attempts have been made to explain this feeling;* but that is impossible. It is the ultimate, the originary that cannot be explained. It is what distinguishes human beings from animals. It is not present in the object, no matter what the object may be.83 The feeling is singular, it is the originary of mankind. It does not depend on culture. It is encountered in its fullest energy in even the most savage, unrefined people. It arises when all single, indeed small, feelings are suddenly checked. This is also the case with strivings. Among the many individual strivings that make human life manifold and varied, there is one that emerges predominant, the striving toward the ideal This striving, however, does not proceed from nature, but from culture alone. We wanted to search for the highest, that which is found if we abstract from knowledge and will, that which is analogous to a consciousness of the infinite. We found the feeling of the sublime and the striving toward the ideal. We must now climb even higher and see what sort of common end results from these two, as that which is mediated between the two. This is a yearning [Sehnen], a longing [Sehnsuchl] for the infinite. There is nothing higher in man. The feeling of the sublime is sudden. It arises all at once and vanishes in the same fashion. Not so the longing for the infinite. It is calm and eternal Longing differentiates itself from the ideal through its undetermined quality. It is simply not bound to any one ideal; it does not remain with any one ideal. The striving toward an ideal is entirely individual An idea, that is, a whole pertaining to the individual, results in an ideal. If one strives toward an ideal, and if this striving is bound up with a longing for the infinite, then one will have sense [Sinn], that is, love for everything ideal. However, if in someone the longing for the infinite is bound upa with the feeling of the. sublime, that person will always want to have this feeling, and one should call this condition cultural formation [Bildung]. " The feeling of the sublime has no need of explanation. But all other feelings must be explained.

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(What one usually understands by cultural formation is culture or refinement. Cultural formation should really only be used for the condition just described.) A few of Plato's writings, primarily the Phaedo, are useful in giving rise to the longing for the infinite. There are some more recent pieces as well, for example, the Addresses on Religion,* whose author* remains anonymous. The longing for the infinite must always be a longing. It cannot appear in the form of intuition [Anschauung]. The ideal never lets itself be intuited/viewed. The ideal is engendered through speculation. We return to the theorem itself. It is: All is in one, and one is all. This is a theorem because it is the core of all theory. It is the expression of all of the results that we found through experimenting by solving the second problem. Results of this theorem Four axioms follow from this theorem. First Axiom: Principles are the transition from error to truth.* All reality is the product of opposing elements. (One may now safely claim that no matter how far natural science may be able to advance, it will never find a higher point to attach itself to than dualism. This is the purest, highest form of illusion, and thus the principle of poesy.81 Duality is the characteristic of all principles as far as matter is concerned; now since the two Mr-elements themselves consist of two elements, the form of the principles will be quadruplicity. Second Axiom: Reality is only in ideas. Identity is the character of ideas, which are therefore only expression, symbol. Their form will be triplicity. (One can remark in passing: the method must begin with reduction. Thus a system cannot begin with the spirit, but rather only with the letter.) Third Axiom: All knowledge is symbolic. This axiom follows immediately from the second. Ideas can only be expressed symbolically. Fourth Axiom: All truth is relative. * Also an essay by Baader. f Schleiermacher. ! The principles derive from the phenomena, from the finite, the determined.

R Schiegel: Transcendental Philosophy

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Because, according to the well-known maxim, all truth lies only in the middle. And this is the case because all reality lies in the middle. Truth is a product of the conflict of deception. It arises out of the struggle of homogeneous errors. Objections But, one could easily argue, is, then, the infinite itself not a fiction? Is it not an error, an illusion, or a misunderstanding;' To this we answer as follows: Yes, it is a. fiction. But an absolutely necessary one. Oiir I has the tendency to approach the infinite, and it is only because of the fact that the I, so to speak, flows toward the infinite, in order to approach it, that we are able to think the infinite. But error resolves itself since we proceed from ourselves as midpoint,* and also return there. How can one err in this? Neither can it be a deception; because the infinite is but one; therefore, one cannot mistake it. A lot of room is left for misunderstanding. But misunderstanding presupposes truth. Nor is belief the final ground of knowledge. Belief can only occur where we are unable to know, where the reality of that which we think cannot enter consciousness. The following statements follow from the posited axioms: Philosophy is infinite, intensively as well as extensively. The classification of philosophy is arbitrary. Thus the philosophy of Fichte is divided into four parts: 1. the Theory of Scientific Knowledge in opposition to 2. Moral Philosophy; 3. Philosophy of Religion, and 4. Natural law, as the postulate of practical reason. The general schema of Fichtean philosophy would accordingly be a Q. Spinoza's philosophy contains only unity. He begins with the infinite (God), and he ends with it again. The general schema of his philosophy would be a QTo be sure, unity is also found in ancient Greek philosophy. But this * The midpoint of our beingis not individuality, but is in the most comprehensive sphere of reason.

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philosophy is never closed; one is, rather, always directed toward the infinite. All of these classifications will be found in our schema. From the statements, philosophy is infinite and its divisions are arbitrary, it follows that the most perfected system can only be an approximation, not of the ideal of philosophy as such, but rather of each ideal itself. (This reminds us of the spirit and the letter of a system.) Each system begins with reduction and analysis. Reduction is the resolution of a complex of phenomena into a single phenomenon. If philosophy is infinite, then knowledge too is infinite; and accordingly there is only owe knowledge, philosophical knowledge.* All knowledge is philosophical. It is an indivisible whole. It also follows from these axioms that skepticism is also eternal, like philosophy. But not skepticism as a system, but rather insofar as it belongs to philosophy. The idea of philosophy can only be attained through an infinite progression of systems. Its form is that of a circular course. If one wants to know how a circle could be described by means of two opposing elements, the matter could be thought of approximately as follows. The center of the circle is the positive factor, the radius the negative, and the point on the periphery the point of indifference [Indifferenzpunkt]. Now the positive factor in the point of indifference strives to join itself with the positive factor in the center; but, because of the negative factor, it cannot approach the center but is merely driven around it. Now enthusiasm is the center. Skepticism, the radius. Enthusiasm must be absolute, that is, one must not be able to diminish or eradicate it. The radius can grow into infinity. So can the degree of consciousness, skepticism; the more it grows, the larger becomes the periphery, or philosophy. One might say about philosophy what an Italian poet said of God: philosophy is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere. What is true of philosophy as a whole is true of each of its parts. Philosophy has to do with the consciousness of the infinite; if it considers this unconsciously, then it descends into the deepest depths; but if it considers it with consciousness, then it climbs to the highest heights that the human spirit can reach. The tendency of philosophy is toward the absolute. What results from this are the following two philosophical articles: * Philosophy is concerned with the soul, the center of all knowledge.

F. Schlegcl: Transcendental Philosophy

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1. The longing for the infinite should be developed in all people. 2. The semblance [Schein] of the finite should be overthrown; and in order to do this, all knowledge should be brought into a revolutionary condition. Consciousness is a history. The return of the determined into the undetermined contains or comprises the different epochs. [Epochs of Error] Epoch i Consciousness at its simplest or lowest degree [Dignitdt], Sensibility If one wants to divide the phenomenon of sensibility into its factors (elements), then the positive factor (or element) is desire [Begierde], the negative element is anger, and the point of indifference isfear. Endless progressions emanate from the midpoint. The minimum is envy, the maximum astonishment [Erstaunen]. Astonishment is the root of the feeling of the sublime. It can be something very unrefined, something stupid. And all striving toward the ideal certainly emanates from envy. These passions, affects, or sensations [Empfindungen] that we find in the first epoch indeed impart error. (They only refer to the individual.) Accordingly, this epoch is an epoch of error. The error is—and this is the character of the epoch—that one completely misjudges individuals. The categories of causality, quality, quantity appear to be real [reell]. Epoch 2 Intuition This is also an epoch of error. The distinguishing characteristic of the error of this epoch is that one confuses different spheres. Epoch 3 Perception Here too there is only error. One thinks merely formally without reality. This epoch, however, is the site of the appearance of understanding. Error has already become completely theoretical.

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This epoch, the last epoch of error, coincides with the first of the epochs of truth, which will now follow. Epochs of Truth Epoch i Insight This epoch is the transition to truth. It could therefore also be called the epoch of principles. Through the amalgamation of the epoch of perception and the epoch of insight, dogmatism arises. Dogmatism seeks reality in purely formal thinking. It looks only for principles. In the epoch of insight, there is still a high degree of error, but it is already the transition to truth. Because this epoch is concerned with principles, it strives toward knowledge. The character of this epoch is delerminacy. Epoch 2 Reason. This, the second epoch of truth, is concerned with the cognition of the infinite. It is therefore the epoch of ideas. In this epoch one finds positive truth. It is therefore also the epoch of cognition. Here idealism is possible. The character of this epoch is clarity. Error is still possible in this epoch, but the error is merely misunderstanding, since one calls all being [Dasein] constant and rejects all, that is active; or one assumes only activity and rejects all that is substantial. The history of consciousness seems to be closed with this epoch, for since consciousness has reached its highest level, it is in fact closed, and in this respect this is the last epoch. But with this epoch, the whole is not yet at an end. Consciousness must return to itself again and in this way close its sphere. Thus, yet another epoch occurs. This is Epoch 3 Of Understanding" * Understanding is the highest perfection of the spiritual and intellectual faculties, that which the ancients called nous. Understanding is a universal consciousness or a conscious universe pp.


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This epoch is a return of all epochs. Here we first comprehend the whole world, the whole [das Game], which is not yet the case in the epoch of reason. It is here that we first interpret [deuten] everything. The character of this epoch is therefore interpretability [Deutlichkeit]. A fundamental characteristic of this epoch is that it is the epoch of symbols. Critique of Idealism That there is such a thing as a history of human understanding follows from the deduction of consciousness. Namely, consciousness is a return of the determined into the undetermined. The first epoch—sensibility— is the epoch that follows on animaliry. The epoch of reason is the highest epoch. But here the circle is not yet closed. It is only with the epoch of the understanding that the circle is closed; this therefore is the highest epoch. Each epoch signifies a certain degree [Dignitdf] on which consciousness stands as it returns into the undetermined. Sensibility [Empfindung\ is merely individual. Here intuition is already becoming theoretical; it is already becoming abstracted. This is even more the case with perception. On the whole, it should be noted: error in the different epochs becomes ever more theoretical, just as truth becomes ever more practical. The epoch of insight proceeds from the phenomenon and strives toward a knowledge. Now because it proceeds from the phenomenon, it assumes the categories of causality, quantity, quality to be real \_reell~\\ precisely because it proceeds from the finite. But, in the end, it recognizes that it has proceeded from something false, and thus the error is nullified. The striving toward a knowledge is a general dualism. Dualism is directed toward a knowledge, whereas realism desires truth." Dualism is only concerned with the realm of the empirical; realism, by contrast, is only concerned with theory. Its character is identity, just as the character of dualism is duplicity. In dualism there are only, two activities and no substance. In realism there is only a single, indivisible substance. Now dualism and realism are the two elements of idealism. Dualism is the negative •and realism, the positive element. Dogmatism is, properly " It is not a question here of an empirical realism. This realism is completely transcendent. It is concerned with the single, indivisible whole; the infinite. Realism appearing in isolation can only be absolute skepticism. It has no content because it is an absolute positive; its form could only be absolutely indirect or negative.

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speaking, the opposite of idealism." It emerges if the epoch of insight does not begin in the spirit of truth. Here, what is precisely the negative is taken for the sole empirical reality [Reelle\, and the true reality is not taken into consideration.85 Now dogmatism begins to search for principles. In other words, it takes the categories to be real [well]. Thus dogmatism, too, can be brought to a high level. Dogmatism, because it holds principles to be the highest, is indeed able to unite these principles and bring them under a highest and final end, but it can, with as much consistency, assume several principles as first principles. And so we see that dogmatism borders on mysticism. For mysticism believes that several principles are revealed to it as original principles. But it is easy to see that the assumption of several principles destroys all method. The elements of dogmatism are empiricism and egoism. Dualism refers to the empirical realm [Empirie]. Realism is concerned with theory. They relate to one another like spirit and letter.1 If one now links dualism and theory, a science will arise that does not proceed from phenomena, but from elements. This science is mathematics. It is, so to speak, a dualism a priori. Mathematics should proceed from elements, and out of these everything else must be produced. Here the elements of geometry would be the point (.) and the straight line (—). The elements of arithmetic would be i and o. But if one joins realism and the empirical, then the science that results from this would be that science that is the farthest removed from mathematics; it would be history [Historic]. History is an empirical realism. Because realism is transcendent here, however, this history would only have to do with the absolute empirical. It is only concerned with ontos onla.m Dualism is concerned with the elements. Realism is concerned with substance. The character of dualism is duplicity, the character of realism identity.* Idealism will always be in conflict with dogmatism because dogmatism often collides with idealism. Among dogmatists one can see Jacobi and Kant as representatives of such a system. dualism ~-^_^^ ^^- realism empiricism -^"^~~^ theory elements -^^^- substance duplicity —" ~~~~- identity


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If one again joins the elements and identity so that the two activities must be contained in one, the result is what, one calls a sphere. If one, however, joins substance and duplicity, the individual arises. Realism is concerned with substance or constancy, and dualism with the elements or flux.* If one now joins sphere to constancy, then what results is what is understood by schema. The individual joined with flux, however, results in cultural formation [Bildung] or a becoming. Schemata are products of mathematics. Cultural formation [Bildung] is the content of all history [Geschichte]. The condition for history [Historic] is an ideal; the ideal is what it refers to. The condition for mathematics is a symbol. (The four elements of mathematics are symbols.) Mathematics and history \Geschichte\ must now again be seen as two elements whose point of indifference is physics. Physics lies between mathematics and history [Geschichte]. We can demonstrate in physics the same thing that we find in mathematics and history. The characteristics of mathematics are schemata, its conditions, symbols. What it is concerned with: spheres. Its method is—constructing. History The distinctive characteristicsare:

cultural formation [Bildung].

The condition:

ideal.

What it is concerned with:

individual.

The, method:

characterizing.

If one then joins schema and individual, a phenomenon arises. But if cultural formation and sphere are joined, the epoch (or period) results. Furthermore, if one connects ideal and constructing, then we get an approximating constructing or an experimenting. And if one furthermore connects symbol and characterizing, then this is interpreting.^ All of these concepts now accord with physics. sphere —__^^___— individual flux —" ^^"~~~~ constancy We therefore have the following: schemata -^_^^— education spheres -"""" ~~~~~~ individual symbol—-__^^ .* ideal constructing-'*'^- characterizing

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It can be easily seen from this that physics is the highest among the sciences, because it is the point of indifference of mathematics and history; just as idealism lies in the point of indifference of dualism and realism, and mathematics and history are derived from dualism and realism. From this also follows what we said earlier: namely, that physics is the first among the sciences, because all science is natural science. If we wanted to use this scale of sciences we have derived with respect to art as well, we could justify it as follows: we must constitute philosophy; this occurs, however, by developing the consciousness of humankind; of course, the fine arts naturally belong to consciousness as well. But this application would be too lengthy here. We will merely remark that the visual arts correspond to dualism, but music corresponds to realism, The duplicity of the visual arts is sculpture and painting." From the preceding discussion, one can see the energy of idealism. It is above all other things, as the highest summation of truth, and extends to everything; everything is conditioned by it. We derived the sciences from the elements of idealism. It seems as if idealism and physics coincide. How do they differ? Because all reality is a result of consciousness (as pure form) and of the infinite, consciousness must be regarded as the negative or minimum of reality; the infinite, on the other hand, as the positive or maximum of reality. Consciousness is the originary reflection on the infinite, which is, however, a reflection without consciousness. The perception of the minimum as the originary root of the universe (of the maximum) is intellectual intuition. The difference between idealism and physics is now the following: The philosopher (idealism) is concerned with the minimum and the maximum, and physics with the finite parts that lie between reality and the elements in an infinite progression of proportions. We proceeded from consciousness and the infinite. We then searched for the subjective conditions that are necessary in order to arrive at a consciousness of the infinite. We had to constitute these conditions, * If one summarizes all of the epochs of error, for example, under die name of sensuality, and if one posits them synthetically with idealism (or the highest sum of truth), then one has the concept of poesy. (Fichte sets up the concept of poesy in this way.)


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and so we arrived at the history of human understanding. This resulted in a critique of idealism, where we were led to an encyclopedia of the sciences. On Method How does method distinguish itself from system? Method is the .spirit and system is the letter. System is the organization of philosophy, method its inner life force. Philosophy is a mathematics of consciousness, a history of the universe, and a physics of understanding (one could call the latter logic}. Method and system apply to the physics of understanding. System. Nothing further can be said than this: it is a scientific whole that is complete unto itself. It is based on matter [Malerie] and form. The matter of philosophy is principles and ideas, its form is unity, the negative factor of which is harmony, and the positive factor consistency. If one now joins the negative factor of matter (the ideas) and the negative factor of form (harmony), then the characteristic feature of the system does not occur; the same is true if one joins both of the positive factors, principles and consistency. However, if one links the positive factor of the one and the negative factor of the other—for example, linking consistency and idea—the result is what should be understood as symmetry. The idea encompasses the whole and consistency strives for a purpose. And harmony, joined with the principles, results in continuity. Therefore the characteristics of the system are the continuity of principles and the symmetry of ideas. One should seek the principle that expresses the relationship of the whole to the parts and of the parts to the whole in art. This is called the architectonic. For nothing other than architecture lies between the visual arts (as negative element) and music (as positive element). The system should represent a whole in philosophy. Method should bring forth this whole. For the purpose of bringing forth this whole, we also have four elements. For philosophy begins with skepticism and enthusiasm. Moreover, the tendency of philosophy aims at the absolute and reality. Thus, for us skepticism, enthusiasm, the absolute, and reality are the four elements out of which the method of philosophy will issue. For if one joins skepticism and reality, the result is nothing other than what is understood by the expression experimenting. The method of philosophy is therefore first of all an experimenting, but

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in which direction? This is resolved when we join the other two elements, enthusiasm and the absolute. What results from this cannot be expressed in a single word. It is: the direction of the method is circular; for it proceeds from the center [ Centrum] and relates itself back to the center. Moreover, we found the elements of the method to be: analysis, synthesis, abstraction. If we carry abstraction over to analysis, the result is the concept of the discursive [raisonnement]. On the other hand, if we carry analysis over to abstraction, the result is the concept intuitive. Let us nowjoin these two concepts with the middle concept (synthesis). Joining the concept of discursive with synthesis results in reflection. And when the concept intuitive is joined with synthesis, the result is speculation.' If one joins in turn reflection with speculation, the result is allegory. The matter [Materie] of all speculation is the ideal. Reflection assumes the existence of a phenomenon. Allegory is the appearance of an ideal. Reflection and speculation are the forms of all thought; thus the only result of thought is allegory.87 Moreover, if we join discursive and intuitive, we get terminology. Here the task is to render the discursive visible. (However, one should not understand by the word "terminology" what is normally understood. Here it indicates the expression of concepts that contain a contradiction; for example, intellectual intuition, the transcendental standpoint, objective arbitrariness pp.] If we take another look at abstraction, then its one characteristic is producing. The other, oppositional characteristic is demonstrating. Now let us again combine the latter with that which we had above (see the following addendum). For we put forth a definition of the infinite and a deduction of consciousness.

Analysis is the condition of reflection. Abstraction the condition of speculation.


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If we now combine producing with the processes of deducing, constructing is the middle concept [Mittelbegriff]. (This is the method ofa mathematics.) On the other hand, if we combine the processes of demonstrating and defining, the middle concept is characterizing. (This is the method of history.) The method of physics is experimenting. (It arises out of the combination of skepticism and reality.) And so we are again at the same place where we began, that is, at our goal. The characteristic of the synthetic method is that it strives toward the midpoint [Mittelpunkt]. The method of idealism is an experimenting that combines. Its direction is either centripetal or centrifugal; that is, it moves toward the center and out of the center. (Observation: It would be better if one called philosophy experimental or central philosophy rather than transcendental philosophy, because then one would take method into consideration; moreover, this expression is tautological, since all true philosophy is transcendental philosophy.)

Addendum concerning the elements of philosophy. Consciousness and the infinite* We can further divide both elements, consciousness and the infinite, into their elements. We take what is given to us, in other words the one, positive factor, and through its opposite look for the negative factor. We know nothing further about the infinite than the undetermined [das Unbestimmle]— this is therefore the positive element. Its opposite is the determined [das Bestimmte], and this is the negative element of the infinite. The formula for this could be a definition of the infinite,* namely, the infinite is a product of the undetermined and the determined. A proof for this is not necessary, but an explanation is. If the undetermined really is to come into being, then it must issue from within itself, and determine itself. (Applied, this could mean that the deity created the world for the purpose of self-representation.) The negative element or consciousness is composed, once again, of the two elements I and non-I. Here we are not able to give a definition, but will present a deduction, which is: the determined determines itself more and more, until it can determine itself in relation to the undetermined; in this way the I arises. According to this, one could therefore also express the destiny of humankind in the following manner: human beings should determine themselves into the, undetermined and in relation to the undetermined [ ins Unbestimmte und zum Unbestimmten]. The infinite is the positive element and consciousness the negative element. ' As the positive, the infinite must be defined. It cannot be deduced, since the act of deduction always presupposes something.

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Method is the negative of philosophy and system is the positive.* The conditions for system are continuity and symmetry. Method is an experimenting, and its direction is centripetal and centrifugal. Every middle part [Mittelglied] should be viewed as an infinite progression to both of these elements. Thus, a minimum and a maximum are always occurring. We were using analysis and abstraction as the two elements whose middle part is synthesis. If we find the minimum of synthesis, it is reduction (when several phenomena are brought into relation to one phenomenon). We can only reach the maximum through approximation. The maximum itself is therefore only an approximation. Between system as a positive element and method as a negative element lies the middle part, syllogism. Syllogism, as it is understood here, expresses something that is whole, something that is complete in itself, a whole of the functions of the understanding. But it is the smallest whole possible. System is also a

(The different levels of consciousness are the epochs of the return to indeterminacy.) The concept of consciousness, which is a part of deduction, is objective. It makes consciousness understandable to us even outside of it. If reality, the middle part of the two w-clements, is nowjoined to the two derived elements, the result is the following: the determined in the I and the undetermined in the non-I are what is real [reett]. In other words: freedom in nature and necessity in humans are. real [reell]. The formulas for the above are: I = non-I, and a = x. And the synthesis: a = I. (x = non-I is the formula for all nonphilosophy.)t From the synthesis follows: the freedom of nature is equal to necessity in human beings. If we ascribe to consciousness the predicate of the infinite or join consciousness to the infinite, then the result is what we call thinking. If we join reality to thinking, and then once again join it to consciousness, the result is a knowledge. This knowledge is a real [reell] thinking with consciousness. On the other hand, the infinite joined with consciousness equals the pure concept of the deity. If this is then joined with reality, there arises—nature. Thinking therefore stands opposite of deity, and knowledge stands opposite of nature. Thus the statement: one can only think the deity, but not know it; and one can know nothing but nature.^ Nature is the middle part between reality and the deity. Its infinite task is to realize the deity. ' One finds the matter of philosophy in the method. The form of philosophy, namely, unity, is found in the characteristics of the system, that is, in continuity and symmetry. f Synthesis is the best expression for the switching of the poles. Synthesis can be defined as: there is no non-I except the infinite; and there is nn determinate for the infinite besides consciousness. The formula for reflection is: 7 = non-I. The formula for speculation is, however, a = x. ! The only science is therefore the science of nature.


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whole, but it can contain an entire complex of syllogisms. (Syllogism is, as it were, a small system, and system is a large syllogism.) Since syllogism is the intermediary between system and method, it must also be possible to find its minimum and maximum. We thus find: ( i ) the minimum, if we join the tendency of philosophy and its matter in such a way that we obtain real principles and absolute ideas; together these yield the transcendental standpoint, and this is the minimum or the conditio sine qua non of syllogism, (2) We will find the maximum, on the other hand, if we join philosophy's form with that with which it begins, namely, skepticism, enthusiasm and consistency, harmony. Consistency and enthusiasm, harmony and skepticism combined, result together in pure understanding, this is the maximum. Thus, it follows: system

syllogism

method

The minimum is the transcendental standpoint, and the maximum pure understanding. General observation. The concepts will be proved; no concept will be used, or at least only provisionally, until its reality has been found. To prove something means to demonstrate its reality. Accordingly, every proof is historical. There is no logical proof, because nothing real [Reelles] comes out of reasonable discourse [vernunftigen Diskurs]. Thus, just as concepts need proof, statements need an explanation and not a proof. A statement consists of two concepts; if the concepts are proven, then the statement does not need a proof, but rather an explanation of the connection between the two concepts. One often arrives at the same concept in more than one way, and can thus prove it in more than one way. (This goes against what is generally said: truth is unique.} Spinoza and Fichte often do it. This is also very natural and follows already from the concept of the experimental method. There thus must be, for example, an infinity of proofs of the infinite. Wre have three moments in philosophy. 1. objective arbitrariness

2. intellectual intuition 3. the transcendental standpoint Objective arbitrariness and intellectual intuition are the two elements, and the transcendental standpoint is the point of indifference.

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Objective arbitrariness" is the conditio sine qua non of philosophy. Arising out of it is intellectual intuition, and through the extension of both arises the transcendental standpoint. We arrived at the solution to the second problem only through approximation, namely, through abstraction. The original abstraction is the concern of arbitrariness, but this arbitrariness is objective per se because it refers to everything that is the condition for everything that is objective. Here the highest unity is sought and everything that is subjective is removed. What one should abstract from is everything that cannot be at the midpoint of philosophy. Because philosophy is concerned with the absolute and with reality, we need to abstract from all relative reality. This happens by positing absolute reality. However, if we posit absolute reality, we ourselves still remain. Now we are able to, and must abstract again from individual consciousness; but we cannot abstract from the original form of consciousness. What remains, besides the infinite, is consciousness, which comprises all of consciousness. Result of the original abstraction. The absolute elements of reality are consciousness (not conceived of empirically, but as the consciousness that makes the empirical possible in the first place) and the infinite. All elements are invisible, and thus the absolute elements are all the more invisible. The sum of the whole, original consciousness, when it comes into consciousness—that is, when it intuits and understands original consciousness—is intellectual intuition. The absolute thesis of all philosophy cannot be proven, for nothing goes beyond it; it contains its proof in itself. But for this reason, the first and the last of philosophy is not a belief, as is generally assumed, but simply a knowledge—to be sure, a knowledge of a very specific kind, an infinite knowledge. All belief contains something uncertain; the opposite can indeed be possible. But this is certainly not the case with the absolute thesis of philosophy. Internally, it is absolute; its certainty can be neither increased nor decreased. Whoever has seen the truth once can never lose it again. From the outside, however, this inner intuition of the truth cannot be presented in such a way that would make it possible, as it were, to Objective arbitrariness is the act of original abstraction.


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master it. It can be proven infinitely or not at all. The philosopher has nothing more than a belief in himself. This is, however, not a postulate. To believe in oneself means to believe in one's ideal. He who forms an ideal of his self and makes this the midpoint of his life believes in himself. Belief is the intermediary [das Mittlere] between knowledge and that which is opposed to it. The minimum of belief would be to be of an opinion [Meinen], the maximum—cognizing [Erkennen]. Cognition is the highest. We can only cognize one thing; here thinking and knowing are one. That which we think, we also know, and that which we know, we also think. Cognition is the highest degree of knowing and thinking. The reality of the infinite can only be cognized; it cannot be proved. Through abstraction we approached the solution to the second problem. The activity of abstraction is objective arbitrariness. This is the conditio sine qua non, the formal, the negative. Intellectual intuition is the positive, the material. It is the consciousness of the consciousness of the infinite. Understanding and intuition are contained in intellectual intuition. The transcendental standpoint is the midpoint between the two. This is the point that raises us above all that is individual. We go beyond ourselves if we raise ourselves to this point. (Our self is a reflection [Wiederschein] of the infinite.) Through intellectual intuition we have found that one cannot abstract from consciousness and from the infinite. These are therefore the two elements with which we can experiment from the transcendental standpoint. These experiments could be called transcendental experiments, because they are only possible at one such point; their tendency is altogether synthetic. The elements with which we experiment are therefore: consciousness reality the infinite Consciousness is +a -a, a waxing and waning zero.

The infinite is a i raised to a limidess power, in all directions. If these elements are also really elements, then one must be able to cross from one to the other. Consciousness arises out of the infinite if the infinite becomes infinitely finite. And if in the consciousness of the I and the non-I, the unification of

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the two is achieved, then the infinite arises.88 The first attempt to arrive at new concepts out of these two first concepts is made by carrying over the one to the other. Thus, if we carry the infinite over to consciousness, we arrive at a new concept, namely, an infinite consciousness or the concept of thinking. However, if we carry consciousness over to the infinite and add it to it, the result is a conscious infinity; and this is the concept of deity. If we now join these new concepts to the first middle concept, reality," so that we ( i ) join thinking with reality under the condition of the Mrelement of consciousness, the result is a real thinking with consciousness, or a knowledge. (2) If we join deity with reality and center this connection through the infinite, the result is a real deity with infinity, or, what is the same, nature^ If we summarize this in a statement, it is: the infinite task of nature is to realize the deity. The result of this combination is that it is impossible to think anything other than the deity. No further concepts can be derived from thinking of the deity. If one wants to refer to this process with a word, there is no more appropriate one than divination. Furthermore, one can see from the derivation of the joined concepts that one cannot know anything but nature. Every science is therefore a natural science, and natural science begins invisibly with divination and ends with it. The concept of divination also refers to two other concepts. Namely, if we join consciousness and nature with each other, centered with knowledge, the result is the concept of reflection. If we further join knowledge with the infinite centered with nature (that is, where nature is the [qualifying] condition, or what is only possible through nature), the result is the concept of speculation.

Nature is, as it were, a deity that has become real.


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Reflection and speculation stand opposite to one another, and between the two, as midpoint and as the beginning and end of natural science, lies divination. If we should want to leave the midpoint and remain only with the one or the other, we would arrive at the standpoint of reflection or, on the other side, the standpoint of speculation, and thus would get the Fichtean system or that of Spinoza. In order to arrive at new concepts, we must return to method, where analysis was the first step. (To break up the phenomenon into its elements.) Therefore, we also have to break up the two phenomena, consciousness and the infinite, into their elements. The known element of the infinite is the undetermined, from which the second element, the, determined, is derived through opposition. The infinite consists therefore of the undetermined and the determined. The undetermined proceeds from itself and determines itself. This is a definition of the infinite.' We must define it because it is the positive. The definition is genetic. Consciousness, as the negative, will have to be deduced. The elements of consciousness are the I and the Non-I. Deduction:'' the determined determines itself more and more until it determines itself into indeterminacy and becomes undetermined. In other words, consciousness is a history of the organism up to the highest point of human consideration, the understanding. Should we define reality or deduce it? We are able neither to define it nor to deduce it; rather, we must seek a middle way. This way can be called a criterion. It is a definition of that which it is not, and a deduction of that of which it consists, or an indication of that from which it is deduced. In order to arrive at empirical [reell] concepts, we must join the elements of consciousness with the elements of the infinite in such a way that we join the positive element of the one with the negative element of the other; thus, the undetermined with the non-I, and the determined with the I. It. follows from this that what is free in nature and necessary in humans is real [reell] (namely, necessity in humans is their persistence; and the free in nature is that which is active in it). This is directly opposed to dogmatism. The idea of principles is contained in the definition. The principle of ideas, is contained in deduction.

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Knowledge can be divided into the theoretical and the empirical. Theory is concerned merely with ideas. Here there is a lack of principles, but theory must proceed according to a principle. The empirical is concerned with principles. Here there is a lack of ideas. If the empirical is really to be the empirical, however, it must proceed according to an idea. With respect to theory, the result that we now obtain through transcendental experiments is: the first original concepts are consciousness and the infinite—these are the concepts a priori.* Everything must be derived from these two concepts. The joining of these two concepts can be expressed in the statement: the positive and the negative are one. This is the statement of identity; we will call it the final truth. This statement is expressed so indeterminately because it means so many different things. Namely, we should join the two concepts (thus it becomes a rule). Then they are joined; all separation is relative, is illusion. They must combine, must join together completely. This is the content of idealism. (The first concepts for dogmatism are quantity and quality, the highest basic principle, causality. However, for idealism the first concepts are consciousness and the infinite, and the highest basic principle is the statement of identity.) Reflection is the minimum of reality as a middle part (an interaction of consciousness and infinity). Reflection is distinguished from consciousness by being a real [wirkliches] consciousness; on the other hand, consciousness is only form. The maximum of reality is the universe. Infinity is only the form. It can only become reality through consciousness. If we abstract from the four concepts, then we arrive at a new middle part—the understanding (nous, as the ancients expressed it.) The understanding is an infinite consciousness, a conscious infinity, a reflected universe, a universal reflection. Philosophy can be called the doctrine, of the limits of human cognition. The statement of identity is the final truth, the infinite and consciousness are the first concepts. All theory proceeds from the first concepts, and all of the empirical ceases with the final truth. Theory is the treatment, the presentation of These are the ideas with which theory is concerned. The empirical proceeds from dualism, hut its end result is identity.


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ideas. It has two concepts (they could be called elementary ideas), and out of these it derives everything. The two concepts are the principle of ideas, and the final truth is the idea of principles. The entire empirical realm is directed toward principles; what is usually missing is a guiding idea. The fundamental principle of identity can be the guiding star because it shows ever)' empiricist what the result of his investigation will be. From this we arrive at the following result for philosophy: Philosophy is completed if all concepts are transcendent and all statements are identical. (This, however, is only the ideal of philosophy, which can never be achieved.) We say transcendent because in order to grasp every concept, one must not only go beyond oneself but beyond all experience. The concept of infinity is transcendent. Infinity consists of the elements of the undetermined and the determined. The undetermined proceeds from itself and determines itself. It has the tendency to determine itself. The determined, as the opposite of the undetermined, must therefore have the opposite tendency of the undetermined. Thus, the determined has the tendency to return into the undetermined. It can only manifest this tendency through the determinability of the determined. This determinability must itself in turn be undetermined, since the determined has the tendency to return again to the undetermined, thus to determine itself into the undetermined. The character of all things determined is thus an undetermined determinacy. From the tendency of the determined to determine itself more and more and to return into the undetermined arises selfdetermination, the, essence of consciousness. If it is proved that the reality of the finite is an illusion, then the question arises as to the subjective conditions for its opposite. What must be cleared away in order that humans may be placed in their original condition? Outside of philosophy we are unable to assume sound understanding [gesunder Verstand; also: common sense]. The usual so-called sound understanding is concerned merely with the finite, and thus illusion, error, and the prejudice of all prejudices. Such an understanding is thus not sound but rather sick and corrupt. It cannot be reconciled with philosophy. It has absolutely no points of contact

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with it. What are called expressions of common sense are at best only the average of the spirit of the age. And if one compares this spirit in different countries or different times, it often stands in direct contradiction. How is this possible if it is the expression of sound reason? The history of consciousness proves that common sense proceeds from error and is thus not healthy but rather sick and corrupt. The sense of humans can become healthy, however; not by means of the understanding, but rather by different means. Namely, by means of art. The highest expression of the power of sense is art, and the agreement of idealism and art is complete. There exists no work of art in which the two concepts—of bringing the infinite to consciousness, or proceeding with consciousness into the infinite—are not posited as the final principle. (Within the framework of dogmatism one can never demonstrate to the artist his real worth.) With this I close the Introduction, which comprises an autonomous whole. We will now proceed to elaborate the system itself. However, since we must join the philosophy of reflection and that of speculation by means of the method indicated in the Introduction, and since Fickle and Spinoza have established these two philosophical systems, more must be said about these philosophers. In our investigation we will sometimes assume the point of view of the one, sometimes that of the other. But since there is such symmetry* and parallelism between the two, we can often take them together. This symmetry is valid for their external expression as well. Both philosophers, as autonomous and original as they are, had their predecessors. Fichte has Kant, and Spinoza Descartes. What is purely theoretical in their systems, therefore, what is valid, what contains spirit, can be expressed approximately in the following statements: The spirit of the Fichtean system is: the object is a product of the productive imagination, and everything in the consciousness to differing degrees is an unconscious reflection.

The spirit of the Spinozan system is contained in the doctrine of the inThe symmetry ol both philosophers is the symmetry of genius; it limits the autonomy of neither.


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finite and the two spheres, attributes or modifications of the infinite, namely, of extension and of thought. What is individually subjective in their systems, or is also the letter of the systems, although admittedly the most spirit-rilled letter, in short, that which does not belong to the essence of the system, is: in Spinoza the perspective of love; in Fichte the perspective of self-sufficiency. Both proceed from the spirit of their respective systems and are fully bound up in them. Is there anything higher than love in a system where the highest condition of man is tranquillity? What is higher than self-sufficiency, if activity is the highest thing in that system? Self-sufficiency consists, according to Fichte's view, in the degree of self-determination. Man is only that to which he determines himself. The only ones who contribute data for a history of philosophy among the ancients are Plato and Aristotle and among the moderns Spinoza and Fichte." Plato attempted to join Herackitus with Parmenides. Heracleitus surrendered to dualism and Parmenides to realism in the way we indicated earlier. Certainly, Plato was more valuable for the philosophy of realism. In the practical realm, he tried to carry the Socratic system over to the Pythagorean. A philosophy can join itself to others and still be completely original, as was the case, for example, with Plato. Concerning the writings of Spinoza and Fichte. The Ethics is written clearly and understandably. It was published posthumously by one of his friends, but he had already completed it a few years before his death. Among his other writings we only need mention Concerning the Method and the Improvement of the Understanding^ which is flawed, but good as preparation. In the Ethics the essential material is already found complete in the first book. The four final books can be considered a history of consciousness. According to his system, it is natural that he begins with matter, and thus the Introduction comes at the end, namely, the history of consciousness. His system is a knowledge of the infinite. The Introduction contains also the individual, the subjective, namely, the love of the deity.

Leibniz comes between Spinoza and Fickle so that he partakes of both of them. Thus we see that, like its method, the history of philosophy consists [in the synthesis of opposites].

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5. Friedrich Schlegel: Concerning the Essence of Critique (i8o4) 90 Everything Lessing did, constructed, attempted, and wanted is most fittingly summed up by the concept of critique. As broad and diverse as Lessing's intellectual pursuits were, this concept—if we take it as broadly as it was taken of old, thereby restoring its former dignity— suffices nonetheless as a summary of his activities. Lessing's poetic attempts should be considered as exemplifications of his principles of poetics and dramaturgy. In philosophy, however— that area for which the tendency of his intellect determined him—he was certainly neither systematizer nor sectarian, but rather critic. Testing, generous and careful testing of others' opinions, refutation of many commonly held prejudices, defense and reanimation of this or that forgotten paradox: this was the indirect form in which he expressed his own opinions in this discipline. The largest part of his other writings—antiquarian, dramaturgical, grammatical, as well as his truly literary investigations—belongs to critique in the broader sense of the concept; and I wonder whether all polemics should not be considered a genre at least closely related to critique.1" But precisely because this science or this art that we call critique includes so much—its field extends as broadly as do the rhetorical arts and languages themselves—it is unavoidably necessary to specify the term more precisely. This can best be accomplished by recalling its origin. We ourselves have taken the term "critique" from the Greeks, who invented and established it, and at the same time took it almost to its highest point of development and perfection. After the close of the age of the great poets, the Greeks did not entirely lose their sense for poesy. Given the large number of written monuments that had survived, and continued to survive, in part because of their intrinsic noteworthiness and in part because of very widespread devotion, simply being acquainted with them soon became a science, and surveying them in their entirety all the more so. And such a task was impossible without a certain ordering. The manner in which the poems were passed on to later ages, as well as the manner in which books were reproduced at that time, gave occupation to an acumen that preferred

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to concentrate on a single work rather than lose itself in the great whole. And even for a single work, it became a lengthy and vast enterprise to deduce both smaller and larger omissions and additions from the older information, to gather them by comparing several manuscripts, or to guess them from the connections, and finally to determine them with certainty on the basis of repeated examinations and comparisons. It was frequently too large a task for a single individual to be able to complete. These two activities constantly remained the hinges of classical critique: the selections from the classical writers, which were supposed to give Greek poesy and literature a clear order, and secondly the manner in which multiple textual versions were to be handled. It may be true that it (classical critique) did not complete the latter task nearly as incorrigibly as it did the former. It may be true that, through their selection of classical works, a great deal that would have been noteworthy to us was not passed on to us because it lay outside of this cycle. But the principle according to which they proceeded is thoroughly proper in that they did not consider to be excellent, fully formed, and worthy of eternal imitation that which was free of mistakes—which was usually that which had no force of excess. Rather, they chose that which was most powerfully arranged or most artistically completed, as the first, the highest, or the ultimate in its genre, even when it gave offense to a limited sensibility. And the method of their studies was exemplar)': an unceasing reading of the classical writings, invariably repeated anew, a repeated reading through of the entire cycle from beginning to end. Only this can really be called reading. Only in this way can mature results arise, along with an artistic sensibility and an artistic judgment that can only exist through an understanding of the entirety of art and culture [Bttdung] itself. To be sure, the critics had a great advantage in this regard. Artistic sensibility was very universal among the Greeks, and the critics had for the most part only to verify and explain the universally held judgments they encountered. Only here and there did their willful decisions change anything; only in individual cases did incidental considerations lead artistic sensibility astray. Furthermore, conflict or difference in judgment could only arise concerning a very narrow range of determinations. In general, however, they were in agreement concerning artistic judgment and its principles. This was quite natural, for Greek literature and poesy was a completely self-enclosed

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whole in which it could not be difficult to find the place that the particular occupied in relation to the whole. This nation never entirely lost its poetic sensibility. The manner in which the natural sensibility of the moderns founders—is repressed, confused, and misled—had not yet occurred. For this is a result of the discovery of the printing press and the expansion of the book market, conditions that have propagated a huge mass of utterly worthless and incompetent writings.92 This is not to say that none remains among the classical poets who was ordinary, or who, straying from the true path, strove toward something false. Nonetheless, the majority of the preserved works, which were generally read and repeatedly revised, were in fact excellent. Those that were less worthy were the exceptions, and even among these none were entirely devoid of culture [Bildung] and art, as is possible only in a situation where a good text is a rare occurrence and utterly bad ones are the rule. It was altogether different for the Romans, in spite of the fact that their critique was adopted and copied entirely from the Greeks. For precisely this condition, this importation of a foreign culture [Bildung] and poesy, necessarily created a huge gulf between the sensibility of the scholar and the nonscholar. And even among the Roman scholars themselves, the conflict over the extent to which the Greek model should be absolutely imitated and the extent to which the native model should be retained was never entirely settled—a conflict concerning nothing less important than the principles of literature itself. In this, the condition of the Romans is already more akin to our own. Moreover, the spirit of this nation was too practical for it to have had more than a few great scholars, and these too were soon without successors. Their poesy, in particular, was too impoverished to renew itself, and since it was contrived, it soon ceased entirely. The romantic poesy of the moderns was certainly not lacking in richness. However, this poesy was the bloom of life to such an extent that it was entirely bound up with this life and had to perish, particularly in Germany, along with the downfall of its constitution and its customs. It was knights and princes who practiced this poesy for the most part, and to a lesser extent priests, who can be considered scholars only in contrast to the knights and princes. This was the case in Germany, Spain, and in southern and northern France. Only in Italy were the three earliest great poets also scholars, however limited their circumstances might have been. Nonetheless, they were more schol-


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ars than anyone else among the early romantic inventors, at once poets and restorers of ancient literature. And indeed, only the Italian poesy of that bygone age has survived and retains its vital influence. The Provencal ballads, the Old French creations, and the masterful works of old German poetry have been lost, and this poesy, which has for the most part been entirely forgotten, awaits its liberator in the dust of private book collections. Since the spirit and the life out of which romantic poesy arose disappeared and was destroyed, its poesy perished as well, and with the poesy, all sensibility for this spirit and life. For, unlike Greece, no age of critique followed the age of great poets such that, even though the power to bring forth new beauty mayno longer have been present, at least the old beauty could have been handed down to later ages. The early, rapid, and, in some countries at least, total decline of romantic poesy (and with it the sensibility proper to the native culture and the memory of its ancestors) was caused by the lack of critique. The consequences of this lack—namely, the neglect and corruption of the mother tongue—make all too clear the importance and the value of this art that appears to play for sheer enjoyment with trifling investigations, rather than to engage in serious pursuits. In fact, no literature can exist for long without critique, and no language is secure from corruption that does not maintain the monuments of its poesy and nourish their spirit. Just as the common source and the origin for all genres of human artistic production and culture [Bildung\ is to be sought in mythology, just as poesy is the highest achievement of the whole, and in whose flowering the spirit of each art and science, when perfected, finally is set free, so too is critique the common pillar on which the entire edifice of knowledge and of language rests. Because of the lack of thorough scholarship and critique, we moderns, and particularly we Germans, have lost our poesy and with it the old way of thinking that was appropriate to our nation. Of course, there has been no lack of scholarship in Europe ever since the fleeting Greeks scattered their treasures, Roman law was introduced, the printing press was discovered, and the universities were founded. However, since this scholarship was so completely a foreign product, the mother tongue was even more ignored. And poetic intuition was so completely lost that the scholars, who were often nothing more than scholars, were lacking the primary and essential conditions for critique. This fact was quite obvious in the first attempts to retrieve

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this poetic intuition and to form judgments about aesthetic value or lack of value. They gradually learned to combine philosophy with scholarship, attempting to employ the universal concepts of beauty and art, often without being able to distinguish where these concepts could be applied and where not. This is perhaps understandable since there was also a great deal of this in the writings of the ancients, which, effective at least as tradition, was bound to arouse a vague belief and all manner of attempts at application. But the very first fruits of this endeavor showed at once the absolute lack of artistic sensibility and the distance from all poesy that marked their attempt to approach it again. For they ventured to judge only individual passages, arguing about their value to that degree of detail where all feeling ceases. And they sought not so much to explain the cause of the pleasure of such passages physically,93 out of the nature of the soul, but rather to derive it by means of sometimes extreme exaggeration from a few fairly empty abstractions about the soul. However, the primary condition of all understanding, and thus the understanding of the work of art, is an intuition of the whole, and precisely this was unthinkable for those who practiced a method diametrically opposed to it. And in the end one read only those passages that were called poetic paintings, and whose rules were brought into an orderly system.94 The first stage of Lessing's career and of his critique fall within this period. And, however much his aesthetic may remind us of this false tendency, we are still entitled to say the following in praise, without emphasizing more than necessary the weaknesses in the first steps of this great intellect. Even in those first aesthetic opinions, which attempt merely to explain the pleasure of art according to the analytical psychology of the Wolffian school95—a manner of explaining the phenomenon of art whose first arbitrary assumption is that the senses are reasonable, and second, that reason itself is taken to be completely self-interested so that it does not fall into unreason—even in this weakest attempt of his first thinking we become aware, not without some pleasure, of a different, more disciplined view. Almost everything is referred back to the concept of reality as the only really real, and many people see in this the first seed of Lessing's later philosophy, which at first followed closely the most rigorous and systematic realism. In addition, this tendency toward realism reveals particularly well the degree to which people had become alienated from poesy. For


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them, the feeling for art was a phenomenon that needed conceptualization and explanation above all—processes through which, however, neither the understanding of art nor the artist himself is advanced. In more recent years, and particularly since Kant, people have taken a new path and have rescued at least the dignity of poesy by deriving each particular aesthetic feeling from the feeling of the infinite or the recollection of freedom. Critique gains little from these attempts, however, as long as the point is merely to explain artistic sensibility rather than universally practicing, applying, and constructing [bilden] it further. A physics of the eye and ear for painters and musicians is partly imaginable and is partly already present in specific data and ideas, at least in rudimentary form. But even if we had a similar science of poesy, it would scarcely be able to help the poet in his practice or change his nature, despite the fact that, as a part of physics, it would be a very empirical science. But because poesy is the more general art, a science of poesy could not be called aesthetics, nor could it be called fantastics. since this latter is in turn so general that it would be conflated with the concept of philosophy as a science of consciousness. A science of poesy would, rather, have to be called something like pathetics: correct insights into the essence of anger, desire, and so forth. The physicalistic theory of humankind and of the earth, however, is undeniably far too incomplete to establish such a science. As a part of physics, such a science would thus certainly be a very real science, but it could hardly help the poet to practice his art or change his nature. In any case, the further development of art [Kunstbildung] would scarcely be advanced by it, and for critique such efforts would be of no consequence at all. But Lessing's intellect was not so constructed as to pursue a false tendency to its end. He moved audaciously from one to the next in an irregular trajectory, crossing many systems as well as very different areas of literature. Early on, in addition to this sort of psychological explanation, Lessing's work exhibits a striving to differentiate strictly between the various genres of art—indeed, to determine the concept of each with scientific precision. This dominates his antiquarian as well as his dramaturgical experiments, and it never left him. An exemplary striving, which actually lays the basis for an improved notion of critique that is to restore to us the former, lost one. Among the ancients the distinction between genres was intuitively clear to everyone. The genres had developed freely, both from the essence of art and po-

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etics in general and from specific Greek forms, and for the most part the genres remained unmistakably and fixedly true to their character even in their deviations. However, in the larger whole of the poesy of all ancient and modern peoples, which is gradually becoming the object of critique for us, the genres are too numerous and have been modified in so many ways that mere feeling without a specific concept no longer suffices to distinguish them from one another. And considering the views that prevailed when Lessing wrote and was beginning to write, the massively unartistic cast of the general way of thinking was also exhibited in the fact that one demanded everything from each work and thus had no concept of the fact that, as with each thing, so too should each work only be exemplary within its kind and genre. Otherwise it becomes a trivial, commonplace thing, as are so many works of modern literature. As many corrections as Lessing's concepts of art may require, his aesthetic nevertheless led in the right direction because the differentiation of the genres, when thoroughly completed, leads sooner or later to a historical construction of the whole of art and poetics. We hold that this construction and knowledge of the whole are the primary and most essential condition for a critique that is really able to fulfill its high calling. The other essential condition for critique is the culling out of the inaudientic; when applied to the native literature, however, this element must, of course, take an entirely different form. What has been preserved from earlier times was better protected from counterfeiting by external factors. However, the large quantity of the false and inauthentic that has taken the place of the true and the authentic in the world of books, and even in the manner of thinking of human beings, is at present extremely large. In order that at least some space may be cleared away for the germs of something better, errors and mental apparitions of every kind must be abolished. We can call this process polemics, as does Lessing, who practiced this art excellently throughout his entire life, and particularly in its latter half. The historical development of the concept of critique given thus far at the same time covers Lessing's career as a writer and corresponds with the different epochs of his intellect. But everywhere we will notice that which was originally called philology, that interest which can be aroused for anything that can in any way be said to be of literary interest, even that which is of interest to a true literator56 or librarian


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merely because it once was of interest. Here and there, too, we take notice with pleasure of traces of the most careful attention to the German language, and of a level of acquaintance with the old monuments of the language that is still infrequent but was at that time even less frequent. Early on, he had written a lengthy commentary on the Book of Heroes, the loss of which is very lamentable.97 And even quite late, and under the pressure of entirely different projects, the epic romances of the Holy Grail and of the Round Table were objects of his research. So it was with him. His intellect was not confined to the narrow sphere of other scholars—who are critics only in Latin or Greek, while they are true noncritics in other literatures because they are on foreign ground in them and without insight. Lessing, on the other hand, handled everything with a critical spirit, philosophy and theology no less than poetics and antiquities. Often he handled the classical with that ease and popularity that one usually finds only in discussions about modern writers, and he examined modern writers with the stringency and exactitude that was previously thought necessary only in the treatment of the ancients. He studied, as noted earlier, the old native literature and yet was well enough acquainted with the newer foreign ones to be able to point out correctly at least the directions in which we must go and what we must study: namely, the older English literature instead of the French, which had predominated until his time, and then the Italian and the Spanish. As extensive as his critique was, it remains nonetheless thoroughly popular and universally applicable. If a universal scholar of great intellect such as Sir William Jones98 pursues not merely the architectonics of poetics, but rather the entire structure of all languages through the chain of their relations all the way back to their origins, exposing for the first time their hidden workshops; if a Wolf," with incomparable acumen—penetrating the labyrinth of all prejudices, doubts, misunderstandings, groundless assumptions, inadequacies and exaggerations, clumsy and sophisticated counterfeits, and the decay of time—finally arrives, to the great pleasure of the investigator, at the source and true origins of the oldest artistic monument of the ancient nation rich in art, then it lies in the nature of the matter that only a few can and should take part in these investigations. It suffices if there are a few critics of this esoteric kind in any age, and a few others who understand them.

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The spirit of Lessing's more popular critique lies, however, entirely within the sphere of the generally understandable. This spirit should be disseminated throughout the range of literary circles, for there is in literature no work so great and none so apparently inconsequential that his critique could not be applied to it. Lessing investigated freely, strove everywhere after correct concepts of art, was an ever more rigorous and yet very agile intellect. In particular, however, he despised and tried to dispose of the mediocre and the miserable. For Germany especially this would be entirely appropriate and desirable today. We are a scholarly nation—no one denies us this—and if, through scholarship and critique, we do not give a secure foundation to our literature, which is for the most part still in the process of becoming, I fear that we will soon lose even the little that we now have. Now, at the conclusion of this Introduction, let me make a few remarks that might at least point to the areas in which the concept of critique must be more precisely and scientifically determined, something I have not been able to do in the foregoing historical discussion. We should think of critique as a middle term between history and philosophy, one that shall join both, and in which both are to be united to form a new, third term. Without philosophical spirit, such a critique cannot thrive—everyone agrees on this—nor without historical knowledge. The philosophical elaboration and examination of history and of tradition is unquestionably critique. But any historical view of philosophy is, just as unquestionably, critique as well. It is apparent that the compilation of opinions and systems that is usually called philosophy cannot be meant here. A history of philosophy such as the one that is at stake here can have as its object of investigation a single system, a single philosopher alone. For it is not easy to grasp correctly the origins of even a single system of thought and the developmental history [Bildungsgeschichte] of even a single intellect. Yet it is certainly worth the effort if we are dealing with an original intellect. Nothing is more difficult than reconstructing, taking note of, and characterizing the thought of another in the subtle particularities of his entirety. Until now this has been by far the most difficult thing in the field of philosophy, whether it is because its presentation is as yet less perfected than that of the poet, or whether it is grounded in the essence of the genre. Nonetheless, we can only say that we understand a work, an intellect, when we are able to reconstruct its course and its


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structure. This thorough understanding, which, if expressed in specific words, is called characterizing, is the real business and the inner essence of critique. We may bring together the most solid results of a historical mass under a concept, or else we may specify a concept not merely in order to allow distinctions, but rather to construct the concept in its becoming, from its earliest origins to its final completion, giving thus, together with the concept, its own inner history. Both of these are characterization, the highest task of critique and the most intimate union of history and philosophy. Notes 1. Source: KA 2: 284-351. 2. A reference to Enlightenment handbooks of poetics such asjohann Christoph Gottsched's Versuch einerKritischenDichtkunst (1730; 4th ed. 1751). 3. Regarding the term "midpoint," cf. Friedrich Schlegel's Ideas 41 and Novalis's "Faith and Love" 18. 4. According to Michael Elsasser's excellent introduction to a recent edition of Friedrich Schlegel's Transcendentalphilosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1991), "enthusiasm" designates the originary activity of God or the absolute in the consciousness of the artist; it is die result of poetic reflection. Cf. also note 35 to the texts in Part I and Schlegel's remark in his Introduction to Transcendental Philosophy: "The consciousness of the infinite in the individual is the feeling of the sublime. This is present completely unrefined in the individual. And this feeling of the sublime is enthusiasm, which we had above as a factor of philosophy. The feeling of the sublime should therefore be raised to a science." Cf. also Ideas 18: "Religion must encircle the spirit of the moral human being, as if it were its element, and this bright chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is what we call enthusiasm." Schlegel's interpretation of enthusiasm is meant to be a correction of Kant's. Kant wrote in the Critique of Judgment "If the idea of the good is accompanied by affect [as its effect], this [affect] is called enthusiasm. This mental state seems to be sublime, so much so that it is commonly alleged that nothing great can be accomplished without it. But in fact any affect is blind . . . enthusiasm is comparable to madness... in enthusiasm, an affect, the imagination is unbridled . . ." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987], 132 and 136). 5. "Infinite poem": the Romantics emphasize aesthetic reception rather than the individual work of art. Their notion of reception or reflection of art is not limited to the individual work of art; rather, it encompasses the whole of art since the beginning of time. A major reason for this view of art lies in the Romantics' notion of what an independent whole is: "the great interconnectedness of all of nature that exceeds the limits of our intuition is the only true independent whole; every individual whole within it is, because of the undissolvable concatenation of things, only imaginary" (A. W. Schlcgel, Theory of Art, included in Part II of this volume). The individual's reflection of works of art is an infinite approximation to art in general. Reflecting on the history of art thus means a productive form of aesthetic reflection. 6. Regarding the notion of (a higher or speculative, not empirical) physics, sec note 37 to the texts in Part I.

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7. The notion of center is not a metaphysical notion. Regarding the notion of center as necessary fiction or illusion, cf. Jocheii Schulte-Sasse's General Introduction to this volume. 8. For Schlegel, reality is always already conjoined with "ideality"; that is, the theoretical and the empirical, the ideal and the real form a "real" union in consciousness. There is no reality outside of consciousness. Cf. the following statements in the Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy. "Now dualism and realism are the two elements of idealism"—"It can easily be seen from this that physics is the highest among the sciences, since it is the point of indifference of mathematics and history; just as idealism lies in the point of indifference of dualism and realism, and mathematics and history are derived from dualism and realism." 9. According to the legend, the god Saturn came to Italy in the reign of lanus, by whom he was hospitably received. Saturn taught the people agriculture, suppressed their savage mode of life, and introduced among them civilization and morality. The result was that the whole country was called Saturnia, or the land of plenty. Saturn was suddenly removed from the earth to the abodes of the gods, wherupon lanus erected an altar to him in the Forum. On Spinoza's influence in Germany, see note 42 to the texts in Part I. The thought that all science is natural science is taken from Spinoza, who maintained that cognition always concerns "extensio," and intellection, nature. 10. In ancient Roman culture, household gods were regarded as spirits of deceased ancestors. 11. Cf. the "Letter on the Novel" (at the end of his Dialogue on Poesy), where Schlegel states: "I seek and find the romantic here, among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, in Italian poesy, in that age of knights, love, and fairy tales out of which the thing itself and the term originate." 12. On "divinatory/divination," cf. note 86 to the texts in Part I. 13. The startling juxtaposition of eye versus understanding is not surprising in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetics. According to Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Schlegel and many others, we relate to art, including literature, visually. Many critics called even novels "pictures." Understanding, on the other hand, signifies an alienated, temporal form of comprehension. 14. Didascalic genre refers to drama, both tragedy and comedy. Didascalia were the pieces brought forward for performance at a dramatic event. 15. On the history of art as a work of art that forever forms itself, cf. note 5 and A. W. Schlegel, Theory of Art (in Part II). 16. Jakob Bohme: German theosophist and mystic who lived from 1575 to 1624. 17. Eleusinian mysteries: secret religious rites first celebrated at the ancient Greek city of Fleusis in honor of Demetcr, the goddess of agriculture and fertility, and Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter who was abducted by Hades (Pluto) to be his wife in the lower world. 18. [ohann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68). Foremost German art historian of the eighteenth century, founder of the science of archaeology through his historical and aesthetic studies of ruins and monuments of antiquity. He exerted tremendous influence on Goethe, Lessing, and the brothers Schlegel, among others. His writings are decisive for the development of the idealistic image of antiquity predominant in German classicism. Greek art is seen as the supreme aesthetic achievement of mankind, and its "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" are held to reflect the ideal combination of physical and spiritual beauty achieved by the Greek world. 19. The reference is to Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), Italian poet and storyteller,


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whose most famous work is the Decameron, a collection of one hundred "novellas," or short stories. 20. A tragedy written by Lessing in j 772. 21. Schlegel writes in the German: "Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch." The German word for novel (Roman) is the same as the stem for "romantic." 22. The prose stories in the Decameron are actually framed by a poem, which includes the narrator's introduction and a description of the "setting" for the telling of the tales. 23. "Theory in the original sense of the word": theory is a derivative of Greek theorem (seeing). Theory means a looking at. In scholastic philosophy, theoria means the vision of God, both in the sense of God's vision and man's vision of God. "Contemplation" is the Latin translation of Greek theoria. The word theos (God) was generally, yet falsely, understood to be a derivative of theoria and thenrein. According to Nicolas of Cusa, "God . . . is called 'theos' by virtue of the fact that He observes all things" (Jasper Hopkins, Nicolas ofCusa's Dialectical Mysticism. Text, Translation, and Interpretative Study of De VisioneDei, aded. [Minneapolis: Banning, 1988], 119). 24. Source: August Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe der Vtrrlesungen, ed. Ernst Behler; vol. i: Vorlesungen iiber Astlietik (1798-1803) (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1989), 181-266. 25. The Romantics blurred the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. First, the beautiful work of art is also infinite, even if only intrinsically. Second, since the Romantics tend to break down the boundaries around the individual work of art (see the remarks on the history of art in note 5), the aesthetic reflection of art becomes an infinite, indeterminable act of contemplation, which necessarily leads to an obiuscation of the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. 26. Schlegel here likens the effect of the fusion of the beautiful and the sublime to Winckelmann's notion of grace. For Winckclmann's pronouncements on grace, sec "Und sonderlich die Grazie," in his Geschichte derKunst des Altertums, chapter 4; and Part II ("Von der Grazie in Werken der Kunst") of his essay "Uber Gegenstiinde der alten Kunst," in Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Kunst (Leipzig, 1925). The reference to Aeschylus is to the three furies ("terrifying graces") in the third play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides. In general, however, the three graces of classical mythology are the goddesses who bestowed beauty and charm and were themselves the embodiment of both. They were the sisters Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne. 27. Although in quotation marks, this citation from Kant's Critique of Judgment is not a literal quote. Rather, Schlegel condenses here the first four paragraphs from section 16 (B 49-50, A 49-50). Here, and in the following excerpts from Kant's third Critique, we have consulted and generally adopted the terminology of Werner S. Pluhar's translation of the Critique of Judgment. 28. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 17(6 56, A 56). 29. Here Schlegel condenses another paragraph from section 17 (B 58—59, A 58). 30. Polyclitus (fifth century B.C.) was a Greek sculptor as well as a theorist of sculpture. He wrote a book on the proportions of the human body (Canon). His ideal of physical perfection became the standard for Western sculpture. 31. This is a condensed version of the last paragraph of section 17 (B 60-61, A 59-60). 32. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801): the most prominent practitioner of the general craze of physiognomy during the late eighteenth century. His writings were influenced by mesmerism, somnambulism, and spiritism. His most famous publication is the Physiogriomische Fmgmenle zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnvi und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (1775—78). Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828), anatomist and phrenologist in Vienna,

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then in Paris. In his Philosophisch-medizinische Untermchungen fiber Natur und Kunsl im gesunden und kranken Zustand des Menschen, 2 vols. (1791), he developed theories of analogy between the size and shape of heads and the size of the brain. 33. The reference is to sexual licentiousness (animal nature), to presentations of the Dionysian underside of Reason. In Greek mythology, satyrs and silens are forest and mountain creatures, part human, with horses' tails and ears or goats' horns and legs, merry, drunken, lustful devotees of Dionysus. In some myths, Silenus is the oldest satyr, the son of Hermes or Pan, and the companion, adviser, or tutor of Dionysus. Aristophanes was the greatest Athenian comic poet (ca. 448-ca. 388 B.C.). His plays mix political, social, and literary satire. They had their origin in religious festivals, the prerational sphere. Burlesque and direct attack on persons made them suitable for the festivals of Dionysus. Actors wore masks in his plays, thereby concealing their identity. 34. Critique of Judgment, section 46 (B 181, A 179). 35. Ibid., (B 182, A 180); translation slightly modified. 36. Ibid., section 47 (B 185, A 182). 37. Ibid., (B 186, A 184). 38. Ibid., section 50 (B 204, A 201). 39. Schlegel is referring here to the Sturm und Drang movement (ca. 1767-85) and its cult of genius in the works of the early Goethe, of Herder, Klinger, Lenz, and Burger. In their writings, these authors campaigned against the reign of Enlightenment rationality and the rationalization of all spheres of life. Against Reason they set feeling and instinct; against the cold observation and measurement of nature they advocated its idealization, which was to be perfected through the creative work of genius. The ideal of nature eclipsed that of Bildung. Sensuality and individuality were among the new values. Against rule-bound activity, art was practiced as godlike revelation, with Prometheus as its symbolic hero. 40. Critique of Judgment, section 49 (B 193, A 190). 41. Ibid., section 57. 42. Cf. Introduction to Critique of Judgment, section 5 (B xxxiii). 43. Critique of Judgment, section 6 (B xxxvii). 44. Ibid., section 5 (B xxxiv). 45. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath, introd. Michael Vater (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). 46. Schelling writes: "If aesthetic intuition is merely transcendental intuition become objective, it is self-evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely, the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that, which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature, which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one. What we speak of as nature is a poem lying pent up in a mysterious and wonderful script. Yet the riddle could reveal itself, were we to recognize in it the odyssey of the spirit, which, marvelously deluded, seeks itself, and in seeking flies from itself; for through the world of sense there glimmers, as if through words the meaning, as if through dissolving misls the land of fantasy, of which we are in search. Each splendid painting owes, as it were, its genesis to a removal of the invisible barrier dividing the real from the ideal world, and is no more than the gateway through which come forth completely the shapes and scenes of that world of fantasy which gleams but imperfectly


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through the real. Nature, to the artist, is nothing more than it is to the philosopher, being simply the ideal world appearing under permanent restrictions, or merely the imperfect reflection of a world existing, not outside him, but within" (ibid., 231-32), 47. With the major exception of Friedrich Schlcgcl's Transzendentalp/iito.sophie, where Schlegel attempts to undermine the meaning of understanding by redefining it (a deconstructive technique Schlegel was fond of employing), the Romantics view the logical, rule-guided operation of understanding as negative; they juxtapose understanding with imagination, fancy, and reason. Cf. the remarks on imagination, fantasy, and reason in Jochen Schulte-Sasse's General Introduction to this volume. 48. Schlegel is referring to this passage in Kant: "It will be said that this construal of aesthetic judgments in terms of a kinship with moral feeling looks rather too studied to be considered as the true interpretation of that cipher [Chiffreschrifl] through which nature speaks to us figuratively in its beautiful forms" (Critique of Judgment, section 42 [B 170, A 168]). 49. "First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons" (Aristotle, On Man in the Universe, ed. Louise Ropes Loomis [Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, 1943], 421). 50. The allusion is to Prince Oronaro in Goethe's farce ("dramatische Grille," written in 1786) by this title. The prince, on his voyage to the oracle, brings along with him a set of painted nature as well as a doll with the features of his beloved whose inside is stuffed with books of a sentimental nature. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Triumph der Empfindsamkeit," Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprdche (Zurich: Artemis, 1948), vol. 6, 502-53. 51. Charles Batteux (1713-80), generally held to be the founder of French aesthetic theory. The fundamental principle of his Les Beaux Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746) (translated into German by Adolf Schlegel in 1752) consisted in the admonition to the artist to "copy beautiful nature." 52. This idiomatic phrase refers to being sent back and forth from one to the other without ever reaching one's objective. (Originally, in the Bible, it says: from Herod to Pontius Pilate. The force of alliteration, and, presumably, of meaning as well, helped develop its present form.) 53. Zeuxis and Parrhasius are the main representatives of the Ionic school of painting. They introduced new techniques, especially with respect to the distribution of light and shade. Alluded to here is the purported contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis, whose painted grapes attracted the birds, while Zeuxis himself was deceived by a curtain that had been painted by Parrhasius. 54. Nicolas Boilcau (1636-1711), French poet and critic. His Art poetique (1674) is the codification of the aesthetic norms of French art of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It provided the theoiy and standard for judging the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. Against the preceding period of the baroque, he exalted the role of Reason in poetry. 55. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), French philosopher and poet. Most highly regarded for his ability to popularize, and thus make available to a wide audience, scientific and philosophical discoveries (Descartes, Copernicus). 56. Salomon GeBiier's (1730-88) idyllic poetry was translated into all European languages. 57. These sentences bring to mind M. H. Abrams's book on Romanticism, Natural SupernaturalL'im (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Although his work certainly has some bearing on the topic, his locus is more on how the "supernatural" elements of religious

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thought remain in force even after their secularization: "Much of what distinguishes writers I call 'Romantic' derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing- two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature. Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived, as the implicit distinctions and categories through which even radically secular writers saw themselves and their world, and as the presuppositions and forms of their thinking about the condition, the milieu, the essential values and aspirations, and the history and destiny of the individual and of mankind" (13). 58. Balthasar Denner (1685—1749) was one of the most famous portrait painters of the time. He had the nickname "Porendenner" because he would portray the most minute pore, the most minuscule wrinkle, so well that you could study the painting with a magnifying glass. 59. In order to fuse the distinct artistic enterprises of an aesthetics of imitation and of creation, Schlegel here avails himself of Goethe's interpretation of the myth of Prometheus as put forth in his "Italienische Reise." 60. Regarding the notion of physics, cf. note 37 to the texts in Part I and the Introductory Essay to Part II by Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff. 61. Karl Philipp Moritz, "Uber die bildende Nachahmung des Schonen," in Werke, ed. Horst Gunther (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981), 2: 549-78. 62. JohannJoachim Winckelmann, Geschuhte der Kunst des Altertums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 217. 63. The works of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) are often distinguished from the other great dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, Lope de Vega, in terms of their more precise use of language and their careful construction. 64. Source: N 3, 242-478. Although generally referred to as a collection of fragments, The Universal Brouillonwas in fact not intended for publication in this form, and does not share the consciously aestheticized form, for example, of Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaum Fragments. "Brouillon" is a French word meaning something like a scratchpad or notebook, and Novalis regarded these preliminary notes as the raw material for an "encyclopedia" that he planned to write as a means of uniting all of the sciences. This larger project, which remained unrealized, is a prime example of the Romantic ideal of challenging hierarchies and conceptual barriers between individual disciplines. In these notes, Novalis strives to draw connections between the sciences—interpreted broadly to include everything from mathematics and physics to poesy and religion— using them to explain each other in a process of reciprocal exchange with the ultimate goal of creating a new "universal science." Novalis's challenge to ossified rationalistic thinking is illustrated not only by the intermingling of customarily separated spheres throughout the Brouillon, but also by the encyclopedia's intended mixture of forms (see 945). 65. We have chosen to translate Lehre as "theory"—and not "doctrine" or "teachings"—throughout these fragments. Rather than a rigid set of principles, or a prescriptive program, Novalis's project is an open-ended attempt to create relationships between different kinds of knowledge. Thus, we read "theory" in opposition not to "practice," but rather to a closed conceptual system. Cf. also note 7 to the Introductory Essay in Part I. 66. philielogia: love of study (Latin elogium = study)


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67. fohann Karl August Musaeus (1735-87) wrote "enlightened" folk fairy tales (5 vols., 1782-86) and satirical novels against the widespread adoration of Samuel Richardson and his sentimental novels (Grandism the Second, 3 vols., 1760-62). 68. If we follow Jacques Le Goff, especially his essay "The Marvelous in the Medieval West" (in The Medieval Imagination [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 27—44), then "marvelous," with its nonreligious, pagan tradition, not "miraculous," would be the equivalent of the romantic notion of wunderbar m Anglo-Saxon and the Romance languages. On the romantic notion of wunderbar, see the chapter "Wunderbares—Wunderliches" in Lothar Pikulik, Romantik ah Ungeniigen an der Nnrmalitdt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 410-67. 69. The German terms Wunder, wunderbar, wunderlich, and wundersam (832) all refer to the rupturing of expectations and are thus related to wit, fancy, and so on. 70. Menstruum universak the ultimate task of medieval alchemy, next to turning metals into gold, was the search for a liquid solution in which anything and everything would dissolve. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Menstruum Universale," in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 248-65, and the General Introduction to this volume. 71. See Fichte Studies 566. 72. "We seek everywhere that which is unconditioned (das Unbedingte) and always find merely things [Dinge]" (N 2, 413, no. i). This refers to the paradoxical articulation of desire in Romanticism; cf. the General Introduction to this volume. 73. "Useful" is a reference to the Enlightenment's preoccupation with the utilitarian. 74. Novalis calls them Tmnsmundaner. Munda refers to a subfamily of the AustroAsiatic family of languages, spoken in central India, or to peoples speaking these languages. 75. Kant, Streil. der Fakultaten (1798). This late work of Kant consists of three independently conceived essays challenging the organization of German universities into the three academic faculties of theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. 76. See our translation of "Faith and Love" in this volume. The German word for both "faith" and "belief is Glaube. Glaube is such an important concept in Novalis, we will remind the reader of the relationship between "faith" and "belief by adding "belief in brackets whenever we consider it necessary to translate Glaube as "faith." Cf. UB 601. See also the Introductory Essay to Part I. 77. A redouts is a party for invited guests, especially a ball or a masked ball. 78. Source: KA 12:3-31. Cf. also Friedrich Schlegel, Transzp.ndentalphilosnphie. The text of Schlegel's Jena lectures on the subject "Transcendental philosophy," delivered during winter semester 1800 and summer semester 1801, have to date not been found. The text included in the Kritische Ausgabe, the Introduction of which is translated into English for the first time here, is the bound copy of notes made by one of Schlegel's students. It was discovered in 1927 in the catalog of a Leipzig antique store by the Germanist Josef Korner and published by him along with copious notes and another Schlegel manuscript in 1935. Korner cites good evidence that the concepts and terminology of the student's notations are accurate. Yet Schlegel himself was able to provide neither a readable text for his daily lectures nor notes for his students, which at that time typically circulated among auditors as an aid to understanding other lecturers, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. That a student should have been able, from one hearing in the auditorium, to reproduce a text Schlegel himself was unable to write is scarcely credible. Even the fair copy of the lectures themselves represents an editorial revision of working notes made by the student. The impossibility of systematizing the cognition out of which Schlegel's freespoken lectures materialized makes it imperative

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for the reader to give the Transcendental Philosophy extraordinary attention. This obvious point bears mention not because of a lack of "authenticity" of the text—there can be no question that Schlegel is at work in it—but rather because there are also a number of other people at work in it, each trying mightily "to make sense" out of thoughts that Schlegel himself was never able to bring to paper, even though he was compelled to return a much-needed publisher's advance on their publication. The value of these lectures consists largely in the evidence they provide about the transformation of an independent critic into an institutionalized academic author—and this transformation has consequences for all subsequent texts. Between the fragments of die late 17905, many of which are included in this volume, and the system of 1800 whose Introduction is rendered here, lies an epistemic break so great that Schlegel could not write it. That task has been assumed by his students, editors, and translators. All footnotes at the bottom of the page are from the Korner edition, and their authorship accordingly uncertain. 79. This is a reference to the scholastic deiinition of truth ("adaequatio intellectus ad rem") as a homology between the mind and things. 80. Latin perga, perge= and so on. 81. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel "On Incomprehensibility" for "chaos of systems" (included in Part I of this volume). 82. Cf. Novalis's statement "I = Non-I: highest statement of all science and art" (Novalis, LogologischeFragmented?,, N a: 542). 83. A central tenet of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Part I, is that aesthetic predicates refer not to the objects on which they are predicated, but to the feeling aroused in the "subject." See, for example, the opening argument of the text. 84. Cf. A. W. Schlegel's Theory of Art. 85. See the following three paragraphs for the justification of empirical = reell. 86. Plato uses the phrase ontos onto, to express the absolutely real character of the ideas. 87. As the Romantics tend to blend the meanings of the beautiful and the sublime, they also tend to blur the distinction between symbol and allegory. Both symbol and allegory are discursive forms representing the infinite within the finite. 88. Here the German original is syntactically incomplete. 89. Schlegel means Spinoza's Traclatus de intelleclus emendalione. 90. Source: KA 3:51-60. This is the "Allgemeine Einleitung" (General introduction) to a longer piece entided "Lessings Gedanken und Meinungen" (Lessing's thoughts and opinions). Sec KA 3: 46-102. 91. Schlegel distinguished between "critique" and "polemics." His usage of "critique" deviates from its usual, critical meaning, which led Walter Benjamin to assert that "a necessary aspect of all judgment, the negative, is diminished" in Romantic criticism. "Critique" means, rather, an unfolding of the spirit of a work of art or philosophy, that is, a productive and positive hermeneutic activity. In his Philological Fragments, Schlegel thus says: " (Until now, philosophical critique was not possible at all, only polemics.) Critique requires classical works as its object" (included in Part III). Cf. also his seventy-first Fragment on Literature and Poesy: "We cannot prove them [aesthetic.judgments], but we must legitimate ourselves with respect to them. It is very certain that we should not judge bad works at all." Schlegel chose the term "polemics" to signify critique in its negative sense. He reserves this term in particular for what he calls nonpoesy (Unpoesie), emotionally and intellectually exploitative trash. 92. Paradoxically, Schlegel's notions of reading, critique, hermeneutics, and so on, are utterly dependent on the invention of printing and the history of the book market. 93. See note 37 to the texts in Part I for the notion of physics; German distinguishes

Moles to Pages 272-75

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between an adjective referring to the body (pkysisch) and an adjective relating to physics (physikalisch). The latter is meant here. 94. See Johann Jacob Bodmer, Crilische Betrachlungen iiber die poetischen Gemdhlde der Dir.hter (Critical observations on the poetic paintings of the poets) (1741). Bodmer's early Enlightenment work embodies much of xvhat Schlegel describes in this passage. Having translated Milton's Paradise Lrat and thus incited great debate as to the merit of the religious epic for a scientific age, in the Critical Observations Bodmer defends his translation by defining poesy as different from rhetoric and history in its ability to appeal to the imagination through the external senses, mediating "truths" through the lively representation of the "probable." 95. Christian Wolff (1679-1754), a principal German exponent of rationalism and early Enlightenment thought. Best known for his systematization of Leibniz's philosophy, Wolff sought a practical usefulness for philosophy. 96. litlemtor (Latin): grammarian or philologist. 97. Schlegel is referring to Das Heldenbuch, one of the collections of early medieval German heroic epics that were often commissioned by German noblemen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 98. Sir William Jones (1746-94) served as a judge for the British High Court in Calcutta, founded the Asiatick Society, and was renowned as a translator of Persian and Sanskrit. His hypothesis that Sanskrit was related to Latin and Greek via a lost common language (Indo-European) is the basis of modern comparative linguistics. 99. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), a German classical scholar, is considered to be the founder of modern philology. He first advanced the theory that ihe Homeric sagas were composed orally by more than one author.


Ill The Fragmentary Imperative


Introductory Essay The Early Romantic Fragment and Incompleteness Haynes Home

The Strategy of Incompleteness As the student who struggles with the heterogeneous writings of Jena Romanticism often has cause to regret, the group promulgated no manifesto. Denied the reassurance of a single text whose concept could delineate, unify, and thus complete a Romantic field, the reader is left to grapple with what appears to be an aggregate of disparate writings. Even identifying the genre to which any particular text belongs can prove to be a contentious issue, as the discussion surrounding the "Fragment of the Three Tendencies" indicates (see note 13). The lack of critical and historical agreement about the tenets defining Early Romanticism compounds the dilemma. And the necessity of writing about the period or school or emergence in such a way as to convey the diffusion of its themes without falling prey to its confusion of interests often enough becomes a question of how to write about one passage without contradicting another. It is no more than a truism to say of the Early Romantics' corpus that it lacks the stylistic unity that might exemplify a school, has no single set of social concerns that could comprise a movement, and presents no commonly agreed-upon set of facts or procedures that would define a theory. Yet, the lack of a manifesto—this gap in the conceptual order of-Early Romantic writing—confronts the present as a signifying gap. And if the drive to identify and categorize to which the theory and pedagogy of knowledge is so often reduced can be held at bay long enough, a great deal may be learned from this manifesto gap—and from its inscription in the quintessential Early Romantic genre of the fragment. If, in introducing the fragments of Jena Romanticism, we choose to 289

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The Fragmentary Imperative

look for signifying relations rather than identities, we can find no better beginning than in the relation between system and fragment. The extent of the Jena Circle's ambivalence to "system" is rendered in Athenaum Fragment 53, a stance that appears often in prior and subsequent fragments. This ambivalence must be read against the claim of Fichte's postcritical system to make noumenal order present to consciousness through a transcendental deduction of the necessary operations of intellection. As an accommodation of an earlier concept of critique to an already postcritical age (see especially Athenaum Fragment 281), the Jena Circle's inculcation of ambivalence to system reveals a strategic move that has, for a century and a half, successfully resisted inclusion of the Circle's writings under the classificatory impulses of modern literary and philosophical history.1 Acquainted already with the power and influence of the system of Transcendental Idealism, the Jena fragments bring over into the new, postcritical nineteenth century a genre that never ceases to testify to the incompleteness of presentations, systematic or otherwise. Despite the rearguard nature of the campaign against Fichte's efforts, and even in the face of the genre's total eclipse by the great systems of the next century, Jena's fragments have kept alive traces of a critique of what are often called today "the grand narratives." Hence, the fragment, through the ambivalence to system registered by its textual body, resists the desire for eminence expressed in the logocentric currents of the Western tradition in general and of the tradition of German systematic thought that followed. The generation of students entering German universities around 1790 sought to rearticulate thought and being after the interlude of Kantian critique. (See the "Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism," for example, in Part I.) This generation, including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, proceeded on the basis of—and directly in the face of—the strenuous efforts Kant made to distinguish these terms and to sequester their union in the operations of aesthetic judgment, which lay outside the scope of disciplinary knowledge. The system most relevant to Jena Romanticism's fragmentary imperative, however, is Fichte's, with its transcendental deduction of the necessary operations of intellection that establish the ground of consciousness as well as being. Manifested in a spurt of successive revisions of the Wissenschaftslehre, this obsession with overturning Kantian critique first appeared as Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftskhre

The Early Romantic Fragment and Incompleteness

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(1794), a scant four years after the publication of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Fichte's text presents the epochal idealist manifesto in relation to which Jena Romanticism's fragmentary imperative must be read. The relation of the Jena Circle to this work is at once important and ambivalent. The "Fragment of the Three Tendencies" (Athendum Fragment 216, subsequently incorporated together with remarks on its reception in the essay "On Incomprehensibility," published in the final Athendum issue [included in Part I]), both eulogizes and parodies Fichte's "small book." The Jena Circle, however, avoids the strategic error Fichte makes in Concerning the Concef>t of the Wissenschaftslehre, with its appeal to the discursive transparency of reason and its claim to have achieved a self-demonstrative method and the apodictic certainty of its principles. Nor, as we will see, does Early Romanticism pursue without substantial modification the egologism of Fichte's Cartesian method. Although the terminological similarity of the egoconcept is evident, the infinitely reflecting, and hence incompletely reflecting, I of Early Romanticism differs fundamentally from Fichte's use of the term. Precisely in the shadow of Fichte's epochal Wissenschaftslehre, the gap in Early Romantic writing where the manifesto should have been presents itself as the recognition of, and as a resistance to, Fichte's monumental error: the attempt to construct a foundational system of knowledge in which intellectual intuition achieves a final degree of completion. By bringing all experience within its purview, the transcendental reflection reestablishes, for all practical purposes, the link between the faculty of intuition and the noumena that Kant had severed. As an introduction to the fragments of Early Romanticism, therefore, the notion of incompleteness offers itself at once as a kind of Heraclitean principle of flux and as a point of departure from Transcendental Idealism, with which the group's texts have been so frequently conflated. Specifying the particulars of the distinction between idealist system and Romantic fragment requires further elaboration; before proceeding with this presentation, however, several preliminary steps might prove helpful. We need first of all to understand something of the literary-historical framework, the division of poesy into the classical and the Romantic, that provides the locomotive force for Jena Romanticism's strategy of fragmentation. And it might be wise to examine, however briefly, the other genres of Early Romantic writing; for the possibility exists that

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incompleteness is no more than a physiognomic property of one genre. Then, finally, we will return to a discussion of Fichte on the basis of which the historical specificity of Jena Romanticism can be established and in which the question of incompleteness takes on its positive relation to two other central terms of Jena Romanticism, reflection and infinity. Such a broad view is necessary, for only through positing the critical unity of the Jena Circle's writings—that is, through the construction of a reflective unity out of the aggregate of writings given in experience—may we posit their historical self-understanding as whole and legible. By proceeding with the fragments in this manner, we may accomplish three significant aims. First, we proceed justly, for by using the method proposed by Athenaum Fragment 116 for modern Romantic poesy to guide our critical reflection of Early Romantic writing, we are less likely to fault those writings for lacking systematic qualities that are extraneous to their kind. Second, we may glimpse Early Romanticism's conservation of the core tenets of Kant's critique of reflective judgment by using their translation of reflective judgment, the concept of Romantic poesy, to critique Early Romanticism. And finally, by casting the historical self-understanding of Jena Circle writing, we may better demarcate this understanding from the dominant field of Transcendental Idealism and perhaps glimpse the necessity that drives the fragmentary imperative of its minor literature.

The Historical Motivation of Incompleteness We begin with the theorem Schlegel posits on the basis of his philological studies2 and brings with him to Jena, a thesis on which the Circle cuts its teeth: the break—aesthetic, epistemic, and ethical—between modern and classical poesy.3 As with the strategic relation between fragment and system, Early Romanticism's critical fissuring of history into ancient and modern practices obstructs purposive developmental models of Enlightenment historiography that accompany grand narratives of consciousness as their epiphenomenon. In the Introduction to Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftskhre, Fichte provides an example of such thinking, citing the genealogy of the Wissenschaftslehre, which Schlegel pillories rather than parodies in the essay "On Incomprehensibility." This break or fissure provides a critical venue that remains a princi-


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pal contribution to subsequent critical literary research. For into this fissure, by means of this break in the continuity of authority of the works of tradition, modern reflection inserts itself, occupies a site from which to resist the dictates of positive fact, and first gains the measure of freedom to survey and to compare salvaged from reflective judgment, a freedom that signals the modern, Romantic criticism of Jena. And this split or break in the authority of tradition, this unbridgeable rupture of the grand narrative of development, remains the principal characteristic of the age Schlegel names interchangeably the "romantic" and the "modern." This terminology signals the disruption of the immanent unity of authoritative knowledge expressed by the Idealist system and opens the field of modern poesy to reflective critique, which is, as Kant had insisted, free of the yoke of authority and capable of disinterested reflection. A summary account of Schlegel's theory of historical rupture is presented in the essay "Concerning the Essence of Critique" (included in Part II, for the first time in English translation). This text is a section of a little-known essay written as the preface to a hack edition of Lessing's work dating from 1804. Many of the concepts found there, however, are abstracted from a much fuller account given in the preJena essay, "Concerning the Study of Greek Poesy" (1795). The "Study" takes its departure from a debate that, despite its various permutations, has lost none of its pertinence to contemporary literarycritical disputes: the relative value of "classical" and "modern" art. Indeed, the familiar stridency of tone evidenced by the following quotes from the "Study" support the contention of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Literary Absolute that we are still within Romanticism, for the clamor of the ongoing, and perhaps uninterrupted, culture wars echoes familiarly across the intervening two centuries.4 In the "Study," Schlegel characterizes modern, Romantic poesy as follows: The borders of science and art, of the true and the beautiful, are so confused that conviction in their permanence has begun to weaken almost everywhere. Philosophy poeticizes, poetry philosophizes: history is treated as creative fiction and creative fiction as history. Even the genres exchange their features with one another; a lyrical mood becomes the object of a drama, and dramatic material is forced into lyrical form. And this anarchy does not remain on the periphery; rather, it covers the entire field of taste arid art. Creative talent is restless and unsteady; indi-

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vidual as well as public receptivity is always at once insatiable and discontent. Theory itself seems altogether doubtful of a fixed point in the unending change. or:

Characterlessness is the sole character of modern poesy, confusion is what its mass has in common, lawlessness the spirit of its history, and skepticism the result of its theory. (My translations)

Despite its treiichancy, Schlegel's characterization of the modern, the romantic in the "Study" remains within an analytic mode, unencumbered by nostalgia for the classical, refusing to call for a return, resisting incrimination of persons or professions that have opened the gates for the barbarians to destroy the temple whose portals are inscribed "to the Good, to the True, to the Beautiful."5 Eschewing all sentimental chatter about the golden age, refusing to engage in personal or professional indictments, Schlegel presents the evidence for fragmentation as the characteristic of the modern, romantic period. And he finds it exemplified in the artistic and critical materials modernity has produced. These productions, moreover, take their character not from individuals or schools but from their episteme, accessible only through the comparative study of culture, ancient and modern. There are many examples similar to the quotes just given, all of them suggesting that what Schlegel called "the modern" in 1795 can be recognized in its current epithet, the "postmodern." And as with those of the best contemporary commentators on this topic, Schlegel's remarks are designed precisely to cancel out the evaluative potential of this split, for they are directed entirely to working out the knowledge-theoretical possibilities of the periodization scheme. Schlegel's paradigm for classical art, on the other hand, is the cultural production of ancient Greece, epitomized by, but not restricted to, the literature of sixth- and fifth-century Athens—including Solon, the Tragedians, the Comics, and the Philosophers—the material with which Schlegel occupied himself during the earlier philological studies.6 Although it is true that the precept of taste informing Schlegel's interpretation of the classical is perhaps best summed up in Winckelmann's phrase, "noble simplicity, quiet grandeur," and although there are decided elements of nationalism in his scholarship of this period,


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to his credit Schlegel refuses to follow what he calls Winckelmann's "mysticism" (Philological Fragment 35) to account for the unifying features of the cultural production of the period.7 Schlegel pursues instead the aesthetic, the epistemic, in short, the poetological basis of this archaic, unmodern unity of cultural sentiment, which survives in its literary and artistic production, that is, in its poesy.8 Turning away from Winckelmann's explanatory concepts of climate and race, Schlegel locates the basis of the unity of classical poesy in what is recognizable in the "Critique" essay as the sensus communis aesthetica underlying classical Greek culture; in other words, the uniformity of feeling and judgment concerning the production and reception of art, which for Kant, too, had been the central concern of the humanities (see Philological Fragments 159, 163, and section 60 of the third Critique). Schlegel posits the uniformity of affective and critical response in classical poesy, a uniformity Philological Fragment 80 may be naming philological affect, to account for the unity perceived in Greek cultural production, and here we pick up the argument elaborated in the "Critique" essay in this volume. The group of exiled scholars working in Egypt (ca. A.D. 350-650)— the "Alexandrian critics," as Schlegel calls them—were Greeks who shared, if not the capacity of their forebears to create art, at least the same language and critical sensibility, the same capacity for philological affect. This criticism he regards as productive in its own right. On the basis of this shared sensus communis, the Alexandrian critics were able to retrieve, organize, and emend many of the surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments of that vanished period of Greek classicism into an organized and thus unitary body of work. Important to note in this regard, however, is that Schlegel never characterizes the textual labor of the Alexandrian critics as a restoration of the previous form. Whatever unity is achieved in this project is at best a critical unity and suffices merely to transmit a critical presentation of classical culture. The critical presentation alone is unified. Schlegel is clear about the incompleteness of the image these critical productions convey, and their achievement cannot be mistaken for the culture itself, which, he stresses, has vanished. At best "images of the age," as Athendum Fragment 116 describes them, are accessible to Romantic reflection, fragments—and this term now includes the critically reassembled texts—of the whole of Greek life transmitted through immense textual labor. Only an episteme exhibiting orderly

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and systematic relations between its parts could be critically represented in this manner. The contrasting term to the classical is, of course, the romantic. And we saw in the quotes from the "Study" of 1795 that the term is to be understood in contrast to the classical as an episteme exhibiting no orderly and systematic relations between its parts. The later essay "Concerning the Essence of Critique" brings a restatement of the characteristic feature of the romantic-modern episteme, a feature that signals the rupture of the functional relation between affect and script exhibited by the classical. For within the vanished sensus communis aesthetica, certain rhetorical formulas, those of the tragedians, for example, produced predictable affective responses within the community. And precisely the unity or systematicity of the relations between artistic presentation and affective response that survived in the Alexandrian critics enabled them to perform their conserving work. By proceeding from a homogeneous affective register that reliably conserved classical aesthetic judgments, the Alexandrian critics pieced together manuscripts out of fragments by means of a studious and detailed method that Schlegel calls "cyclical reading" (Philological Fragment 73). Under the romantic episteme, however, the Greeks' "natural sensibility" and its common set of myths (Dialogue on Poesy) in which the sensus communis aesthetica was grounded have no counterpart. Instead, the "modern" sensibility is confounded by what Schlegel calls "a huge mass of utterly worthless and incompetent writings," writings that elude general critical agreement while breaking apart the unity of judgment regarding aesthetic value. Within the romantic episteme sensus communis is absent and no longer functions as the ground of a unified artistic sentiment, on the one hand, or critical judgment, on the other. With its demise, the systematic relations between art, knowledge, and morality characterizing the unity of classical life disintegrate into an aggregate, into structurally differentiated, semiautonomous realms of human activity warring for preeminence.9 Hence, rather than evaluating incompleteness as a sign of inability, instability, or methodological inattention in Early Romantic writing— the first two epithets may be in play, the last definitely is not—the refusal on the part of the Jena Circle to promulgate a programmatic statement of a Romantic project can also be read as a necessary operating principle, that is, as a methodological commitment to the neces-


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sity of incompleteness characterizing the modern, or romantic episteme. And we have gained something in our knowledge of Romanticism, perhaps, when this manifesto gap ceases to surprise or disappoint. Indeed, we can read in it a signification that is very much present in literary-critical studies at the close of the twentieth century, namely, a predisposition for the petit recit,w the narrateme as opposed to narrative, a rejection neither Fichte nor his successors contemplate of an absolute epistemic narrative, complete with an origin of consciousness and a destiny.

Documenting Incompleteness The refusal to give the last word, this refusal to desire to present a manifesto, can be documented in every Early Romantic text, even those that express systematic tendencies. The Dialogue on Poesy, for example, presents a meeting of compatriots interested in reading and writing, perhaps much like those of the Jena Circle itself.11 Yet only by isolating the formal presentation of a single presenter and identifying its position with the proper name and supposed authority of one or the other member of the Jena Circle can anything like a systematic presentation of a whole view be found. Even then, the presentation chosen for the attribution "essential tenet of Romanticism" gains its authority alone by recourse to biographical material, that is, claiming to find, for example, Friedrich Schlegel's opinions in one section or the other and basing that passage's supposed authority in his position as "leader" of the Circle. Yet even granting this extraliterary machination, any one section of the Dialogue renders at best the presentation of a single topic on a single day, and within the full text of the Dialogue no presentation escapes without criticism from the interlocutors, just as none elicits more than partial agreement. Under the modern episteme, it could not happen differently, and hence the Dialogue on Poesy refuses to provide us with the essence of Romanticism or its concept. Another candidate for the missing Romantic manifesto is the Athenaum essay "On Incomprehensibility." Unfortunately for its candidacy, it comes at the end of the Athenaum series rather than the beginning, thus appearing more as a swan song, or, perhaps better, a parting shot at thejournal's many well-placed detractors.12 Although this essay is certainly the systematic presentation of a general view attributable

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to the Jena Circle at the height of Friedrich Schlegel's authority, it resists, by the nature of its chosen theorem, allowing itself to be transformed into a program; for its irony, which is perhaps its most systematic element, subverts the isomorphic potential of the binary pair comprehension/incomprehension on the basis of which an epistemic system might be grounded. Furthermore, the call to "reading"—at once the rhetorical high point of the essay and its categorical imperative—flies in the face of an earnest insistence on plainspeak, which the fragments of the journal's earlier issues had elicited from a displeased German intelligentsia. But if the essays offer us no manifesto, no single key to the identity of Early Romanticism, the fragments entice us by offering a feature of the Early Romantic corpus relevant, at least, to the search for a manifesto. Precisely this most Romantic of genres offers a sampling of theorems representative, if any body of texts can be, of the whole of Early Romanticism. Perhaps the fragments themselves should be regarded as a kind of manifesto; perhaps a genre, if its features can be described adequately, can function as a manifesto. This seems to be the position of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, for example, in The Literary Absolute. The conceptual power promised by locating a representative sampling within an identifiable genre is mitigated, however, by the very range and scope not merely of the themes of the fragments, but of their moods, voices, modalities, and—with respect the Athenaum Fragments, at least—the collective nature of authorship of a group famous for disputes, variant readings, and expulsions. Furthermore, the problem of identifying the corpus of fragments, that is, establishing them as an identifiable genre within Early Romantic writing, proves to be a daunting task. It requires, for example, answering the initial question as to whether this corpus is one or many. The authors of The Literary Absolute attempt such a rigorous delineation of "the romantic fragment" from the tradition of aphoristic writings, "the Chamfortian genre," as Schlegel calls it (with reference to Sebastien Chamfort [ 1740—94], a famous author of aphorisms), which they credit with initiating the Early Romantic deployment of this mode of fragmentary writing. Such distinctions as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy attempt are difficult to uphold, however, even within their target group, the Athenaum Fragments. As we have seen, the "Fragment of the Three Tendencies," for example, returns in the essay "On Incomprehensibility." Other


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fragments as well find subsequent elaboration and incorporations that should contradict their "essential fragmentation," as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe attempt to define it.13 Some fragments, indeed, appear to approach the "perfect sentence" of the Chamfortian aphorism, complete with a strong element of the homily, yet another attribute denied them by the rigor of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's attempted delineation. And it appears extremely doubtful that, as these authors suggest, the "posthumous fragments" should not be regarded as "romantic fragments" merely because they were not published during the lifetime of their author. The contingence of publication, the same in today's literary market as in the Athendum's market—a successful veto by another group member, the lack of space, time, and money, or pressures by powerful literary figures to abandon the mode altogether—should scarcely be allowed to determine a fragment's status as a "romantic fragment." Yet even if agreement respecting the number of the corpus of the fragments seems far off, perhaps there exists a single, incontestably essential fragment that presents what might be identified as a Romantic manifesto. And indeed, the Circle provides such a candidate. Of the many and varied texts of Early Romantic writing, it is perhaps Athendum Fragment 116 that comes closest to fulfilling this expectation. Beginning as it does with the promising scholastic form of a definition ("Romantic poesy is ..."), this fragment, with its characteristic turn of irony, at once denies the possibility of its own essence and details the operations that enforce its fragmentation as manifesto. In the passage of this fragment concerning the operation of modern poetic reflection—itself one of the most often repeated topics of Early Romantic writing—this necessity suggests itself: Only romantic poesy can, like the epos, act as a mirror of the entire world that surrounds it, and become an image of the age. And yet it is also romantic poesy that can hover on the wings of poetic reflection between the presented [Dargestellteri\ and the presenting [Darstellenden], free from all real and ideal interest, and continually raise this reflection to a higher power, thus multiplying it as in an endless row of mirrors.14

The epos, the fragment tells us in this passage, is capable of presenting an image, a still reflection of an age. This would be a picture, perhaps like the Iliad'?, description of Achilles' shield, stabilized by an authoritative perspective grounded in the sensus communis aesthetica of

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the classical episteme to which the term "epos" refers.15 Romantic poesy has this imaging capacity as well, but with the essential qualification that Romantic poesy is able to, indeed, at its best, must "hover on the wings of poetic reflection." Unlike the classical epos, therefore, it does not rest in the completed perspective of a single, unified, and self-identical "presented," nor in any stage of "presenting," or synthesizing, the image. Romantic poesy, on the other hand, is itself characterized by what can be recognized as an "ecstasy" entailed by the nonisomorphic structure of its concept of reflection.16 Romantic poesy, and the species of reflection it constitutes, spill out of the containment implied by perspectival completion of naturalism as well as the interpretive synthesis of any given hermeneutic. Because it does not rest or find its final expression, the productions of romantic poesy are not suitable for imitation as a finished work would be.17 Remaining, moreover, the object of "poetic reflection," the image produced by Romantic poesy is itself amenable to being taken up by a "higher power" of reflection on the previous image, "multiplying it as in an endless row of mirrors" in a series of subsequent treatments, including critiques and reviews that constitute such an essential and equally valued genre of Early Romantic poesy. Important to note is that the metaphor of reflection detailed in this passage precludes the possibility of the mere reproduction of a phenomenal object in "inner sense," the medium of reflection since Shaftesbury introduced the term from Empiricist epistemology into aesthetic theory early in the eighteenth century.18 For each Romantic reflection contains not only the completed work, "the presented." The central feature of Romantic reflection is that its novel productions site the work in relation to its "presenting" as well. And this site, which at a subsequent stage of reflection now includes the presented together with the presenting, itself becomes the object of further reflection in an endless process. The model of reflection presented by Athenaum Fragment 116 requires us to recognize the functional relation in the Early Romantic concept of poesy between the production and the critical reception of texts, a relation that inevitably produces a certain confusion of genres. We will return to the infinite structure of Early Romantic reflection and the textual model on which it is based in the concluding section, where Fichte's concept of reflection will be distinguished from Early


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Romantic reflection by way of Athenaum Fragment 116; for, as Walter Benjamin suggests, this distinction is the site of the specificity of Early Romantic reflection and provides it with a certain genetic account. Athenaum Fragment 116, and the structure of reflection presented in it, serve to distinguish the salient features of Early Romantic writing from Fichte's Transcendental Idealism.

Concerning the Historical Specificity of Early Romanticism All the remarks thus far concerning the absence of a Romantic manifesto have tacitly supposed that we know at least the successive stage that Early Romanticism occupies in literary history; that is, we know how to distinguish it at least from what came before it, if not from what came after it—if The Literary Absolute is right and we are still "within" Romanticism. We have assumed up to this point that the search for the manifesto depended on finding a text located somewhere within the corpus of Early Romantic writings that was properly configured as a manifesto. The search thus far has raised the problem of how to identify Early Romanticism. The problem of distinguishing Early Romanticism from Transcendental Idealism is perhaps the basic literary historical starting point for an introduction to the texts collected in this volume and for the fragments in particular. And if, after the discussion of what Early Romanticism is not, there remains a question as to what it is, perhaps, as with the question regarding the absence of a manifesto, it will be seen that the essential incompleteness of Early Romanticism is not a fault, but rather a fundamental challenge to the practices of reading and writing in the period of the late Enlightenment. For Early Romanticism remains, in principle, underdetermined. As Benjamin reminds us of Romanticism, "Only those can work in it who have their own convictions about what it is."19 As I have argued, the thesis concerning incompleteness as a methodological commitment of Early Romanticism derives in part from the literary-historical investigations Schlegel initiates in his early philological studies. The significance of these investigations derives in turn from their recognition of a break or rupture—an essential discontinuity—between the classical and the modern, a recognition now taken for granted in every historical inquiry in which the interpretation of the past by a current idiom is regarded as an epistemological

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problem. Thus it seems puzzling that the technical as well as the terminological development of Early Romanticism was spurred, nonetheless, by Fichte's epochal Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftskhre, a text for which both the atemporality of the forms of intellection and the narrative of continuous philosophical development are crucial assumptions. By revisiting the topic of reflection introduced in the discussion of Athendum Fragment 116, and by attempting to determine in greater detail how the structure of Early Romantic reflection distinguishes itself from the structure of reflection presented by Fichte's idealist manifesto, we may gain in our understanding of the historical specificity of Early Romanticism.

Reflection and Incompleteness The philologeme of choice to distinguish the writings of the Jena Circle from Fichte's work is reflection; it is an intersection at which Early Romantic writing meets with and departs from Transcendental Idealism. From this intersection, too, the relation between reflection and incompleteness derives its consequences, for the trajectory of Jena's reflection concept springs the bounds imposed by the Wissenschaftslehre\ Absolute I, the willful contradiction on the basis of which its foundational system rests (see the Philosophical Fragments, especially 2, 9, 13). By refusing to acknowledge the authority of the Absolute I, modern, Romantic reflection imports infinity into its epistemic structure, which in turn makes any of its productions necessarily incomplete, and brings down on itself the long-standing charge of irrationality. More precisely, however, this point of intersection between Jena Romanticism and Transcendental Idealism must be sought in a certain writing about reflection. For this slight shift of emphasis makes legible an aspect of the "fragmentary exigency"2" present in all Early Romantic writing—an aspect directly opposed to Fichte's system and particularly to its form as manifesto. Early Romantic writing rarely departs from its self-understanding as poesy, and, unlike its role in the project of the Wissenschaftskhre, Early Romantic writing conceives itself as more than a mere carrier of thought. For Jena poesy, writing is a displacement, a mediation, an activity at one remove from the reflection of "inner sense" that the Wissenschaftskhre presumes to manifest. Thus, as with the absence of a manifesto, once again there is a lack in Early Romantic writing, irremediable and permanently principled, that


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sunders any systematically representable relation between thought and being, concept and sense. And if the idiom of such a description sounds too current, too much at one with a passing poststructuralist fashion, it may at least serve to call attention to the poetological concerns of Jena Romanticism. But the concluding task of this introduction to Jena Romanticism's fragments is to distinguish Early Romanticism from Fichte's system of Transcendental Idealism—that is, to begin to find out what Early Romanticism is not in an effort to determine, preliminarily, what it might be. On the basis of Walter Benjamin's study on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism, it is possible to say that although the structure of reflection as well as its function differs essentially between Fichte and Schlegel, there is, nonetheless, a substantial area of agreement between them. Benjamin writes of the connections between these texts: "Here it concerns noting with precision how far the Romantics follow Fichte in order to recognize clearly where they break with him."21 Benjamin's monograph presents the essential similarities between Transcendental Idealism and Early Romanticism, while allowing a significant point of departure between them to emerge. An emphasis common to Fichte and the Early Romantics, as Benjamin's argument points up, is the deployment of the conceptual figure of "reflection" to secure "direct knowledge" (unmittelbare Erkenntnis), a term that supplants the discursive and problematic "judgment." The agreement breaks down immediately, however, concerning the proper object of this reflection. The proper object of reflection in the Wissenschaftslehre is a thought, the positing of the Absolute I together with its genealogy of self-contradiction. For such a task, writing is at best a cumbersome, at worst a treacherous, mode of conveyance. For Early Romanticism, on the other hand, it is writing's mediacy—its nature as poesy—that guarantees the endlessness of reflection. But the significance of "reflection" is perhaps best seen by referring to the knowledge-theoretical model of Kant, against which both Fichte and the Early Romantics, though with vastly different aims, were responding. The goal of Kant's first Critique had been to demonstrate that reason pays for its certainty with respect to human knowledge with a principled limitation: its scope may not go beyond the phenomenal qualities of objects to include their noumenal features. This restriction, however, does not apply equally to subjectivity's knowledge of itself. In

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the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), for example, Kant argues that human beings have direct intuitive knowledge of space and time in the "inner sense" of introspection. These two conditions of all phenomenal appearance are the a priori judgments constituting "the subjective structuration of our minds." This intuitive certainty with respect to the fundamental structures of experience provides the basis on which the operations of subjectivity construct the shared experience of the world of phenomenal objects and the knowledge of them given by Newtonian physics, for example. With respect to nature itself, as opposed to the phenomenal constructions in experience, the judgments of human knowledge are limited; they may never specify the noumenal characteristics of things-inthemselves that underlie phenomena. Noumenal qualities are those that attach to "objects" independent of any specific local conditions affecting a subject and its space-time coordinates. Cut off from these noumenal qualities underlying the phenomena—synthetic a priori judgments—the predictive empirical statements of scientific knowledge would obtain only concerning phenomenal objects that the disciplines of knowledge themselves first constructed. Benjamin characterizes the historical situation of German philosophy in the middle of the i ygos with regard to this issue as follows: As soon as the history of philosophy in Kane asserted, even if not for the first time, nonetheless explicitly and with great force, the simultaneous possibility of thinking an intellectual intuition [i.e., of space and time in inner sense] and the impossibility of thinking it in the area of experience [i.e., the noumenal basis of phenomenal experience], a multifaceted and almost feverish effort emerged to win this concept back for philosophy as a guarantee of its highest claims. This effort went out primarily from Fichte, Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling.22

The noumenal remainder forever escaping human intuition and judgment, that unknowable x testifying to Kant's fundamental ambivalence toward the power of reason in its repeated critiques, was not to the taste of the "modern," post-Kantian generation of writers. By shifting the knowing moment to reflection from judgment, they effectively removed the limits Kant had placed on reason; by eliminating the noumenal remainder, they restored unity to the edifice of knowledge. Here Early Romanticism forms a strategic alliance with the claims for reflection and its capacity to restore the concept of a field of absolute knowledge for which Fichte and his successors


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strove.2' In the midst of this agreement, nonetheless, the paradigms of philology and poesy orienting the Jena Circle ensure that the Romantic Absolute is an absolute of mediacy that threatens any writing of a Transcendental Absolute. As indicated by the notes to the Preface of Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,the elimination of theDingn sichwas an aesthetic imperative of Idealist philosophizing, one which the Jena Circle shared. And the disruption to the unity of knowledge that the thingin-itself brings with it doubtless underlies Schlegel's pointed remark that Kant is a "half-critic" (Philosophical Fragment 10), for, by his own standards, the first requirement of critique is to posit a unity within which judgment may establish the systematic relations of parts to whole. The strategy for eliminating this noumenal remainder and rendering the entirety of knowledge as a unified whole—both in the Wissenschaftslehreand in the writings of the Early Romantics—is to situate reflection as the fulcrum of all cognitive, knowledge-directed mental activities. Both the writing of Jena Romanticism and Fichte's system replace the first Critiques emphasis on sense experience (howare synthetic a priori judgments possible?) with the concern for reflection and its capacity to intuit directly its related forms. The Jena Romantics, as Athendum Fragment 116 indicates, turn reflection to the broad field of poesy. Fichte, however, harnesses this reflective capacity to establish the "mystical" authority of the Absolute I, the certain knowledge of the mind's own activities. In direct opposition to Kant's focus on experience as the source of knowledge, which he shares with the tradition of philosophical Empiricism and with Newtonian physics, the Wissenschaftslehre constitutes an excursus into the transcendental composition of consciousness as such and for its own sake as the foundation of systematic knowledge. The transcendental consciousness deduced by Fichte produces at once the constitution of the subject of knowledge in its own right and its capacity to author the empirical qualities comprising knowledge. The transcendental subject, in order to be competent for certain phenomenal knowledge, must have a specific constitution. In other words, patterns of thought must necessarily demonstrate a definite configuration in order to account for the knowledge we have of the world. To this extent, Idealism can be understood as elaboration of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of Kant's first Critique, inverting, how-

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ever, the role of sense from the source of experiential knowledge to an idiom of transcendental consciousness that is governed by the strictures of theWissenschafislehre. For Fichte, therefore, this structuration of subjectivity is no longer of interest primarily as a transcendental guarantor of phenomenal certainty as in Kant's writing. For Idealism, this subjectivity authors all that is known and knowable, both of the mind's own structures and of the realm that Kant's analysis constructed as the phenomenal experience. The noumenal, as an irrational remainder, is eliminated, reunifying the system of knowledge. The faculty of judgment, the presentative faculty of sense that had negotiated the interface of the noumenal and the cognitive, is replaced by logically fixed typologies of reflection. The thing-in-itself also disappears in Romantic reflection, but as we saw in the discussion of Athendum Fragment 116, infinity is conserved, being brought over from the noumenal into the textual by the "presenteds," whose mediated linkages serve as a limitless source of objects for poetic reflection. Unlike the model of Athenaum Fragment 116, Fichte's subject construction remains the sole object of knowing in Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre. He seems convinced that the structure of its thought is comprised by universally applicable forms that must be discernible and specifiable by means of self-demonstrative theorems analogous to those of Euclidean geometry if the fields of knowledge constituting its content are to avoid skepticism.24 As Benjamin reads Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre, reflection is the autochthonous form of thinking out of which arise the many terminological distinctions that Fichte draws in his system.25 Tathandlung, Setzung, Gegensetzung, for example, are all species of reflection in that they each constitute an essential form of thought process that is graspable in its entirety by another form. Because these forms have as their sole content the previous level of form, they are capable of knowing each other directly, without encountering the split between a transcendental and an empirical consciousness. The subject-object model of experience typical of the Enlightenment epistemologies, including Kant's—but not of reflection-based idealist systems, nor of Early Romanticism—founders on a coherent and consistent explication of the problem of intuition, in spite of the recursion to the transcendental frame.26 For the subject's affective registration of a material particular resists by definition systematic ar-


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ticulation to abstract, general conditions elaborated for any and all particulars by concepts of the understanding.27 The architectonic proposed by the Wissenschaftslehre eliminates this aporia, at least from the "doctrine of basic science" itself, by distributing out the difficulties of organizing various classes of material particulars to the special sciences and their methodologies. In the Wissenschaftslehreproper, only the general, atemporal structures of mentation are at issue, and the role of reflection as a formal activity is designed precisely to eliminate the conundrums entailed by articulating empirical intuitions of material particulars with atemporal concepts. As Benjamin reads Fichte: "Fichte means here [in the Wissenschaftslehres discussion of formal reflection] an immediate and certain knowledge by means of a connection of two forms of consciousness (of the form and of the form of the form or of knowing and of the knowing of knowing)."28 If the Absolute I that Fichte assumes posits (setzi) a Not-I (Gegensetzung) in the constitutive act of consciousness (Tathandlung) ,2'' this Absolute I is capable of knowing its own formal construction completely, without remainder. As Dorothea Veit-Schlegel observes, "Anyone who is capable of grasping geometry will also be able to learn the Wissenschaftslehre, but precisely this is its limit—that it can be divided and comes out even."30 By subjecting reflection to the authority of the Absolute I as the formal operation capable of establishing an idealist ontology, Transcendental Idealism takes the consequent step toward completing the program implicit in the first Critique. By redirecting what Kant intended as the rationally necessary requirements of the phenomenal certainty exhibited by empirical science, Fichte's version of the transcendental deduction asserts consciousness as the author of a foundational system, not its critic. Kant's transcendental deduction operates within the boundaries set out by the heuristic nature of critique, seeking to provide a ground for the recursive yet productive reflection on sense, while leaving its noumenal source, the thing-in-itself, open and beyond the power of the ratio to think its entirety. Fichte's transcendental deduction, on the other hand, is directed toward absolute goals. He subjects reflection to the limiting concept of idealist systematic rationality, the authority of the Absolute I, beyond which reflection is unable to give account of its operations; for within the ontology of introspection, were reflection allowed to surpass the Absolute I, it would be unable to halt, suffering an infinite

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regress. For this reason, according to Benjamin, Fichte bans this aspect of endless reflection from the theoretical to the practical sphere, from which position the stability and surety of the edifice of knowledge are safely isolated from the ever-threatening endlessness of reflection. Jena Romanticism not only refuses to follow Fichte, but institutes a series of strategies designed to counter and forestall altogether the closure toward which systematic idealism tends. The model of reflection in Athenaum Fragment 116 is, on the other hand, scarcely one that can "come out even." Its orientation to critique, a topic that crosses the spectrum of Early Romantic writings, instances itself most frequently as textual critique, and displays what I referred to as the "ecstasy" of Early Romantic reflection to the fullest. Unlike the idealist species, Romantic reflection does riot seek to maintain its self-identity by imposing restrictions on the scope of its own activities of positing or subsuming related forms; for it regards its subjection to the presented, even if the presented is the Absolute I, as an abridgment of that freedom it regards as "its first law." On the contrary, modern, Romantic reflection finds itself confronted with works, with objects of which it claims no authorship. It finds itself situated, moreover, within an endless web of such presented objects, each of which gives evidence of previous reflection and hence relation to it by kind. Yet these presenteds are not of its own making; and in the process of reflecting on these previous reflections, it generates an unforeseeable sequence of subsequent ones. In both retrospecting and prospecting, Romantic reflection finds itself irretrievably mediated through prior and subsequent presentations of textualization, each bearing the unmistakable signs of reflection that offer the opportunity for direct knowledge. Yet each presented exceeds the authority of Romantic reflection, and the direct knowledge of any particular presentation requires, as Athenaum Fragment 116 stipulates, the critical authorship of romantic reflection in which the work or object is disarticulated and held up against a new reflection. Such an infinite web of previous and subsequent reflections comprises the best referent for what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy intend as the "literary absolute," and if, as they assert, the goal of this process is to produce a totality subjected to an "eidaesthetics," this goal has no more than regulative force, as the "idea" had for the Critiques. Early Romantic reflection, as documented by Athenaum Fragment 116, cannot have as its object an ahistorical structuration of the Ab-


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solute I that Fichte's model proffers, for the Romantic Absolute is itself a composite figure, even if each of its components contains a moment of "direct knowledge." The constitution of the Romantic Absolute entails the sum total of reflective trajectories, trajectories that elude calculation not only by their number and complexity, but by their contingency. If we assume, for example, the philological model indicated by Schlegel's discussion of the Alexandrian critics, the reflective activities of reading fragments and emending manuscripts intervene in a linear process that may have ended, as Schlegel thinks to be the case with early European vernacular literatures, with the final disintegration and loss of the written materials of that culture's episteme. Yet by linking the fragments of a vanished classical episteme with the romantic episteme, the project of critique carried out by the Alexandrian critics, with its inevitable and constitutive contingence exemplified by the discovery of bits of parchment and ink, nonetheless enables the transmission of reflections that themselves become works, objects, presenteds—textual materials for the reflective and critical labor of the "Romantic I." The philological model offered by Schlegel as the exemplum of critique obliterates the stasis and necessity governing any particular configuration of the Absolute I as Fichte's Concept desires it, while bringing to the fore a well-attested philologeme of Romantic writing, ranking with reflection and one ever so closely bound up with incompleteness, infinity. Of the importance of reflection for the Early Romanticism, Benjamin observes: "The Romantics grounded their epistemology on the concept of reflection not only because it guarantees the immediacy of cognition, but just as much because it guarantees the particular endlessness of its processes. Reflective thought achieved for them a special systematic meaning in that it makes each previous reflection into the object of a subsequent reflection."31 As we saw in the discussion of critical reflection as the character of Early Romantic poesy, the subsequent reflection takes as its object not simply the presented image itself, but the presented image together with its siting in a textual medium, its presenting. As long as the presented (Dargestellten) as well as the presenting (Darstellenderi) can be taken up as a subsequent stage of the process of reflection, the completion of the process of reflection—an aspect on which, for Fichte, its rationality depends—is threatened even while its claim to direct knowledge and the regulative force of the unity of knowledge remain intact.

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Jena Romanticism describes a modern, romantic episteme that recognizes flux as an essential characteristic of the age. In unromantic fashion, Early Romanticism seeks accommodation with this flux, inviting it into its knowledge-theoretical premises, and tapping its power to drive the production of modern poesy. The short-lived alliance with Transcendental Idealism provides Romantic writing with a postKantian idiom for the thinking of this flux, yet by breaking the authority of the Absolute I, Romantic reflection conserves the freedom asserted for reflective judgment in the third Critique. The fragmentation inherent in the labor of Romantic reflection conserves as well the imperative of unity expressed by critique; not by the constitutive means of a "willful positing of a contradiction," as Fichte's Absolute I attempts, but by appeal to the regulative force of the Absolute. Hence, the unity sought by Romantic reflection retains the poetological status native to the critique of reason; it follows that critique in resisting the impulse to manifest unity in a systematic articulation of sense and concept. For the "prospect of a boundlessly growing classicism" that Athendum Fragment 116 claims for Romantic reflection remains only a prospect; its achievement is deferred, meanwhile, by a practice of fragmentation designed to assure the autonomy of reflection from the "real" with which it is presented and the "ideal," the presenting, by means of which that real is interpreted. The "anarchy . . . covering the entire field of taste and art" that "Concerning the Study of Greek Poesy" ascribes in 1795 to the romantic, modern sensibility and the "skepticism" that is "the result of its theory" are harnessed at Jena to drive a modern critical method of reflection, whose maxims, nonetheless, bring forward into its modern idiom the ideal of the humaniora summarized in the closing section of Critique of Judgment. Kant's argument has established the importance of critical reflection, the general type of judgment on which aesthetic judgments proper rely: reflective judgment serves as the figure of extradisciplinary knowledge, which lies in cultivating our mental powers by exposing ourselves beforehand to what we call humaniora [the humanities]; they are called that presumably because humanity [Humanitdt] means both the universal feeling of sympathy, and the ability to engage universally in very intimate communication. When these two qualities are combined, they constitute the sociability that befits [our] humanity [Menschheit] and distinguishes it from the limitation [characteristic] of animals.32

Notes l.o Introductory Essay

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In the final Athenaum issue, "On Incomprehensibility" warns its readers that only "through reciprocal communication" can "social interaction engender relations and concepts of relations that themselves become objects of contemplation. These, upon closer reflection, in turn reproduce and entangle themselves, thus leading us away from this One Object." Whether this One Object be the Absolute I, the concept of racial supremacy, or economic utility, the strategy of incompleteness and its genre of the fragment incline toward breaking the authority of its gaze, opposing its power by turning reflection to the textual field, to poesy, to draw its comparisons, and by insisting that reflection remain free to frame its own critique according to its needs. "On Incomprehensibility" places great faith in a new generation of readers, a generation that negotiates the writings of the Jena Circle by means of the critical reflections adequate to its age. And if a strict reading of the essay's claim to "deduce" such a reader must be regarded as rhetorical, nonetheless the genres of Early Romantic writing, and that of the fragment in particular, contribute to conserving the autonomy of the humaniora, of the field of poesy, a field for which there is perhaps no concept available. For these writings provide a site of anamnesis, a site for remembering—rereading and rewriting—the fundamental poetological concerns of human knowledge: that the image of the age always presents itself as poesy, however prosaic its verse.

Notes to Introductory Essay 1. A good example of this resistance to organizational schemes is provided by Father Copleston's introductory discussion of "Post-Kantian Idealist Systems." Coplesion feels forced to include Romanticism under the heading of "Idealist Systems" even while admitting that system is more characteristic of idealism than Romanticism. His final means of distinguishing the two relies, unfortunately, on a binary opposition between "the philosopher" (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and "the artist" (Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis). See Frederick Charles Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Fichte to Hegel, vol. i, Parti (Westminster, Md.: Newman Bookshop, 1946—75), 29-38. 2. See Philological Fragments 73, 74, 80, 8a, 83, 98, (82 and 98 included in Part 111), as well as the discussion of the methodological importance of "cyclical reading" in "Concerning the Essence of Critique" (included in Part II), for one of many indications of Schlegel's methodological interest in reading. 3. It would be at cross-purposes with this essay to attempt a definition of Early Romantic "poesy," and, given the long usage of its English cognate, unnecessary. Opposed to the orality associated in the English tradition with poetry, Schlegel championed the

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composite and written character of "poesy." Ii' anything needs to be stressed, then, it is the written character of "poesy" for the Early Romantics. 4. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature, in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 5. For a contrasting treatment of current tendencies in literary and cultural theories, see Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 6. For an example of Schlegel's writing in this period, see "On Diotima" (in Part IV). 7. See the selections from Winckelmann contained, for example, in German Essays on Art History, ed. Gert Schiff (New York: Continuum, 1988). 8. This unity of sentiment derived in its turn from a commonly held and mythically supported relation to nature. See, for example, the section of the Dialogue on Poesy concerning myth (in Part II). 9. See the two-volume history of European modernity by Norbert Elias, The CivilizingProcess (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). 10. See Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) for more on the petit recil 11. Attention should be given to the refusal of the Dialogue on Poesy to pose as a transcription of an oral—that is, for Schlegel, secondary—mode of thought. In this regard, the diegetic markers strewn liberally throughout the seams of the Dialogue itself are of particular interest. 12. More on the antifragmenlary tendencies of the late Jena Circle can be found in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute. 13. See the exemplary case of the "Fragment of the Three Tendencies" (Afai6) in its incorporation into "On Incomprehensibility." A strict reading of the definition of "essential fragmentation" in The Literary Absolute would deny this fragment its status as a "Romantic fragment." 14. In the original, the passage reads: "Nur [die romantische Poesie] kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgcbenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dcm Oargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse, auf den Flugeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen." 15. Ci. the discussion of Achilles' shield as the presentation of the classical world in Hans Roberljauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 64-65. 16. Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community (ed. Peter Connor; trans. Peter Connor et al. [Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991]) defines ecstasy as "the impossibility, both ontological and gnosological, of absolute immanence . . . and consequently the impossibility either of an individuality in the precise sense of the term, or of a pure collective totality'" (6). On the concept of reflection, see Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 17. See Johann Christian Gottsched (Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982]) for a presentation of the Enlightenment poetics of imitation. I have in mind Gottsched's example in chapter 2 of the "famous Greek painter" who goes to a work of art, the text of the Iliad, in order to paint a convincing Minerva. Each of the genres of poetic imitation Gottsched outlines in chapter 2 relies on an idealizing schema in which "each and every finite thing has two sides, one


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good and one evil." If a writer were "to forget his intentions" in imitating a thing, he would lose his ability to judge and commit the excesses of the satirist on the one hand or the epigone (Lobdichter) on the other. This fate still befalls Romantic imitators. 18. See Shaftesbury's discussion of virtue and vice in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1964), and Kant's first Critique. 19. Review of Eva Fitzel, Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantih (Tubingen, 1927), in Walter Benjamin, Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung: Ausgewdhlte Schriften, 1920-40 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1984), 136-37. 20. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 57. 21. Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The concept of art criticism in German Romanticism) (Bern, 1920), 21; my translation. 22. Ibid., 13; my translation. 23. Almost certainly, this noumenal residue accounts for Schlegel's reference to Kant as a "half-critic" in fragment 10 of Schlegel's Concerning the Wissenschaftslehre. 24. See Fichte's invocation of Euclid in the Introduction to Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre. 25. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 17. 26. See Walter Benjamin's critique of this model in "Uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophic," in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 4, 2, 157-71. 27. See Benjamin's critique of the Enlightenment's concept of experience in "The Program of the Coming Philosophy." 28. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 15. 29. Fichte, Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre, i: 110. 30. For more on Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, see Lisa C. Roetzel's Introductory Essay to Part IV. 31. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 15; my translation. 32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Racket Publishing Company, 1987), 231.

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i. Friedrich Schlegel: Critical Fragments (1797-1801)' i. Many are called artists who are actually nature's works of art. 2. No people wants to see anything more on stage than its own unexceptional surface; one ought to oblige them with heroes, music, or fools. 7. My essay "Concerning the Study of Greek Poesy"2 is an affected prose hymn celebrating that which is objective in poesy. The worst thing about it is its complete lack of necessary irony. The best thing is its confident assertion that poesy is of infinite worth, as if this were an accepted fact. 9. Wit is unconditionally sociable spirit, or fragmentary geniality. 16. Genius does not derive from willfulness, but rather from freedom, as do wit, love, and faith, which in the future must become arts and sciences. One should demand genius of every person, however, without expecting it. A Kantian would call this the categorical imperative of geniality. 18. Novels like to end as the Lord's Prayer begins: with the Kingdom of God on Earth. 20. A classical text must never be able to be understood completely. But those who are formed [gebildet] and continue to form [bilden] themselves must always want to learn more from it. 21. Just as a child is actually a thing that wants to become a person, so too is a poem nothing more than a thing of nature that wants to become a work of art. 22. A single analytical word, even in praise, can immediately extinguish the most splendid flash of wit, whose flame only then can warm once it has glowed. 25. The two main principles of so-called historical critique are the postulate of baseness and the axiom of ordinariness. The postulate of baseness: everything that is great, good, and beautiful is improbable, because it is extraordinary and at the very least suspect. Axiom of ordinariness: as things are for us and around us, so must they have been everywhere, for everything is naturally this way. 27. A critic is a reader who ruminates. He should consequently have more than one stomach. 28. The sense (for a particular art, science, human being, etc.) is

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differentiated spirit; self-limitation is thus one result of self-creation and self-destruction. 32. The classification in chemistry of dissolution, according to which some things dissolve dry and others in liquid, can be applied in literature to the dissolution of authors who, after having achieved their highest point, must sink again. Some become vapor, others turn into water. 34. A flash of wit is a breaking down of spiritual materials, which had to be most intimately mixed prior to their sudden separation. The imagination must first be filled to overflowing with every kind of life before it is time to electrify it with the friction of free sociability so that even the slightest friendly or unfriendly touch can draw flashing sparks and glowing streams of light or crashing thunderbolts from it. 36. Whoever has not yet arrived at the clear insight that there could be an entity that is still completely beyond his own sphere, the sense for which he lacks completely; whoever does not have at least a vague sense of the place within the human spirit where this entity might reside—that person is either without genius or has not yet been educated [gebildet] to the classical within his own sphere. 37. In order to write about something well, one must no longer be interested in it. A thought that needs to be expressed prudently must be completely past; one can no longer be occupied with it. As long as the artist is inventing and is filled with enthusiasm, he is in an illiberal state, at least with regard to communication. He will want to say everything then, which is a false tendency of young geniuses or a prejudice befitting old fools. He thus fails to recognize the value and the dignity of self-limitation, which is the beginning and the end, the most necessary and the highest, for the artist as well as for all human beings. It is the most necessary because wherever one does not limit oneself, one is limited by the world, which is how one becomes a slave. It is the highest, because one can only limit oneself at those points and at those places where one has infinite power, self-creation, and self-annihilation. Even a friendly conversation that cannot break off freely at any moment, in an unconditioned and arbitrary manner, has something illiberal to it. A writer, however, who wants and is able to express himself purely, who keeps nothing to himself, and wants to say everything that he knows, is to be greatly lamented. There are only three mistakes one must avoid. Whatever appears to be and indeed should appear to be unconditioned arbitrariness, and thus nonreason [Un-

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vernunft] or superreason [Ubervernunft], must nevertheless at bottom be plainly necessary and reasonable. Otherwise, mood becomes obstinacy, illiberalism arises, and self-limitation becomes self-destruction. Secondly, one must not be too hasty at self-limitation, and one must make room for self-creation, invention, and enthusiasm until it has run its course. Third, one must not take self-limitation too far. 42. Philosophy is the actual home of irony, which one could define as logical beauty; for one should practice and demand irony wherever philosophizing takes place, in spoken or written conversations, as long as it is not completely systematic. Even the Stoics held urbanity to be a virtue. To be sure, there is also a rhetorical irony, which, when used sparingly, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics. But this form of irony is to the sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse what the splendor of the most brilliant oratory is to an ancient tragedy in elevated style. In this regard, it is poesy alone that can raise itself to the height of philosophy and is not grounded in ironic passages, as is rhetoric. There are ancient and modern poems that breathe the divine breath of irony consistently throughout. In them lives a truly transcendental buffoonery: internally, in the frame of mind that oversees everything and raises itself infinitely above all that is conditioned, even above its own art, virtue, or geniality; externally, in the execution, the mimetic manner of a good, ordinary, Italian buffo. 47. Whoever wants something infinite does not know what he wants. But the reverse statement cannot be made. 48. Irony is the form of the paradoxical. Paradox is everything that is simultaneously good and great. 54. There are writers who drink the unconditioned like water, and books in which even the dogs bear a relation to the infinite.3 55. A truly free and educated [gebildet] human being should be able to tune himself as he wishes—philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, classically or in the modern manner—completely at will, just as one tunes an instrument, at every moment and at every pitch. 60. All classical literary genres in their strict purity are now ridiculous. 65. Poesy is a.republican speech; it is a speech that is its own law and its own purpose, where all parts are free citizens and may vote. 68. How many authors are there among the writers? Author means originator. 75. Notes are philological epigrams; translations are philological

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mimes; some commentaries, where the text is only an impetus or nonI, are philological idylls. 80. In Kant's genealogy of originary concepts, I unhappily note the absence of the category of the "almost," which has without question had as much of an influence in the world and in literature, and has corrupted just as much as any other category.* In the spirit of the natural skeptics, this category colors all other concepts and intuitions. 84. From that which the moderns desire, one must learn what poesy should become; from that which the ancients do, what it must be. 85. Every author of integrity writes for no one or for everyone. Whoever writes so that this or that person will want to read him deserves not to be read. 86. It is said that the purpose of critique is to educate [bilden] readers! Whoever wants to be educated [gebildet] must, however, educate himself. This is impolite, but there is nothing to be done about it. 93. One sees in the ancients the completed letter [Buchstabe] of the whole of poesy; in the moderns, one has a presentiment of its spirit in the process of becoming. 103. Many works that are extolled for their beautiful continuity have less unity than a colorful heap of ideas that aim at one aim, animated solely by the spirit of one spirit. Yet these are connected by the free and equal coexistence in which, as the sages assure us, the citizens of the perfect state will someday find themselves; connected by that unconditionally sociable spirit that, according to the presumptions of distinguished persons, is now only found in what is commonly called, in such a strange and almost childish manner, high society. On the other hand, many a product whose coherence is never doubted is, as the artist well knows, not a work, but rather only a fragment, one or several, raw material, sketch. But the drive toward unity is so strong in human beings that at the point of creation the originator himself often adds on to what he cannot fully complete or unify, often very sensibly and yet in a way that is completely unnatural. The worst thing about this is that the things that one uses to drape over the already existing genuine pieces in order to create the illusion of unity are nothing but dyed rags. And if these pieces are skillfully and deceptively costumed and are veiled with understanding, then it is even worse. Then This applies to the categories of "more or less" and "perhaps." In the spirit of the followers of Garve, they color all of the other concepts and intuitions.

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even the chosen are initially deceived, who have a deep sense of the small amount of good and beautiful that can still be found sparingly here and there in writings as in actions. Now they must use judgment in order to arrive at the correct sentiment! No matter how quickly this analysis takes place, the initial, fresh impression is lost. 104. What is commonly called reason is only one kind of reason, namely, the thin and watery kind. There is also a thick and fiery reason that makes wit what it is and provides genuine style with elasticity and electricity. 106. Nothing is more lamentable in its origin and more monstrous in its consequences than the fear of being ridiculous. Hence, for example, the slavery of women and many other cancers of humanity. 108. Socratic irony is the only absolutely nonarbitrary and thoroughly deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it and to disclose it. This irony remains a puzzle to anyone who doesn't have it, even following the most open confession. It is not intended to deceive anyone but those who regard it as deception, and who either take pleasure in the delightful mischief of poking fun at the whole world or else become angry when they suspect that they themselves might also be meant. In Socratic irony, everything should be in jest and everything should be in earnest—everything candidly open, everything deeply hidden. Socratic irony springs from the union of a sense for the art of living and a scientific spirit, out of the coming together of a completed philosophy of nature and a completed philosophy of art. It contains and arouses a feeling of the indissoluble conflict between the unconditioned [Unbedingte] and the conditioned [Bedingte}, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. Socratic irony is the freest of all licenses, for by means of it one can transcend oneself; but it is also the most requisite, for it is unconditionally necessary. It is a very good omen if the harmonious, comfortably dull types have absolutely no idea how to take this constant self-parody, and disbelieve over and over again to the point of dizziness, taking jest precisely for earnestness and earnestness for jest. Lessing's irony is instinct; in Hemsterhuis it is a classical study; Hiilsen's irony arises from the philosophy of philosophy and is able to vastly exceed that of the others.4 112. The analytic writer observes the reader as he is; he calculates accordingly and develops his machines in order to have the desired effect upon him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader

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as he should be; he does not conceive of the reader as still and dead, but rather as lively and counteractive. He allows what he has invented gradually to come into being before his very eyes, or he entices the reader to invent it himself. He does not want to have a specific effect on the reader, but enters with him into the holy relationship of the tenderest symphilosophy or sympoesy/' 115. The entire history of modern poesy is a running commentary on the short text of philosophy: all art should become science and all science should become art; poesy and philosophy should be united. 117. Poesy can only be critiqued through poesy. Ajudgment of art that is not itself a work of art—either materially, as the representation of the necessary impression in its becoming, or through a beautiful form and a liberal tone in the spirit of ancient Roman satire—has no civil rights in the kingdom of art. 121. The simplest and most immediate questions—such as "Should one judge Shakespeare's works as art or as nature?" and "Are epic and tragedy significantly different or not?" and "Should art create deception or merely semblance?"—cannot be answered without the most profound speculation and the most learned history of art.6 123. The desire to learn something about art from philosophy is a thoughtless and immodest presumption. Many take it up in this way, as if they hoped to learn something new here. But philosophy cannot and should not do more than to make the given experiences and existing concepts of art into science, to raise the view of art, and to expand it with the help of a thoroughly learned history of art, and to produce that logical state of mind in regard to these objects that unites absolute liberality with absolute rigorism.

2. Friedrich Schlegel: Athenaum Fragments (1798)' i. Nothing is philosophized about more rarely than philosophy itself. 22. A project is the subjective seed of an object that is in the process of becoming. A perfect project should be both completely subjective and completely objective, an indivisible, living individual. In terms of its origin, it must be completely subjective, original, and only possible in this spirit. In terms of its character, it must be completely objective, physically and morally necessary. The sense for projects, which could

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be called fragments from the future, differs from the sense for fragments from the past only in its direction, the former being progressive, the latter regressive. What is essential is to be able to idealize and realize objects immediately and simultaneously, to expand them, and to a certain extent to explicate them internally. Because transcendental is precisely that which concerns connecting or separating the ideal and the real, one could say that the sense for fragments and for projects is the transcendental component of the historical spirit. 24. Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments from the moment of their emergence. 43. Philosophy is still moving in a much too straight line; it is not yet cyclical enough. 53. For the spirit, it is equally fatal to have a system or not to have one at all. It will therefore be necessary to join the two. 77. A dialogue is a chain or a garland of fragments. An exchange of letters is a dialogue on a greater scale, and memorabilia are a system of fragments. There is nothing yet that is truly fragmentary in material and form, and that is at the same time completely subjective and individual, and completely objective, and a necessary part of the system of all sciences. 78. Not comprehending usually arises not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of sense. i ] 6. Romantic poesy is a progressive universal poesy. It is not only destined to reunite the separated genres of poesy and to bring poesy into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It wants to—and also should—blend and merge poesy with prose, geniality with critique, the poesy of art with the poesy of nature, give life to poesy and render it sociable, make life and society poetic, poeticize wit and fill up and saturate the forms of art with every kind of genuine cultural material, and animate them through the oscillations of humor. Romantic poesy comprises everything that is in the least poetic, from the greatest systems of art that themselves contain multiple systems to the sigh, the kiss breathed out in artless song by the poetizing child. It can lose itself in what it represents to such an extent that one could conclude that its one and all8 is to characterize poetic individuals of all kinds, and yet no form exists as yet that would be suitable for fully expressing the spirit of the author. For this reason, many artists who merely wanted to write a novel end up more or less presenting themselves in rough approximation. Only romantic poesy can, like the epos, act as a

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mirror of the entire world that surrounds it, and become an image of the age. And yet it is also romantic poesy that can hover on the wings of poetic reflection between the presented and the presenting, free from all real and ideal interest, and continually raise this reflection to a higher power, thus multiplying it as in an endless row of mirrors. It is capable of the highest and the most multifaceted cultural refinement [Bildung] possible, and not only from the inside out, but also from the outside in; for romantic poesy organizes all parts of each thing, whose product is to be a whole, along similar lines, out of which arises the prospect of a boundlessly growing classicism. Romantic poesy is to the arts what wit is to philosophy and what society, interaction, friendship, and love are to life. Other genres are fixed and are capable of being classified in their entirety. The romantic genre is, however, still in the process of becoming; indeed, this is its essence: to be eternally in the process of becoming and never completed. No theory can exhaust romantic poesy, and only a divinatory critique might dare attempt to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free, and it recognizes this as its first law, that the willfullness of the poet tolerates no imposition of laws. The romantic genre is the only one that is more than a genre and that itself typifies poetic production; for, in a certain sense, all poesy is or should be romantic. 121. An idea is a concept completed to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continually self-generating interchange of two contesting thoughts. An ideal is at once idea and fact. If, for thinkers, ideals do not have as much individuality as the gods of antiquity do for artists, then all pursuit of ideas is nothing but a boring, tiresome dice game with empty formulas or, in the manner of Chinese bronzes, a brooding contemplation of one's own nose. Nothing is more deplorable and more contemptible than this sort of sentimental speculation without an object. At the very least, this should not be called mysticism, since this beautiful old word is so useful and indispensable for absolute philosophy, from whose standpoint the spirit views everything as a secret and a wonder, which from other standpoints it takes to be natural in theory and practice. Speculation en detail occurs as infrequently as abstraction en gros, and yet it is these two that give birth to all of the material of scientific wit, and are the principles of higher critique and the highest levels of spiritual edification [Bildung]. It is this great, practical power of abstraction that makes the ancients, who instinctively practiced it, actually ancient. It

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would have been futile for the individuals to express fully the ideal of their kind, if the kinds themselves, strongly and sharply isolated, were not allowed the freedom of originality. But to transport oneself willfully first into this and then into that sphere, as into another world, and not simply by means of the understanding and the imagination, but with one's entire soul; to renounce freely first this and then that part of one's being, limiting oneself completely to yet another; to seek and then find one's one and all, first in this and then in that individual, intentionally forgetting all others: only a spirit that contains a multiplicity of spirits and an entire system of personas can do this, a spirit within which the universe—which, it is said, germinates in every monad—has grown to fullness and matured. 137. There is a material, enthusiastic rhetoric that is infinitely superior to that sophistic misuse of philosophy, the declamatory exercise in style, the applied poesy, the improvised politics that is commonly given the same name. Its calling is to realize philosophy practically and not merely to triumph dialectically over practical unphilosophy and antiphilosophy, but to destroy them completely. Rousseau and Fichte forbid even those who only believe what they see to hold this ideal to be a chimera. 139. From the romantic point of view, even the abnormal forms of poesy, even those that are eccentric and monstrous, are valuable as materials and preliminary exercises to universality, if there is at least something to them, if they are at least original. 198. Formerly, nature was preached among us, and now only the ideal. We forget all too easily that these things can be intimately connected, and that in beautiful presentations, nature should be ideal and the ideal natural. 206. A fragment should be, like a miniature, completely separate from the surrounding world and complete unto itself like a hedgehog. 216. The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Scientific Knowledge,and Goethe's Mmferare the major tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offense at this combination, whoever cannot appreciate a revolution that is not loud and material, has not yet raised himself to die lofty, expansive view of the history of humanity. Even in our impoverished cultural histories—which, accompanied by a running commentary, generally resemble a collection of variants on a classical text, which itself was lost— many a small book to which the noisy crowds paid little attention at the time has played a larger role than any activity of the crowd itself.


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226. Since people are always objecting so strongly to hypotheses, they should at least attempt to begin history without a hypothesis. It is impossible to say that something is without saying what it is. By thinking facts, we already relate them to concepts, and it is not immaterial to which concepts. Knowing this, we determine and choose, among the possible concepts, the necessary ones to which we will relate facts of all kinds. But if we do not acknowledge this, then the choice remains an instinctive one, is left to chance, or is arbitrary and we flatter ourselves that we have a pure, solid empirical grasp completely a posteriori, when in actuality we have a most one-sided, most dogmatic, and most transcendent view a priori. 238. There is a kind of poesy whose one and all is the relationship between the ideal and the real, and which, according to the analogy of philosophical terminology, should be called transcendental poesy.9 It begins as satire with the absolute difference between the ideal and the real, hovers in the middle as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute identity of the two. We would place little value in a transcendental philosophy that was not critical, that did not simultaneously represent the producer and the product, or contain a characterization of transcendental thinking within the system of transcendental thoughts. In the same way, the poesy that unites the transcendental materials and preliminary exercises of a poetic theory of writing common to modern poets with the artistic reflection and beautiful selfmirroring that is found in Pindar, in the lyric fragments of the Greeks, in the ancient elegy, and among the moderns in Goethe—this poesy should also represent itself as a part of each of its representations, and should always be simultaneously poesy and the poesy of poesy.10 242. No one finds attempts to characterize the ancients as a whole paradoxical; but so little do they know that they would take note if someone asserted that ancient poesy is an individual in the strictest and most literal sense of the word, that its physiognomy is more distinctive, its manners more original, and it itself more uncompromising in its maxims than all of those phenomena combined which, in legal and social terms, we must and are supposed to accept as persons, indeed, even as individuals. Is it possible for us to characterize something other than individuals? Is that which from a certain given standpoint cannot be further multiplied not just as much a historical entity as that which cannot be further divided? Are not all systems individuals, just as all individuals are, at least in embryonic form and tenden-

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tially, systems? Is not all real unity historical? Are there not individuals that contain entire systems of individuals within them? 243. The mirage of a past golden age is one of the greatest obstacles to the approach of the golden age that is yet to come. If the golden age is past, then it was not really golden. Gold does not rust or weather: it arises again from all possible attempts at mixing and corruption, indestructibly genuine. If the golden age will not persevere endlessly, then it is better that it not begin, and then it is useful only for elegies bemoaning its loss. 255. The more poesy becomes science, the more it becomes art as well. If poesy is to become art, if the artist is to have exhaustive insight and systematic knowledge into his means and goals, into their obstacles and their objects, then the poet must philosophize about his art. If he is to be more than a mere inventor and worker; if, rather, he is to be knowledgeable within his field and capable of understanding his fellow citizens in the realm of art, then he must also become a philologist. 256. The fundamental mistake of sophistic aesthetics is taking beauty merely for a given object, for a psychological phenomenon. Of course, beauty is not simply the empty thought of something to be produced; for it is at the same time the thing itself, one of the originary activities of the human spirit. Not merely a necessary fiction, but a fact as well—namely, an eternal, transcendental fact. 281. Fichte's Theory of Scientific Knowledge is a philosophy concerning the matter of Kantian philosophy. Fichte does not speak much about its form, for he himself is a master of it. However, if the essence of the critical method consists in the fact that in it the theory of the determining faculty and the system of the determined stimulations of the mind [ Gemutswirkungen] form the most intimate union—just like the union of the thing and thought in a prestabilized harmony—then, with regard to form, Fichte could be a Kant raised to the second power as well, and the Theory of Scientific Knowledge substantially more critical than it seems. Above all, the new presentation of the Theory of Scientific Knowledge11 is at once both philosophy and the philosophy of philosophy. There may indeed be legitimate uses of the word "critical" that do not apply to all of Fichte's works. But when dealing with Fichte, one must, like him himself, look toward the whole without any secondary considerations, and toward the one thing that really matters. Only in this way can one see and grasp the similarity of Fichte's philosophy and the Kantian. And at the same time, one can never be too critical.


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288. We are close to awakening when we dream that we are dreaming. 290. Something is filled with spirit if the spirit is continually revealed in it, or at least reappears frequently in altered forms; and not merely once at the beginning, as is the case in many philosophical systems. 304. Philosophy too is the result of two contesting powers, poesy and praxis. Whenever these powers completely penetrate one another and fuse, philosophy emerges; when philosophy breaks down again, then it becomes mythology or throws itself back into life. It was out of poetry and laws that Greek wisdom arose. Some think that the highest philosophy could once again become poesy; it is even a common occurrence that ordinary people only begin to philosophize in their own way when they stop living. Representing this chemical process of philosophizing better, and whenever possible putting its dynamic laws completely into order, and separating philosophy, which must constantly reorganize and disorganize itself, into its living fundamental powers and returning it to its origin: these are what I regard as Schilling's actual calling. In opposition to this, I see his polemics, especially his literary criticism of philosophy, as a false tendency. And his aptitude for universality is not well developed enough to be able to find what it seeks in the philosophy of physics.12 305. Intention taken to the point of irony, and containing the arbitrary semblance of self-annihilation, is just as naive as instinct taken to the point of irony. Just as the naive plays with the contradictions between theory and praxis, the grotesque too plays with peculiar displacements of form and material, loves the semblance of the accidental and the strange, and coquettes with unconditioned arbitrariness. Humor deals with being and nonbeing, and its actual essence is reflection. Thus its closeness to the elegy and to all that is transcendental, but also its arrogance and its tendency toward the mysticism of wit. Just as geniality is necessary for the naive, so too is a serious, pure beauty necessary for humor. Humor prefers to hover over the light, clear streams of rhapsodies of philosophy or poesy, and flees cumbersome masses and disconnected parts. 345. It would be desirable for a transcendental Linnaeus to classify the different I's and publish an accurate description of them, together with illustrations, so that the philosophizing I would no longer be so easily confused with the philosophized I.13 366. Understanding is mechanical, wit is chemical, genius is organic spirit.

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391. Reading means satisfying the philological drive, and affecting oneself literarily. One cannot read out of pure philosophy or poesy without philology.

3. Friedrich Schlegel: Ideas (i8oo)14 4. Religion is the all-animating world soul of culture [Bildung]; it is the fourth invisible element next to philosophy, morality, and poesy, which, like fire when it is contained, quietly warms everything around it, and only breaks into terrible destruction through force and outside interference. 5. The mind can only understand something by taking it into itself as a seed, nourishing it, and letting it blossom and grow to fruition. So scatter holy seeds in the soil of the spirit, without excessive cultivation. 10. Ideas are infinite, independent, constantly in flux, divine thoughts. 11. It is only through religion that logic becomes philosophy; it is only from religion that everything comes that makes philosophy more than science. Without religion we will have only novels, or the folly that is now called the fine arts instead of an eternally replete, infinite poesy. 12. Is there such a thing as an enlightenment? The only thing that should be called enlightenment is if one were to bring forth a principle in the spirit of human beings like the light in our universe—indeed, not through artifice, but rather by deliberately setting it in free motion. 13. Only he who has his own religion, an original view of the infinite, can be an artist. 14. Religion is not only a part of culture [Bildung], a part of humanity, but the center of all other things, everywhere the beginning and the highest, simply the originary. 15. Every concept of God is empty chatter. But the idea of divinity is the idea of all ideas. 16. A religious man is religious only in the invisible world. In what form can he appear among humans? He will want to do nothing further on earth than to cultivate [bilden] the finite into the infinite, and thus, no matter what name his occupation carries, he must be and remain an artist.

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17. When ideas become gods, then the consciousness of harmony will become devotion, humility, and hope. 18. Religion must encircle the spirit of the moral human being, as if it were its element, and this bright chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is what we call enthusiasm. 19. It is the natural state of man to have genius; he too had to emerge from nature's hand in a healthy state, and since love is for women what genius is for men, we must think of the golden age as a time when love and genius were universal. 20. Every person whose goal and center of existence is the cultivation [bilden] of his mind is an artist. 21. It is characteristic of humanity that it must raise itself above humanity. 22. What are the few remaining mystics doing? They are forming more or less the raw chaos of already existing religion. But only a few of them, through weak attempts on a small scale. Let us do it on a large scale, from all sides with the masses, and let us awaken all religions from their graves and reanimate the immortal ones and shape them using the omnipotence of art and the sciences [Wissenschaft]. 23. Virtue is reason that has become energy. 24. The symmetry and organization of history teach us that humanity, as long as it has existed and developed, has always existed and developed, as an individual, a person. In this great person of humanity, God became human. 41. Nothing is more needed in this age than a spiritual counterweight to the revolution, and the despotism that it exerts on the human spirit by concentrating within it the greatest secular interest. Where should we seek and find this counterweight? The answer is not difficult; undoubtedly within us, and whoever has grasped the center of humanity there will have also found the midpoint of modern culture [Bildung] and the harmony of all of the sciences and the arts that have until now been segregated and at odds with one another. 46. Depending on how one sees it, poesy and philosophy are different spheres, different forms, or else the components of religion. For if an actual attempt were made to really unite the two, the result could only be religion. 72. In what you call the aesthetic, you are seeking in vain the harmonious fullness of humanity, the beginning and end of human cul-

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ture [Bildung]. Try to recognize the elements of formation [Bildung] and of humanity and worship them; above all, fire. 81. Every relation of the human being to the infinite is religion, namely, the religion of humans in the entire fullness of its humanity. When mathematicians calculate an infinite quantity, this is of course not religion. The infinite, conceived of in its fullness, is the divine. 95. The new, eternal gospel that Lessing prophesied will appear as a Bible, but not as a single book in the usual sense. Even what we call the Bible is, of course, a system of books. I might add that this is not an arbitrary expression! Or is there another word besides the word Bible, book pure and simple, absolute book, that can distinguish the ideal of an infinite book from the common idea of a book? Furthermore, it makes an eternally significant and even practical difference whether a book is merely the means to an end or an independent work, an individual, a personified idea. It cannot be the latter without something divine, and in this way the esoteric concept is in accord even with the exoteric; what is more, no idea is isolated, but it is what it is simply in the context of all ideas. An example will explain what I mean. All classical poems of the ancients are interconnected, indivisible, comprise an organic whole, and, seen correctly, are only One Poem, the only thing in which poetic art itself appears in perfection. Similarly, in perfect literature all books should only be One Book, and in such a book that is eternally becoming, the gospel of humanity and of culture [Bildung] will be revealed. 96. All philosophy is idealism and there is no true realism other than that of poesy. But poesy and philosophy are only extremes. Now, if one says that some people are plainly idealists and that others are decisively realists, then this is a very true observation.15 In other words, this means that there are as yet no completely educated human beings, there is as yet no religion. 98. Think of something finite formed into infinity and you have thought of a human being. 99. If you want to penetrate the essence of physics, let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poesy. 101. Wherever there is politics or economics, there is no morality. 117. Philosophy is an ellipse. The one center, to which we are now closer, is the autonomous law of reason. The other is the idea of the universe, and in this center philosophy touches religion.

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4. Friedrich Schlegel: Fragments on Literature and Poesy (i7g7) 16 2. Only through absolute progressivity (striving toward the infinite) does the sentimental become sentimental and of aesthetic interest.17 Otherwise it is of mere psychological, that is, physical interest, or of moral interest as a part of a worthy individuality. 3. All poesy that is not classical and not progressive is nature poesy—Shakespeare is the sentimental classicist, maximum of mimicry. 4. The opinion that the novel is not a poem is based on the proposition All poesy should be metrical. But, for the purpose of furthering progressivity, and for this purpose alone, an exception can be made to this proposition. The novel is a yet incomparably more mixed poetic melange than the idyll or satire, which do follow a specific law of mixture. 25. The different ways of reading: of a philologist, of a philosopher (logically, rigorously), and of a historian (aesthetically, critically)— the political and popular way of reading.18 27. Is the erotic, which moves toward the totality of unification (marriage), something like an essential component of the romantic genre, according to its origin? Does the reason for this already lie in the explanation given above? 30. Political correctness, the romantic addition of the erotic, intrigue, and theoretical influence render French tragedy a thoroughly modern product. The retention of the ancient mythos was a reproduction [Nachmachung], not an imitation [Nachahmung]; the omission of the chorus was an essential infidelity. 32. Three predominant genres: ( i ) tragedy for the Greeks; (2) satire for the Romans; (3) the novel the moderns. 33. Art itself would be a limitation for the highest beauty. 40. All prose is poetic. If one sets off prose from poesy completely, then only logical prose is properly prose. 42. The romantic author must also be rhetorical, something the classical author may never be. 43. The human spirit is itself an antithesis; the heart too has its antitheses. 71. According to their nature, all properly aesthetic judgments are

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and can be nothing other than decrees. We cannot prove them, but we must legitimate ourselves with respect to them. It is very certain that we should not judge bad works at all. 78. The great difference between the psychological capacity for representation and the technical objectivity of a character. (Sancho and Achilles.)19 86, Shakespeare's tragedies are mixtures of classical tragedy and the novel. 87. 90. Classical poets are at once synthetic and analytic. 92. Just as it is the goal of science to become art, likewise it is the goal of art finally to become science. 93. Until now, philosophy taught the artist only to know his purpose, to correct, elevate, and expand his spirit and thoughts. Once there is a material, synthetic psychology, science will serve as a guiding principle of experimentation as well, and will teach this psychology to know theoretically the means to the artist's ends—which, until now, he has only come to know through practice. 94. There is a way of receiving, away of sensing, analytically, and another, synthetically. The synthetic judgment of art must not merely be represented genetically, but must also be constructed as necessary. 96. The history of progressive poesy could only then be fully constructed a priori if it were completed; but so far we can only point to the history of modern poesy for a confirmation of the progressive idea, and derive suppositions from it. 104. Why should there not also be immoral people whom we tolerate just as we tolerate those who are unpoetic and unphilosophical? Only apolitical or antipolitical people are not to be tolerated. no. Modern aesthetics consisted for a long time merely of the psychological explanation of aesthetic phenomena. In this fact there lies at least an indication of the imperative that art should become science. One should rather seek the means of solving aesthetic tasks scientifically. 114. Ten years from now, Schiller's philosophemes will seem to those who are at the forefront like Garve's seem now. 125. Only the classical or the progressive deserves to be criticized. 126. A critical society would have to be comprised <entirely> of political cynics. Who else can stand up and say that circumstances, preference, sympathy, leniency, friendship never had the slightest


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influence on his judgment? 138. In humor there is an appearance of arbitrariness, which, however, must be based on laws. 144. Art, like critique, permeates all domains but has its proper seat in the aesthetic domain. There is an ethical, political, societal, logical, and art—but only in the aesthetic can art build works, permanent works. 146. Everything that rests on the opposition between appearance and reality, like the elegiac in Schiller's sense, is not purely poetic.50 157. There are three schools of a theory of art in Germany: ( i ) Aesthetics—Sulzer; (2) Winckelmann, Lessing, Moritz, Herder; (3) Kant and Schiller, pp. 167. Everything provincial is opposed to the classical; every European nation, however, is to be considered only as a province of modernity. 197. The construction of an individual entirely without characteristics would be a similar basis [for philosophy like Fichte's]. Pure history, on the other hand, characteristics without construction. 203. Goethe is not a modern but rather a progressive, thus simultaneously an ancient. 21 207. Sense is self-limitation and thus one result of self-creation and self-annihilation. 212. The concept of a conditioned, delimited wholeness is in no way contradictory. Thus the animal, the work, the person, everything, pp. 213. Undelimited wholeness is in the novel, that is, limited unwholeness, the striving toward it. 217. Ancient tragedy also does not strive toward the so-called unity of action. To have no action is an action. Actions are infinitely divisible. Unity is therefore a matter of arbitrary choice. We attribute unity to that action which is or seems to be whole in philosophical, poetical, and ethical terms, or which strives toward this wholeness. Political wholeness consists of absolute universality and liberality. All unity is practical and none is physical, though its coherence is. 218. The poet should know scientificallynot merely his object, that is,

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those on whom he wants to and should have an effect, but also the material that he presents, that is, human nature. 219. Historical unity lies in the unification of the physical and of all practical entities. 223. Semblance is the play of representations, and play is the semblance of actions. Pleasure is the material of the artistic impression; play and semblance the form. Pleasure is consciousness ofanimality(potentialized animality). <Senseis potentialized life, divided.> 225. We cannot deduce poesy from ethics or from logic; they all come simultaneously and are of equal birth. 226. Whatever does not annihilate itself is worth nothing. 227. That everything should become art belongs to the philosophy of praxis. 228. The theory of art [Kunstlehre] as absolute antithesis to the Theory of Scientific Knowledge [ Wissenschaftslehre]. 229. Naive — self-limited. 232. Goethe is a poetic Kant with grace; a criticizing empiricist of poesy. The first poetic universalist. 237. Almost everything comical rests on the semblance of selfdestruction. 244. Modern critique must tendjust as much toward the absolute as poesy does. 245. Typically, it is not critique but rather a declaiming enthusiasm that can be heard concerning particular passages, and ignorant wit that attacks the whole in polemical fashion. 246. There is also an absolute rhetoric; this lies at the basis of my Study?* 262. No Greek wrote for the reader. The most extreme of the contemptible opinions held by philosophers concerning poets is always the charge that they write for the masses 264. In Goethe the components of the modern and of the romantic are not at all separated. 268. 286. 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?


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287. The only pragmatic theory of art for the artists is the theory of the classical and the romantic. 343. All forms, even the strangest, must come again and receive new meaning. 347. Poems can be constructed a priori, and the idea that recipes can be given for writing poems is also correct. However, no one can make a poem according to a recipe who is unable to write one in the first place. 361. The fantastic romance is for sensuality and the imagination, the sentimental romance for the heart, the psychological romance for the understanding, the philosophical romance for reason. Wit must rule in these. In the psychological romance, the fantasy is stimulated to the point of overexcitement but moves within the fetters of the understanding. In the fantastic romance, on the other hand, fantasy provokes the understanding, derides reason, and gives the heart nothing. 390. Dithyrambs are already something modern.23 394. The romantic form is prosaic epos. 426. That naive which is merely instinct is silly; that which is mereintention, affected. The beautiful naive must be both at the same time. (Even if Homer had no intentions, his work and the nature that let it grow certainly do have them.) Everything naive is an expression of absolute individuality, exactly opposed to the objective. 24 443. The spirit of a work is always something undetermined, thus something unconditioned. Spirit is the specific unity and wholeness of an undetermined plurality of unconditioned features. Tone is the undetermined unity of the particularities. Form is a totality* of absolute limits. Material is a piece of absolute reality. Classical writings have no tone as such, only style. 467. It is a part of the concept of a wow?/that it can have no nationality. 469. Nationality and common (generalized, popular) morality are necessary properties of the rhetorical drama. 473. Matter, form, and style together construct the letter. <Style is spirit for the ancients.> 496. Each system only grows out of fragments. 498. Aesthetic polemics, as in my review of Wold^mar, is quite rare.25 512. The essence of the modern consists of absoluteness, of universality, and of the abstraction of tendencies.

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538. Cervantes's witwas still the golden age of innocence of the modern wit. 570. All education [Bildung] and all poesy are cyclical. The ancient cyclized, the modern cyclizing. 584. Romantic unity is not poetic but MYSTIC; the novel is a mystical work of art. 586. The romantic imperative demands the mixing of all poetic genres. All nature and all science should become art. Art should become nature and science.

Concerning the Theory of Prose 588. No one has yet said what prose really is. There is a prose of nature and a prose of art, as in poesy. There is poesy without meter ([Goethe's Wilhelm] Meister) and there is metrical prose ([Lessing's] Nathan [der Weise]). The basis of prose is dialectical, that is, logico-political—then grammatical. 592. In modern (German) prose, many things have come to signification that had lain deeply buried and that could not be signified in the classical languages. Concerning Criticism 621. Was there ever really a critic? Only the philosopher can be a critic. Fichte considers my critique, with respect to moral character, to be transcendent. 631. Characteristics is not historical;26 it considers its object as resting, being, as one indivisible whole. It considers history as flowing, becoming, to be joined together according to its parts, without condensing the whole. Critique is thus, as it were, potentialized history. 634. Everything that is to be criticized must be an individual—but individuality must be presented in the characteristics not historically but rather mimetically.27 635. Good critics and characterizers must observe correctly, conscientiously, and multifacetedly like the physicist; measure precisely like the mathematician; arrange things carefully like the botanist; dissect like the anatomist; separate carefully like the chemist; feel like the musician; imitate like an actor; embrace skillfully like a lover; comprehend like a philosopher; study cyclically like a sculptor, stringently

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like a judge, religiously like an antiquarian; and understand the moment like a politician, pp. 637. <Studyis an infinite potentialized reading. The kind of contemplation given to sculpture.> 640. Everything that must be studied cyclically is classical. 641. It is a poor way of thinking for authors to despise and deprecate the existing public and to ignore the ideal one. The public does not exist; this idea can at best be represented by that which we empirically call the public. 644. Study is like theory (unintentional, tangible contemplation), an unintentional reading, which becomes necessarily cyclical. 653.

5. Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments (i7g6) 28 i. blessed.29—Just as the Eclectic derides him, the Mystic in turn despises, even annihilates, the Eclectic. The Mystic can demonstrate conclusively to the Eclectic that the Eclectic is equal to zero in the philosophical domain, as he himself is equal to zero in the technical and historical domains. The Mystic can easily silence the Skeptic by showing him, as can readily be done, that he contradicts himself. Of course, this does nothing to relieve the suspicion of reciprocal destruction [ Wechselvernichtung]. This fact, however, does not bother the Mystic because, if he is consistent, he is indifferent about the communication of his system and is satisfied to be equal to zero in the technical and historical domains, since internally he is equal to i /o or infinite. This fact may, however, give the Eclectics the weapons they need to justify through skeptical methods their charge of nonsense, which arises only out of their incapacity. Aside from the relation of reciprocal creation, that of reciprocal destruction also takes place between the three positions. 2. If one is allowed to posit arbitrarily something unconditional, nothing is easier than to explain everything. For this reason, the Mystic actually achieves the positive component of the philosophical task. No one has understood this as well as the Greek Sophists and the modern Mystics, among them Fichte. This is a new reason why Mysticism is in-

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curable. It has in fact no interest at all in the technical and the historical. Bring the Mystic whatever you will from this domain in order to embarrass or confound him, and prepare him for conversion; he will smile and as easily as a child explain, solve—destroy—everything by means of his talisman. In fact, he is pope in his domain, and has the infallible power to open and shut heaven and hell with his keys. It is an inconsistency in Fichte that he takes an interest in the dissemination of his philosophy. 4. As regards philosophical capacity—absolute knowledge—Eclecticism and Skepticism lead to Mysticism, the abyss into which everything sinks. 5. The isms are incurable, but the Mystic, the Eclectic, the Skeptic can be cured is cyclical. (I have always read this way. Winckelmann.) Cyclical reading is the only kind of reading that deserves to be called study. 74. But what, then, is reading? Apparently, something philological.6''' 75. [...] Whoever makes a scientific work philological is a historian; but certainly only if the form is historical and not merely philological. The science arising from philology is called history. [. . .] 77. Each philologeme refers to an immeasurable quantity of conditioned, yes, often highly micrological, knowledge. This is the philological absolute. Through its constant connection to this absolute, philology becomes ideal. 79. Yet the smallest philologeme can be connected to the philological absolute from infinitely many sides and from infinitely many directions. Is the ability to do this philological spirit or sense? <What is spirit or sense? Is spirit something like sense raised to the second power?> 80. Reading means to affect oneself philologically, to limit or determine oneself philologically. But one could certainly also do this without reading.

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82. Reading means satisfying the philological drive. It is impossible to read out of philosophy alone, without philology. Also hardly out of pure artistic sensibility and the drive for art. 83. 85. Lexica are philological satires. Notes and scholia are philological epigrams, xenien.66 96. In sentimental philology just as in all sentimentality, such a stupid guilelessness, a disgusting vigor [Schwung]. 97. Running commentary is sentimental philology that, of course, also becomes naive. Ancient classical scholia are naive in the good sense. An open and yet unconscious admission of self-annihilation, of absolute nonunderstanding. 98. 105. [. . .] 118. Is a history of Greek visual art even possible"? Winckelmann never asked himself this question. 120. The most critical philologists read very philosophically without knowing it. They strive toward absolute understanding. 129. The classic pervades all faculties and components and sides of the human spirit. It is a particularly different form of education [Bildungsart], that becomes art, and thus must also be able to become science. It is, to be sure, only a part of history. 155. Author and public pp are literary concepts. Author, originator, discoverer, originary writer. To determine this, who might be one and who not, is no easy matter; the same holds true for public. 157. The litterateur stands in the same relation to authors as the antiquarian does to antiquities, the philologist and critic to the classics; he works for a public as the philologist and the critic work for the expert, the antiquarian for the lover of artifacts; and, lastly, the historian, in the common sense of the term, for the expert on history. <pragmatio 166. My view of the Greeks in particular, not merely the Romans, with whom I became acquainted later, is no doubt absolute critique, which I say with all modesty. [. . .] 167. The peculiar distinction and opposition between critique and

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interpretation! 67 What is interpretation but a communicated hermeneutic critique, lessons on the critique of sense? But all types of critique are indivisible. 170. The Arabs must have been entirely lacking in the concept of the classical. Otherwise they could not possibly have undervalued the original, according to existing translations. 172. The Arabs absolutize everywhere. What appeared useless to them, they destroyed immediately. 181. Philology never entirely perished. 183. That a sect of philosophers denied all value to the study of antiquity is the first dawning of a philosophy of philology. 190. There is a hatred of philosophy in the character of limited philology and vice versa. 199. Etymologizing orthography is the only critical etymology. The desire to distinguish arbitrarily between everything—for example, between ahnden [punish, avenge] and ahnen [forbode]—is very empirical and tasteless. 206. Socratic irony = the sense for the art of living [Lebenskunstsinn]. 212. Not to read cursorily in philology, to want to read only amendingly; this is like always demanding demonstrations in philosophy. 224. Winckelmann is the historian of the study of antiquity. (It seems that, for the moderns, everything begins with history.) My immediate interest is in mythology as part of the study of antiquity. Notes 1. Source: KA 2: 147-63. This selection ol fragments contains some ol Schlegel's earliest, published in i 797 in the journal Lyceum tier schonen Kunste, and fragments published later in August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel's Charakteristiken und Kritikenof 1801. [KA] 2. Uber das Studium tiergrivchischenPoesie (written in 1795; published in 1797). 3. Cf. Schelling in the Fichte-Schclling correspondence, where "unconditioned" is denned as all that has not been defined as particular. 4. August Ludwig Hiilsen (1765-1810), a German philosopher, was originally a follower of Fichte, and later took on the pantheism of the late Romantics. On Hemsterhuis, see note 32. 5. Poesy as defined by the Early German Romantics is "universal" (AF 116), going


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beyond the bounds of the established parameters of the aesthetic to include many forms of praxis. "Symphilosophy" and "sympoesy" are clearly contained within this rubric, and have to do with the praxis of philosophy and poesy between subjects. Cf. AF 112 and Novalis's Blutenstaub 20. 6. See A. W. Schlegel's Theory of Art (seventh lesson) for a discussion of the relationship between art and nature (included in this volume). 7. Source: KA 2: 167-239. Thejournal Athendumwas founded by A. W. Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel in 1798. The first two editions were published almost simultaneously in 1798, the first containing the fragments translated here. They are by a number of different members of the Schlegel circle, with the greater part of the fragments being attributed to Friedrich Schlegel. The remainder of the fragments were written by A. W. Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Novalis. Fragments 282—94 in particular are taken from Novalis's Blutenstaub. [KA] 8. As in other fragments, Schlegel does not say "essence" but "one and all" because of his belief that we can only approximate the infinite (i.e., all) through the individual. 9. Cf. the distinction between ideal and real, idealism and realism in Schlegel's Transcendental Philosophy (Part II). 10. Cf. Schlegel's "Letter on the Novel" at the end of the Dialogue on Poesy, where the novel must simultaneously be a theory of the novel (Part I). 11. Schlegel means Fichte's "Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre" of 1797-98. 12. For more on physics, see Schlegel's Transcendental Philosophy (Part II) and note 37 to the texts in Part I. 13. The Linnean system was a means for classifying plants according to characteristics of their flowers established by the Swedish botanist Carolus von Linnaeus (1707-78). 14. Source: KA 2: 256-67. Influenced by intense discussions with Schleiermacher in 1798, the Ideas were first published in the Athenaum'm March of 1800. Working within the Kantian rubric, Schlegel refused to insert religion in the place of poesy, as Schleiermacher had done. The Ideas were an attempt to theorize religion in an entirely different way; Schlegel defines religion as a synthesis of philosophy and poesy, calling it "the fourth invisible element next to philosophy, morality, and poesy" (no. 4). 15. Cf. Schlegel on Fichte and Spinoza, realism and idealism ("Fichte's Basic Characteristics of the Present Age"). 16. Source: KA 16: 83-190; taken from Schlegel's notes of 1797, which were the preliminary notes for a planned series of essays. [KA] Words inside carets (< >) are later additions by Schlegel. 17. Cf. Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. On longing and progressivity, cf. Jochen Schulte-Sasse's General Introduction to this volume. Absolute progressivity is both necessary and impossible. 18. Cf. Athendum Fragment 391. 19. The reference is to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire in Cervantes's novel. 20. In Schiller, the elegiac rests on the opposition between reality and the ideal (not semblance). [KA] 21. Schlegel wrote to his brother in February 1794: "The problem of our poesy seems to me to be the unification of the fundamentally modern and the fundamentally ancient; if I might add that Goethe, the first of a new period of art, started to near this goal, then you will of course understand me." [KA] 22. Schlegel's Uber das Studium dergriechischen Poesie (1795). 23. The dithyramb is a Greek choric hymn, originally in honor of Dionysus or Bac-

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chus, that was particularly vehement and wild in character. Modern poesy for Schlegel is in part characterized by its refusal of classical forms, thus perhaps his designation of the "chaotic" dithyramb as modern. 24. Cf. Athendum Fragment 305. 25. See the remarks on "polemics" in note 91 to the texts in Part II. Schlegel's review of Jacobi's Woldemarvias quite controversial, for Schlegel sought to find a philosophical system in the novel, and applying Fichte's system to it, concluded that the novel was deficient inasmuch as it lacked one. The review concludes with the scathing comment that Woldemar ends "as all moral debauches end, with a salto mortalemto the chasm of divine mercy." [KA] 26. "Characteristics" is a term Schlegel uses to designate a particular genre of criticism; it is the result of a critical activity that attempts to unfold or characterize the spirit of a work of art. The term is related to "characterization," "critique," "reflection," "divination," "individuality," and "understanding." (Cf. also notes 86 and 91 to the texts in Part II, and Athendum Fragment 116.) 27. Cf. Athendum Fragment 242. 28. Source: KA 18: 3-14. Written in 1796—97, both the Philosophical Fragments and the Philological Fragments are part of a collection called the Philosopkische Lehrjahre, which remained unpublished and in note form until the critical Schlegel edition of 1963. [KA] Their primary subject matter is Schlegel's study and criticism of Winckelmann, Herder, and Kant. The notes on the Wissenschafislehre (Theory of scientific knowledge [KA 18:4-14]) are part of the Philosophical Fragments. 29. The first six pages of this manuscript are missing, which is the reason for the abrupt beginning of the first fragment. [KA] 30. For Reinhold, see note 64 to the texts in Part I. Cf. also Philosophical Fragment 98. 31. See other fragments on femininity in Part IV. 32. For Winckelmann, see notes 18 and 26 to the texts in Part 11. Franziscus Hemsterhuis (1721-90) was a Dutch philosopher and art critic who had a strong influence on the Romantics. His treatises include Lettresur I'homms et nes rapports (1772), Sophyleou de la philosophic (1778), and Lettre de Diodes a Diotime sur I'atheisme (1787). 33. Schlegel is referring to the popularizing intellectuals of the Enlightenment, in particular Friedrich Nicolai. 34. This is a reference to the place and political projects of Freemasonry in eighteenthcentury societies. Disregarding the social ranks of its members, Freemasonry emphasized the moral nature of human relations. By defining itself as the starting point of a moralizing campaign, Freemasonry intended to transform political relations into moral relations, and thus a better society. 35. The reliance of physics—the recognized paradigm of empirical knowledge—on mathematics, together with the premise that all knowledge derives from sensation, makes the intuitability of mathematical propositions necessary. If this can be shown not to be the case—as many, including Kant, argue—it would "destroy" the integrity of the empiricist's position by making it rely on a priori axioms. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, section 5. 36. Quote from Voltaire's Candide. 37. The term "technism" appears consistently in the fragments and in the Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy. In the First Introduction to the Critique oj'Judgment (1790), Kant provides an initial statement of the relation between techne (which glosses as Kunst), purpose (Zweck), and critique. In short, techneis the capacity to view nature as a whole, against which its parts can be judged. Thus, techne is presupposed by critique. It is crucial to note that the whole obtained by this technical capacity is distinct from a sys-


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tern or any object that can be subsumed under a specific goal or end. To indicate this distinction, Kant uses the term "ptirposiveness without purpose" (Zweckmajligkeit ohne Zwech) to distinguish the transcendental character of this originary or grounding whole. Cf. also Philosophical Fragments i l l , 113, and 114. 38. See the Transcendental Philosophy for more discussion of the relation between mathematics, physics, and history. 39. Scheol (Hebrew "abyss"): poetic designator among the Hebrews for the netherworld into which human beings fall in death; the dark realm of silence and decay. 40. Plato called Socrates' method maieutics or the "art of midwifery" because students were not taught, but were encouraged through questions to find the answer within themselves. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the so-called maieutic method was taken up by educators, and became the centerpiece of the pedagogical version of the Enlightenment's critical stance. 41. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), author of the epistolary novel Woldemar (1779)42. Source: KA 16: 33-82. 43. Winckelmann was an early theorist of a historical discontinuity between antique and modern notions of beauty, thus the relation between his texts and Schlegel's historical sense, as seen in Concerning the Essence of Critique. See, for example, Winckclmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1754). See also notes 18 and 26 to the texts in Part II. 44. On Garve, see note 54 to the texts in Part 1. 45. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714—79) was a Scottish lawyer and writer. His main works are Of the Origi.n and Progress of Language (1774-92) and Antient Metaphysics (! 779-99)46. For more on Schlegel's thoughts on "application," see Philosophical Fragments 72, 113, 114. 47. For more on the "intrusion of the moral," see On Incomprehensibility and the continuing polemic against Garve. 48. Erduin Julius Koch, Hodegetikfurdas Universitdtsstudium in alien Fakultdten (Berlin, 1792). [KA] 49. On "technical," see note 37. 50. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), classical philologist and well-known scholar of Homer, participated with Humboldt in the founding of the University of Berlin, and had a significant influence on German university reform. In Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), Wolf broke with the philological tradition by theorizing the Homeric texts to be the product of multiple authors of a previous oral tradition. 51. See Philosophical Fragment 6 for the logical malady of the empiricist. 52. Epideixis denotes a festive speech (Aristotle). Like the later Stoics and the Hcrmagorians (Hermagoreer), Schlegel divided rhetoric into three categories: "The ancient rhetoricians divided eloquence into the judicial, the advisorial, and the epideictic, which one could call a festive eloquence"; "the purpose of epideictic or panegyric eloquence is to allow the artfulness of the rhetorician to shine before a public meeting of listeners or when read by readers" (Dialogue on Poesy). 53. Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), classical philologist and historian of ancient Greek culture. 54. Richard Bentley (1662-1742), most significant English classical philologist of his day. 55. August Wilhelm Rehberg (1757-1836), Hannoverian statesman and political writer. His essay "Should the Ancient Languages Be Used as a Grounding for the Gen-

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Notes to Pages ooo-ooo

eral Education of the Youth of the Higher Classes or Be Left to Proper Scholars Alone?" was published in the BerlinischeMonatsschriftin 1788 and 1789. \KA]a 56. David Ruhnken (1723-98), philologist, student of Hemsterhuis, and later professor at Leiden, was one of the most important Latinists of the time. 57. Johannes Clericus (Jean Le Clerc) (1657-1736), Are critica in qua ad studio, linguarum Latinae, Graecae et Hebraicae munitur, veterumque emendandorum, spuriorum scriptorum a genuinis dignoscendorum et judicandi de eorum libris ratio traditur (Amsterdam 1696-1700 and many other editions). Le Clerc was a Swiss philosopher and Arminian theologian who had considerable influence on French philosophy. He advocated rational religion, and also championed the views of John Locke. 58. Schlegel wrote in Philological Fragment 163: "The question as to why philosophy is called humaniora must indeed also be answered here." Latin humaniora signifies that which encourages and upholds human education. 59. A scholiast is a writer of scholia, from the Greek scholion, explanatory remarks or comments as on the text of a classic by an early grammarian; a commentator, annotator. 60. By "first treatise," Schlegel is presumably referring to his intent to publish these fragments. In 1797, he wrote to F. J. Niethammer, the editor of the Philosophisches Journal, "In this respect, I plan to publish a fairly extensive series of philosophical essays, which together will form a complete philosophy of philology." [KA] 61. " . . . if it be true that Translation is a Species of Explanation, which differs no otherwise from explanatory Comments, than that these attend to Parts, while Translation goes to the Wholt" (James Harris, Philological Inquiries [London: 1781], 27). [KA] 62. The German reads: "Die eigentliche philosophische Kritik . . . hat mehr Schwierigkeit und Veranlassung." 63. The three types of critique seem to be philosophical, philological, and historical critique. 64. Cf. Concerning the Essence of Critique (Part II). 65. Cf. Athendum Fragment 391. 66. A reference to Schiller's and Goethe's Xenien (Greek xenion = present for a host), 414 distichs in which Goethe and Schiller attacked the shallowriess of German literary and intellectual life. The term is used in an ironic sense. 67. Arnold Heeren (1760-1842), German historian and professor in Gottiiigen. Wrote Idem iiber Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Vo'lker der Alien Welt (1793-96), and the historiography GescMchte des Studiums der klassischen Literaturseit dem Wiederaufleben der Wissenschaften (1796-1802).

IV

Toward a Theory of the Feminine


Introductory Essay Feminizing Philosophy Lisa C. Roetzel

My favorite area of study carries, for all practical purposes, the same name as my bride. Her name is Sophy—philosophy is the soul of my life and the key to my self. Since knowing her, I am also completely amalgamated with this study. NOVA UTS'

In Early German Romanticism, the body of work becomes the female body as the feminine is merged with philosophy. Novalis's inscription of his bride Sophy and philosophy under the same name in the epigraph can be seen as a cipher for the introduction of the feminine into the Romantic project as a whole. The naming defines philosophy as feminine and establishes the centrality of the feminine to Romantic critique. Under this equation, both woman and the discourse of philosophy become the object of study. A blurring occurs between the boundaries of Sophy and philosophy. It becomes unclear whether Sophy should be studied as part of philosophy, or whether philosophy is part of Sophy, or both. Novalis does not resolve this ambivalence, for to do so would disrupt the organicity of this pair. Both are woman and philosophy, and both are the male philosopher's object of desire. Novalis's statement is in many ways paradigmatic for the work of other members of the Jena Circle, who attempt to use the feminine as a basis from which traditional philosophy can be challenged. Gender critique, as they see it, makes it possible to think outside of the categories of traditional Western philosophy. In other words, by critiquing long-held gendered concepts within philosophical discourse, concepts ranging from the primacy of the male subject to the supposed gender neutrality of philosophical language, the Early German Romantics felt that the boundaries of philosophy could be tested and expanded. Gender critique was seen as a critical lever that could pry 361

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loose the foundations of traditional Western philosophy. The Jena Circle consciously set itself apart by declaring its own philosophy to be feminine, taking a radical departure from a discipline traditionally defined as masculine and occupied with the concerns of men.2 Furthermore, realizing the political implications of this critique, Early German Romanticism took it to its ultimate conclusion; that is, it was recognized that addressing gender required an equal concern with the issues of gender in society at large. It consequently redirected what was initially a strategic employment of gender in philosophical discourse into an argument for social equality. Friedrich Schlegel could thus become an advocate for the inclusion of women in philosophy and for the improvement of the conditions under which women lived. Although the feminization of Romantic philosophy may seem to mean only progress for eighteenth-century women, from the perspective of current feminist criticism, it appears that Sophy herself might have had an altogether different view of its implications. In fact, upon closer reading, it becomes clear that Novalis's attempt at theorizing feminine philosophy cannot transcend traditional philosophy's definition of the male subject as desiring subject. Novalis's statement represents the interests of the male philosopher, and not necessarily those of Sophy. The equation of Sophy with philosophy occurs under the gaze of the male philosopher; her contours are shaped by her lover. Indeed, the biographical Sophy is herself largely constructed by Novalis, and serves as the woman of his dreams. Sophie von Kuhn, who died in 1797 at the age of fourteen, is figured in Novalis's work as the object of an always unfulfilled longing.3 Sophy thus begins as a teenage girl, and, in the eyes of the male philosopher, undergoes a transformation that refigures her as feminine ideal. The Male Philosopher and Feminine Philosophy Man created woman—from what? From a rib of his God, of his "Ideal." NIETZSCHE 4

The happy occasion of a union between the male philosopher and feminine philosophy—what Novalis calls becoming "amalgamated" with the study—thus reveals the tensions inhering in Romantic attempts to use femininity as a basis for critique. Whether functioning as

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the historical Sophy, as philosophy, or as the female body, Sophy/ philosophy is the ideal woman of the male philosopher's dreams. Thus, although Sophy/philosophy may indeed represent a revolutionary step in respect to new methods of critique, the terms of her creation adhere to conventional sexual politics. Feminine philosophy, as defined by Novalis, reproduces eighteenth-century stereotypes regarding women and essentializes the feminine. There is no doubt that Early German Romanticism's use of the feminine as a central critical concept makes a positive difference with respect to tradition, but what is one to make of the unsatisfying terms of the appropriation? Indeed, reading Early German Romanticism with respect to gender means situating oneself within the tension between revolutionary approaches to the feminine and the persistence of established gender politics. The recent reception of Friedrich Schlegel, for example, reflects what often becomes a dilemma for modern readers.5 In the context of the late eighteenth century, Early German Romanticism is progressive in its centering of the feminine in philosophical discourse as well as its advocacy of women's rights to participate in the philosophical discussion. However, it fails to recognize its own participation in the oppression of women. The tensions inherent in the textual practice are echoed in the lives of the members of the Jena Circle. As I will later discuss more thoroughly, efforts by the Jena Circle to live their theories and to include women in the production of the Athendum often neglected to challenge accepted roles. The schism between the progressive theoretical enterprise of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and the sexual politics that determine the practice of Romanticism is not overcome. However, to dismiss Early German Romanticism for this reason would be to disregard a strategy that was revolutionary for its time. By the late eighteenth century, binary oppositions of gender that relegated men to the public realm and women to the private realm had become so entrenched that attempts to challenge such divisions encountered strong resistance. Romantic efforts at gender critique such as Friedrich Schlegel's novella Ludnde (1798) were met with incredulity, if not open hostility. Moreover, role divisions along the lines of gender had become internalized to the extent that it was difficult for members of the group to take actions outside of them. This particularly affected the women members of the group. Caroline SchlegelSchelling, a critic and philosopher in her own right, often declined to

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publish her work. The fact that Schlegel-Schelling was heartily disliked for her political activities and for her literary-critical outspokenness points to the late eighteenth century's uneasiness with a woman critic. This and Schlegel-Schelling's own difficult relationship to the role of critic attests to the hegemony of certain gender constructs by the late century. Such gender constructs continue to influence the current understanding of the Early German Romantics, which has until recently focused on the male members of the group, particularly Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. In Part IV, we have included members often read as being peripheral to the Jena Circle, among them the women Romantics and the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter. We see it as being particularly important to add the voices of women members of the group, who have only recently been recognized as critics and philosophers. The women members of the Jena Circle, Dorothea VeitSchlegel and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, are often not taken to be legitimate philosophers, with their letters and diaries being treated simply as documentation of the daily lives of the group." An attempt to integrate the contributions of women members of the group into a discussion of Early German Romanticism as a whole is consequently an important step toward recognizing them as critics, poets, and philosophers in their own right. Yet we too must reflect upon the ways in which this volume adheres to reigning gender politics. What does it mean to bracket off a separate section on theories of femininity and women writers? Does our placement of the section at the end of the volume reveal an underlying prioritization of those strategies in Early German Romanticism that address issues other than gender? Does it reveal a prioritization of the male philosopher over the female philosopher? Although our efforts are aimed at pointing out the centrality of theories of the feminine and women writers to Early German Romanticism, our own gender critique might itself occasionally fall into such traps, despite our best efforts to avoid them. In many ways, this volume of translations is only a beginning. Our decision to focus on the philosophical and literary critical texts of Early German Romanticism limited the number of texts of women Romantics we could include, since theorizing Early German Romanticism is not the main concern of either Caroline Schlegel-Schelling or Dorothea Veit-Schlegel. The implications of our initial editorial decision were perhaps greater than


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we could have realized, for these parameters omitted the Romantic praxis that chiefly occupied both women. Although we do include texts describing such praxis, the reader should be aware that for Schlegel-Schelling and Veit-Schlegel, Romantic critique meant living as Romantics. There is much more work to be done in investigating this lifestyle as the philosophical praxis of women Romantics, work that is unfortunately beyond the scope of this volume. Before I discuss approaches to the feminine specific to Early German Romanticism, it is important to establish what I mean by this term. Definitions of "the feminine" are not unchanging, but are instead determined by the historical and cultural context in which they arise. In late eighteenth-century Germany, prevailing gender oppositions, as I mentioned earlier, tended to work along a division of public versus private. In respect to this division, masculinity was associated with characteristics that would enable men to serve as citizens in the public sphere. These characteristics include activity, reason, and control of the senses. Femininity, associated with the domestic realm, was seen as being characterized by passivity, feeling, and sensuality, to name only a few.7 In eighteenth-century philosophy, such oppositions determined the philosopher to be male, and philosophy itself to be a masculine pursuit, since only men were capable of the reasoned thought required for the discipline. Traditional Western philosophy of this time also reproduced such binary divisions in its own discourse; its subject, for example, is masculine, and the object is feminine. Other oppositions of this kind include masculine reason versus feminine feeling, or a masculine sublime versus a feminine beautiful.8

The Feminine as a Site of Critique Why then, do the Early German Romantics choose the feminine as a foundation for critique? One answer can be found in the reversal of Western philosophy's equation of the subject with the masculine and the object with the feminine in Friedrich Schlegel's statement, "The object is masculine, the subject feminine." Novalis similarly states, "Man conforms to his nature as object—woman to her nature as subject." Traditional Western philosophy centers the masculine subject and posits that which is beyond or outside the masculine subject as feminine. Attributes associated with this "beyond" include all that is incomprehensible or uncontrollable in subjectivity, nature, and Ian-

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guage.9 When turned on its head, this unreflected reproduction of the binary oppositions of gender opens up the possibility of a radical form of criticism. Reflection upon the oppositions of subject/object and masculine/feminine becomes a critical lever that can undo an entire system. The appeal of the feminine as a site of critique thus has to do with the volatility of reified oppositions of gender when they are inverted and reinscribed under the position of the feminine. Theoretically, then, the explosion of long-held concepts in a play of gender enables Romantic philosophy to get beyond a number of oppositions at the heart of Western philosophy, among them theory versus praxis, reason versus intuition, and the male philosopher versus the female muse. The "philosophical" critique thus spills over from a rethinking of key philosophical concepts into epistemological and social critique, that is, a reconceptualization of what it means to practice philosophy, and of who ought to practice it. It is thus possible for the gender critique to work on many levels, for philosophy to encompass all areas of life, or to be, in Friedrich Schlegel's understanding, a "universal philosophy." Philosophy, for example, is not only rethought as a feminine discipline with a feminine subject, but it can and should be practiced by women, according to Schlegel. He states, "Women have absolutely no sense for art, but they do for poesy. They have no predisposition for science, but they do for philosophy. They are hardly lacking in speculation, inner intuition of the infinite; they only lack abstraction, which is far more easily learned." As progressive as this statement may be for its time, it is nevertheless possible to see it merely as damning with faint praise. Although women are to be included in philosophy, Schlegel unquestioningly repeats other contemporary gender stereotypes. Women still cannot succeed in the masculine field of science, and remain associated with a "feminine" immediacy or intuitive knowledge. Clearly, such reproduction of binary oppositions of gender threatens the efficacy of the critique. But before I examine this tension underlying theories of femininity in Early German Romanticism in greater detail, I would like to outline how the critique is supposed to function. To do this, I will turn to Friedrich Schlegel, whose work includes the most systematic articulation of the Romantic gender critique. Friedrich Schlegel's interest in questions of gender starts early in his career, with the philological writings of 1794 and 1795.'" At the age of twenty-two, he begins to read with questions of gender in mind,


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as he searches for the social and historical reasons for the inferior status of women. In his early philological essay "On Diotima," Schlegel writes against the variety of philosophy of history that ignores questions of gender, asking why a woman could not indeed have taken part in the Socratic dialogue. His analysis, which evolves into both a history of women in ancient Greece and a critique of his own day, acknowledges the collusion of male power structures in the oppression of women. Scrutinizing the philological work of his contemporaries, Schlegel concludes that this too is tainted by participation in such power structures. To divide Greek women into either the category of the virtuous wife or that of the immoral hetaera is, he argues, "to claim that women exist for men's purposes; this is to exclude the good and the beautiful from the destiny of women, a point in which the Greeks held an entirely different view." Such views are, for Schlegel, not only contrary to the reality of ancient Greece, which he sees as holding a much less differentiated view of women's roles. They also reproduce the sort of thinking in gender oppositions that needlessly fetters both men and women, a sort of thinking that Schlegel breaks apart as he writes, "Only independent femininity, only tender masculinity are good and beautiful." Schlegel's argument for the historical participation of women in philosophy thus contains the germ of a questioning of established categories of gender. This line of questioning becomes important in his later works, such as the essay "On Philosophy. To Dorothea." This essay, published in the Athenaum in i 799, marks a shift to the more rhetorical, "Romantic" style of Schlegel's writings during the Jena period. Although it can be read together with such works as the Dialogue on Poesy and the Transcendental Philosophy, what sets it apart from these well-known works is its foregrounding of the feminine as a foundational concept in Romantic philosophy. At the same time, this essay partakes of Schlegel's ideal of a "philosophy of philosophy," that is, a philosophy that functions both on the level of content and on the level of form. Although we have seen such strategies at work in the fragments, for example, it is important to recognize the centrality of form to the appropriation of the feminine as well. In "On Philosophy. To Dorothea," the many-layered gender critique functions on the levels of social criticism, poetic/philosophical theory, and form. First, Schlegel makes the not insignificant political move of addressing the essay to women. On August 24, 1798, he

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writes to Henriette Herz11 that the letter is directed "not to Veit alone, but to all women. Since the scribes in Berlin, as I hear, have no interest in understanding us, we are both [Schlegel and Schleiermacher] very inclined to place our hopes in women" (KA 8: clvii).12 Schlegel thus makes the point that the essay is to have implications beyond participating in the current philosophical debate among men. The radical move of addressing a philosophical essay to a woman (his lover, and later wife, Dorothea Veit) is just what it claims to be. It is an attempt to bring women into the discussion, not as fledgling or novice philosophers but as the only human beings who can truly practice philosophy. Significandy, this philosophy is outside of the discourse of conventional philosophy, so much so that the traditional philosophers in Berlin cannot understand it. "On Philosophy. To Dorothea" thus begins with the redefinition of the philosopher as female, and goes on to present itself as a "feminine" philosophy. Although this same strategy is employed in Schlegel's earlier work, what sets "On Philosophy. To Dorothea" apart from his previous philological essays is his attempt at a "feminine" form. He appropriates the letter form, which in the eighteenth century is coded as feminine, challenging conventional philosophical discourse at the level of language. The essay is striking for its seemingly informal, personal style—the "letter" is hardly a conventional philosophical treatise. Written as a letter to a friend and lover, the essay attempts to reflect simultaneously upon itself and the principles of its own creation.13 One implication of the reflective moment in "On Philosophy. To Dorothea" is a clear emphasis on the sort of multilayered perspective that I have been discussing; that is, the thematic sort of critique that we have seen before is combined with narrative strategies that attempt to undermine gender hierarchies on the level of form. Such strategies go beyond the appropriation of a "feminine" genre, extending to what Schlegel often refers to as the "feminine" strategies of irony and wit. The strategies of juxtaposing contradictor)' statements, reversing positions, redefining terms in opposition to their accepted usage, and creating oppositions that ultimately collapse on themselves are defined as feminine. The feminine consequently comes to be identified with strategies that displace many of the concepts on which idealism and Enlightenment thought are founded, including the notions of a self-identical subject or ego and the unity of signifier and signified. In "On Philosophy. To Dorothea," such feminine moves also act to


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destabilize traditional essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity within the discussion of poesy and philosophy. They do so by introducing a principle of movement between the two. This principle is manifested in the Romantic concepts of reciprocal motion [Wechsel] and communication [Mitteilung], both of which signify an interchange or interaction between two entities. Wechsel is the basis for the interaction that destabilizes gender; its practical implications are realized in Mitteilung, or reciprocal communication, which brings philosophy to the practical realm. Through Mitteilung, which does not need to take place via the written word, but occurs in such everyday circumstances as a conversation among friends, Schlegel hopes to create a space for philosophy beyond disciplinary confines. His use of nontraditional modes of philosophical communication, such as the forms of the fragment, the novel, satire, and letters, can be seen as an outgrowth of the concept of Mitteilung. When philosophy and poesy engage in the reciprocal motion of Wechsel or Mitteilung, differing traits are exchanged in a never-ending process. In the play of Wechsel, Schlegel toys with traditional definitions that mark poesy as feminine and philosophy as masculine. In this form of exchange, each side takes on the qualities of the other without losing its own fundamental characteristics. What is traditionally coded as masculine philosophy acquires some of the feminine qualities of poesy that are outside of language or unmediated in their connection to a critical other space. Poesy, which is commonly seen as feminine, gains philosophy's ability to mediate: it acquires a voice as it enters into language and the public realm. The fact that this process does not imply the collapsing of the two poles into an androgynous whole underlines Schlegel's intent to call gender definitions into question. Schlegel's emphasis, not on the two poles but on the exchange between them, disrupts the given economy of gender from within.14 A similar move occurs in "On Philosophy. To Dorothea" in the discussion of the sublime and the beautiful, which is embedded within an analysis of woman's place in society. Here Schlegel sets up and subsequently subverts the typical Enlightenment hierarchy of the sublime and the beautiful, where the masculine sublime is valorized as the ultimate aesthetic experience. Schlegel begins by stating that the organization of the female body around motherhood, its "sole purpose," disqualifies it as a sublime object, and that the male body,

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which has "a number of purposes," is a potential object of the sublime experience. This seems to reproduce the neoclassicist hierarchy in which the sublime and its disruptive pleasure are valued above the form and unity of the beautiful. However, Schlegel proceeds to overturn this aesthetic by rejecting masculine sublimity as primary and identifying feminine beauty as the highest. He then opens the experience of the sublime to women by stating that it can serve as a muse for both (see "On Philosophy. To Dorothea"). In other words, both men and women can experience the sublime and be inspired by it. By granting women access to the sublime, Schlegel is able to undermine the hierarchy between the beautiful and the sublime and to collapse its gendered basis, both of which are radical moves in the context of eighteenth-century philosophy.

The Question of Positionality Attempts by the Early German Romantics to employ the feminine as a means for reconceptualizing philosophy depend on a rethinking of the role that gender plays in the creation of a philosophical system. A gender critique carried out to its final implications demands, in other words, an awareness on the part of the philosopher of his/her positionality. For Schlegel and Novalis to be fully successful in gender critique, they must be able to avoid reproducing patriarchy's centering of the masculine position. As I stated earlier, the question concerning their success or failure in maintaining the delicate balance between a gender critique and an awareness of their own inscription as gendered subjects has been the impetus for divergent readings by recent critics. The concept of feminine philosophy, for example, although clearly intended to explode accepted gender hierarchies, is highly problematic. Can Schlegel's definition of a feminine philosophy, as grounded in a critical "other" space to which women have unmediated access, avoid being defined solely in terms of masculine desire? A centering of the masculine position could undermine the critical impetus, transforming the woman philosopher into muse, or read her as sole initiate into the secrets of feminine philosophy. In other words, barring critical reflection, the gender critique can simply reproduce commonly held binary oppositions of gender. In effect, a lack of consideration of what it means not only to write "the feminine," but to write it in a certain way, from a certain position,


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reduces the power of the Early Romantic gender critique to destabilize, to undermine. In "On Philosophy. To Dorothea," Schlegel takes the remarkable step of locating Romantic critique at the site of the female body, but does not reflect on his own relationship to the economy of gender as male philosopher, writer, indeed, creator. In terms of the most basic means of production, Schlegel, for example, has a very different relationship to the praxis of philosophy than does the woman to whom he addresses the letter. At the same time that Friedrich Schlegel is publishing the "letter," Dorothea Veil, the embodiment of feminine philosophy for Friedrich Schlegel, remains anonymous in her contributions to the Romantic project. Moreover, Friedrich Schlegel fails to consider that in appropriating the feminine, he cannot help but take on everything associated with this concept. This includes not only the often criticized tendency of Early German Romanticism to slip back into a projection of the position of woman as muse, but the more significant problem of using the feminine as a means for the oppression of women. To take on the female body as the site of critique means to take on the history of violence enacted on the female body.15 Nowhere is the tension between an idealized, Romantic femininity and traditional notions of femininity more apparent than in the work of Novalis, who seems to have the uncanny ability to distill both Romantic concepts and the problems associated with them down to their essence. Novalis's fragment comparing women to the infinite, for example, exposes the tension between a radical appropriation of femininity and the social marginalization of women: Arc they not similar to the infinite in that they cannot be raised to the second power, but rather only be found through approximation? And are they not similar to the highest in that they are absolutely near to us, and yet always sought after—that they are absolutely understandable and yet not understood, that they are absolutely indispensable, and yet are usually dispensed with. And are they not similar to higher beings in that they seem so childish, so ordinary, so idle, and so playful?

When read in terms of Novalis's concept of the absolute I, which, as a realm of "hovering," is always destabilized, the feminine itself could be seen to be always unstable and thus beyond the world of binary oppositions.16 The feminine is neither the highest nor absolutely near, it is both. This definition, in other words, contains within it the

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self-reflective move of always calling itself into question, or placing the feminine under erasure. Novalis's definition of the feminine consequently contains a recognition of its own constructedness, and an acknowledgment of the fact that, as a definition, it does not rest on stable foundations, but is always in flux. This critique of the language of "the feminine" is then extended by analogy into a critique of the conditions of its appropriation. Novalis is aware of the presence of masculine desire as the feminine is "sought after." He also recognizes the significance of the male philosopher, who can only approach the feminine as "absolutely understandable and yet not understood." Moreover, Novalis is aware of the immense gap between this idealization of women and the common treatment of women. Here the feminine ideal is desired but never achieved, interpreted but not understood, and made central while at the same time being dismissed. Could Novalis's reading of the feminine in terms of this complex nexus between the male philosopher, language, and desire be an instance in which the Early German Romantic appropriation of the feminine actually works? Although this passage is for me one of the passages that comes closest to a self-reflexive definition that is always in the process of destabilizing itself, it nevertheless ends on a highly ambivalent note. What is one to make of Novalis's return at the end of the passage to characteristics traditionally coded as feminine? Does not the final statement that women are "so childish, so ordinary, so idle, and so playful" fall into reproducing characteristics traditionally coded as feminine in a seemingly unreflected manner?17 Perhaps the most striking example of such slippage takes place in a fragment of Novalis's that has largely been repressed. In his thematization of rape as "the greatest pleasure," Novalis makes a disturbing connection between the concept of woman as life source and violence against women. While the fragment hardly contains the sort of reflection that could redeem it from its stance of pure violence— indeed, it is impossible to consider a way in which such a statement could be "redeemed"—it does unmask the threat of violence that clings to the female body. In a perverse way, this fragment acknowledges what the remainder of Romantic philosophy refuses to admit, namely, that the concept of the feminine, however idealized, contains the experiences, many of them violent, that are daily written on women's bodies.


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Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the Genderization of the Philosophy of Nature The fact that the potentially radical move of appropriating the feminine as a site of critique brings with it a need for reflection on the implications of this appropriation must also be considered when dealing with the work of Johann Wilhelm Ritter. Ritter (1776-1810), who is known as the founder of electrochemistry, was associated with the Jena Circle as friend and as Romantic physicist. The Early German Romantic promulgation of a "universal philosophy" makes the group's interest in science hardly surprising. Contemporaneous scientific theories are interwoven into a large part of the group's work. Science is part of the "symphilosophy," and the work of Ritter, a promising young physicist at the University of Jena, was highly compatible with the Romantic project. Besides obvious ideological similarities that easily made Ritter the personification of the Romantic physicist, Ritter also institutes gender as an important part of science, which makes him of interest to this inquiry. Ritter's work is based in Schelling's all-encompassing theory of a Naturphilosophie or philosophy of nature, which rejected Newton's concept of chemical matter as being purely mechanical. Rather, for Schelling—combining the Kantian concept of a formative cognition with a concept of spirit or soul—the outer world of objects is given form by the human spirit.18 Since nature is the product of spirit, it can never be purely mechanical. Instead, the belief of Naturphilosophie in the power of the human spirit to create and know nature as its own product becomes associated with a belief in the cosmos as organism. It is here that we see the connection to Ritter, who bases his work both in Schelling's concept of cognition and in his belief in a universal organism. During his short lifetime, Ritter seeks to overturn such basic oppositions within the Newtonian system of mechanics as the division between inorganic and organic matter, theorizing that inorganic matter was also capable of chemical reactions that could be interpreted as "life."19 The work of Galvani on electricity, which posits that inorganic matter could be the source of electricity—and not merely a conductor, as Volta had suggested—is at the basis of such speculations. Ritter also works further in the vein of the natural sciences to theorize cycles and periodicity in nature, the pulsations of the cosmic organism.20 Ritter's texts on gender are collected from his final work, an auto-

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biographical account of his life, published posthumously, entitled Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch fur Freunde derNatur (Fragments from the bequest of a young physicist: a handbook for friends of nature). The notes and fragments exemplify Fitter's attempt to explain natural phenomena in terms of their connections to one another as part of the cosmic organism. The insertion of gender into the discussion seems, indeed, to be only one of many factors in the equation; that is, Ritter does not center gender in his work as a theoretical and critical concept. However, Ritter's influence on the Jena Romantics as Romantic scientist is significant. His statements on gender, for example, often work with established oppositions, seeking to find a place for these oppositions in a philosophy of nature. When Ritter conceives of such oppositions as part of a cosmic organism, he sees them as being interconnected to other opposite pairs in an all-encompassing web of nature. Here nature is simultaneously concrete or "bodily" as well as associated with the human spirit as that which cognizes and creates all things. In Ritter's work, there is thus a dual concern with things as objects or bodies, and with the connection to spirit or soul that is at the heart of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Both Ritter and Novalis are interested, for example, in sex and sexual organs as the place where the opposition man/woman is broken down, and some sort of spirit is produced. The following statement by Novalis is clearly indebted to Ritter's theories: "Soul and body touch in the act, chemically, or galvanistically, or electrically, or fierily. The soul eats the body (and digests it?) instantly; the body conceives the soul (and gives birth to it?) instantly." Likewise, Ritter's equation of men with animals and women with plants can be seen in the context of Naturphilosophie, where all things exist in both a physical and a spiritual relation to one another: "Vegetation and animalization appear to form one scale, one line with the different conditions of man and woman. The more woman advances, the more man recedes. As man advances, woman recedes or becomes concentrated. The human female is the most concentrated plant indifference on earth (indifference of both sexes of plants), but man too becomes freest there." Novalis takes up the concept of men as animals and women as plants as well, in what appears to be an attempt at working in terms of a concept of organicity. Here gender is assumed to be natural—a notion that is indeed problematic in its supposition that categories of gender are both organic and unchanging.


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However much we as critics might recognize the pitfalls of such an employment of gender, it is nevertheless important to recognize the ways in which this critique succeeds. One of the most striking characteristics of both Ritter's and Novalis's work is their foregrounding of the body. A philosophy in which the body and bodily functions are central—for Ritter and Novalis, breathing, eating, drinking, excreting, sex, birth, nursing, menstruation—defies the purely intellectual "headbirths" of traditional Western philosophy/idealist thinking. And although these categories are conceived of in terms of conventional notions of the masculine and the feminine, foregrounding the body in physics and in philosophy can have revolutionary implications.

The Women of Early German Romanticism: Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel The questions raised by the appropriation of the feminine by male Romantic writers take on an added urgency when the involvement of women writers and philosophers in the group is considered. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel are active participants in the Alhendum, and are at the center of the communal Romantic lifestyle—the "symexistence," as Friedrich Schlegel called it—that the group lived in Jena. Each woman is a writer in her own right, with Caroline Schlegel-Schelling acting as critic, editor, writer of reviews in the Athendum, and anonymous translator of Shakespeare, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel writing the Romantic novel Florentin, the novella Camilla, short stories, and numerous translations. It is highly misleading, however, to read these women in terms of their success as published writers because their relationship to both the poetico-philosophical project of Jena and the public sphere differs substantially from that of the male members of the group. Neither woman, for example, is acknowledged for her work on the Athendum. The full extent of the involvement of either is unknown. Heeding the conventions of the time, both published under their husbands' names, with Caroline being the more reluctant of the two to publish at all. Her oeuvre is thus largely composed of letters, just as it is the diaries of Dorothea Veit-Schlegel that provide the greatest insight into her participation in the group. At the same time that the relationship of each woman to the means of production differs from that of male members of the group, so does her relationship to an idealized Romantic femininity.

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In the context of the Romantic project, both women are clearly inscribed as muse, a position that can have a crippling effect on women's initiative. Simultaneously, both women are held up as the embodiment of the female philosopher and are encouraged to engage in philosophical praxis. Friedrich Schlegel is particularly adamant in his encouragement of his sister-in-law, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, who is a talented writer and critic. Because the relationship of Veit-Schlegel and Schlegel-Schelling to the social and political impetus of the project and its theories is determined by their status as women, they cannot be read in the same way that one reads the works of male writers in the group. While the masculine clearly functions as the norm in the late eighteenth century and is thus not problematized or is invisible within the discourse of philosophy, the feminine, as we have seen, occupies the position of the other. Women practicing philosophy hold this same outsider status, and it has thus been necessary for critics to first identify the place of women in the Jena Circle as others. This necessary first step has led to a predominance of the biographical in readings of both women. The biographical focus has been particularly seductive because much of the work of these women does not "fit" into established categories of genre. It has also, unfortunately, led in the past to a lack of attention to their writings as philosophy. Recent critics, however, have begun to read the letters and diaries of the women Romantics as important contributions to the Romantic project.21 With these caveats in mind, it is nevertheless important to contextualize Veit-Schlegel and Schlegel-Schelling in order to be able to understand their writings, and thus a certain amount of biographical information is in order. Both women, for example, possessed better than average educational backgrounds for women of their day, although much of this was self-taught. Both grew up in intellectual households, and although intellectually and politically active in their own right, with Dorothea participating in the literary salons in Berlin and Caroline engaging in republican politics, both remained in the subordinate position of the intellectual woman; that is, although each was active in her own way, neither had access to the same educational opportunities, avenues of communication, and power available to male intellectuals. As part of the Jena Circle, both women publish under their husbands' names and, while powerful inside the circle itself, have little leverage outside of it. Both are also dependent on other


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members of the group for supplying books and ideas that were being discussed among male philosophers and other intellectuals. The writing of both Caroline and Dorothea is also influenced by the great deal of work that each does to economically support herself and her husband. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling not only edits A. W. Schlegel's work, but is anonymous coauthor of the Shakespeare translations that were for a time their main source of income. The translations of Dorothea Veit-Schlegel—she translated ten books in the first ten years of the nineteenth century—make it possible for Friedrich Schlegel to practice philosophy, as she willingly sacrifices what she sees as her inferior talent to his genius. Particularly in the case of Dorothea VeitSchlegel, her writing is severely limited by the time spent supporting her husband. Other factors playing on these women's lives place them in a different relationship to the Romantic lifestyle advocated as part of the "universal philosophy." Both women shoulder the domestic responsibilities of wives and mothers, including running households on very little money. Both also bear different consequences than do the men for their participation in the communal life of the Jena Circle. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, an independent, outspoken woman by any account, had taken steps defying eighteenth-century bourgeois morality prior to her connection to the group. After the death of her first husband, she had lived as a single mother, and had been politically active in the Mainz republic, for which she was jailed. Dorothea Veil left her husband of fifteen years to be with Friedrich Schlegel, and for financial reasons lived with him out of wedlock until 1808. These unconventional lives as well as their participation in the Jena Circle placed both women beyond the pale of conventional morality, with SchlegelSchelling being called "Madame Lucifer" by her detractors.22 It has been suggested that it was such negative sentiments on the part of outsiders that made her unwilling to publish.23 The influence of conditions of production on the female members of the Jena Circle was clearly profound. These conditions have a particularly strong effect on the choice of discourse, and the choice of genre. Both women seem to feel strongly that the lack of an institutionalized academic education shuts them out of the philosophical discourse employed by the rest of the group. Caroline SchlegelSchelling, although heavily involved in the group's discussion of Fichte, looks to male members of the group to guide her through

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Fichte and Co supply her with works of other philosophers as she seeks to become familiar with the field. Dorothea Veit-Schlegel recognizes her outsider status within the group as being related to her lack of mastery of philosophical discourse: "They often laugh at me and feel quite superior when I appear to do without the proper words, the fashionable expressions with which they so easily signify everything, such as: great, sublime, modern, classical, gothic, charming, wondrous, heavenly, divine—and so on." She goes on to defend herself in a move that defines her as a Romantic philosopher as well: "That which we cannot name is of course always the dearest and best and actually what one means. Why, then, is there so much talk?" (diary entry 217). Here Dorothea Veit-Schlegel engages in what might be one of the most radical moments in Early German Romanticism: she turns her dissatisfaction with philosophical discourse, her inability to speak the language, on its head and transforms it into a statement on the inadequacy of language to signify what cannot be signified. This highly subversive move, which calls into question the grounding of the Jena Circle in academic discourse, points to another difference between the female members of the group and the male members. In addition to their work on the Athenaum, both women practice forms of writing traditionally coded as feminine, but often do so in a way that reflects their involvement in the group. Dorothea VeitSchlegel's diaries not only bear witness to the daily lives of the Jena Circle, including the tensions between herself and Caroline, who was more accepted as an intellectual by the male members of the group. They also point to a divergent view of what Romanticism might mean. Although Veit-Schlegel herself is not anti-intellectual, her diary entries point to a view of the praxis of Romanticism that diverges from the highly intellectual form of Friedrich Schlegel. Here what she calls "life" and "love" is preferred to theory's "cold egoism," "the point where one is more interested in ideas than in human beings" (diary entry 226). The letters of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling may be viewed in a similar light, as an example of her own form of Romantic praxis. Although research has tended to focus on the fact that Friedrich Schlegel himself saw her letters as Romantic writing, what is perhaps more important is the fact that the letters indeed stand on their own as examples of Romantic praxis. The letters are uniformly witty and erudite, with their use of the Romantic strategies of irony and satire taking them


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beyond the purely biographical. It is clear, moreover, that SchlegelSchelling comes to her own conclusions about the Romantic project. She not only appears skeptical at one point in her famous statement to Novalis that "What you are all up to is a veritable sorcerer's cauldron to me." She also enrages Friedrich Schlegel with her critique of the Athenaum, and engages in exchanges of ideas with other members of the group. Her critique of Fichte, in which she argues that he lacks poesy, participates in the dialogue of Romantic philosophy on both the theoretical and the formal level, as she employs wit and satire as tools of critique. Fichte, she claims, is no more Romantic than Spinoza, and his theories no more poetic than mathematics. She raises the sarcasm to the second power, so to speak, as she claims that "Anyone who is capable of grasping geometry will also be able to learn the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, but precisely this is its limit—that it can be divided and comes out even" (letter 294). This tone is echoed in Caroline Schlegel-Schelling's published reviews, which employ the Romantic strategies of satire and wit as significant components of critique. What is conspicuously lacking in the works of Caroline SchlegelSchelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel is the sort of understanding of femininity promulgated by Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, arid Ritter. This is in many ways hardly surprising, considering the differing relationships that the male members and the female members of the group have to otherness. Despite its radical impetus, Early German Romanticism is a movement that in many ways works within established parameters—it can critique but cannot truly go beyond the discourse in which it exists, the discourse of the male-dominated bourgeois intelligentsia. And although its progressive moments must be acknowledged, such as Friedrich Schlegel's advocatioii and encouragement of women, and the numerous attempts to allow the volatilecategories of gender to collapse on themselves, other aspects of the Romantics' gender critique are not as circumspect. The question that goes begging in Early German Romanticism is, as we have seen, that of the writer's own position vis-a-vis the feminine other. For it is one thing to appropriate the category' of the feminine with the undergirding of the male-dominated position that functions as the status quo in eighteenth-century Germany. It is another thing, as exemplified by the cases of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to live this position of otherness.

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Notes to Introductory Essay 1. Novalis, Schrifien, 2d ed., vol. 4, cd. Paul Kluckhohn (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 188; my translation. 2. On the inscription of Western philosophy as masculine, see Susan Bordo, "The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought," Signs 11.3 (1986): 439-56. 3. Novalis met Sophie von Kiihn in 1794 when she was twelve years old. As the deceased beloved, she figures prominently in Novalis's work. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1955), 944; my translation. 5. Schlegel is a controversial figure among i'eminist critics, who struggle with his ambivalent gender politics. He has been criticized for placing women on pedestals, for depicting women as embodiments of masculine ideals (Barbara Becker-Cantarino, "Priesterin und Lichtbringerin. Zur Ideologic des weiblichen Charakters in der Fruhromanlik," in Die Frau ah Heldin und Aulorin, Zehntes Amherster Kolloquium zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen [Bern: Francke, 1979], 111-24), and as "objects of projection" for masculine desires (Sigrid Weigel, "Wider die romantische Mode: Zur asthetischcn Funktion des Weiblichen in Friedrich Schlegels 'Lucinde,'" in Die verborgene Frau, ed. Karl-Heinz Gotze et al. [Berlin: Argument, 1983], 67-82). On the other hand, some feminist critics read Schlegel's critique as radically breaking up gender hierarchies, or even theorizing a space for the feminine in aesthetics and philosophy. For these critics, Schlegel is the creator of a feminine-erotic aesthetic (Gisela Dischner, Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde und Materialien zu einer Theorie des MiijJiggangs [Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980], 1 1 ) , the theoretician of an androgynous "other" (Sara Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism [Bern: Lang, 1983], 128), and is responsible for bringing "feminine desire" into philosophy and theories of language (Christine Garbe, "Fiktionen des weiblichen Begehrens. Eine Re-Vision der sexuellen Diskurse vonJ.-J. Rousseau und Friedrich Schlegel," in Das Sexuelle, die Frauen und dieKunst, ed. Karin Rick [Tubingen: Claudia Gehrke, 1988], 100-117). 6. An important exception to this tendency is Christa Burger's chapter "Luziferische Rhapsodien. Carolines Briefwerk," in Leben Schreiben: Die Klassik, die Romantik, und der Chi der Frauen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990). 7. See Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der 'Geschlechtscharaktere.' Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziadon von Erwerbs- und Familienleben," in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in derNeuzeit: NeueFonchung, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976); trans, in Richard Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Family (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 51-83. 8. On the genderization of the sublime and the beautiful in Kant, see Olga Lucia Valbuena, "The 'Charming Distinction.' Ur-teil as the En-gendering of Reason in Kant's Thought, Genders4. (1989): 87-102. 9. Bordo, "The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought," 454. 10. "Uber die weiblichen Charaktcrc in den griechischen Dichtern" (On the feminine characters of the Greek poets) (1794) and "Uber die Diotima" (1795). The latter essay is translated in this volume (Part IV) as "On Diotima." 11. The literary salon of Henriette Herz (1764-1847) was one of the centers of Berlin intellectual and cultural life in the 1790$. Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veil met at Herz's salon. 12. The "scribes in Berlin" probably refers to the Enlightenment critic Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), who attacked the Early German Romantics in his voluminous Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland (1783—96) and in the satirical novel Vertraute


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Briefe von Adelheid B. an ihre FreundinJulie S. (1799), where he represents the movement as overly emotional, and draws a caricature of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling as Romantic coquette. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a theologian and philosopher who received his education in schools of the Brudergemeine (cf. note 11 to the Introductory Essay in Part II), was a close friend of A. W. and Friedrich Schlegel. Schleiermacher's writings on hermeneutics had a lasting effect in the humanities. 13. Walter Benjamin's dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (Bern: A. Francke, 1920) continues to offer the most thorough discussion of Romantic reflection. It is taken up anew by recent critics, among them Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 14. Schlegel returns to the theme of Wechsel in his novel Lucinde, where he thematizes an exchange of gender roles between the male protagonist and his female lover. 15. Alice Kuzniar begins with this axiom of the fetishized cinematic image to propose the possibility of a different feminine bodily response in the work of Novalis. She argues for the presence of women's voices in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen that subverts the oppression of the body. See Alice Kuzniar, "Hearing Woman's Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen," PMLA 107.5 (October 1992): 1196-1207. 16. Cf. the Introductory Essay to Part I. 17. Winfried Menninghaus, who has published the only German-language collection of Romantic texts concerning femininity, sees Novalis's critique of the binary oppositions of gender as being much less developed than Friedrich Schlegel's. See the "Nachwort" to his Friedrich Schlegel: Theorie der Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), 2 i3f. 18. S. R. Morgan, "Schelling and the Origins of his Naturphilosophie," in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3of. Also, see the Fichte-Schelling correspondence for reference to Schelling's philosophy of nature (Part I). 19. Walter D. Wetzels, "Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic Physics in Germany," in ibid., 204. 20. Ibid., 206. 21. Christa Burger reads Caroline Schlegel-Schelling's letters as examples of Romantic writing, seeing even her refusal to write "works" as a Romantic strategy. In so doing, she argues against previous biographical interpretations. My reading of the strategies of wit and sarcasm in Caroline's letters as Romantic strategies is largely indebted to Burger. 22. This defamation has been attributed to Friedrich Schiller, whose poem concerning women, "Die Glocke," Schlegel-Schelling found to be patently ridiculous. See Sigrid Damm's introduction to her edition of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling's letters, "Freund Lieber, ich komme weit her schon an diesem friihen Morgen. " Caroline Schlegel-Schelling in ihren Briefen, 2d ed. (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981), 35. 23. Ibid., 34.

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i. Novalis: On Women and Femininity1 Teplitz Fragment 440 [N 2: 621]: Charcoal and diamonds are one substance—and yet how different. Is it not the same case with man and woman? We are earthen clay—and women are eyes of the world and sapphires, which are made of earthen clay as well. Universal Brouillon 690 [N 3: 399]: Woman is the symbol of goodness and beauty. Man is the symbol of truth and law. Why the male must be more beautiful (relative beauty) in the animal kingdom than the female. (Animal beauty—attraction—is strength— energy.) (Man, on the whole, is more directly attractive. Woman is more indirectly attractive.) [...] Teplitz Fragment 404 [N 2: 610]: The postulate of feminine mysticism is commonplace. Women are required from all sides to love the first, best object unconditionally. Does not every high estimation of their spirit's free force and power of self-creation presuppose this? Note 6 [N 3: 556]: On the sphere of women—the nursery—the kitchen—the garden—the cellar—the pantry—the bedroom—the living room—the guest room—the attic or the storage room. Notegz [N 3: 568]: Women know nothing about social relations. They are connected to the state, church, public, and so on, only through their husbands. They live in the true state of nature. Universal Brouillon 101 [N 3: 259]: THEORY OF HUMAN BEINGS. Women actually have a definite sense for the external. They are born oryctologists.2 Logological Fragment 100 [N 2: 544]: Man is phlogistic—predominantly a process of compression. Woman is dephlogistic—predominantly a process of attenuation.3 Fichte Studies 576 [N 2: 275]: Reason is in man, feeling in woman— both are positive—that which sets the tone. The morality of woman is grounded in feeling—as that of man is grounded in reason.

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Fickle Studies 577 [N 2: 275]: On the different types of entertainment of both sexes. Man may desire the sensual in a reasonable form; woman may desire the reasonable in a sensual form. The secondary essence of man is the principal essence of woman.

Physical Fragments [N 3: 78]: [. . .] For each body that has a quality (is each quality a matter that is linked by means of the system, by means of the individual, etc.?) there is also a limit to this quality, a point of this quality where it can be sensed—where it emerges—appears. The quality is the feminine principle—the subject. Attraction is the masculine principle, the object. [. . .] Fichte Studies 519 [N 2: 261]: Man conforms to his nature as object— woman, to her nature as subject. Man must transform his feelings into concepts; woman must transform her concepts into feelings. Concepts do not deceive him; feelings do not deceive her. Fichte Studies 510 [N 2: 260]: Man must restrain his nature and provide law and mastery for the individual in himself. Mastery of the will belongs to him—and subjection of feelings. Woman must obey her nature—restrain her individuality. Her feelings must determine her will. For man, feelings are secondary, for woman, the will. She must have a subordinated will—he must have subordinated feelings. (He may simplify the general—she may generalize the particular.) He and she both serve reason. He is the ideal of content—she is the soul of form. For both, the general and the particular are of a different kind. His individuality and her generality are descended from one line and also, in this way, his generality and her individuality. Fichte Studies 511 [N 2: 260]: Preservation of the particular. Preservation of the species. These are their natural goals in procreating. The former is the female, the latter, the male goal. The form of satisfaction of this drive is on his part; or rather, his pleasure consists in the victory of his drive, of his power over that which is opposite, that which attracts him. Her enjoyment consists in stilling her longing, her need, through the feeling of power—not the sensation of power.4

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She desires—but her sensations resist and can only be suspended momentarily by means of a power foreign to her. He senses—but he does not desire—and his will can only be suspended for a few moments by means of a yielding foreign to him. Teplitz Fragment 428 [N 2: 616-18]: Does not the fact that the extremes of women's education [Bildung] are much more striking than ours speak for their superiority? The basest rogue is not as different from the most admirable man, as a wretched hussie is from a noble woman. And the fact as well that one finds many good things said about men, but still nothing good about women. Are they not similar to the infinite in that they cannot be raised to the second power, but rather only be found through approximation? And are they not similar to the highest in that they are absolutely near to us, and yet always sought, after—that they are absolutely understandable and yet not understood, that they are absolutely indispensable, and yet are usually dispensed with. And are they not similar to higher beings in that they seem so childish, so ordinary, so idle, and so playful? Their greater helplessness raises them above us as well—just as their greater self-sufficiency, their greater talent for slavery and for despotism, and thus they are altogether above us and beneath us, and yet more connected and indivisible than we are. Would we still love them if this were not the case? With women, love came into being, and with love, women came into being—and therefore one does not understand the one without the other. Whoever attempts to find women without love, and love without women, is like the philosophers who contemplated desire without its object, and the object without desire—and did not see the two simultaneously in action. Their circle. That which is not yet a leurportee5 is not yet mature,. Their pursuits. What they are to every epoch. Their education. They are there, as the noble Romans, not to do the work, but rather to enjoy the results—to put into practice, not to experiment. Chevalerie. Their build—their beauty. They are a delightful secret—only veiled—not locked. Philosophical mysteries are fascinating in a similar way. The state of being a hetaera.6 Their faculties. Glimpses of the future. The act of embracing. The Greek goddesses. The Madonna. Every people, every era has its favorite female character. Women in poesy. To be loved is fundainen-


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tally essential to them. On the feminine seasons. The understanding [Verstand] alone separates women from love. Fragments and Studies 702 [N 3: 692]: Marriage is the greatest secret. For us, marriage is a popularized secret. It is unfortunate that our only choice is between marriage and solitude. These are extremes—but how few human beings are capable of an actual marriage—how few also can bear solitude. There are bonds of all kinds. Marriage is an infinite bond. Is woman man's goal, and is woman herself without a goal? UniversalBrouillon 1106 [N 3: 470-71]: Marriage is to politics as the lever is to the science of mechanics. The state consists not of separate human beings, but rather consists of pairs and communities. The classes of marriage are the classes of the state—woman and man. Woman is the so-called unformed [ungebildet] part. There is an ideal of this latter class. Rousseau saw it exclusively in his apology of natural man.7 Rousseau's philosophemes are, on the whole, feminine philosophy or theory of femininity—opinions from the feminine point of view. Now woman has become slave. Note 235 [N 3: 590]: Some women may say, with good reason, that they sink into the arms of their husbands. Happy are those who rise into the arms of their lovers. Notegy [N 3: 569]: Shouldn't a woman's inspiration be able to express itself through a pregnancy? Could a Roman soldier be the father of Jesus? On the nativity story in general—its poesy, its inner manifestness. [. . .] Physical Fragments [N 3: 93]: [. . .] The woman does not actually conceive, but rather, the egg conceives. The egg is a secretion of the woman. When the egg has conceived, it once again becomes, through adhesion, a part, not a member, of the mother. The man does not actually impregnate, but rather, is only a tool for impregnation—the sperm impregnates. Eggs and sperm are opposite secretions, and sperm only provides the agitating potency. It doesn't penetrate by force—but rather, it merely arouses excitability. It has more energy than the egg, and overpowers the

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excitability of the egg. It ignites the egg. The duration of ignition lies in the nature of organic composition. (Generation of animal warmth.) (Sperm is perhaps a fluid, organic [artificial] substance; the egg is congealed, artificial substance. The sperm becomes the first nourishment of the egg as soon as ignition has occurred. It absorbs the sperm in order to increase its capacity, with its greater quantity of absolute thermal material.) Universal Brouillon 409 [N 3: 319]:[...] The sperm is a means for the nourishment and stimulation of woman, as a replacement for what is lost in menstruation. In the truest sense, therefore, man lives with her, on her behalf. Is woman more sensitive, man more excitable? Logological Fragment 159 [N 2: 560]: The lyric poem is for heroes, it produces heroes. The epic poem is for human beings. The hero is lyric, the human being is epic, the genius is dramatic. Man is lyric, woman is epic, marriage is dramatic. Universal Brouillon 236 [N 3: 281]: THEORY OF HUMAN BEINGS. An eternal virgin is nothing other than an eternal, female child. What corresponds to the virgin in us men? A girl who is no longer a true child is no longer a virgin. (Not all children are children.) Teplitz Fragment 430 [N 2: 618]: The beautiful secret of the virgin, that which makes her precisely so unspeakably alluring, is the presentiment of motherhood—the premonition of a future world that slumbers within her and is to grow out of her. She is the most appropriate image of the future. Teplitz Fragment 355 [N 2: Go 1 ]: All enchantment is artificially aroused insanity. All passion is enchantment. A charming girl is more of a real enchantress than one thinks. Universal Brouillon 283 [N 3: 290]: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. The bosom is the breast that has been elevated to a state of mystery—the moralized breast. Further remarks of this kind. Thus, for example, a dead man is a man who has been elevated to an absolute state of mystery.


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Note 75 [N 3: 565-66]: There is only one temple in the world, and that is the human body. Nothing is more sacred than this lofty figure. To bow down before human beings is to pay homage to this revelation in the flesh. (Divine adoration of the lingam,8 of the bosom—of statues.) One comes into contact with heaven when one touches a human body. On the killing of crippled, old, and sick people. Note go [N 3: 568]: It is strange that the association of sensual pleasure, religion, and cruelty has not yet made people aware of their intimate relationship and their collective tendency. Note 144 [N 3: 575]: On sexual desire—the longing for contact with flesh—the pleasure in naked human bodies. Is it perhaps a hidden appetite for human flesh? Teplitz Fragment 429 [N 2: 618]: Eating is nothing but accentuated living. Eating, drinking, and breathing correspond to the threefold division of bodies into the solid, the liquid, and the vaporous. The entire body breathes—only the lips eat and drink: precisely that organ which again excretes, in manifold tones, that which the spirit prepared and received through the other senses. Lips are so important for sociability; how much they deserve the kiss. Every gentle, soft curve is a symbolic wish for contact. Thus everything in nature invites us, figuratively and modestly, to its enjoyment—and thus nature may indeed be female, at once virgin and mother. Universal Brouillon 81 [N 3: 255]: PHYSICS. Is every embrace simultaneously the embrace of the whole couple, as if of one nature, with oneart (one spirit), and the child the unified product of the doubled embrace? Are plants perhaps the products of feminine nature and masculine spirit—and animals the products of masculine nature and feminine spirit? Are plants perhaps the girls—animals the boys of nature? [. . .] M?fe564 [N 3: 651]: Resemblance of women to plants. Poetry on this idea. (Flowers are vessels.) Chemical, organic, and physiological nature of the beauty of a bodv.

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Scientific Studies [N 3: 87-88]: Man is more mineral—woman more vegetable. [. . .] View of regressive nature—from animal to plant, and so on to the mineral as the highest. The female period seems very vegetable. (Juice flows into plants.) (One could add to the Schlegelian view that herbivorous animals could be compared to philogynists and carnivorous ones to pederasts.9 Embracing is enjoying, devouring. A woman, like the immortal wild boar in Valhalla, can be eaten every day anew.)10 Universal Brouillon 126 [N 3: 264]: PHYSICS. In comparison to the life of animals, the life of plants is a ceaseless process of conceiving and giving birth—and the former, in comparison to this latter, is a ceaseless process of eating and fertilizing. As woman is the highest visible form of nourishment that makes the transition from body to soul, so too are the sexual organs the highest external organs that make the transition from visible to invisible organs. The glance,—(speech)—the touching of hands—the kiss—the touching of the bosom—the grasping of the sexual organs—the act of embracing. These are the rungs of the ladder on which the soul climbs downward; opposite this is a ladder on which the body climbs upward to the embrace. Scent—sniffing—act. Preparation of the soul and the body for the awakening of the sex drive. Soul and body touch in the act, chemically, or galvanistically, or electrically, or fierily. The soul eats the body (and digests it?) instantly, the body conceives the soul (and gives birth to it?) instantly. Universal Brouillon 117 [N 3: 262]: THEORY OF NATURE. The more lively the resistance of that which is to be devoured, the more lively the flame of the moment of pleasure will be. Application to oxigene. Rape is the greatest pleasure. Woman is our oxigene. THEORY OF NATURE. Are all excrements fertilizing potencies? viz. manure. The difference between animal and plant dung. Human embryos also flourish more quickly and abundantly when they are fertilized by higher forms of manure. As we manure the ground for plants, so do the plants manure the air for us. Plants are children of the earth. We are children of the ether (earth for fixed, ether for fluid). The lung is actually the core of our roots. We live when we breathe and we begin our life by breathing.


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(Children of the heavens married the daughters of the earth.) We devour plants, and they flourish in our own decay. What devouring is for us, fertilization is for plants. Conception is the feminine pleasure—consuming is the masculine. (A drunkard can be compared to a debauched woman.) Fertilization is the consequence of eating. It is the reverse operation; fertilization is opposed to giving birth, as eating is opposed to conception. Man is to some extent also woman, as woman is man. Is this perhaps the reason for their differing modesty? Universal Brouillon 797 [N 3: 425]: Dance—eating—talking—mutual feeling and working—being together—hearing, seeing, and feeling each other, etc.: all these are conditions and causes and themselves already functions of the effectiveness of the higher composite human being, the genius, etc. Theory of Lust It is Amor that has pressed us together. Lust (mutual attraction [Sympathy]} underlies all of the above functions. That function which is truly sensually pleasurable is the most mystical one, the one that is almost absolute or that demands totality of unity (mixture), that is, chemical. Teplitz Fragment 362 [N 2: 603]: Lesfemmes are the pole around which the existence and la philosophic of the pretentiously clever men revolve because they affect body and soul at once. They too love undividedness and place unlimited value on this mixed pleasure. This taste spreads to everything. A bed should be soft, form and stitchery pretty, food delicate, but also animating, and so on for everything. The literary mind of these men also enjoys the provocation of the femmes, which is why they have written so much about them. Everyone sees his image everywhere—which is why vanity finds everything vain. Nothing is more appropriate than the image of the condition resulting from that philosophie du monde which the consummate and consumed cosmopolitans unintentionally and truly naively advance in their writings and speeches in reference to themselves and their own way of thinking. It is truly not comforting or enticing; their age is increased threefold in unpleasantness as, in contrast, their youth was also spiced threefold. La vraie philosophie is part of the passive science of life. It is a natural,

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antithetical effect of this epicurean life, but not a free product of our magical inventiveness [Erfindungskraft]. There is progression in the bad as well. If one lets oneself go, a monster gradually comes into being in its own way. Thus with brutality, cruelty, lust, hypocrisy, etc. Teplitz Fragment 370 [N 2: 604]: Lesfemmes should not complain about injustice. Too bad, if a woman was present! The beaux-esprits are completely correct when it comes to lesfemmes. But who would confuse les femmes with women? Teplitz Fragment 371 [N 2: 613]: Les femmes are models of the most tender, most feminine constitution—the greatest asthenics—with a minimum of reason. Viewed thus, they become very understandable. Annihilators of reason. On fashion. Is an asthenic woman the greatest attraction for an asthenic man? and vice versa? Teplitz Fragment 416 [N 2: 613]: Women—children—esprit des bagatelles. Type of conversation with them. The patterns of ordinary femininity sense the boundaries of each specific existence very exactly, and conscientiously avoid overstepping them; hence their famed ordinariness— practical cosmopolitans. They themselves cannot stand exaggerated elegance, delicacies, truths, virtues, inclinations. They love the variety of the common—newness of the ordinary—not new ideas, but new clothes—uniformity of the whole—superficial charms. They adore the dance above all because of its lightness, vanity, and sensuality. A joke that is too good is fatal to them, as is everything that is beautiful, great, and noble. Mediocre and even bad literature, actors, plays, etc.—that is their thing.

2. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Natural Philosophy of Femininity" 434 [2: 45]: Plants are nothing at all but organs of the earth. All plants are one thing, one animal through and with the earth. Plants have two sexes, and the earth has the other two. These four sexes enact a relationship of marriage. As plants mate, this mating in turn mates with

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the earth, and everything is one. Vegetation is the earth; the earth is the sun; the former is woman, the latter is man. Animals contain man in themselves; they are like plants, lifted out of the earth with a piece of soil. The plant's brain is the earth, the soil. The plant's sensitive system is in the earth; the latter is itself the sensitive system, the former the irritable one. 430 [2: 41]: Plants, all vegetation, are the language of nature. Everything is expressed in plants. Plants do not hear, but animals hear, and speak less or not at all—namely, through their essence. The more animals hear, the higher their artificial, audible language. Music is a higher form of vegetation. 431: The lower their level of animalization, the nearer the individuals of one and the same sex or species (of animals) come to one another and the smaller the difference in their "line of cohesion." (In the case of plants such a line does not even exist, but rather, they are all completely the same, and mere unities according to their number.) The higher up one goes, the larger the difference becomes, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to find his own kind; it becomes most difficult in the case of human beings. As an undivided species, polyps show us that the two sexes, man and woman together, form one line of cohesion. This remains the schema all the way up. And therefore it is the task of those individuals who are born for each other to find each other, who together comprise the link in the line of cohesion. [. . .] 444 [2: 54—56]: [. . .] The human being seems to signify the line of cohesion between the earth and the moon. The two parts of a human being are earth and moon. The earth with its internal and external organization (head and arms), the moon with its internal (front or back) and external (back or front) organization (sexual organs and feet). The head revolves around its axis, like the earth. The sexual organs do not; they perpetually turn the same side to the "earth." It is remarkable how the expansive pole of woman's lower system is much larger than the man's; her contracted pole, on the other hand, is much smaller. The expanded pole of woman's upper part is also larger, and with that the breasts. Yet their arms appear smaller, as a rule, than ours, and instead our breasts are smaller. That the lower system signifies the moon is indicated by women's monthly cycle. But precisely in them the moon part is far more developed, much moreleft to the mercy of the moon. Love is the indifferentiation of quanti-

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tative indifference,12 which entered into human beings through the earth and the moon, to the one line of cohesion that now comes into immediate conflict with the sun. By virtue of the fact that woman is undifferentiated in the lower parts when impregnated, her upper indifference separates, as do the lower poles of the upper system, which give milk—the reverse of the monthly cycle, as it were. Woman remains indifferent because she nurses; because of this, the upper indifference remains open and the lower closed. 481 [2: 97]: The two great processes of the earth, hydrogenation and oxidation, appear to comprise the good and the evil of the same. Oxygenation is the source of all error, all inhibition, all stasis, all fear and torment. The organic drive of hydrogen, on the other hand, is the free artistic feeling of God, the source of good. Only the organic is good; only love is beautiful and magnificent. All evil is nothing but the phenomenon of the inhibition of the drive toward the good, the devouring of the good. Woman is good; man alone has within himself evil that must be overcome. 482 [2: 98]: Man only performs the delivery. He should not be so proud as to believe that the child is his fruit. He merely returns woman's nature to her, he loosens her bonds, and the earth, germinating, gives birth through her. She is the continuation of the earth. Man is foreign, woman native to the earth. It is his task to honor her. There is therefore nothing more horrible than the one-sided subservience of woman. For her part, she must give the earth its due. We love the earth alone, and through woman the earth loves us again. Therefore, you find in love the answer to all secrets. Know woman and everything else will be yours. 483 [2: 98]: The fact that it is woman who gives birth in nature indicates her superiority. Woman is actually the last limit of the earth, and man definitely stands a step below her. 485 [2: 99-100]: "If you want to find out exactly what is proper, ask only among noble women. . . . And if you ask both sexes: man strives toward freedom, woman toward propriety."13 This passage from Goethe's Tasso is an excellent indication of the place of woman in the natural world. The earth in its highest, freest form is propriety itself; the extraplanetary on earth is transfigured in man. Woman will always be indifference; man, on the other hand, difference, polarity. 486 [2: 101-2]: Vegetation and animalization appear to form one scale, one line with the different conditions of man and woman. The


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more woman advances, the more man recedes. As man advances, woman recedes or becomes concentrated. The human female is the most concentrated plant indifference on earth (indifference of both sexes of plants), but man too becomes freest here. The fact that man does not become truly separate (like woman, when she becomes freer, in the plant), lies in the earth as earth. On the sun, this must by all means be the case, just as the sun and the earth in general must stand in complete opposition to each other. The sun begins where the earth ends. On the sun, man separates into poles, or has separated into them, and woman is most concentrated, insofar as woman disappears entirely with the expansion (polarization) of man. Just as there are female cryptogams here on earth, there are male cryptogams on the sun.H It is curious that, the nearer plants come to cryptogams, the more animalistic they become, just as animals become more vegetable, the nearer they come to plants. Incidentally, the doubled sex in man reveals itself already in his internal schism, which woman never knows. First and only in woman does man come to rest. 500 [2: 112]: [. . .] The history of conception and birth, etc., is actually the history of the process of separation in general. Conception = first differentiation, which overcomes inhibition more and more, until the differentiation becomes absolute in bodily terms, and continues on and on after birth on a higher level. Pregnancy = schema of magnetism. Birth = schema of complete differentiation. Polarity must become the schema of the family, and the family the schema of polarity. One recognizes and understands it best by studying humans and their history. 501 [2:112-16]: Woman yearning = indifference. / Woman on the path to fulfillment = beginning difference. / Woman in complete fulfillment = total difference. Man differentiates; the longing for this is his form of yearning, which is on the path to fulfillment with the certainty of having induced difference; it is complete when difference has become absolute. As woman's difference increases, man actually becomes certain of his fulfillment, which is proven by external appearances. He already felt the existence of his fulfillment at the beginning in his own satisfaction, just as woman was aware of her fulfillment in her own satisfaction, and woman is certainly able to determine when she has conceived, for from that moment on, every following union must seem to be merely a memory to her, instead of the hope that it was earlier.

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Something like this must also occur and does occur in man. It is curious that animals only have hope (by means of instinct), but not memory (by means of reason). Menstruation in the human female is curious, as if it were an incomplete differentiation on a very low level, yet on the same path as the differentiation that occurs later, on a higher or on all levels. It (the former) stops during the time that woman is able to differentiate more freely, but it only appears to stop, for now it is supported by the other levels, used for a higher purpose. The family as type would seem to show the triplicity in each (organic) chemical process. Only as difference can the one sex (woman) enter into difference with man. Man becomes indifferent as he enters into the difference of woman. Woman gives w^her individuality; unity turns into duality, and the yearning to give up the same is woman's yearning in general. But what separation is sublated in man through love? Is it the often-mentioned struggle between science and love, or better, between science and yearning? Man seeks individuality. Only when he enters into the family as husband and exists in it has he found individuality and become one. Thus there is no union without separation. Separation itself takes place for the sake of union, and the latter for the sake of separation. [...] It should further be noted: how woman in the greatest separation from the child becomes indifferent again; how man becomes different again afterward; how they become completely as they were before. That everything becomes again as it was is most remarkable of all; it becomes what it was in that it ceases to be what it was. Because woman becomes indifferent again, she exists and comes to the point of greatest difference from the child. One could say in general: the one pole returns to indifference everywhere and thereby continually yields the other anew. The one pole is everywhere, as it were, the child, the son of the other, which is the mother; but this does not involve the father. Thus the relationship between + and - is not that of the love of lovers, but rather that of the love between mother and child. Yet it is only a question of this relationship to the extent that. + and - maintain themselves side by side. Insofar as they enter and are able to enter into indifference, it is the relationship of the love of lovers or of the union, of the so-called indifferentiation. It is here that deep secrets reside. Meanwhile, until they are answered, the Madonna with the child remains the most beautiful sym-


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bol of polarity. Next to this, John is the one that differentiates, as it were, just as the Madonna with the child is the one that is in the process of differentiation. 502 [2: 117]: If organic contact (= animal magnetism) is an organicelectric process, and coitus is an organic-chemical process, then one can comfortably carry all laws of the electric-galvanistic chain over to organisms. A row of individuals in mere contact constitutes one class. But if one posits a chemical process, (coitus) between two members in a chain of three members, one has an organic-galvanistic chain with intensified coitus. One repeats this chain many times and obtains an (animal-magnetic) galvanistic-organic battery, with intensified coitus in greater proportion everywhere; and just as water is differentiated (impregnated) by gold and gold is differentiated (impregnated), even if it is simply in contact with it, it is also possible to impregnate a female individual by mere contact with a male. 504 [2: 118-19]: Love—inner act of preservation of the individual that has become external. Here the act appears as art, as a cell in a beehive, as a web. Procreation is, to be sure, a phenomenon of secretion, a phenomenon of secretion of the self. Thus for man. Woman appears rather to assimilate here, but she also only appears to, for she detaches herself as well, only as matter, while man detaches himself as spirit, as idea, and thus inspiration is formed. Man in the state of love is painter, musician; woman is sculptor. Woman falls behind intellectually; man falls behind physically. Woman wwtangles herself, and man entangles himself. In procreation, the power of fantasy. Nothing but the mere construct of the other. Magic, due to the effect of the cipher, of the form, of the letter (of the organic). For both give, neither actually receives. The form of man must have an ideal effect, for it calls forth the matter in woman; the form of woman must have a material effect, for it calls forth the spirit, the idea. They marry, as has already been said, and become the soul, life. Man is a god to woman; woman is a nature to man. God and nature unite to constitute the world. Everything indicates that the essence of procreation is to be sought much deeper than in the mere laws of matter. 518 [2: 130-32]: All life is a kiss that the sun gives the earth, just as love is the point of indifference of humankind. When living things kiss, then a life arises within life; it is the resurrection day of the

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heavenly God in the earthly human being. Man and woman are the symbols of the duality in the solar system. Who signifies the sun, and who the earth? As woman is created from the rib of man, so too is the earth created from a rib of the sun. The sun shines forth; man also strives forward like the light. Thus it is also the light of the sun that begets the embryo of life in the uterus of the earth eternally afresh. In love he arrives at the light of the world, and delights in his existence for the first time. That is why he is also born with tears. Sun and man rule the day; at night earth and woman win a splendid victory over the day. The moon is a secret, lovely message from the sun to the earth, higher man's reflected yearning for love to his earthly lover. And just as the virgin's yearning gaze in the mirror likes to linger comfortingly on a young man's eye, so too it is with the moon's glow, wherein the beautiful woman of the earth bares her bosom more freely and lets her tears flow, full of hope to be heard. That is why ardent feelings of gratitude for a merciful hearing also suddenly still these tears. 495 [2: 108] Art appears to be man's way of giving birth; the phenomenon of separation from coitus, from the intimate union of love. Woman gives birth to human beings; man gives birth to the work of art. Yearning will never represent a work of art, but only the tranquillity of pregnancy. Man emerges from love pregnant with the work of art; woman emerges from love pregnant with the child. Humanity and art are two sexes. 496 [2: 109] It is in art alone that human beings exist, in human beings alone that art exists. As a giver of birth, woman is the artist; as an artist, man is a giver of birth. Thus art accompanies human beings throughout life. 497 [2: 109] The art within man is the phenomenon of the rebirth of yearning. The child within woman is the same, except that here it is objectified. 636 [2: 206-7]: Woman can be oxygenated, and man oxygenizes. That is why woman also gains weight in love, like all bodies that oxidize. This is accompanied by lighter specific weight, greater thermal capacity, weaker refraction of light, greater transparency, and so on, as elsewhere. 677 [2: 216]: Girls are born hexameters: when they become women and ****, they become" pentameters.

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3. Friedrich Schlegel: Theory of Femininity15 Nothing has a more deplorable origin and more terrible consequences than the fear of appearing foolish. This is the cause of women's oppression and many other cancers of humanity. [Lyceum Fragment 106] Prudishness is the pretension of innocence without innocence. Women must, of course, remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, stupid, and base enough to demand of them eternal innocence and a lack of education [Bildung]. For innocence is the only thing that can ennoble ignorance [Bildungslosigkeit]. [AF$i] All great revolutions have been incited by youths or by women. Christianity, Socratic philosophy, pp. [PhilosophicalFragments, 2d Epoch, Part IV, no. 1548] If you want your influence to be great, kindle and educate [bilden] youths and women. First, here there is still fresh energy and health to be found; this is how the most important reformations have been achieved. [Ideas 115] Woman is a classical and classicizing being; man a progressive being. Together they are a historical system. The equation between masculinity and femininity is an insoluble one. Every man possesses genius; harmony is the essence of woman. Every man contains a demon within, every woman a marriage. Man is more sublime, woman is more charming; both are equally beautiful; both are equally deserving of praise. In feminine beauty there is more Suada,16 harmony, and symbolism; in masculine beauty more allegory, enthusiasm, and energy. [KA 7: 59] Death is perhaps masculine, life is feminine. [KA 7: 200] It can perhaps be determined quite definitively whether an educated [gebildet] woman whose morality is in question is denied or chaste. If she follows the general tendency, and if the energy of her spirit and her character, and the appearance and effect of the same, is her one and all, then she is defiled. If she knows something greater than greatness; if she can smile at her natural tendency toward energy—in short, if she is capable of enthusiasm—then she is chaste in the moral sense. In this regard, one can say that all of feminine virtue is religion. But that women have a stronger belief in God or in Christ than men, or that any sort of good and beautiful freethinking suits them less than men, is of course only one of an infinite number of commonly held banalities that Rousseau brought together into a

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proper system of femininity, in which this nonsense is so purely expressed and developed that it could not help but meet with general approval.17 [AF^2o] Passion and love—a moment without dualism. Marriage and friendship—already a great amount of dualism. Marriage is harmony of spirits, of geniality.18 All life is masculine and feminine. Passion is more marital, love more amicable. Femininity tends more toward marriage, masculinity more toward friendship. The feminine form is entirely blossom and fruit—the calyx rules her body. The angularity of the man is perhaps more mineral. Masculine beauty is not merely absolutely animal, but is also absolutely mineral, and this is expressed even in ancient statues. Perhaps women's vegetable qualities are less often expressed, even in the paintings of the ancients. Since they are absolutely vegetable, women themselves are poesy. The poesy of children is still very different from that of women. The world as a chemical process in order to spread all forms of love. The lack of consciousness of animality is necessary for women; their exclusive focus on love is merely arbitrary, because today the center of their existence requires it. The highest principles of history are, like those of morality, vegetable. This explains the nonclassical peoples. Spirit is the original feminine. And thus, reflection, or better yet, fantasy. The object is masculine, the subject feminine.19 The philosopher's form of devotion is theory, pure intuition of the divine—calm, peaceful, and serene in quiet solitude. For this Spinoza is the ideal. The religious state of the poet is more passionate and more communicative. It begins with enthusiasm and ends with mythology.20 That which is in the middle possesses the characteristics of life, down to the difference between the sexes. Mysteries are, again, feminine; orgies want to conquer or impregnate everything around them in the joyful exuberance of masculine power. [Ideas 128] Feminine consciousness is already quite different—its keynote is a pure state of becoming lost in the object, thus the necessary unity of the object of women's love—indeed, this itself is love. Pure longing, the first moment of going beyond oneself is something different. [Ideas !37] To be sure, reason is the feminine, receptive principle in the under-

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standing—even animals have memory, albeit a very limited one, but they do not have reason. For freedom, (from a practical standpoint) matter [Materie] only seems to be infinitely determinable material [Stoff]. This alone founds shared intuition. It assumes a practical association of spirits. In intuition, sense is the feminine, that which is receptive; in action, material is seen as feminine, and offers itself to us in a feminine manner. The union of spirits is not a union in the manner of marriage and passion, but these themselves are merely weak imitations of the realm of thought. Irony is the universal solvent21 and the synthesis of reflection and fantasy, of harmony and enthusiasm. Universality, originality, totality, individuality—only nuances of the above; universality is the minimum. Here men and women meet. [KA 8:71] Women have much less need for the poesy of the poets because their own innermost essence is poesy. [Ideas 127] Women have absolutely no sense for art, but they do for poesy. They have no predisposition for science, but they do for philosophy. They are hardly lacking in speculation, inner intuition of the infinite; they only lack abstraction, which is far more easily learned. [AF102] Confessions, arabesques, and the fact that women write novels are all that is to be won from the so-called novel of the age. [KA 2: 207] The novel as a whole is feminine; dithyrambic fantasies are masculine. The femininity of a mode of representation is even more apparent in that which is not said—and only in that which is not said by women—than in the niceties that only women can express. Everything that has a tendency toward absolute harmony, or a stress on harmony, is related to the mystical, for example, femininity. For its essence is inner congruence and a striving toward external unity. I. Masculine—fire, anger, enthusiasm O. Meister Petrarch Fiametta didactic intensified, progressive, positive II. Feminine—death, melancholy, irony, architectonic orchestral MUSICAL A Galatea, Shakespeare's sonnets—Cancionero Sternbald III. O (Hellenistic, oriental, Christian) mythology Adonis, Ofterdingen. Childlike—jest, lust, harmony.— [KA 2: 27]

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Women are treated just as badly in poesy as they are in life. The feminine ones are not ideal and the ideal ones are not feminine. [AF49] The natural state of human beings is to have genius; they must also emerge healthy from the hand of nature, and since love is for women what genius is for men, we must think of the Golden Age as the era when love and genius were universal. [Ideas 19] If one does not regard Voltaire's treatment, but only the meaning of his book—that satirizing the universe is philosophy and is actually the right thing—then one can say that the French philosophers effect with Candide what women effect with femininity; they introduce it everywhere. [AFgy/j.]

4. Friedrich Schlegel: On Diotima (i795) 22 In the Platonic dialogue, the Symposium, Socrates converses with his friends about love; and when it is his turn to offer his opinion, he instead gives an account of a conversation that he had with "Diotima a prophetess. She possessed great wisdom in the art of prophecy and in many other areas, and once secured for the Athenians postponement of an epidemic through their sacrifices made for ten years before the coming of the plague, and taught me the art of loving."23 In the dialogue, Socrates even calls himself her admirer, her student. Her extensive thoughts on desire and the beautiful are as comprehensive as they are astute, as definite as they are delicate. The gentle greatness with which she speaks reveals a heart that equals her great understanding and presents an image to us not only of beautiful femininity, but of perfected humanity. Her dialogue with the wise man is one of the most excellent relics of antiquity. And it is probable enough that the Platonic Socrates—here, as in several other dialogues—does not take the term love, which he confesses to have learned from her, to mean transitory delights, but rather nothing other than the pure goodness of a perfected disposition. Anyone who knows and loves that dialogue will not be entirely indifferent toward the perhaps insignificant question: Who was this Diotima whom Plato endowed with such great words? How did this Greek woman attain an education [Bildung], a spirit, that so strongly contradicts our common opinion of Greek women? Perhaps someone re-

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calls that the soulful Hemsterhuis, in his most perfect dialogue, Simon, brings this name back to life in the most beautiful manner.24 To begin with, this antiquarian trifle attracts attention because it appears as an enigma that challenges the acumen of classical scholars. Then it becomes an occasion for rectifying common opinions and prejudices about Greek women and thereby for shedding new light on the public and domestic life of the Greeks. That which is reflected in an investigation carried out in this way will, of its own accord, form an image of Greek femininity that is in fact still incomplete, but nevertheless most pleasantly surprises the friends of the Greeks with its sound coherence. Just as it has frequently been possible to restore, even with considerable gaps, the complete image of a broken statue from its smallest fragments, here too we find a guide for reestablishing what has been lost, for bringing together what has been broken apart, the prospects for a not entirely incomplete history of Greek femininity. If we compare the preliminary contours of this history with our customs and opinions, with the history of other peoples, with the principles of pure psychology and moral philosophy, then prospects open up that are so very extensive and rich that they must intrigue every friend of science, of history, indeed, of human nature in general. Plato tells us nothing more about Diotima's social situation than that she was from Mantinea; he refers to her in none of his extant dialogues besides the one mentioned above. I find no trace in earlier authors, and the later ones are content with merely mentioning her. We must therefore take refuge in speculations. This is a slippery course on which we should be guided by the most careful investigation! The common opinion is that in ancient Greece well-bred women had no education [Bildung], were excluded from interaction with men, even oppressed and despised, and that only courtesans possessed a higher education [Bildung] and enjoyed interaction with men. Anyone who is convinced of this opinion and reads Plato's dialogue only cursorily will settle our question very hastily, and define Diotima without a doubt as a hetaera because she appears to be educated [Bildung] and engages in dialogues with a man. This is an explanation to which there are so many important objections that we must dismiss it completely. [. . .] Greek education [Bildung], however, which characteristically pervades the entire population and extends into every activity of every individual, whose range is equal to the range of human nature in its

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greatness and weakness, raises what is noble to a higher level and beautifies even the lowly. Greek education imparted a soft glow over even the wretched baseness of the most disgraceful way of life. In giving themselves, the Greek hetaerae took pleasure; in giving pleasure, they educated [bilden]. Their life could be compared to a beautiful, sensual art, equally removed from the free outpouring of an enthusiastic heart and from unfeeling worthlessness. It is possible that this art received its first realization [Bildung] perhaps in the opulent, soft Miletus, its final completion in Athens. It was already Solon, the most righteous, wise and humane of all Greek legislators, perhaps even of all human legislators, who, instead of attempting to regulate things that he could not change through feeble or pernicious prohibitions, attempted to order them by law instead.25 This man, while securing the morals of the female citizens through strict penal laws against adultery, seduction, and prostitution of freeborn citizens, granted the hetaerae tolerance and protection. Indeed, he was the first to buy girls for brothels and founded the first temple in Attica to Venus Pandemos.26 The comedian Philemon called it "a magnificent, a patriotic innovation"!27 Other laws rob the citizen of his rights, seduce him into depravity, and then punish ridiculously after the fact. The philanthropic Solon granted unfortunate women, whose birth denied them the rights of citizens, or who were deprived of them by an unfortunate accident, the only thing that stood in his power: public tolerance. The human spirit of the Attic people confirmed the law of Solon and granted these women public protection; at least one reason for worthlessness was removed in that limitless and irredeemable contempt did not force them to the point of despair. Athenian public opinion recognized the good and the beautiful of every person and allowed fallen ones to return freely. Following the course of ancient wars, how often and how easily could a girl, raised with the awareness of civic freedom and with noble customs, fall into a slave's fate and way of life through cruel circumstance! Indeed, even for these women the main reason for their way of life was not so much their own guilt, sensuality, or selfinterest, as the misfortune of birth. It is thus understandable how the fine Menander, the philosopher of the new comedy, could almost always represent the hetaerae as good and noble and why we often find them in a union with men in which the grace of lovers, the serious activity of women, and the dignity of motherhood are combined and in which nothing but the ab-


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sence of civil or priestly consecration, a privilege of the free, prevents marriage. [. . .] If Diotima were a hetaera, then it is indeed odd that her name is not to be found in any of the rather extensive registers of hetaerae, and that Plato would make such a fuss about a courtesan who was so insignificant that no chronicler, no litterator?* knew about her. It would have been entirely impossible for her to speak about love in the manner that Plato allowed her to speak. Lais, for example, to whom Diogenes awarded "the prize for Greek sexual offense" and the condemnation as "the wise dog who led her naked life with masculine sense," is of no small significance here; Lais, "who spread her favor to anyone from whom she could draw profit," could perhaps love all individuals, but presumably not out of love of humanity.29 Diotima's lowest level likely remained Lais's highest goal. The beauty of the individual is, namely, according to the teachings of the prophetess, the lowest step on the ladder leading toward the goal of the art of love, to the beautiful that is everlasting and universal and in whose enjoyment life first deserves to be called life. The flood of her speech flows with the holy rage that no Venus hetaera can impart, with which the god of prophets and artists alone fills his most favored ones. According to the testimony of the Platonic Socrates, her life was also dedicated to the god of harmony: she was the priestess of the immortal prophet and proclaimed graciously to mortals what the divine youth confided to her pure soul. No hetaera was ever invested with this holy office; no slave practiced this holy art of Apollo! One finds examples of itinerant prophets from other lands, but no examples of prophets who were slaves. Nothing contradicts Greek customs as strongly as this. [. . .] Diotima is therefore not a hetaera. Either she stands alone, inexplicable in Greek history or, contrary to popular opinion, there was another class of Greek women besides the hetaerae that had access to the education [Bildung] that made her dialogue possible. When Proclus, a later but not unlettered writer, discusses Plato's theory concerning the education of women in his commentary on the Republic, he says that the statement that the perfection (destiny) of both sexes is the same moved the Platonic Socrates to advocate equal education for both sexes; but it was experience that brought him to this conclusion.30 Here he refers to Pythagorean women and, in addition to Theano and Mycha, to Diotima as well.31 But it seems that this explanation has only made our question more general and more complex; for

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the accounts of Pythagoras and his orgies, while numerous, are as unreliable as they are vague. Similarly, the accounts of these Pythagorean women written by the Attic Philochoras are in part quite vague and in part from very late sources. It is well known that, among the friends and successors of Pythagoras, not only men, but also women, became very famous; lamblichus names seventeen of them. Pythagoras supposedly left his writings to his daughter Damo. In his remarkable elegy (whose historical section is, however, not without poetic license or inaccuracy) , the poet Hermesianax writes of "the madness that bound him to Theano"—a woman philosopher to whom poems were ascribed. In later ages, scholarly works were imputed to some of these women; fragments of these works can be found in Stobaeus. Stories that verge on the fantastic are often told of the wonderful heroic deeds of other women, their pertinent answers, or philosophical statements. We are not concerned here with testing each individual case. The general notion, however, which all of those accounts unanimously explicitly confirm or implicitly presume, has a very credible and discerning witness—Dicaearchus, who claims that it was Pythagoras who also united a society of women, and that not only men but also women were his students. With his arrival at Croton, he also taught women. They thus enjoyed a higher level of education [Bildung] than other Greek women—indeed, even a formal [wissenschaftlich] education. It seems necessary to conclude from this what other accounts silently presume: that women were not excluded from interaction with men. Thus we already have one example that contradicts popular opinion! We have as little specific information about their public relations and their domestic way of life as we have on Pythagoras's legislation in general. Did they somehow differ from other Greek women, not merely in their education, but also in their rights and responsibilities? It is obvious that this concept, though indeterminate, corresponds very closely to our Diotima. It explains her formal education and her philosophical spirit. The position of a prophetess, her language— which can be broken down entirely into pure reason and yet does not lack some similarity to the language of visionaries—is quite compatible with singular features of Pythagoreanism as it may have been shortly before or during Plato's time.32 [. . .] The different systems of Greek philosophy—the rational, the empirical, the skeptical, and so on—did not emerge at once but formed [sich bilderi] gradually and in connection with one another just as the


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philosopher, like the poet or the sculptor, followed his master and perfected the unfinished work of his predecessor. This is why the greatest rational moralists and politicians among the Greeks agree so strongly in their theory of the destiny and education of women. Thus it was perhaps Pythagoras, the father of rational morality and politics among the Greeks, who already created the first seed of that theory, and drew up the first outlines that later became Opinions of Plato and the Stoics.s?> Not only Plato rejected marriage in his model of a perfect state and demanded that women as well as goods be common property; Diogenes the cynic, Zeno, and Chrysippus, the princes of the Stoics, held this opinion as well, which, because it offends our particularity, seems unreasonable to us. It is, however, easier to ridicule it or to think little of it than to understand its greater meaning: namely, the demand that femininity as well as masculinity be subordinated to higher humanity; the sublime theory that complete community is the essence of the state, whose basic conditions are nothing other than lawfulness and freedom. But what contradicts this more sharply than the separation of marriage and property? Yet this is reserved for the age "when the wise will rule or the rulers will be wise."341 only mention this because it is not without connection to the opinions of Plato and the Stoics concerning the destiny and education of women, which can elucidate and confirm the accounts of the Pythagorean women. To be sure, there was a difference between the theory of Plato and that of the Stoics, but it is unimportant for our purposes. It is enough that both claimed that the destiny of the male and the female sexes is simply the same; the Stoic Cleanthes wrote a work of his own on the idea that male and female perfection are simply one and the same. Plato demands in his model of a Greek free state that public education include women; they should participate in physical exercise and music, in public gatherings, in short, in the education [Bildung], the responsibilities, and also the rights of men. Greek history has absolutely confirmed the lawfulness of this demand and has justified Plato's legislative wisdom. Reason tells us that a state in which lawfulness is reached only at the cost of freedom is very imperfect; and experience teaches us that a state must degenerate where public education is not as widespread as freedom. The Peripatetics held the opposite opinion. Aristotle not only rebukes Platonic principles and Laconian morals in this respect, but also can never express his opinion strongly enough concerning the lower value and capability of women. A similar passage in

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Lucretius is perhaps not sufficient to allow us to assume that Epicurus thought like Aristotle in this matter, which is otherwise not unlikely. The customs of the Laconian women correspond very closely to Pythagoras's experiment and to the opinions of Plato, who rebuked Spartan customs only inasmuch as they did not go far enough. In Sparta girls took part in public education, physical exercise, and music, which also exhausted the range of male education [Bildung]. To be sure, women renounced physical exercise, supervised domestic affairs (without, however, occupying themselves as much with feminine tasks as did the Attic women), took no part in civic symposia, but participated in the society of men and were also very highly regarded by the public. Spartan moral history could very easily be falsified for well-known reasons; this happened early on, when earlier philosophers provided later orators with the occasion to do so through their fondness for Doric lawfulness and Doric strength. Thus whoever wants to believe unquestioningly all of Plutarch's tales of the valor of the Spartan women only proves that he is better at believing than examining;35 he who unquestioningly wants to dismiss all of them proves only that he does not know how to differentiate. In addition, one can, not infrequently without prophetic vision, differentiate the early, genuine tales from the later school exercises in the case of this writer, the latter having been created in the style of the former: as, for example, one can differentiate the oldest moral tale concerning a Laconian mother who murdered her fugitive son from the two later versions. The point at which all accounts agree with the earliest and best ones is perhaps this: that at the time when morals had not yet degenerated, Laconian women were inspired by great patriotism and were even capable of sacrificing motherly love to it. As unparalleled as this remains in history, it is nevertheless plausible. For in Sparta, in general, nature was sacrificed to law and to love. No drive is as powerful as false modesty; hence, one can consider the moment when the Spartans cast off their clothing and base modesty in pure holy enthusiasm and celebrated their competitive games naked as the highest flowering of Doric virtue. At this great moment, when they sacrificed the last weakness of nature to law at the altar of love, the bud of their state opened into full flower: it was their battle at Salamis.36 [. . .] Indeed, the physical exercises in which girls participated, in light clothing or entirely without clothing, contradicted Ionic and barbarian customs. They were, however, not disadvantageous to their health


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and appearance; for the beauty, health, and large stature of the Laconian women are widely recognized. In later times, on the other hand, these exercises could perhaps have compounded the prevailing state of licentiousness. The Roman Callimachus envies Sparta for the favorable opportunity, the unrestricted freedom that girls' gymnastic games offered lovers, and wishes that Rome had similar customs. For it is known that, once their customs had been corrupted, Laconian women surpassed all other Greek women in debauchery, lust for power, and greediness, and the greater power of their vices attests to the high level of their virtue. Aristotle painted a powerful picture of this situation, which was probably very true to his times. If, however, he had the intention of censuring, and if he mixed the ages, then it is more appropriate to pardon him than to try to vindicate him. After the distinct characteristics of the Greek tribes had become blurred and after Doric virtue had ceased to flower (which already occurred with the Peloponnesian War), the specific knowledge of this was soon lost. Then one could say the same thing of Doric virtue that Eupolis had already said of the Doric songs of the Theban eagle: "They have become mute through the lack of feeling among the masses." Although it was brief, there was indeed a time when it could be said that Laconian women possessed masculine power and independence, and that Laconian youths, on the other hand, possessed feminine humility, modesty, and gentleness. But was it not the case that the masculine exercises of Spartan girls, as well as the formal education [wissenschaftliche Bildung] of Pythagorean women, eradicated femininity? Both strike us as being contrary to reason, as do Plato's claims, and insult our own particularity. These claims can be justified as follows: some characteristics of these customs and opinions can be explained by the earlier state of knowledge [of antiquity]; many others can be fully justified by the nature of the Greek republics. But if we separate the essential from the incidental, then the following principle cannot be disputed: femininity, like masculinity, should be purified to a level of higher humanity. And, although it failed, the attempt to truly realize, in customs and in the state, what the ideal art of Attic tragedy actually reached is nevertheless commendable: without eradicating gender, to subordinate it to the species. Greek customs were based on necessity; ours are based on the incidental and on particularity [das Einzelne]. What is uglier than overly florid femininity, what is more repulsive than the exaggerated

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masculinity that dominates in our customs, our opinions, yes, even in our better art? Yes, even artistic presentations that are supposed to be ideal, even attempts to develop the concept of femininity in a pure form, are influenced by this pernicious manner of thinking. The elements of pure femininity or masculinity are seen as necessary characteristics that could destroy the freedom of the mind. They are, however, only nature's enticements or alleviations, and to direct them without destroying them, to obey necessity while respecting nature, is freedom's highest work of art. Second, too many characteristics are included within the concept of pure femininity (which perhaps has no more than two elements, sincere intimacy [Innigkeit] and tenderness, just as the concept of masculinity has those of breadth and resolve). Among those characteristics that are seen as positive attributes of the sex, that are taken from experience and only apply to an exaggerated femininity, are perseverance and simplicity. What is understood by these characteristics is nothing other than an absolute lack of character that receives its moral precepts from another being. And indeed, the unity that is given from without is here more complete than the autonomous, hard-won perseverence of men. But it is precisely the domineering vehemence of men and the selfless devotion of women that are already exaggerated and ugly. Only independent femininity, only tender masculinity are good and beautiful. [. . .] The second group [the first being the Laconian women] is that of the female lyric poets, of whom there were hardly a small number in Greece and who were hardly unknown. During the flowering of lyric art, did not Sappho and Erinna make Lesbos the most beautiful garden of music just as Alcaeus did? But even outside of Lesbos, Corinna could be the rival, friend, and mentor [Meisterin] of Pindar. Strabo calls Sappho, the beautiful woman from Lesbos, a wonder, and states that in poesy no other woman rivals her in the least. One could say of her fragments what Meleager says of her lyric blossoms, which he wove into his own poetic garland: "there are only a few from Sappho, but all of them are roses." The poetic epithets of a "female Homer" and a "mortal muse" are the historical truth. She loved tender pleasures and became the founder of a school of the beautiful and of art for the girls of Lesbos—defamers have called it a school of licentiousness. But doesn't the term education [Bildung] mean many things? For many, poesy alone could not legitimately be called education. This is because Greek poesy and Greek education are entirely different from


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our own. I would call to mind that one can expect nothing other than Greek education of Greek women. And what is Greek education if not poesy, its limitations and the goals of its path, the seed from which sprung the tree of their entire education, and the most beautiful fruit with which it brought its growth to completion? But it also seems as if the women poets had a freer association with men than did other Greek women. This is unquestionable in the case of Sappho: in addition to Alcaeus's declaration of love and her reply, there are other fragments and accounts that express this explicitly or presume it implicitly. The spirit of her life and her songs reveals it. I do not want necessarily to assume her love for Phaon, because a classical writer was of the opinion that it was a different Sappho that loved Phaon. Although her poems were in everybody's possession, and were received enthusiastically, it is still possible to see how such a confusion of identity could come about, and how, in general, a great degree of erroneousness could creep into her history. It was not seldom, for instance, that the comics presented her on stage and used their poetic freedom to such an extent that Diphilus made even the audacious Archilochus and Hipponax, the princes of iambic poesy, her admirers [Liebhaber]; and just as anachronistically, but with an entirely different emphasis, Hermesianax writes of her love for Anacreon. In the case of Corinna, there is also reason to assume that she associated with men freely, and this was probably the case with the other women poets as well. Either they deviated from the morality and the customs of common Greek women as they adopted masculine art, or it is not at all improbable that in Lesbos and in other small Aeolian or Ionian free states, women did not participate in public forms of education as in Sparta, but were also not excluded by law from public life and from interaction with men, as they were in Athens. Therefore their exclusion had more to do with arbitrariness and an individual's circumstances. The way of life of the women poets has brought about misunderstandings, and I have seen (although I no longer know where) even Sappho presented as a hetaera. It was Greek poets alone who were the venerable teachers of a free people and, according to the people's belief, consecrated favorites of the gods; holy music was a privilege of the free. There are very few cases where slaves or hetaerae practiced art. At the very least it can be clearly determined that those who took part in public plays could not be both. Sappho came from what was apparently a wealthy family of merchants. Her brother Charaxus was a wine

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merchant in Naucratis, who bought the freedom of a very beautiful hetaera whom he loved. Sappho was more likely to make fun of this and ridicule it in her poems than to be a hetaera herself and wait for a liberator. The example of Sappho and of the Greek women poets contradicts the view powerfully and eloquently put forth by Rousseau that women are entirely incapable of true enthusiasm and high art—a view that cannot be proved on the basis of reason and that experience does not support, not to mention that an incomplete experience cannot offer complete proof.37 What is striking is the fact that, even with so many famous women musicians and poets, no Greek woman is well known for drama or the plastic arts. Perhaps it has been overlooked that, just as there are two types of art, there are also two specifically different types of enthusiasm: the dramatic and the lyrical. Plato's hint in the Ion has not been taken, where he sharply and carefully determines the characteristics of plastic and musical enthusiasm. Musical enthusiasm is at one with the lyrical, and if one separates the musical from the dramatic, which is comprehensive and, indeed, includes the lyrical, then it is the plastic that remains. Perhaps nature does not deny women the range and the determination that the dramatic requires—a power that nature cannot exercise over the free mind—but nevertheless impedes it infinitely. On the other hand, the nature of lyrical enthusiasm corresponds to the concept of pure femininity so completely that it could also be called feminine enthusiasm, just as dramatic enthusiasm could be called masculine. Perhaps it is as the result of a similar confusion that the existence of philosophical spirit in women has been denied, because they lack systematic spirit, which is only a part of the philosophical. But the gift of being able to hear the tenderest sounds of nature from within and to communicate purely is, when it concerns knowledge of the mind and of morals, of immeasurable worth; and who would deny this of women? As long as the one true system was not discovered, or as long as it still continues to be inadequately presented, the systematic approach remains more or less divisive and isolating. Systemless lyrical philosophizing at least does not destroy the whole of truth so completely. Perhaps women, who are uncorrupted and are educated [gebildet] into the good and the beautiful, surpass many men in the vague feeling of what is right. And perhaps the more a man's system is complete, the less he will misunderstand the worth of the lyrical philosophemes ofDiotima.


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There are many exceptions to the common view that in ancient Greece only immoral women had a higher education [Bildung] and could take part in interaction with men. But were not inadequate education, unjust oppression, and raw contempt the lot of female citizens in some or even in most of the Greek free states? And when the most unanimous testimony, when proof of all sorts seems to leave no room for doubt that this was the case in Athens, but that Athens was the pinnacle of Greek education [Bildung] and sociability, then what is one to think of the sociability, the taste, the love of the Greeks in general? Some who had very exaggerated and indeterminate concepts of the situation of Attic women, and expanded these to include the Greeks in general, have attempted to defend the Greeks against a false accusation made on false grounds, namely, because they could use such a justification of Attic customs as a foil for their satire on the morals of our age. For them, one merit of the ancients is the division between the seductive charm of a courtesan and the serious activity of women, the dignity of motherhood. For these were entirely separate for the ancients, so that the double aptitude that nature planted in the hearts of women was also divided between two different classes and ways of life. [. . .] The actual opinion of those writers seems to be the following: women can and should be nothing but useful. Should a people's lamentable opulence now find pleasurable women indispensable, then it is best that women are either the one or the other, but whichever one, completely. In other words, this is to claim that women exist for men's purposes; this is to exclude the good and the beautiful from the destiny of women, a point in which the Greeks held an entirely different view. There are others, however, by far the majority, who continue to have equally indeterminate and exaggerated concepts of Attic women, or of Greek women in general. Remaining true to the mode of thought of our age, they censure the morals of the Greeks and the Greeks themselves most vehemently. In their opinion, the Greeks lacked a sense for feminine grace and beauty in form and manners, the Greeks' social education [Bildung] was quite undeveloped in comparison to ours, beauty was not able to rouse the Greeks' dulled disposition to love, or immoral opulence, unjust self-interest, had early smothered the tender bud. Many who do not say this nevertheless think it. In

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order to prove that the Greeks were no less receptive to feminine grace and beauty and were no less responsive to love than the Goths, I would like to refer to the remnants of plastic art, because here, relying on one's healthy senses, unerring visual evidence disarms prejudice most easily and quickly. Is not the circle of the ideal figures of female gods like a complete garland, woven from the most beautiful blossoms of femininity? Also, the few remaining examples of Greek plastic art not only prove that during the good age, both in the representation of the female figure and in general, charm was subordinate to the beautiful. Even after the degeneration of taste, and even in the works of mediocre artists, it was not the individual, but the universal that was represented (which is more than can often be said for the best of modern artists of all kinds, from ages that have been called golden]. These examples of Greek plastic art also exhibit the finest ability to comprehend and to communicate the tenderest characteristics of feminine nature. [. . .] Indeed, education [Bildung] and sensibility can be found in the character of more modern peoples, and at the same time a peculiar dullness and nonformation [Unbildung] or malformation [Missbildung], but it would be completely ignorant to apply this to the Greeks. Their education [Bildung] and their spirit were in constant connection and stood in unbroken correlation to one another.38 Their history is living matter unified by one soul into a whole. The principle of their education [Bildung], the spirit of their history, is a maximum of sensibility. Not only their virtue and greatness, but also their weaknesses and vices, arise out of a supreme elasticity and tenderness of mind. This not only surpasses our belief, but also the limits of our imagination, and yet this is the most reliable guide for the scholar of ancient Greece, who, lacking the sensibility of the ancient Greeks, will never be able to rise above commonness. Could one not turn this argument against the moderns? Those who have no feeling for beautiful masculinity in form and in morals show a feigned reverence for beautiful femininity that is suspicious, and perhaps nothing other than a sensuality coated with art and refinement. But those who feel beautiful masculinity lively and fully have taste and sensibility indeed: for the beautiful and the good in both sexes are simply one and the same. Several things have a very unfavorable influence on our judgments concerning femininity, love, and the social education [Bildung] of the ancients in general. First, there is a tendency to mix the crude sim-


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plicity of the most ancient age with the immorality of the later age, and the depravity of the worst people with the beautiful education [Bildung] of the better people in the good age. Then there is a tendency to confuse the Greeks and the Romans. It can be said of Roman urbanity what Horace said of Roman poesy: "There still remain traces of an original crudeness." In contrast to the powerful and sublime manner of the Romans, Attic sociability is almost provincial. If one calls freedom from all limited views and narrow-minded customs in interaction and in the way of life the great world, then the Romans reached a level of distinction that no other ancient or modern people has approached, even from afar. Third, one forgets the essential and clings to what is arbitrary and insignificant, since each person takes his own particular features to be the unconditional law of human nature. The greater audacity of the passions and their manifestations in a powerful people living in warmer climates holds just as little universal validity as the northern frostiness of the soul, yet it has at least the same rights. On the other hand, the republican openness and decisiveness of the Greeks and Romans in morals and in interactions have a clear advantage. But whoever wants to comprehend ancient history correctly, indeed, whoever wants to recognize definitely and clearly human beings and human life in general, must, above all, purge his mind of false modesty, which gentles the animal in man in order to smother the human being. [.. .] The law should not destroy nature in man, but order it; and so too modesty should not be eradicated, but should obey the laws of the understanding and of morals, as was, for example, Plato's view, or the example of the Dorians. One should remember this, because the animal drives are very difficult to tame with such laws, and because many chance circumstances have acted to safeguard false modesty from the height of European education [Bildung] . It is for this reason that the Greeks are so often misunderstood, and that many modern people are completely unable to comprehend the fact that it was a great, indeed, even a holy, act of the Spartans when they cast off their clothing and base modesty, and celebrated their gymnastic games in naked beauty and pure enthusiasm, enjoying their virtue in quiet repose as they attained civic love. Or is the reason for the oppression of Greek women rather to be found in ancient tribal practices, as is the case with some of the noble peoples of the Orient? It is true that such age-old practices often become second nature, protecting nonsense and injustice from the

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highest education [Bildung] of the noblest peoples, and can crush the most beautiful blossoms of humanity. But whoever is familiar with the most ancient history of the Greeks knows how favored they were by nature and by fate in this respect. For their humble origin, which can be distinguished from the common only by a few tender features, invisible to undiscerning eyes, contains the complete seed of their most admired, fullest blossom. In the poems of Homer there is still no trace of this oppression that must, therefore, be very recent. Women take part in men's societies and are treated with respect; this is quite the reverse of the Oriental practice of confining women and its consequences. Indeed, they participate in the heroic education [Bildung] of this age of knights and bards, although the age favors the education [Bildung] of men more than that of women. The most plausible explanation would attempt to derive this lack from the excess of the Greeks, this weakness from their virtue, to attribute a portion of this to their republicanism, but the greater part to their physical exercise and music; for these three were, so to speak, the leaves that developed from the tender bud of Greek education [Bildung] in Homer, as they unfolded into the perfected flower of freedom. That which was the highest glory and the greatest pleasure of Greek men did not include women. This explanation contains much truth but does not answer everything, since even many Greek women participated in physical exercise and music; it reveals the least about the deviations from Attic customs. Without a doubt, social interaction with women in all of the ancient republics was very different from that of ancient and modern monarchies, and for this reason the face of love and its features. Certainly a woman, accustomed to the homage of slaves or despots and then suddenly placed among republicans of ancient times, would find it somewhat austere in the beginning; if, however, she were of a nobler nature, then she would soon realize that she had actually been desecrated and despised as a tool of impotent desire where she was idolized, but not respected for herself. Physical exercise definitely had to cause a revolution in the situation and in the morals of the female sex, whether or not women could now take part in it as they did at Sparta. In the latter case, that of most of the Greek states, if not all of them apart from Sparta, but in any case in all Ionic states, this revolution removed women from the society of men, which took up its proper residence in the gymnasia;39 it gradually weakened the respect for women and thereby even lowered their


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worth by excluding the female sex from that which was the highest flower of male life and the first love of youth: beautiful games and free actions with male friends. The justifications for or explanations of Greek customs that I have given up to now have assumed indeterminate or incorrect concepts concerning what should be explained. I will now restrict myself only to Athens and draw up a quite general yet more specific outline of the fact, and develop the reasons for this. If we have only first gained ground here, where the accounts are the most complete, then we can determine from this investigation the ways in which the situation and the morals of the female sex in other Greek states were similar to those in Athens and Sparta. The assumption that the Ionic states were similar to Athens and that the Doric states were similar to Sparta can perhaps serve as a guide in arranging the small, still extant fragments into a picture of the whole that would not be lacking in beautiful unity. The most divergent particular features of the situation and the morals of Attic women are the following: (i) Apart from the amount of music making that was indispensable to public festivities, their education was restricted to feminine handiwork; both their diligence and their skill are very well known. They were, however, also spectators at the theater, this sublime school for Attic citizens; (2) With a few exceptions they were excluded from public life, from societies, indeed, from interaction with men; (3) The judgments of Attic writers on the other sex are unusually harsh, and the agreement of their statements reveals that this was the public judgment and the voice of the people. The laws themselves, the laws of free Athens, of the righteous Solon, promoted the restriction of women. Solon already restricted women from appearing publicly through a law that, taken literally, sounds strange but has the genuine stamp of antiquity. It determines the number of articles of clothing, the size of the utensils, and the value of the food and drink that a woman could take with her and carry on her person when she went out during the day. At night she was only allowed to appear in public if in a wagon and with a torch. A law of Philippides imposed a fine of a thousand drachmas on women who caused disorder in the streets. There were specific official bodies that watched over these and other objects of female morals: rwociKOKoajlo^ and ruvociKOVOjio^.40 The Attic laws are not arbitrary ideas that are forced on a people against its needs. Rather, they are drawn, especially the laws of Solon, from the innermost nature of morals and of the situa-

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tion, and it is therefore a pleasure to look for their often hidden meaning. It is therefore in history that we must seek the explanation of these laws concerning women. At first glance it seems as if the sole purpose of Solon's laws is to encourage good morals and to limit useless efforts. But two facts in Herodotus have led me to suspect that an additional purpose, and the main purpose of the later law, was the preservation of public peace; for, given their passionate nature, the tempestuous taste for freedom that also animated Attic women could easily threaten it. Already in very ancient times, Attic women banded together and killed an unfortunate man who appeared to be guilty because he, to whom each woman addressed questions concerning her husband's whereabouts, was the sole survivor of an unsuccessful attack against Aegina. In the Persian War, when Lycidas wanted to seduce the Athenians into heeding suggestions that would have led to the loss of their freedoms, these women killed the traitor; when the Attic women at Salamis received news of this, they broke into his house and killed his wife and children. Since public opinion becomes factional in the absence of public education, and since, except for drama, women had no share in this education, this ochlocratic41 female law should not surprise us. [. . .] Such laws were indeed nothing other than palliatives; as their repetition proves, they could be nothing else. However, in later times we find no fact like the one found in Herodotus. The aforementioned authority, namely, "censorship of women," as Aristotle states, "exists only in aristocracies, and is as useless in democracies as it is in oligarchies. For in democracies, how could the censor force women not to appear in public?" I do not understand this in terms of the appearance in public of individual women on domestic business (it would be absurd to forbid this, and, in any case, it was usually male slaves who performed these duties). Rather, I understand it in terms of public appearances of women, which were dangerous either to good morals or to the public order. How could the censor punish the poor masses monetarily? (Thus Philippides' laws might have been in many ways inapplicable.) He could only impose corporal punishment on free men in the case of a major offense, and he could not dispense disgrace, for in a democracy public opinion, and not the legislators, determines what should bring honor and disgrace. Through the expulsion of women from public life, which was unavoidably connected to the expulsion of women from the society of


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men, the peace of the whole was indeed secured, but the separation in the education and morals of the two sexes was determined and reinforced all the more. The only means for rectifying this problem fundamentally would have been to allow women, as at Sparta, to take part in public education, and yet at the same time to avoid the opposite mistakes. Solon did not have the power to use these means, because they contradicted the spirit of the lonians. He despaired of the morals of the female citizens so strongly that he found it necessary to affirm the strict laws of Draco against adultery, seduction, and prostitution. If one is to understand Solon's legislation correctly as the highest work of the art of justice, wisdom, and mercy, of which the whole human race should be proud, one must not forget that it was not Solon's responsibility to devise laws arbitrarily, but only to give order to public opinion and to find its best expression. And even if it were the case that his laws, wherever possible, were in keeping with the strictest justice— and that wherever this was not in his power, he at least knew how to strike a balance between the laws of necessity and reason by taking truly ingenious courses in using and protecting the law in the most discerning and finest fashion—this might have little meaning for some people, but it is still more appealing than other legislations. If these provisions seem strict, the Attic state, on the other hand, saw to it that young female citizens were educated in feminine tasks. Furthermore, the state supported marriages; daughters of those who had performed outstanding service for their country were, at public expense, educated or given a dowry; anyone could lodge a legal cornplaint against a person who insulted a woman; even those most unfortunate women who were denied the rights of citizens were at least tolerated, etc. All of this took place in the spirit of righteous and good Athens, where equality under the law was at home and where even slaves had rights, where they, as Demosthenes said, could speak more freely than citizens of other states, where even they could be happy. I would not venture to surmise the lawful grounds for divorce in Athens, whether the will of both parties or of one party only was sufficient for divorce. But it is highly probable that in this area as well, the Attic laws were truer to their own spirit and more just than others, and that the rights of men and women were the same. The fact that the authorities attempted to discourage such nonsense, by negotiating an equal settlement, and requiring the personal appearance of women in court, and the names given to divorce, a7iO7iO|J,7iT| and ocTioXetxjn^,42

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lead one to deduce something extremely arbitrary. There was a political reason for the special privileges of every epiclerus;43 these privileges can serve as an example of the depth of meaning of even the most unusual of Solon's laws. This was the case in respect to any female citizen who, in the absence of sons, inherited the property of her father. The authorities arranged her marriage and gave her hand to the nearest relative, who, however, had to be marriageable in every respect, and if it were otherwise, gave her hand to the next nearest relative; indeed, if she were already married at the time of her inheritance, the first marriage would be dissolved. Such an heiress enjoyed a great number of privileges, the greater part of which had the intention of providing her with descendants. Some of these privileges were, however, of the type that soon were outdated and became ludicrous. Solon sought not only to secure the most important unity of smaller parts, of which the whole of the state was composed, through marriages; otherwise, these parts could easily become the foundation for factionalism; rather, even in the case of those more unusual decrees, he had a purpose that stood in the most precise relation to the greater goal of his whole legislation. This goal was to check economic inequality—which in general, but particularly in Greece, grows quickly once it gains ground— at least to the extent that the violent disturbances that such inequality necessarily brings to free states would be avoided. Through such laws Solon attempted to restrict the combining of two inheritances, and to preserve economic equality between individuals, as well as families. The distribution of tax monies in Athens was this sort of masterpiece of justice and of wisdom; the state showed great generosity in providing for those who had performed outstanding service for their country, or for those who, through no fault of their own, needed its help. The laws were so exemplary that there were no beggars in Athens, and excessive wealth was seldom and short-lived. Economic inequality was, in general, what triggered both genuine Greek democracy and Solon's legislation, through which the highest task of every Greek free state was so happily—and, when one remembers that Athens was a democratic trading center, one can say so admirably—resolved. As concerns the history of morals and the constitution of Athens that I have been developing here, it should not surprise us to find statements by Attic writers concerning the female sex that generalize unfairly, but in this city were not entirely without reason. And yet, what is speaking through them is not so much contempt but mistrust,

F. Schlegel: On Philosophy. To Dorothea

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not passion but reason. Even the most inane, ridiculous misogyny of Euripides reveals more the bitterness of an injured party than the arrogance of an unjust oppressor. This also explains why the Greeks privileged love between men and the opinion that the more noble form of love or heavenly love could only take place between men. Solon himself made use of the course of events and undertook the noteworthy attempt of ennobling to the level of Doric love the Ionic excesses that he could no longer completely eradicate. He forbade male slaves to love other men, this being a right of free men, but, on the other hand, attempted to restrict unnatural excesses through strict penal laws. He achieved this to the extent that even in Plato's times one could say that only in Athens and in Sparta did people know how to differentiate heavenly love from its baser varieties. Plato lived during the age in which Attic licentiousness and lawlessness, their power yet unweakened and its freedom yet uninhibited, continued their exuberant excess. He was also close enough to the time in which Doric virtue was at the height of its flowering. Thus his preference for Doric morals, also with respect to women. With a few masterful strokes, he immortalized a woman who corresponded to this preference, who simultaneously satisfied both his tender feeling and the high ideas of reason: Diotima, in whom the grace of an Aspasia and the soul of a Sappho are united with great independence, whose holy disposition represents an image of perfected humanity.

5. Friedrich Schlegel: On Philosophy. To Dorothea44 You did not listen without religion to what I told you about Spinoza; Hemsterhuis brought you great pleasure; and even the translations could not scare you away from Plato, whom you would most likely worship if you knew him fully. You are also inclined "not just to content yourself with your natural philosophy; rather, you want, God willing, to make something of yourself." It pleases me that you take this matter so seriously. And why should it be otherwise? Your inclination toward philosophy is certainly not vain curiosity—for whoever knows what is right because it resides within him does not simply latch on to this or that. His purpose is not merely to know all kinds of things dictated by fashion or chosen on a

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whim. So why should you not give in to this inclination? Fear of what the so-called world might say can hardly deter you. For you know only too well how easy it is to succeed in the world unnoticed or undisturbed, and, if need be, you would not be afraid of candidly revealing yourself to the world as you are. I am also confident in my hope that you are not infected by thoughts that instill in many a dainty woman a secret fear of the sciences, or even of the arts, or of anything ever touched by scholarliness. I am referring to the concern that the development of the intellect would mean a loss of moral innocence, and above all of femininity—as if precisely that which, as they say, makes whole nations effeminate could make women too masculine. A concern that seems to me as unfounded as it is unmasculine! For where once femininity resides, it never ceases for a moment to remind its owner of its existence—especially when one is accustomed to a whole and undivided existence, as you are. I remember quite vividly my bold assertion that philosophy is indispensable to women because there is no other virtue for them than religion, to which they can gain access only through philosophy. I promised you at that time to prove this thought, as one calls it, or to work it out more fully than is possible in conversation. I have come to keep my promise; not just to prove myself a man of my word, but rather purely and simply because I desire to do so, even if only to tease a woman so determinedly contemptuous of all writing and the world of letters with my love for these things. You would most likely prefer a conversation. But I am first and foremost an author. Writing holds for me an indescribable magic, perhaps because of the glimmer of eternity that hovers around it. Yes, I confess to you, I wonder what mysterious power lies hidden in these dead pen strokes and how the simplest of expressions that seem to be nothing but true and accurate can be so meaningful that they stare as if from clear eyes, or speak to us like accents without artifice coming from the depths of the soul. It is as if one can hear what one reads, yet the only thing one who recites these beautiful passages can do is attempt not to spoil them. The silent characters seem to me a more proper cloak for these most profound, most immediate expressions of the mind than the sound made by lips.451 would almost like to say, in the somewhat mystical language of our H.: Life is writing; the sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of the divinity onto the tablets of Nature with the stylus of the formative spirit. But as for you, I believe that you will successfully do your part with re-


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gard to this purpose of the human race if you continue to sing as you have, outwardly and inwardly, in the ordinary and the symbolic sense, and if you are less reticent, and now and then read with devotion from the divine writings, and not only have others read for you and tell you about them. But, above all, you must consider words more sacred than you have until now; otherwise I would be in a bad way. For of course I can offer you nothing, and I must explicitly demand that you will expect from me nothing but words, expressions of that which you have felt and known for a long time, only in not so clear and ordered a fashion. Maybe it would serve you well to expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language, and grammar of the instinct for godliness that lies at its origin and, essentially, is philosophy itself. Whether it be a natural arrangement or human artifice, the fact of the matter is that woman is a domestic being. You are most likely surprised that I too am supporting the popular view in this matter of domesticity, which appears ever more frequently in our books the less it is encountered in the family. You will think this is yet another of those paradoxes that, once the strangeness wears off, tend to revert to the basest commonplaces and most readily available platitudes. You would be absolutely correct if I were speaking of women's destiny. This destiny seems to me, however, to be the exact opposite of domesticity, if you understand destiny, as I do, not as the path that we take or would like to take of our own accord but as the one to which the voice of the God in us directs us. It is not the destiny of women but rather their nature and circumstance that are domestic. Furthermore, I consider it a more useful than pleasant truth that even the best marriage, motherhood itself, and the family can in fact so effectively ensnare and pull women down with needs, with economic and worldly considerations, that they forget their divine origin and image. In fact, women often do not even become aware of these things, even those women who would otherwise have the inner gifts and the external means to do so. Indeed, we see daily how seldom women dare raise their heads above the public sea of prejudices and platitudes. And if they do, it is usually only when they love more intensely and independently than fashion or household mores would sanction. If the object of affection does not live up to their expectations, they resign themselves immediately after the loss of happiness and virtue and fall back into the same old pattern. Truly, one must be of very strong convictions not to consider a moral Anadyomene46 a mere fairy tale—a

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woman who, like the goddess of the myth (only more godly, and, to the spirit, more beautiful than she), rises out of that ocean with her entire being and her entire form. "But," you will say, "is it any different with men?" As a matter of fact, it is; even if you do not consider, out of all the men who are and could be educated, that very considerable number whose actual business it is to gain immortality through the Jacob's ladder of the arts and sciences. Let us suppose that a man who lives only for the state or for his own social class, understands little or nothing of the arts and sciences, and is also without religion, without an original, unique, and plentiful source of pure inner enthusiasm;47 even so, his love of freedom, and especially his feeling of honor and his responsibilities to his social class, can be a kind of religion, can serve as a substitute and warm, however slightly, his cold disposition so that at least a spark of the eternal Promethean fire remains hidden among the ashes in memory or in hope of better times. Furthermore, the male professions of the upper classes are more intimately related to the arts and sciences, and thus to the gods and immortality, than are household affairs. But even if a man accomplishes and desires nothing more than to earnestly further that which is useful, even then this usefulness is of greater scope and magnitude and gradually broadens even the limited spirit. With this broadened outlook, the thought arises to advance to a higher level. The lifestyle of women has the tendency to make them increasingly limited and bury their spirit, even before its blessed end, in the earth's maternal womb. Whether noble or bourgeois makes no difference here. For fashionable life is even more lifeless; it banishes the spirit even more effectively than does domestic activity—a colorful, barren sand that is even worse than the other, the dark earth. For precisely this reason, women should strive with both mind and soul toward the infinite and holy—they should develop nothing more thoroughly than the sensibility and the capacity for it. And no love affair should be as serious as the one with religion. You notice that I agree with the ancient uncle in Wilhelm Meister who believes that equilibrium in human life can only be maintained through oppositions. Not to such a degree, however, as the old Italian who wants to bring up the quiet, sensitive youth to be a soldier, or to make the fiery and impetuous one into a religious man. I disapprove of the latter only because I regard all moral upbringing as foolish and totally un-


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acceptable. Nothing comes of these silly experiments, except that one overrefines the person and profanes that which is most sacred in him, his individuality. One can and should do nothing more than properly and usefully cultivate the pupil. Everything beyond that must, from early on, be left up to his own discretion, to do whatever he wants and however he wants to do it, and at his own risk. Further, I believe that if one forms someone into a good citizen and instructs him in all types of sound occupations as the nature of his circumstances permits, while at the same time allowing for the freest possible play in the development of his own nature, then far more can be accomplished with this person than with the best in society—indeed, all that is necessary. But attempting to form someone into a human beingis like claiming to give lessons in becoming godlike, it seems to me. Humanity cannot be innoculated, virtue cannot be taught or learned, except through friendship and love with sound and genuine people and through contact with our own selves, with the gods in us. The individual mind, the individual strength, and the individual will of a person are the most human, the most originary, the most holy in him. Gender is less significant and more a matter of chance; it is only an external factor of human existence and in the end really nothing more than a sound arrangement made by nature. This arrangement cannot be arbitrarily destroyed or reversed, but rather can certainly be submitted to reason and formed according to its higher laws. Masculinity and femininity, as they are commonly regarded and practiced, are indeed, the most dangerous obstacles to achieving humanity, which, according to an old myth, is located in the middle and yet can only be a harmonious whole that suffers no division. The world seems, in fact, to feel the same about this point as does the unhappily married Sophie in the Accomplice, who says: "He is a bad person. But, he is a maw."48 It is precisely this measure that is used to judge the value of men and women. No wonder, since there is no profession in which people are so backward as in the human. Such an inhuman lauding of man and woman is no different, it seems to me, than if one wanted to praise somebody by saying: he is a bad person but an excellent tailor, which would still be quite a good recommendation for someone who was just then in need of a tailor. The world, however, and whoever echoes it, will most likely stand by its convictions, but I will certainly stand by mine: only gentle masculinity, only independent femininity is

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proper, true, and beautiful. If it is so, one must by no means further exaggerate the characteristics of gender, which is nothing more than an innate and natural profession, but rather seek to temper it through strong counterbalances so that individuality may find a potentially unlimited space and freely move about the entire realm of human existence according to its fancy. However little voice I grant nature in the legislative council of reason, I nevertheless believe that there can exist no truth that nature does not allude to in its beautiful hieroglyphs. Furthermore, I believe it to be nature itself that determines women's domesticity and leads them to religion. I find that things are already organized in this way. Have no fear that I will start to approach you with questions of anatomy. I am leaving it up to a future Fontenelle or Algarotti of our nation to present and unravel for ladies the singular mystery of gender differences with a sense of decency and elegance.49 It is not too difficult to determine that the female constitution is completely oriented toward the sole beautiful purpose of motherhood. And, for precisely this reason, you women must pardon the priests of the fine arts if many of them award the prize of beauty to the male body, even though the female is superior in the divine simplicity of her outline. "But how," you will say, "can that voracious gender delight in the iridescence and fragrance of a flower without immediately thinking of the fruit that is to ripen in its chalice?" Oh, dear friend, it is not the men who are against you here, nor even the artists. You women will need to come to terms with poesy and art itself when these so emphatically hate and denounce all that appears to be useful, and so love the independent, the internally whole and complete, and defend egoism. Admittedly, there exist purposes for the male body as well, and more base ones at that. But precisely because there exist a number of purposes, because the male body is not oriented exclusively to this or that function, there evolves from this indeterminacy a certain divine semblance of the infinite. But if the male form is richer, more independent, more artistic, and more sublime, the female, I find, is more human. Even in the most beautiful male, godliness and beastliness are clearly separated. In the female, both blend together, as in humanity itself. And it is for this reason that I also find it very true that female beauty can alone be the greatest: for the human stands above everything, and above the godly. This has perhaps caused some theorists of femininity to demand expressionless


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beauty as the most essential duty of the female body, and to strongly insist on its fulfillment. There is, it seems to me, no other characteristic of the female constitution, apart from the maternal, that is so original and essential as the more gentle, feminine congeniality [Sympathie]. Upon looking at the consummate man, anyone would immediately say: "This man is destined to shape the earth and to submit the world to the dictates of the divinity." Upon first glance at a beautiful woman, one would think: "In this vessel, the oft too impetuous music of this fleeting, rich life shall resound more softly and lovely, just as the flower transforms what it takes in from the air around it into harmonious colors and produces sensual perfumes in return."50 And is not this inner state, this gentle activity, of all poetic endeavor the essential condition for religion, or rather, is it not religion itself? To consider body and soul as originally and eternally different and yet still to deify the abovementioned congeniality and its sensual manifestation as the true virtue is only beastliness in a more refined form. But who would want to differentiate things, to childishly tear asunder and fragment the eternal harmony of the universe, in such a foolish manner? I use the term religion without hesitation, for I know and have no other. You will not and you cannot misunderstand the word, since you possess the thing itself, but do not possess the outer frills, which is also called religion but would best be termed otherwise. For you, every emotion does not turn into clamorous idolatry, but rather into quiet worshiping. It is for this reason that, when your emotions happen to come out or show through, you appear strange, hardened, or foolish to the common masses. And those thoughts of love that are conceived from sparks of inspired wit in the bosom of eternal longing, are not these more alive and real for you than that insignificant thing that others would rather call reality since it lies there, like a shapeless mass, so vast and raw? Religion, by the way, namely, the original inner religion, seeks solitude, just as it seeks love; it, too, scorns all ornament and glitter, and of it too can be said: The light of their own beauty is all that lovers need for their secret consecration. How, then, could one want to deny that you have religion merely because you might have no answer if one asked you if you believe in God, and because speculation about whether there is one God, or three, or as many as you like would strike you as nothing more than rather playful, uninteresting musings. I admit that this matter holds enough interest for me, even as just play-

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ful musing. And if that third man is missing, I would gladly sit at the philosophical hombre table51 of theological secrets and polemics, always more readily than at a literal table. I do love virtuosity of all kinds so much that it could even seem attractive to me in the form of fanaticism. That you, on the other hand, find fanaticism not only ludicrous but also intolerable I readily understand, and I would not wish it otherwise. It feels as if the truth would be thereby compromised and almost desecrated, because truth is included in it, and, furthermore, in such a form that the whole thing deserves to be laughed at. Superstition, like all that is lowly, is something you hold even beyond contempt. You are so completely indifferent to the common pursuits of the masses that you rarely even think of this indifference of yours—it hardly even exists for you. I cannot disapprove of this because it is not your business to trouble yourself about the world anyway. Blessed is she who does not need to mix with the throngs, and can hearken in peace to the singing of her spirit! / at least subsist in the world as an author, and thus I could surely reflect in all seriousness on what would, in this respect, be most beneficial for the masses and what ought to be expected from priests and rulers. Above all things, however, I enjoy recognizing and divining the spirit of the ages and the nations in religion as well. I certainly do not expect you, however, to concern yourself so much with concrete human history. It suffices for you to reflect inwardly with increasing lucidity on the inner history of humanity. Although I hold what is commonly called religion to be one of the greatest, most wonderful of phenomena, I nevertheless can accept as religious in the strictest sense only those instances when one thinks, writes, and lives divinely, when one is filled with God; when a breath of devotion and inspiration is cast over our entire being; when one no longer acts out of obligation, but out of love, for the sole reason that one desires to do it, and one desires it because God says so, namely, the God in us. I feel as if, in this section on religion, I could hear you reply: "If it is only a matter of devotion and worship of the godly, if the human is the highest, if the male is by nature the more sublime being, then would it not be correct, and indeed, most convenient, to worship the man and thus modernize the Greek religion, which deifies human beings?" I will certainly be the last person to steer you away from this path or to spoil your pleasure, if the man you are referring to is otherwise loyal to the original nature of the male and is of sound senses. I, for one,


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could never love without the hazards of worshiping something in a chivalrous manner, and I do not know if I could worship the universe with all my soul if I had never loved a woman. But, to be sure, the universe is and remains my password. Do you truly love if you don't find the world in your lover? To be able to find it and situate it in him, one must already possess the world, love it, or at least have a disposition, a sense, a capacity for loving it. It is self-evident that this power can be cultivated, that the view from the mind's eye must become ever broader, firmer, and clearer, and our inner ear ever more receptive to the music of all spheres of general learning [Bildung], that religion in this sense can be taught and learned, but never exhausted. Admittedly, however, friendship and love, as the organs of all teaching of morals, are also indispensable to these branches of learning. Moreover, in the case of two lovers, if the man attempts to lead his lover beyond the common duties of the little household gods into the open or associates her with the twelve great gods in the form of the famous Lares, and if she, like a priestess of Vesta, watches over the sacred fire on the pure altar in his breast, both will experience more rapid and effective progress than if each had strived separately in a heated pursuit toward religion.52 The concept of the universe and its harmony is for me the one and all; in this seed I see an infinite number of good thoughts, the revelation and further development of which I see as my proper purpose in life. It would be foolish and limited to demand, much less to claim, that this one thought be the center of all minds. However, it strikes me that a certain regulated exchange between individuality and universality is the actual heartbeat of the higher life and constitutes the first condition for moral well-being. The more completely one can love or form an individual, the more harmony one finds in the world; the more one understands concerning the organization of the universe, the richer, more infinite, and more worldlike each object becomes for us. Indeed, I am almost convinced that the deepest, most restless, almost voracious participation in all life, as well as a certain sense for the holiness of lavish abundance, is as important to a person as prudent self-restraint and quiet modesty of the spirit. Of course, one can also get on quite tolerably, even happily, without this great scope and depth to life. We see it every day; everything runs its normal course and is even in a state of constant progress. The domestic creature patterns himself after the herd that feeds him, and es-

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pecially after the divine shepherd; when he matures, he establishes his roots and renounces the foolish desire to move about freely, until at last he becomes petrified, at which point he often begins in his old age to wear motley colors, like a caricature. But the ordinary citizen is not fashioned and molded into a machine without some effort. He has secured his happiness if he can become a cog in the political wheel, and he can be considered complete in every respect when he has transformed himself from a human being into a mere figure. What is true for individuals is also true for the masses. They nourish themselves, marry, reproduce, age, and leave behind children who in turn live in exactly the same way and leave behind the exact same kind of children, and so on into infinity. Pure life merely for life's sake is the actual source of baseness and everything is base that is not infused with the world spirit of philosophy and of poesy. These alone are whole and capable of animating the individual arts and sciences and uniting them into a single whole. Furthermore, only through philosophy and poesy can the individual work embrace the world, and it is only with regard to them that one can claim that all the works ever produced through them are members of a single organization. It is true that life likes to take the middle course; philosophy and poesy, on the other hand, love the extreme. Furthermore, whoever wants to accomplish something must concentrate solely on the goal and take the proper measures not to become more interested, as do poetic and philosophical minds, in the first distraction he encounters than in the original aim, or to lose himself in aimless daydreams. It is also true, however, that a common person cannot have a purpose and cannot accomplish anything proper; that all objects lie too near or too far from the practical person's grasp, that all relationships are irritating to his eyes, and that one cannot, in the very midst of life, come to gain a proper perspective on life. All that is powerful, striking, and great in the lives of people who act or love, even if they have never heard of the arts and sciences, is inspired by the world spirit. The true middle is the one to which one always returns after taking the eccentric course of enthusiasm and energy; not the middle that one never leaves. Clearly, although all absolute seclusion leads to desiccation and self-destruction, there exists none more foolish than that which isolates and confines life itself as if it were some common trade, since the true nature of human life consists of the fullness, totality, and free


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activity of all faculties. He in whom nothing else stirs is not necessarily on the wrong path; but he who never budges is nothing but a reasonable oyster. Totally different is the case when a thinker finds, among the multitude of objects, the correct one, isolates it from any outside distractions, and becomes engrossed in its interior until it becomes a world for him that he would like to represent in words or deeds. Drawn from one related object to another, he will continually progress forward, while remaining true to the center and returning home to it with ever greater riches. I know you agree with me wholeheartedly that poesy and philosophy are more than means of filling the gaps that, despite all distractions, remain for idle people who happen to have some education; and that you agree that they are a necessary part of life, the spirit and soul of humanity. Because it seems to be nearly impossible to love poesy and philosophy equally, however, you find yourself standing at the crossroads like Hercules, or Wilhelm Meister, wondering which muse to choose and to follow. Let us begin with poesy. It seems to me that for you it is either something totally different from poesy, or it is not poesy enough. In other words, you either treat poesy like philosophy, and embrace only divine thoughts, or you use it as you would music, simply to create a pleasant atmosphere and to complete life. To be sure, you take poetry quite seriously, and with regard to the two or three great writers, the only ones whom you actually read again and again, you look for an infinite number of things—preferably, however, for the highest, namely, a worthy, fitting presentation of the most beautiful humanity and love. Wherever the presentation is so deep and true, you have easily found occasion and inspiration to create your own poetry from this or that poem and to imbue it with a more divine meaning. But take a look at yourself, at your inner life and love, remember all the great things you witnessed, meditate on the holiness of the best poets that you know, and decide then if these poets go beyond reality, as they always claim. I have quite often been struck by the impression that poesy does not attain the highest reality at all, and I have then been surprised to encounter the opposite claim everywhere, until I realized that it might just be a matter of semantics and that these poets understand reality as that which is everyday and common, whose existence one so easily forgets. I am far from indicting poesy for being less religious than its sister.

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For it seems to me to be its engaging destiny to unite spirit with nature and to beckon heaven itself down to earth through the magic of its convivial charms; the elevation of men to gods it may leave to philosophy. If a man is in need of a counterbalance to his everyday existence so as not to forget the muses and lose the sense of harmony, the sciences cannot come to his aid unless he is refreshed and invigorated by poesy's fountain of eternal youth. You will have guessed that I am referring back to what I said about the difference between male and female socialization [Bildung] and from which I now conclude that, for women, philosophy is the more immediate and indispensable necessity. Women are not in danger of forgetting outer charms, as so easily befalls men. And even if they are otherwise irreverent, they hold youth and the youthful disposition sacred and this poesy of life comes naturally to them. This is also why almost all, without exception, choose poesy, if what comes about without comparison, without reflection, and solely on the basis of traditional opinion and first impressions can still be called choice. If they are the type who can only be delicate and charming, who define their existence only by outer appearance and desire nothing but elegance, and for whom this means everything, then so be it. Poesy—I use the word as always in the broadest sense—poesy alone can lend this elegance at least a glimmer of soul and keep the spirit elegant as well. Others have a predisposition for religion and love, but they went astray in their thinking because in higher social circles they paid for some false wit with mistrust of everything divine. These, too, must idolize poesy and grieve over lost faith before they can realize that one can never lose either oneself or love, even if it may at times seem so; and once they have realized this, they may think back and smile at their disbelief. You see, I am not so taken with my opinion that I should forget the infinite variety of characters and situations, and I have remained so composed that I was even able to reflect on elegance. I readily concede that poesy speaks to many women and that it is beneficial and indispensable to all of them. In any case, it is not my intention to separate the muses. The thought alone would be blasphemy. Poesy and philosophy are an indivisible whole; like Castor and Pollux, they are forever linked, though rarely together.53 Between the two of them they share the farthest reaches of great and dignified humanity but, coming from their different directions, they meet in the middle. Here, in the innermost and most holy, the spirit is whole, and poesy and phi-


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losophy entirely melted into one. The dynamic unity of mankind cannot be rigid and unchanging; it consists of friendly exchange. Thus, he who regards the study of humanity as his sole profession could link poesy and philosophy only by devoting himself completely now to the one, now to the other. This is perhaps best for those who want to actively promote the arts and sciences. But he who merely wants to attain harmony and eternal youth through them may be obliged to show some kind of preference for one over the other. But it should be clear that he would not be able to do this without often returning to the other and using it as a complement. For the rest, however, I stand firmly by my statement: religion is the true source of virtue and happiness for women, and philosophy the most exquisite source of eternal youth for them, as is poesy for men. Both statements must be taken as a general rule. Also, I can appreciate the fact that you are not one of those elegant exceptions. I would rather the divine be too severe than too delicate. Incompletion lends the sublime, in my view, a new and higher appeal. Its dignity thus seems more immediate, more pure. It is as if it remains more faithful to its original majesty if it scorns, out of holy pride, the fullness and adornment of formative nature. I judge people the way I do physiognomies: I take those to be most interesting that look as if nature had imprinted a great design on them without taking the time to carry out its bold plan. Godliness paired with severity is most holy for me and no sensation, no opinion, is rooted more deeply or intimately in me.54 Some time ago I was examining a tall classical Pallas whereupon this fact resurfaced quite vividly in my mind.55 She is a perfect image of wise courage, and it seems to me that the first and most natural thought one might have on laying eyes on her would be that all virtue is, in the end, nothing but competence. Competent is that which possesses at the same time both vigor and skill, which combines crushing power with clear, calm insight. Never has the godliness of a form captivated me in such a way. And yet, my impression of her would not have been nearly as strong if her stance, posture, features, gaze, everything about her, had not been so straight, serious, stern, and terrifying, if, in other words, she had not had all the severity of the older style of art about her. It was as if I saw the muse of my inner life before me; perhaps you too would recognize her as yours if you saw her. That poesy is more well-disposed toward the world while philosophy is holier and closer to God is too clear and obvious to dwell on it

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any longer. It is true that philosophy has often disavowed the gods, but then only those it considered not godly enough; and this is, of course, its old complaint against poesy and mythology. Or perhaps this is but a passing crisis and thus proves exactly the opposite of what it seems to prove. The most intense inclination can most easily turn against itself; the greatest rapture becomes painful, and everything infinite touches its opposite. There exists a form of jealousy that does not spring from envy or distrust but from innate, deep-seated insatiability. Can this exist without love? Similarly, the passionate disbelief of many philosophers is impossible without religious ardor. What does true abstraction do but purge representations of their worldly element, elevate them, and place them among the gods? It is only through abstraction that all gods have developed from men. Let us compare no longer but turn immediately to the greatest of all the human faculties that produce and form philosophy and in turn are formed by it. This is, according to general opinion and terminology, the understanding.™ To be sure, contemporary philosophy often devalues it and elevates reason much higher. Moreover, it is quite natural that a philosophy which, rather than giving the infinite, progresses toward it and which, rather than completing anything in particular, connects and mixes everything, that such a philosophy values nothing higher in the human spirit than the ability to join representations with representations and to continue the train of thought in innumerable ways on into the infinite. This trait is, however, not a general rule. According to the opinions and the discourse of educated people, imagination is most intimately linked with the poet, reason with the moral man. But understanding is what really counts if the issue is the spirit of man. Understanding is the capacity for thought. A thought is a representation [ Vorstellung] that exists entirely for itself, is completely formed, whole, and infinite within its boundaries. It is the most divine aspect of the human spirit. In this sense, understanding is nothing else than natural philosophy itself, and not much less than the most valuable good. Through its omnipotence the whole person becomes inwardly bright and clear. He forms everything that surrounds him and that he touches. His sensations turn into actual occurrences and everything external becomes internal before his very eyes. Contradictions dissolve into harmony as well; everything takes on meaning for him, he sees everything in its correct and true light; and nature, earth, and life appear again in their original grandeur and godliness. And yet,


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beneath this mild exterior slumbers the power to, in an instant, renounce once and for all everything that we call happiness. Well, then. Philosophy is indispensable for women. But wouldn't it be best if they practiced philosophy as they already do, in a natural way, just as Moliere's gentilhommeus.es, prose—that is, alone or with friends who think likewise and also worship the universal world spirit.57 I would gladly add to this group the type of community that keeps the spirit supple and wit light, if this type were not so very rare that one can hardly count on it. If we call community only those instances when several people are together, then I hardly know where to find it. For surely togetherness as it is commonly understood is in truth solitude, and human beings tend to be anything but human beings. I leave it up to you to determine how few people it takes to be called a relatively large community according to this criterion, and what value it has. For conviviality is the true element for all formation, which has as its goal the entire person, as well as for the study of philosophy, which is our present topic. What either never occurs at all, or else happens of its own accord, is the best and the most indispensable. All effort and art are fruitless if we were not lucky enough to get to know ourselves first and to find the highest. We know only too well that this or that occurrence awakened in us the sense for a new world, that all of this would not exist without this or that acquaintance, and that we would still be seriously laboring on a lower niveau with little success. And does it not often seem as if we might, with respect to our real self, lose everything we have with one stroke? But we should not even wish that this might never happen, for it would be contradictory to want to buy this security with the loss of freedom. Thus, what is holiest is infinitely tender and fleeting and the morality of each individual, as well as of the whole species, must seem like a game of chance because of its direct dependence on arbitrariness. In other areas where it is active— for example, the arts and sciences—the course of the human spirit is determined by and subject to fixed laws. Here everything is in constant progress and nothing can disappear. Thus no step can be skipped, for the present step is necessarily connected to the one before and after it. What had seemed outdated for centuries blooms with the renewed force of youth when the time has come for the spirit to recall it and return to it. Here, the steady improvement and natural cycle of education [Bildung] is neither good-natured hope nor scientific dogma that needs to be posited so as not to relinquish completely

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all rational thought. No, it is pure fact; only with the single difference that the natural cycle, which is more at home in the arts and in ancient history, is available to us in specific examples. However, the steady process of perfection, which manifests itself most clearly in philosophy and modern history, is a fact that can never reach completion. Not so in the realm of morality; here it is a question of all or nothing. Here the question of being and not being constantly resurfaces. A stroke of chance can have a permanent impact and even obliterate large parts of our lives as if they had never existed and should never return, or else bring a new world to light. Like love, virtue springs only from a creation out of nothing. But for this very reason one must seize the moment, one must form for eternity what the moment offers and transform virtue and love, where they appear, into art and science. This cannot happen without connecting life with poesy and philosophy. Only thus is it possible to lend, to the best of our abilities, security and permanence to the one thing that is valuable. Only thus can the formation [Bildung] of poesy and philosophy develop on an entirely firm ground and unite the different advantages of both. Without unshakable independence [Selbstdndigkeit], the pursuit of constant progress can easily disperse the spirit in the world and confuse the mind, and only limitless love in the center of power will expand the circles of human activity further with each new journey. Where there is a lack of virtue and love, the drive for improvement knows of no return to itself nor into the past and it degenerates into a mad rage of destruction; or else the formative drive, having reached an extreme point, retreats and silently extinguishes itself, as has so often happened in the arts. A well-formed philosophy must, to be sure, be natural, but also artificial. Since, as we have seen, it was the forming of philosophy with which you were concerned, you are quite right not to remain content with your philosophy of nature but to seriously strive for the highest. But how will it be possible to carry this out? You have no confidence in so-called popular philosophers.58 And which of those German or English philosophers might I suggest to you since Voltaire's wit and Rousseau's eloquence have not been able to conceal from you the frequent banality of their opinions and views? The two or three philosophers of our nation who are not subject to this type of reproach are precisely those who have made only brief ex-


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cursions into the realm of philosophy and would not sufficiently answer to your needs. Abstraction is an artificial condition. This is not an argument against it, for it is surely natural for man to place himself from time to time in artificial states. But it explains why its mode of expression is also artificial. One might even call it the mark of serious philosophy that it desires to be nothing but philosophy and brackets all remaining aspects of human activity, so that, without artificial aid and preparation, it must be incomprehensible to the raw human senses. You are not so easily discouraged by difficulties, and you would not shun hard work; but you would find it difficult to become accustomed to a division of your being, perhaps even impossible without a mediator. It would have to be someone who, while concerning himself with artificial thought, would not have forgotten the finer features of the merely natural; someone to whom it would be of equal interest to devotedly follow Plato from a distance or to show understanding for the common man's point of view, someone who thinks exactly as he lives and is. I would trust myself to be this mediator for some philosophers and to bring them considerably closer to you and to anyone who wants to educate himself through the study of philosophy. I have often wondered whether it would be possible to make accessible the writings of the famous Kant, who so often laments the imperfection of his presentation, without diminishing his richness or robbing him of his wit and originality, as usually happens with excerpts. If it were permissible to organize his works somewhat better, obviously according to his own ideas, especially with respect to sentence structure, episodes, and repetitions, they would become as accessible as, for instance, those of Lessing. One does not have to take any greater liberties than the old critics did with the classical poets and I think one would then see that Kant, on a purely literary level as well, belongs among the classical writers of our nation. In the case of Fichte, such an undertaking would be quite superfluous. Never have the results of the deepest, seemingly infinite reflection been expressed with the popularity and clarity that you would find in his new presentation of the theory of scientific knowledge.591 find it interesting that a thinker whose single great goal it is to make philosophy scientific, and who perhaps has greater command of artificial thinking than any of his predecessors, can show such enthusiasm for popular forms of communication.

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I consider this kind of popularity to be a rapprochement of philosophy and humanity, taken in the true and great sense of the word, which reminds us that man [der Mensch] shall only live among men and that no matter how far his spirit extends itself, ultimately he must return home. In this respect, too, he has carried out his will with iron force and his latest writings are friendly dialogues with the reader in the candid, simple style of a Luther. I do not think that one should introduce the true dilettante to Fichte's philosophy in any other way than he himself has done in this new presentation. If somebody does not understand him at all, then it is simply because of a complete difference in perspective. The only work left for me would be the attempt to present the necessary and natural character of the philosopher as such. For if Fichte is a philosopher with every fiber of his being and also, by disposition and character, the archetype and representative of the genre for our age, then one cannot grasp him fully without understanding his personality, not just philosophically but also historically. But as long as he does not understand Fichte himself, as he is and as he develops, the best dilettante would, to be sure, grasp some parts of his philosophy completely, while in other parts he would find himself entirely lost. But perhaps you would consider it more advisable not to begin your studies with the philosophy of our age, or not to restrict yourself to it? In general, I would have nothing against this. The only problem with the philosophers of the preceding century is that they use scholastic Latin, and with the ancients, besides the bad quality of the translations, that they demand so much historical knowledge and so many annotations. How one ought to introduce dilettantes to Plato is not yet clear to me even though I have given it much thought. But with God nothing is impossible; one only needs to truly want it and, beyond that, to hope for the best. I can promise you Spinoza with some degree of confidence. Not so much something about him, but rather Spinoza himself: a mixture of excerpt, exegesis, and profile. I consider a complete translation counterproductive because the mathematical form cannot be retained and can be omitted without harm. In one respect Spinoza would be easier for you than the others. He was exclusively concerned with perfecting the spirit within him and in connecting his thoughts into a systematic work. He has little regard for the opinions of others


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and for the individual sciences. For this remains the greatest difficulty, one that cannot be erased by either mediation or qualification. Philosophy is necessarily also the philosophy of philosophy and is nothing other than the science of sciences. Its entire being consists in alternately absorbing and, reinvigorated, radiating the force and the spirit with which it first infused the individual sciences so that they reemerge more powerfully. One must therefore know everything in order to know anything and one does not understand any philosopher if one does not understand them all. From this you can also gather that philosophy is infinite and can never be completed. And with regard to this immeasurability of knowledge, the difference between your understanding and the insight of the most artificial and most learned thinker can no longer seem so great that it need undermine your courage. As long as you have a sense for the highest, then your knowledge differs from his in degree only and you are on equal ground. In any case, form accounts for little or nothing in philosophy, and neither does the material or the object of study. There are writings that, with regard to content, do not seem to fall under this rubric yet contain more spirit of the universe and therefore more philosophy than do many systems. The treatment, the character, the spirit are everything, and all studies, even the most banal reading, may become philosophical through the domination of the inner over the outer form, through the development of one's understanding and thought and through the continuous relating to the infinite. Don't I seem to you like John the Baptist "who came into the world not as the light but to speak of the light"? I am arguing on and on about philosophers and how I would like to treat this and that one without accomplishing or producing anything myself—and maybe I speak highly of the others to you so that I need not do anything myself. If we were face to face, my dear friend, I know I would not only talk about philosophy, but I would actually philosophize with you. I would start by reminding you of the whole of humanity and elevating your feeling for it to thought. Then I would show you how infinite being and becoming splits into and generates that which we call God and Nature. You see, this would culminate in a kind of theogony and cosmogony, and it could become almost Greek in character. In doing this, I would initially pay little attention to the history of philosophy and borrow from the spirit of the individual sciences only what is indispensable, what is really general, what everybody knows,

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and what is no longer thought of in terms of its form and separate existence. Of course, I would gradually enlarge my circle to a considerable degree. In any case, I would modify everything to the moment and its mood. I would seek to connect everything as much as possible to your most personal views and opinions, and I would often approach the same problem from a new angle. But the infinity of the human spirit, the godliness of all natural things, and the humanness of the gods would remain the eternal great theme of all these variations. Thus, we would not only have diversity in our philosophy but unity as well—a unity that we are not in danger of ever losing. If one has this unity and therefore knows that, considered as a whole, there is only one indivisible philosophy, then we can safely admit that there are an infinite number of philosophies with regard to man's formative process. Their communication may now unfold its entire wealth of forms and nuances, and the time of its popularity has come. If it is the task of the author to spread poesy and philosophy among the people and to create for life and from life, then popularity is his foremost duty and his highest goal. To be sure, for the sake of this goal and his own spirit he will often have to concentrate exclusively on the nature of the subject at hand and the rules of presentation and then his form of expression will necessarily be unusual and incomprehensible to many. But he would most prefer not to divide his activities, and to mix with the large society of educated people, for it is here that he can participate most directly in the eternally ongoing creation of harmony and humanity. He will also not want to distinguish himself through an unsocial and unnatural language. He does not need to do so and yet he can never lose himself among the crowd. For where language is animated by enthusiasm there arises from the most common, simple, and understandable words and phrases, as if spontaneously, a language within language. Where the whole thing is as if cast from the same mold, those of similar mind feel the living breath and its enchanting breeze, while those of a different mind are left undisturbed. For the most beautiful thing about the beautiful Sanskrit of a Hemsterhuis or Plato is that only those understand it who are supposed to understand it. There is no need to worry about sacrilegehere—there never is, if it is one's profession to communicate or to present oneself publicly. Clearly, those who are not free of this fear would do best to depart from this world immediately. This is the least of my worries.


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Thus, when the time is right, I would gladly try to put into writing what I wanted to explain to you in person and to select, for other dilettantes as well, from all of philosophy that which humans need as humans, and to present it in the most popular manner. Because needs differ so greatly, I would, to be sure, have to strive for a certain average reader and keep in mind someone like Doryphorus,60 that is, a thoroughly well-balanced reader. But besides the fact that I would have to travel about in order to seek out the best readers and piece together this ideal from them, as did the old painter in Crotona who made his Venus from the most beautiful girls in town, I cannot get excited over such an average figure anyhow. The thought of you and of some other friends will have a stronger effect on me. Nevertheless, the image of such an all-encompassing whole as this philosophy for humanity holds a certain terrifying dignity for me and will continue to do so for quite some time. At first I might therefore risk smaller attempts for which I have no proper name as yet. Imagine soliloquies about topics that concern the whole person or at least focus solely on him; with no more analysis than is allowed in a friendly letter, in the tone of a coherent conversation, something like this letter to you. I do not want to call it philosophy so much as morality, although it is different from what is usually referred to by that name. In order to achieve what I envision in this genre, one would have to be, above all, a human being, and naturally a philosopher as well. I have surprised myself and I am realizing now that it is actually you who are initiating me into philosophy. I only wanted to tell you about philosophy; the serious wish rewarded itself and friendship taught me to find the way to connect philosophy with life and humanity. I have, in a certain sense, communicated it to myself. It will no longer be isolated in my mind, but rather its enthusiasm will spread through every facet of my entire being. And what one learns to communicate publicly through this inner conviviality will become, through however general a communication, an even deeper part of ourselves. In thanks I shall, if you do not object, have this letter printed immediately and carry out with love what I have sketched out for you. Do not smile at the many projects. A project that springs vital and whole from our innermost being is also holy and a type of god. All activity that does not derive from the gods is unworthy of man. Thus it is good to stock up on such things.

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6. Dorothea Veit-Schlegel: Selected Diaries and Letters61 Diaries 217. [no date] They often laugh at me and feel quite superior when I appear to do without the proper words, the fashionable expressions with which they so easily signify everything, such as: great, sublime, modern, classical, gothic, charming, wondrous, heavenly, divine— and so on. Oh, yes, indeed, I know these words; what words they are! But I am afraid to use them. From today onward they could signify something completely different, just the opposite, and it would not surprise anyone at all. That which we cannot name is of course always the dearest and best and actually what one means. Why, then, is there so much talk? In a beautiful marriage it is necessary that the woman have just enough intellect to understand that of the man; anything beyond this is harmful. Caroline judges all human beings entirely equally, namely, she considers them all to be stupider than she is herself, treats them very differently, however, and in infinite nuances according to her motives. I, on the other hand, judge human beings quite differently, but treat them all equally; that is, I do not treat them at all, I simply deal with them or I trust them. Since I never have motives I often confuse the two and am deceived; Caroline, on the other hand, always deceives herself. In short, we both err, she in judging, I in treating others, if one can actually call my calm openness "treating." Many plays are not booed off the stage because people are yawning so much that they cannot close their mouths enough to boo. To be precise, Wilhelm62 is indeed, as big as Friedrich, not according to weight, but rather to measure: what the latter has in depth, the former measures in breadth. 226. [1802-4] To educate oneself [sich bilderi] is the aspiration of life, but one can-

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not be educated until one dies. What kind of perfect education [Ausbildung] can want to live? What kind of education does not disturb life? Doing without something, as evidence of inner strength and conscious effort, always gives me simultaneously great pleasure. But that I must bear the triumph and the sympathy of enemies, that I must still have daily engagements with my enemies—I find it to be an inferior trait of my nature that my indignation about this is not enough to kill me. For a proper, genuine marriage, it is necessary that the woman also be interested in the man's affairs and take part in them as much as possible. There is no profession and no class in which she cannot do this with decency, even elegance. (Men who hold an office where this is not possible should not marry.) It is the only way to secure the devotion of the man and rule of the house permanently and thoroughly. The woman must be certain of the latter, but never rely on it or make use of it to the disadvantage or neglect and degradation of the man. Surrender to fate? Struggle against fate. Finally, one comes to the point where one is more interested in ideas than in human beings—and finally, in one's own idea above all, if there is even a moderate degree of egoism. Oh, only love saves us from this cesspool of cold egoism, of obstinate vanity. Baptized on April 6 in Paris and married in the Swedish chapel. On Trinity Sunday, May 27, the first Communion in the Swedish chapel in Paris.r's

Letters 181. To Schleiermacher,Jena, November 15, 1799 Dear friend, it is not right that you write so seldom. Hardenberg is here for a few days. You must see him, because even if you read thirty books by him, you will not understand him as well as you will if you drink tea with him once. I speak here on pure intuition alone. I have not even gotten into a discussion with him at all, but I think he avoids it; he is so in Tieck, with Tieck, and for Tieck that he finds 110 room

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for anything else. Enfin [. . .] I do not like him yet. But he looks like aa visionary and has his own unique essence, one cannot deny him that. Christianity is a I'ordre dujourhere; the gentlemen are a bit mad. Tieck carries on with religion like Schiller with fate. Hardenberg thinks Tieck agrees with him completely. But I will bet you anything that they do not understand themselves, much less each other. Now listen! Yesterday noon I was with the Schlegels, Caroline, Schelling, Hardenberg, and a brother of his, a Lieutenant Hardenberg, in paradise (there is a walk called that here), and who appears suddenly down from the mountain? None other than the old, divine excellency, Goethe himself. [. . .] He made a quite splendid face as he greeted Friedrich, which made me quite happy. [. . .] Imagine my wild joy: I wrote a pretty song to accompany my novel; everyone likes it quite well.64 191. To Schleiermacher, Jena, April 28, 1800 . . . The Lucinde letters, my good friend, are proper letters; accept my praise and thanks for them.65 What is even more, they are feminine; what is more, girlish! Caroline's letters: transcendentally girlish! [...] 193. To Schleiermacher, Jena, May 15, 1800 . . . Now I am studying the Soliloquies, when I'm in a good mood.66 They are, however, a little difficult for me; Friedrich does not understand wherein the difficulty lies—do you know perhaps? Do you also conceive of your novel immediately in letters? It can come into existence in this way and in no other way. In letters, you succeed so extremely well in describing the characters; in short, your letters are very valuable to me. [. . .] 194. To Schleiermacher, Jena, June a, 1800 . . . Friedrich is lazy, therefore he will not write to you today. Florentin is almost completely written down; the lazy man, Friedrich, still hasn't corrected the mistakes in the last pages for me, otherwise it would have already been completely finished and I could send it to you. If it is tolerable and Bohn does not want to take it with him, then I will send it to you beforehand. It is a fabulous book; I am very curious to find out whether you andjette will like it. [. . .]

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203. To A. W. Schlegel,Jena, October 28, 1800 [. . .] Florentin is really being published, to my great fear! I wish to God that we could say the same about Lucinde. [. . .] I have to tell you something funny about how Friedrich has gotten into philosophizing. Yesterday evening he fell asleep on the sofa and when it became late and I woke him, he said, still half dreaming: 'Yes, yes, I will analyze myself right away" and, as I was laughing terribly, repeated this yet a few times very earnestly. Come soon and live with us, it is most civilized and friendly here. Adieu, dear friend.

7. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling: Selected Letters/Reviews/Parody67 Letters 187. To August Wilhelm Schlegel, 1797 [?]68 f . . . ] Hufland sang almost all of Juliet's part in Cotter's opera the day before yesterday; I find the music most noble.69 Nothing of the spirit of the original has been transmitted into the opera itself. The lovers always seem to me to be like Julie and Saint Preux, who—Madame de Stael might put it differently—loved each other somewhat according to rules.70 Shakespeare's Juliet is so young, so sincerely glowing. Gotter's is a moral passion, Shakespeare's a romantic one. Romeo resembles Saint Preux in that he can neither hide nor master his pain. And who could demand this of the young man? The monk knows well what befits a man, but he also knows that he speaks in vain and that he will edify only the wet nurse. And yet, it took some time for the doubter to collect himself and to hear the real comfort of the comforter, who promises him a Juliet as philosophy never could. [. . .] It is often said that the story, the plot, is not Shakespeare's own. The spirit is always his. The rough plan and the spirit—the term I will use to refer to the more refined plan—are very different from one another. Hamlet, as he exists now, is Shakespeare's most original creation, as we have long known. I imagine that it is advantageous for the genius not to invent and to execute at the same time. Is it not true that precisely the foreignness of the raw material gives rise to moments of beauty, insofar as the less coherent aspects of the existing material

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first achieve true unity in the poet's treatment of it? And where it meets with apparent contradictions, this unity gives birth to the wondrous spirit out of which we are constantly coaxing new secrets, and which we never tire of exploring. (I can easily comprehend that you only understand each other.) I do not recall the legend of Hamlet, but its ending was probably similar to that of the tragedy, in that chance takes over the revenge more than Hamlet does. And to whom do we then owe the figure of Hamlet? In die case of Romeo, Shakespeare came upon far more material and he followed it very faithfully—oh, but how it became his own. [. . .] 191. Friedrich Schlegel to Caroline, Berlin, November 1797 If only I could write more, dear Caroline! How I wish I could. You must not take offense that now, in the midst of everything that I would actually like to write and should write, I give preference to that which is related to the journal. 71 Do write and tell me everything that you yourself are thinking of contributing to it, even before you have decided. I will then advise you as best I can. You should advise me as well, and ponder critically and thoroughly everything I write you about my writings and projects for it. And in particular, promote all that Wilhelm can and will do for it through your participation. If he accepts my proposal regarding the master's newest lyric poems, you will certainly be a great help to him there.72 Do not let Wilhelm's activities or your own hesitation to work dissuade you from the thought of submitting contributions yourself. But even if you cannot or will not do this immediately, there are still many options open to you: to double and give direction to our zeal with your participation and advice. I have always believed your natural form to be the rhapsody—for I believe that every human being possessing strength and spirit has his own unique natural form. What I mean with this will perhaps become clear to you if I add that I consider pure, solid, clear mass to be Wilhelm's actual natural form, and fragments to be mine. I have indeed, also attempted rhapsodies myself, and Wilhelm can doubtless make very good fragments, but here I speak only of that which is most natural for each person. One certainly creates difficulties for oneself, particularly if unpracticed, by choosing a form that is unnatural and thus only attainable with great skill and exertion. If you should ever write a novel, perhaps someone else ought to lay out its design and, if it is not

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to be an entirely epistolary novel, to write out those parts that are not in the form of letters. You are certainly capable of speaking fragments and writing them in letters: but they are always focused precisely on what is individual and thus are not useful for our purpose. Your philosophy and your fragmented nature each follow their own course. Therefore, be careful in your choice of form, and consider that letters and reviews are forms over which you have complete control. I am assuming that you will write some of the letters on Shakespeare's comedic spirit as well, if the proposal is accepted? That which could be printed from your letters is far too pure, beautiful, and delicate for me to wish to see it broken into fragments and made coquettish through simple selection. On the other hand, I would not find it impossible to compile73 a single great philosophical rhapsody out of your letters. What is your opinion on this? It would be something for the summer when we are together again; for I am very tempted to join you both and to remain with you for the entire summer, returning here, however, the following winter. [. ..] 198. Friedrich Schlegel to A. W. Schlegel, Berlin, February-March 1798 [. . .] Your wife wrote me a very vehement and insulting letter about the Athenaum, which you probably did not see before it was sent. I can make up for the two entire days this useless vexation spoiled for me with nightly vigils and some effort, and my health can take a blow now and again. But my high spirits and good mood are gone and will probably not return for some time. [. . .] Caroline thinks that my fragments are often too long. That is, of course, one of those comments to which the answer remains stuck in one's throat. [. . .] 219. To Novalis,Jena, February 4, 1799 [. . .] But the rest of your mental activity stirs me up beyond measure. You would not believe how little I comprehend of your circle's essence, how little I understand of what you yourself are up to. When all is said and done, I know nothing about anything but moral humanity and poetic art. I enjoy reading everything that you report now and then, and I have no doubt that the time will come when it will all come together for me as well, and I will not rejoice in your remarks solely because they come from you. What you all are up to is a verita-

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ble sorcerer's cauldron to me. Let me in on this much: whether what you are doing will actually amount to a published work, or if the nature that you are constructing so splendidly and artfully and simply is meant to perish for this world along with your own splendid and artistic nature. For, you see, when you say that you are undertaking a work, it is impossible to tell whether it is meant to become a book, and when you love, whether it is the harmony of the worlds or a harmonica. What can I report to you of Ritter? He is living in Belvedere and sends over many frogs, of which there is an overabundance there and a shortage here. Occasionally he accompanies them himself. [. ..] We are industrious and very happy. Since the beginning of the year I have scarcely left Wilhelm's room. I am translating the second Shakespearean drama: iambs, prose, even some rhyme.74 Adieu, I must send this off. 284. To Schelling, Braunschweig, January 1801 [...] What you wrote me how plants disperse water, animal organisms divide iron, and human reason dissects everything has been occupying me day and night. Whenever I can't sleep and won't allow myself to dream, I think of this wondrous and yet so natural progression, and attempt to grasp those parts of it that are within my reach. And what will dissect our reason? And will we not do it ourselves one day? Oh, please be my prophet in this as well. I can see clearly how your tracing of poetically creative nature will organize itself into a glorious poem. You recall Goethe's little poem in which Amor paints a landscape;75 he doesn't paint it, but draws a veil over everything that is, and then there comes a point when the sun's rays again shine so brightly—yes, in this way your genius will become the love that animates everything. I don't blame you in the least that you don't want to discuss this in greater detail, even with me; you have to finish it alone. I would not be able to share any of it in advance if I were in your position, and if I have asked you for this in the past— one often asks for things at one moment that one sees differently in another. If only you could build me a bridge from my caverns and mountain peaks to your philosophy, namely, one with a solid foundation—for I find nothing easier than standing wherever reason grasps itself. I thought that I grasped everything quite well that you wrote me in letters, and it would be wonderful if you were to carry out what you re-


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cently mentioned: a presentation that you would address to me. So why don't you get started on it? Now it will surely become quite natural. It will make me very happy if I can comprehend even a part of the manner in which Fichte alters his system. Now see, we have made the assumption that everything is settled, that Fichte is standing still. In truth! Like the sun in the valley of Gideon or whatever it is called. I love these surprises [end of page; remainder of letter lost] 291. To Schelling, Braunschweig, February 1801 [...]! would still like to respond to many important things in your letter, but I don't have what I need in order to do it, hardly even the time. I couldn't lay my hands on the explanation of Fichte. But my sense of divination tells me that you are probably not off the mark with the bittersweetness. Whether Fichte has raised himself above consciousness and reflection is something I cannot ascertain so precisely; as far as his I is concerned, I am certain that he cannot go so far that he would not like to shove another I to the side if it awakened in him the kind of premonitions that you have. I am also firmly of the opinion: don't let yourself be shoved away. The act of resistance could, I think, end such that only the truly initiated would be aware of it—for you can continue to build without worrying about him; he is so utterly backward in knowledge and poesy that with all of his power of thought he cannot imitate your nature. Therefore you needn't protest so strongly that he has robbed you of what is yours, and an apparent split would bring about tremendous confusion in its wake. For it is indeed, through the philosophy of nature that your idealism has become something different than his, and he must let it stand.76 I still have to make sure that the article did not come here; Schlegel has gone to the reading club for it three times without success. [. . .] 294. To Schelling, Braunschweig, Sunday afternoon, March 1, 1801 [...] You certainly don't want to find out from me, my dearest friend, although you have almost indicated as much, how far Fichte's spirit reaches. I have always had the impression that, despite his incomparable power of thought, his watertight method of reaching conclusions, his clarity, precision, immediate intuition of the I, and his explorer's enthusiasm, he is nevertheless limited. I only thought that divine inspiration had left him, and if you have broken through a circle that he

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has not yet been able to get out of, then I would believe that you have not done so as a philosopher (if this use of the term is incorrect, you must not chide me) but rather as someone who possesses poesy while he does not. Poesy brought you immediately to the state of production, just as the keenness of his perception brought him to consciousness. He possesses light at its brightest brightness, but you also possess warmth, and the former can only illuminate, while the latter produces. Am I not being clever here? Just like seeing an immeasurable landscape through a keyhole. As I perceive it, Spinoza must have had much more poesy than Fichte: if thought isn't colored by poesy, isn't there something lifeless about it? What is missing is the secret—see, I have a pretty good idea of this. Anyone who is capable of grasping geometry will also be able to learn the Theory of Scientific Knowledge, but precisely this is its limit—that it can be divided and comes out even. I have long been yearning for a competent translation of Plato. Would Schleiermacher do it as well as Friedrich would, if he could work? [...] 326. To A. W. Schlegel, Jena, July 19-20, 1801 [...] Here an economical aside to be read at your leisure, which I now begin by informing you that I have learned to use the hexameter form, namely, formally. Now don't get angry and say diat I could have never learned it from you, as you are in the habit of saying. You silly friend, why didn't you just begin to show me? Schelling sat me down and mapped it out on paper for me with - and ~, and now I understand it. If thoughts, images, vitality, and form would fuse into one, then I could write poetry, but they all lie separately in the bowl like one of Madame Tieck's herring salads. [...] Reviews On Johannes Mtiller's Letters77 If it were possible for an empty and purposeless journal to become significant by virtue of a single excellent contribution, this should have happened to the Deutsches Magazin, as it had the privilege of sharing with the world the Fragments from Letters of a Young Scholar to His Friend (in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth volumes) -.Johannes Mutter's letters to Bonstetten,78 written between 1775 and 1778 in Switzerland, in which he devotes his soul completely to the friend he idolizes, in


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whom he confides everything that he desires, honors, and loves. What a splendid mind and great, earnest striving are revealed there! How the young man devotes himself to become what he has since become: the first historian of the moderns, or rather, the last historian of the ancients, just as Brutus was the last Roman! Such devotion, such effort, and a steadfast presence of the highest and noblest goal. He educates [bilden] the entire man toward the practice of his chosen profession. The letters are remarkable purely for the beautiful harmony that is revealed between what he wanted and what he achieved. But he always found the concatenation of circumstances distasteful. At that time he was fighting against privation, dependence, and the difficulty of gaining acceptance. Later, as a man of firmly established fame, he was in the service of social conditions that did not make use of his genius, even though the Helvetian's convictions were able to adapt to them. If future generations recognize him in the portrait of an earlier age, they will look for him in vain in the history of our own age, for the dominant way of looking at occurrences appears to grant the highest authority to great events. Formerly, he could not respectably belong to his fatherland: "It is slumbering," he prophesied, "and its awakening will be fatal." Perhaps now he has no longer a fatherland. This youth worked for the future, indeed, for eternity, while the shortcomings of the present moment oppressed him. "He was only happy when he was composing," the rest of his time was given over to worry; and yet he could never bring himself to desist and thereby harvest the quickly devoured fruit of a carelessly strewn seed. One part of his immortal work was written, and then no bookseller could be found who would offer a price adequate to support the continuation of his work. To be sure, twenty years ago things were made more difficult for young writers; in the meantime, the question is whether his history would not suffer the same fate today, since there is nothing to recommend it but an unusual and misunderstood excellence. In addition, there was the philistinism of petty republican censors, and the comforting advice of good friends, one of whom rejected the German language and wanted the work written in French, another (Bonnet, who must have meant a great deal to him in every respect) who found his writing style much too dry and austere. He had to have a great deal of character, indeed, in order not to forfeit his talent. Here we see the decisive influence of his acquaintance with the ancients, and how they left the mark of knowledge on his kindred na-

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ture. In him they found not only a receptive mind but also a loving heart. The friendship that breathes through these letters is proof of this: like his works, it too is in the style of antiquity. Who can doubt that it pervaded him completely and was his comfort, the nourishment of a needy soul, as it were? In this as in every other relationship that emerges in the letters, he appears with an original and naive charm, and the slightest of his remarks, his judgments, his desires give fuel to the interest of both intellect and feeling. Their greatest charm is that they are not meant for a third person, and what a third person now finds in them was all the more the depth of his soul. They are like true love letters that have fallen by chance into a stranger's hands. A grown man can smile at the ardor of his youth, but it is only in this way that he becomes a man. Whoever knows Miiller's history of Switzerland must read these letters in order to understand it better; and whoever does not know it must read them in order to become receptive to it. What history is can be illuminated by the sanctity with which Muller treats it. Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, no. 107 (May 6, i8o5)79 Musenalmanach for the Year 1805. ed. C. A. v. Chamisso and K. A. Varnhagen. Berlin: Frohlich. If it is possible, for a time, to ruin something that is in itself good and superb, then it is not the work of those criers and faultfinders who are utterly ineffective unless propped up by the Inquisition. Rather, it is the achievement of those who have been moved by the mere surface of the good and the superb, who seize on the words, the form (in reality the mask), a few tones that are connected to real ideas, and a melody that imitates an inner coherence, and who attempt to bring before the public in an uncommon way an extremely negligible talent, an insignificant endeavor that could be effectively presented in the most common way. The effect that this has on the clever, friendly reader could best be characterized by a Heracleitus and a Democritus joined in the form of a Janus head.80 But evil enemies naturally take pleasure in these lost souls and expound on how such a wicked beginning inevitably had to lead to such wicked consequences. Those stupid people who never do anything other than cling to reprints praise this spurious phenomenon as entirely genuine. However, it ultimately disgusts good society altogether, for all caricatures are wearisome to


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everyone; for a time no one can bear to hear or see the thing at all. What has given rise to these simple comments, which are not new, is the Musenalmanach, which, following a preliminary notice in no. 104, we address again now more specifically. The editors call themselves C. A. von Chamisso and K. A. Varnhagen; the rest of the poets: Robert, Eduard, Ernst, Anthropos, Wolfart, *, **, ***, and so on:" in all likelihood, nothing but assumed names that have no further import beyond the fact that the imitation begins already with them. For we recall that such names also appear in the Musenalmanach of 1802 that Schlegel and Tieck edited, such as: Novalis, Bonavenlura, I(n)humanus, even Sternchen and a Sophie, in whose place we have here an Auguste who admittedly appears to us to have simply thrown on a feminine cloak and collar—which, following the fashion of the day, do not differ much from the masculine.82 Thus, already beginning with the names, these gentlemen sacrifice their bourgeois individuality in order to trust in the communality of poetry, out of which they imagine their poetic individual may more gloriously emerge. Unfortunately, it is only an individual void of individuality. They belong altogether to a breed that we are not eager to mention by name. It is true that the one or the other has made progress in the artistic realm, and some of them imitate the human gesture and voice that they chose as their model quite deceptively. The verse sounds just like it, the objects are in no way inferior, and there is not much lacking in content—no more than that amount which has always prevented alchemy from producing real gold. Here we find countless sonnets to philosophers (Fichte), poets (Goethe, Tieck), to the esteemed friends among themselves, to other imaginary beings, about the elements and to the elements, to the hours of the day and to the seasons, about colors and sounds, as well as sonnets just like those Petrarch used to write. Cycles of poems, Goethean epigrams, a fragment that is not much worse than "The Secrets";83 canzone, both original and translated, terzarima, variations or glosses. Hymns from the Latin could not be omitted, and in their selection the authors have even risen to the Virgin's immaculate conception. Recall Friedrich Schlegel's ballad about light; here we can read an offensive one about noise. You run into broken verse everywhere; some are thoroughly exhausted; heavy verse, three-syllable rhyme, no symptom is lacking. Anyone who needs to make the effort for official purposes could easily identify what the symptoms themselves are lacking. Upon further exploration you find more of the same business. It

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is all astoundingly earnest: we know that humor is the most difficult thing to imitate. Even if the poems are not philosophical, the authors have certainly consumed a goodly portion of philosophy that they did not necessarily come by firsthand. This is presumably the source of the blunder that pesters the author of the Theory of Scientific Knowledge with magnets, metals, and the four corners of the earth. There is another sonnet, however, which describes him better: I welcome you, then, peaceful84 clarity. The beings that open themselves up to your bosom Are servants, I their master, mine the dwelling place.

There is some discussion of self-destruction, of the death that is life, of the doubled death that is consequently doubled life and from which the Us arises as truth. Love reveals itself as full of fire and fury, as punishing and adoring. Where it expresses itself sensually, it appears to do so only in keeping with the highest views of physics.85 With this, nothing but a somewhat modified new epoch of sentimentality has begun, as in the age of Werther; this one is, however, by far not as harmless. It is too proud actually to kill; on the other hand, it does suffocate everything that is great in attempting to pull it into its own small circle, and it kills itself in its sheer manifestation. Simple loving always retains something delightful and true, even if the hundredth time echoes the first ninety-nine; it is believable; complicated sentiment alone betrays itself as pure nonsentiment when it is not genuine. It is not necessary to dispute the fact that sentimentality constantly reappears even when one believes it to be miles away. We simply cannot get rid of it; it belongs to our nature, at least since the beginning of the Christian era. One would only hope that each person possessed his own sentimentality rather than toiling away at someone else's. That which is individual is the maternal soil of sentimentality; it must truly have sprung from here in order to be of value. Even if it lacks its own strength or inventiveness and therefore devotes itself with love and admiration to something outside of itself, there is yet something, in this personal devotion, that surpasses a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal,86 and it would be aided by a measure of restraint from certain things. But the sentimentality of our day is marked, not by this, but rather by brazen sacrilege against the holiness of nature and of art. If only our writing youth in particular would leave the powers of heaven and earth alone until they learned to recognize them within their own


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perception through quiet and diligent study, instead of merely acquiring knowledge by rote and then playing with their wondrous relationships as with rhymes. Do these writers impute a deeper meaning to these things, rather than placing themselves, like these things, in the service of the production of poems? But the conjurer who uses the qualities of things for his tricks is more respectahle than the person who misuses them in words and images. [...] In all of this, it is possible that this or that person could find the judgment of the whole written here to be too severe, if he focused on details. Not that any details distinguished themselves noticeably: in this respect, as in every other, there is a decisive monotony in the collection. There is neither inventiveness nor some sort of agreeable uniqueness to captivate us, and especially noticeable is a complete lack of freshness and liveliness. Yet one cannot deny that many a thing thrusts itself on us as if it were something. This, however, makes the true friend of poesy in particular despair, because something is then indeed, nothing, since depth and background are lacking everywhere; only those who are themselves shallow can deceive themselves for very long about this. I am speaking here in particular of a specific way of presenting lyric poesy, in which to fill in its forms with good craftsmanship requires good craftsmanship in the writer, and requires a significant uniqueness all the more, as the forms themselves are dominant enough to captivate by themselves and to foster the emptiness. Recently, these meaningful tones have had a part in conjuring up the deceased sense for poesy as art in a more general fashion. However, as the disciples allow a refined [gebildet] technique to appear for its sake alone, one is left with the even worse feeling that art is transforming itself into a phantom once again on a higher level. It is the true merit of predecessors when imitators, without genuine effort, can nevertheless accomplish so much. This could be a memorial to the predecessors to give the striving toward form a less formal direction, where some have done almost too much and have come to a standstill at its outermost boundaries. For our poets, certain internal forms of assistance—taken from the ideas that are increasingly widespread, and from the discoveries of philosophy and physics—now join what is merely externally given. The weakest of these poets find this in crucifixes, images of the Virgin Mary, images of saints, and so on, that have supplanted Venus, Amor, the Graces, and nymphs as oldfashioned, but in their hands become the same meaningless, out-

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landish auguries and wax figures that one usually finds in German monastery churches. To close with Democritus, we would like to recommend to our authors for inclusion in the next volume the following sonnet, which has come to the attention of this contributor. It is from a technically unpracticed but naturally profound hand:87 The flower is ever so inflamed with love, Its cups want all to press upward, And wave their filaments to the stars, To take root in the azure land. The fruit wine brims over the golden rim, The drops themselves resound in the chalice, And children who chased butterflies Now catch Psyche by every green wall. Thus the old must form itself anew; For all are sitting around the sweet gruel, And those who cannot yet hold a spoon Are cheerfully laying their daily egg, And praying to the lofty cross of miracles,88 Which, when erected, is a cross the whole world must bear.

Parody of Friedrich Schlegel's Habilitation Theses of i8oi 89 I. Platonis philosophia genuinus est Idealismus. [Plato's philosophy is genuine Idealism.] My philosophy is the only true Idealism. II. Realismi majores sunt partes in Idealismo producendo quam Dualismi. [Realisms are greater parts than Dualisms in producing Idealism.] Moreover, it contains very many parts of Realism, and some of Dualism. III. Philosophia moralis est subordinanda politicae. [Moral philosophy is to be subordinated to political philosophy.] Philosophical morality must be subordinated to political morality. IV. Enthusiasmus est principium artis et scientiae. [Enthusiasm is the origin of art and science.] The imagination is the source of my arts and sciences. V. Poesis ad rem publicam bene constituendam est necessaria. [Poesy is good and necessary in constituting the state.]


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Poesy is necessary in order to stir everything together. VI. Mythologia est allegorice interpretanda. [Interpreting mythology is allegorical.] Mythology is to be interpreted as one pleases. VII. Kantii interpretatio moralis evertit fundamenta artis criticae. [The moral interpretation of Kant overthrows the foundation of critical art.] The correct explanations will throw the foundation of things up in the air. VIII. Non critice sed historice est philosophandum. [Philosophizing is not critical but historical.] One must philosophize not coherently but fragmentarily. Notes 1. Source: N 2 and 3. Specific volume and page references are given in the text. Our selection of fragments is taken from the appendix to Friedrich Schlegel, Theorie der Wdblichkeit, ed. Winfried Menninghaus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982), 159-72. 2. Oryctologists = mineralogists. 3. Until around 1790 it was thought that fire was caused by a substance, named phlogiston, that dissipated in the burning process. The phlogiston theory was displaced by the discovery that burning was instead caused by a uniting of oxygen and the flammable material. This new theory appealed to the Romantics and their notions of dynamic reciprocal relationships: matter does not simply disappear but rather is exchanged and transformed. In these fragments, however, Novalis uses both theories in ways that demonstrate the collapsing of that structure of mutuality: man is the flammable element that must be ignited by woman/oxygen. In this process, woman is consumed by man/fire as a means for the union of his soul and body; that is, the moment of real mutual exchange occurs within man himself. The pathological structure of this notion is revealed in the assertion that rape is "our greatest pleasure"; the path to the Absolute as one of forced—not mutual—union is echoed in the cannibalistic devouring of women, which takes on the function of a sort of holy communion. (See Logological Fragment 144 [N 3: 575]; Scientific Studies [N 3: 87-88]; Universal Bmuitton 126 fN 3: 264!; Universal Brouillon 117 [ N 3 : 262].) 4. On feeling and sensation see the following Fichte Studies fragments: for feeling 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 31, 32, 197, 651; for sensation, 566, 567, 651. 5. a leurpartee (French): at their level. 6. Hetaera (Greek): a courtesan or concubine, usually an educated slave; sec Friedrich Schlcgel's "On Diotima," also translated in this volume. 7. On Rousseau, cf. also the following letter from Novalis to Caroline Schlegel (February 27, 1799): "Rousseau understood femininity exclusively, and all of his philosophies are the product of a reflective feminine soul. His apology of the natural state [Naturstand] belongs in the realm of philosophy of women: woman is the real natural human being [Naturmensch]—a true woman is the ideal of the natural human being, just as a true man is the ideal of the cultural human being [Kunstmensch].

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"The natural and the cultural human being are the actual original classes [Stande]. Classes are the components of society. Marriage is simple society, as the lever is the simple machine. In marriage one finds both classes. The child is to marriage what the artist is to society: a non-class that promotes the intimate union, the true pleasure of both classes. The great marriage—the state [der Stoat}—consists of a feminine and a masculine class, which are called, half correctly and half incorrectly, the uneducated [ungebildet] and educated [gebildet] classes. A woman belonging to the educated class is uneducated man. Unfortunately, here among us, uneducated man has fallen far behind educated man—he has become a slave [Sklavin (feminine)]. Oh, that he could again become woman!" (Caroline Schelling, Caroline: Briefe cms derFriihmmantik, ed. Georg Wait?: and Erich Schmidt, vol. i [Bern: Herbert Lang, 19701,507-8). 8. Lingam (Sanskrit) = symbol. Specifically, it refers to the phallus or phallic symbol; used extensively in the cult worship of Siva, the Hindu god of destruction and reproduction. 9. See Friedrich Schlegel's fragments, also in Part IV ("3. Friedrich Schlegel: Theory of Femininity"), on the "vegetable" nature of women. 10. In Norse mythology, Valhalla is the great hall of slain warriors over which the god Odin presides. The warriors feast on the flesh of a boar that is slaughtered daily and made whole again every evening. 11. Source: Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragments aus dem Nachlasse nines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch fur Freunde der Natur, a vols. (Heidelberg, 1810). Specific volume and page references are given in the text. Our selection of fragments is taken in large part from the appendix to Friedrich Schlegel, Theorie der WfihlicMmt, 173-83. Ritter (1776-1810) was a physicist who studied and worked in Jena, and whose work, particularly in the field of galvanism, had a great influence on his friends in the Jena Circle. He is widely considered the founder of electrochemistry. Ritter's work erased the traditional demarcation between organic and inorganic nature by demonstrating that chemical reactions occur in a similar manner in both realms; galvanism could thus be viewed as the unifying force in nature, electricity as the vital principle. (See Novalis, femininity fragments; Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, letter a 19.) 12. Indifferent = undiil'erentiated; although the term is apparently borrowed from Schelling, "indifference" is used here not to denote the Absolute as an unattainable goal or regulative idea, but rather a grounded, biologically reductive moment of unity. Throughout these fragments, woman is aligned with "indifference" and man with polarity. 13. Taken from 'I'orquato Tasso, act 2, scene i, a classical play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790). 14. Cryptogam: a plant lacking true seeds and flowers. 15. This section contains a selection of various fragments pertinent to Schlegel's theory of femininity. Specific references to fragments are given in the text. With the exception of the last two fragments in this section, all can be found in Winfried Menninghaus's more extensive compilation in his edition of Schlegel's work on femininity, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, 123—55. 16. Suada (Latin): the ability to speak well and to persuade. 17. Statements by Rousseau supporting commonly held concepts of gender and gender hierarchy met with widespread approval, such as his claim in the novel Emile that woman is made for man: "Ce principe etabli, il s'ensuit que la femme est faite specialement pour plaire a rhomme." Cf. Novalis's fragments on femininity for a different evaluation of Rousseau; cf. also his letter to Caroline Schlegel, reprinted in note 7. 18. On geniality, cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary


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Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 55-56. 19. This fragment subverts Western philosophy's traditional positing of a masculine subject and a feminine object. 20. Cf. Schlegel's "On Philosophy" (in Part IV) and the "Speech on Mythology" in his Dialogue on Poesy (in Part II). 21. Cf. Novalis, Universal Brouillon 314. 22. Source: KA i: 70—115. 23. This is not a literal translation of Plato. For a literal translation, see The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1928), 367-68. 24. Franziscus Hemsterhuis, Simon ou desfacultes de I'ame (1790). Hemstcrhuis was a Dutch philosopher and art critic (1721-90) who was inlluenced byjohn Locke and Shaftesbury. He had a great influence on Herder and German Romanticism, especially Novalis. Schlegel probably confused Simon with Hemsterhuis's earlier work Lettre deDiocles a Diotime sur I 'time (1789). 25. On Solon, see "Faith and Love" and note 91 to the texts in Part I. 26. Venus Pandemos: In Roman mythology, Venus was the goddess of love and beauty. She was identified with the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who had formerly been worshiped in Athens under the name Pandemos (all the people's), as being a goddess of the whole country. By a regulation of Solon, the name acquired a very different sense, branding her goddess of prostitution. 27. Philemon: A Greek poet of the New Attic Comedy, born about 362 B.C. He died in Athens, nearly a hundred years old, but with mental rigor unimpaired, in the year 262 B.C., according to the story, at the moment of his being crowned on the stage. 28. Litteralor: Latin term for grammarian or philologist. 29. Cf. Friedrich Jacobs, Anthologia graeca adfidem codicis olim palantini nuncparisini ex apographo gothano edila. Curavil epigrammata in codice palatine desiderata et annotationem critican adiec.it Fridericus Jacobs. Lipsiae: Opus impressum typis Hertelio-Breitkopfianis venditurin libraria Dyckiana, 1813-17, vol. 2, 29. 30. Proclus, the most important representative of the later Neoplatonic school, was born in A.D. 41 2 at Byzantium. He became head of the Platonic school until his death in 485. His disciples were numerous. His efforts were directed toward supporting paganism in its struggle with the newly victorious Christianity, by reducing to a system all the philosophical and religious traditions of antiquity. His philosophical works are primarily a commentary on a few dialogues of Plato (mainly on the Timaeus) and also on the theology of Plato. 31. Theano: a celebrated female philosopher of the Pythagorean school. Mycha: Schlegel was probably referring to Myia, a daughter of Pythagoras and Theano. 32. Pythagorcanism: the philosophy of Pythagoras, the main tenets of which were the transmigration of the soul and the belief in numbers as the ultimate elements of the universe. For the Pythagoreans, happiness consisted in the science of the perfection of the virtues of the soul, or in the perfect science of numbers. The ethics of the Pythagoreans consisted more in ascetic practice, maxims for the restraint of the passions, especially of anger, and the cultivation of the power of endurance, than in scientific theory. 33. Pythagoras: a celebrated Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C., a native of Samos who was probably either a merchant or an engraver of signets. If Pythagoras ever wrote anything, his writings perished with him, or not long after. It. is all but certain that Philolaus, a native of Crotona, who was a distinguished Pythagorean philoso-

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pher, was the first to publish the Pythagorean doctrines. Pythagoras resembled the philosophers of the Ionic school, who undertook to solve, by means of a single primordial principle, the vague problem of the origin and constitution of the universe as a whole. His predilection for mathematical studies led him to trace the origin of all things to numbers. 34. The importance of the wisdom of rulers is expressed in Plato's Republic (Plato, The Ftepublic, trans. G. M. A. Grube [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974]). Grube refers to the Platonic paradox that "the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, should rule" (111). (The Greek word philosophos meant a lover of truth and wisdom rather than a philosopher in the restricted sense.) Socrates says: "Cities will have no respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, nor will the human race, I think, unless philosophers rule as kings in the cities, or those whom we now call kings and rulers genuinely and adequately study philosophy, until, that is, political power and philosophy coalesce, and the various natures of those who now pursue the one to the exclusion of the other are forcibly debarred from doing so" (133). 35. Plutarch, a Greek writer of biographies and miscellaneous works, who was born at Chaeronea, in Boetia, about A.n. 50. His fame as an author is founded principally on his Parallel Lives. Plutarch has a propensity to portray the persons represented either as models of virtue in general or as slaves of some passion in particular. Plutarch's Maralia is a collection of his other writings on various topics, including the natural sciences, philosophy, history, mythology, and the history of literature. 36. The Dorians lost Salamis, a mountainous island off the Attican coast, around 600 B.C. to the Athenians, who conquered the island because of its strategic importance for securing safe passage to their harbor. 37. On Schlegel's usage of "enthusiasm," see note 35 to the texts in Part I and note 4 to the texts in Part II. Schlegel repeatedly associates "enthusiasm" with the sublime. See, for instance, his Introduction to Transcendental Philosophy (in Part II of this volume): "The consciousness of the infinite in the individual is the feeling of the sublime. . . . And this feeling of the sublime is enthusiasm." Were he to follow the common eighteenthcentury meaning of these terms, this would imply that enthusiasm is masculine; for, in the eighteenth century, the sublime was widely associated with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity. See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "High/Low and Other Dichotomies," in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, cds., High and Low Cultures: German Attempts at Mediation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). However, Schlegel here redefines or deconstructs the generally accepted meaning of the terms; the paragraph is thus a good example for Schlegel's linguistic strategy of undermining widely accepted perceptions and word usages. 38. For Schlegel, gender issues are very much connected with the existence of other divisions and ruptures in modern societies such as "high" versus "low" culture, and the sublime versus the beautiful. The whole thrust of Schlegel's essay is to argue that gender difference is an arbitrary cultural phenomenon, that the dichotomy of "masculinity" and "femininity" is caused by modern culture and is thus relative and even unnatural. 39. In ancient Greece the gymnasia were places of exercise for the purpose of strengthening and improving the body. They also served as schools and were meeting places for the philosophers and sophists. 40. Transliteration: gynaikokosmos and gynaiko-nomos; gynaikokosmos (Greek): world of women; gynaikonomos (Greek): a member of a board of magistrates at Athens and other cities to maintain good manners among the women; there was an equivalent of this apparently aristocratic institution for children as well.


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41. Ochlocratic = mob law. 42. Cf. Kritischetriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. F.rnst Behlcr et al. (Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1958), editor's note 2, vol. i, 113. Apopompe = divorce initiated by the man; apoleipsis = divorce initiated by the woman. 43. Epiclerusvaa the name given to the daughter or daughters of an Athenian citizen who had no son, or whose son had died leaving no male issue. 44. Source: KA 8: 41-62. 45. For Schlegel, talking is, like writing, an unabashedly temporal activity. Both forms of language allegedly undergo a mutation when transformed into an artistic book, which is viewed as an atemporal point of reference. The force behind such mutations is a valorized imagination whose task is to transform the temporal and dissipating product of writing into an "image on [its] basis, [that] appears before the eye at once." As Friedrich Kittler put it: "Even if the literate individual 'the writer' had to fall finally from his private exteriority of handwriting into the anonymous exteriority of printing in order to secure over distance and beyond death 'his legacy and its dissemination'— literate individuals as 'readers' could reverse this externalization once and for all. . . . Thus precisely the optical and the acoustical flow of data that ceased to write themselves under the monopoly of writing were to be supplemented by a perfect literacy. Writing had been made effortless and reading silent, so that writing could be confused with nature. In letters that they had been able to skip over as educated readers, people experienced visions and sounds. Around 1800 the book became at once film and phonograph record—not in the reality of the technical media, but in the imaginary of readers' souls" (Friedrich Kitder, Grammophon, Film, Typeurriter [Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1986], 17-19). 46. Anadyomene was an early Greek name for Aphrodite, who, in one version of the story of her birth, is born out of the foam of the sea. 47. Cf. note 4 to the texts in Part II and note 37 in this section. 48. The reference is to Goethe's Die Mitschuldigen (1769), one of his earliest dramas, in which Sophie, an innkeeper's daughter, is forced to marry Soller, a gambler and thief. 49. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657—1757), French philosopher whose writings served to introduce key concepts of the biological and physical sciences to the general reading public. His Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) greatly influenced the Italian Enlightenment thinker Francesco Algarotti (i 712-64), who wrote an introduction of Newtonianism "for the ladies." 50. In regard to the genderization of the sublime and the beautiful in the eighteenth century, especially in Burke, see Schulte-Sasse, "High/Low and Other Dichotomies." 51. Hombre: a traditional European card game of Spanish origin. 52. Vesta: Roman goddess of the hearth and keeper of the most sacred fire. Lares is closely associated with Vesta and refers to the good spirits of the dead who watch over households. 53. Castor and Pollux are the twin sons of Jupiter and Leda. They represent the endless cycle of darkness and light. 54. On the genderization of the sublime, see note 8 to the Introductory Essay to Part IV and note 38 in this section. 55. Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom. The Athena Lemnia by Phidias (ca. 500-432 B.C.) is considered to be one of the greatest models of classical sculpture. 56. According to Kant, understanding (Verstand) is the faculty of experience; with the assistance of the "categories," understanding assembles and orders sense data. Reason (Vernunft), which Kant calls the "higher faculty of cognition" or "the cognitive faculty of

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ideas," orders the concepts of understanding into a unified whole that exceeds experience. Reason is therefore the faculty of critical reflection. Kant's definition of the relationship of understanding and reason is the reversal of the traditional scholastic definition of this relationship. According to scholastic psychology, sensatio, memoria, imaginatio, ratio, and intdlectus form a hierarchy of cognitive faculties, in which ratio (Vernunft or reason) is the subordinate and intelkctus (Verstand or understanding) the higher faculty. Somewhat confusingly in the context of German Idealism, Friedrich Schlegel adheres to the traditional usage of understanding and reason. 57. LeBourgeois Gentilhomme (The would-be gentleman) (1670). Written in prose, it is closer to stage "naturalism" than other plays of the seventeenth century, which were typically written in verse. 58. Schlegel is most likely referring to such Enlightenment philosophers as Christian Garve (1742-98) whose mission it was to popularize philosophy, in this case the work of the English philosophers Ferguson and Burke, for a more general audience. 59. Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1797-98); English translation: "First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge," in Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Meredith, 1970), 2-28. 60. Doryphorus: sculpture by Polyclitus, Greek sculptor of the fifth century B.C. It is also called Canon since it embodied the theoretical writings of Polyclitus. 61. Source: Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Caroline and Dorothea in Briefen, ed. Ernst Wienecke (Weimar: Kiepcnheuer, 1914). 62. "Wilhelm" is August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline's husband. 63. Although divorce was legal in Germany at this time, religiously mixed marriages were not. Dorothea Veil, nee Mendelssohn, daughter of the famous Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, had to convert in order to marry Friedrich. 64. The novel, Florentin, which remained unfinished, was written primarily to help support her family financially. A first volume was published anonymously in 1801 by Friedrich Schlegel, who was assumed to have written it. 65. Friedrich Schlegel's unfinished novel Lucinde, published in 1799, caused a scandal, mainly because of its celebration of what was perceived as lascivious sensuality; cf. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). In 1800, his friend Friedrich Schleiermacher anonymously published a critical defense of the novel, his Vertraute Briefe uber Friedrich Schlegeh "Lucinde" (Confidential letters on Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde), which gained fame on its own terms. 66. Friedrich Schleiermacher's Soliloquies (1800), in which the individuality of each human being is seen as a unique organ and symbol of the Infinite. 67. Source: with the exception of the second review, all texts by Caroline SchlegelSchelling are taken from Caroline Schelling, Caroline: Briefe aus der Fruhromantik, 2 vols., ed. Georg Waitz and Erich Schmidt (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1970; reprint of Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1913). The second review (of the Musenalmanach 1805), originally published in the Jenaische Allgemtine Literaturzeitung, no. 107, is taken from the Sitzungsherichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-histarische Klasse, Jahrgang 1912 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1912). 68. A. W. Schlegel used this and die immediately preceding letter (186, not translated here) as drafts for his article on Romeo and Juliet that appeared in Schiller's journal Horen, (1797, no. 6). Cf. A. W. Schlegel, "Uber Shakespeares Romeo und Julia," Sammtliche Werke, vol. 8, 71-97. Several passages were taken over virtually word for word. In the preface to an 1828 edition of his works, Schlegel acknowledges that he had


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"help" in several of his essays and reviews, albeit without naming Caroline explicitly (see Sammtliche Werke, vol. 7, xxxiii). 69. Romeo and Juliet, a two-act play (1776, published in 1778) by Friedrich Wilhelm Goiter (1746-97), with music by Georg Benda (1722-95). 70. Julie and Saint-Preux: figures in Rousseau's epistolary novel, Julie nu la Nouvelle Heloise (1791), which exalts virtue and natural man in opposition to hypocritical social morality. Anne Louise Germaine dc Stael (1766-1817): a French writer (De I'Allemagne) who was an acquaintance of A. W. Schlegel's. 71. The reference here is to the Athendum, which Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel published between 1798 and 1800. 72. The "master" is Goethe. 73. In the original, diaskeuasiren, a Greek term that Friedrich Schlegel often used, meaning to compile or edit in the manner of Homeric poems. 74. The reference here is to As You Like It. Caroline did an apparently significant amount of unacknowledged work on these important translations. Begun by A. W. Schlegel with seventeen plays (1797-1810), finished by Ludwig Tieck together with his daughter Dorothea and Wolf Graf Baudissin (1825-40). Known generally as the "Schlcgcl-Ticck" translations, they were highly influential and remain to this day authoritative German translations of Shakespeare. 75. "Amor als Landschaftsmaler" (Amor as a landscape painter) (1787). 76. For the nature of the dispute between Schelling and Fichte, see the selections from their correspondence in Part I. 77. Source: Athendum 2.2 (1799): 313-16. A Swiss historian and politician who was greatly admired by the Schlegel brothers, Johannes Miiller (1752-1809) served as an administrator in several courts (Kassel, Mainz, Vienna, Berlin). Muller was most famous as a historian, and his concept of history was influenced by his friend Johann Gottfried Herder. 78. Karl Viktor von Bonstelten (1745-1832), Swiss writer. 79. Both Caroline and Friedrich Schelling wrote numerous anonymous reviews for this daily (!) literary paper. Originally founded in 1785 as an organ for the increasingly dogmatic Kantian school, the paper was reincarnated in 1804 under the banner of Schelling's philosophy. 80. Heracleitus: Greek philosopher, ca. 54o-ca. 480 B.C.; developed a cosmology that stressed the need for living in harmony. Democritus: Greek philosopher, ca. 46o-ca. 470 B.C., exponent of atomic theory of the universe. Janus: Roman god of good beginnings, which are sure to result in good endings; represented in art with two faces facing in opposite directions. 81. Pseudonyms for the contributors, most of whom are not well known today; * and " and "" all refer to Fichte. 82. Bonaventura = Schelling; Inhumanus = A. W. Schlegel; Sternchen = Fichte (Caroline is apparently unaware that Fichte appears in both issues of the Muse.nalmana.ch). 83. "Die Geheimnisse: Ein Fragment"; a poem by Goethe (1784). 84. The original poem actually read fdndlic.h (hostile) rather thanfriedlich (peaceful) used by Caroline here. 85. On "physics," see note 37 to the texts in Part I. 86. Cf. i Cor. 13:1: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (King James Version). 87. The sonnet is apparently by Schelling.

462

Notes to Page 454

88. Wunderkreuz; on Wunder/wunderbar, see notes 68 and 69 to the texts in Part II. See also UniversalBrvuillon 234, 832, 986 (Part II). 89. In German universities, it is necessary to write a second dissertation called the Habilitationsschrift, or "inaugural dissertation," usually conceived as one's magnum opus, in order to be appointed as a proper professor. In 1801, Friedrich Schlegel taught for a brief period at the university in Jena.

Bibliography

Selected Studies on Early German Romanticism in English Behler, Ernst. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Unfortunately, this study by one of the most eminent scholars of German Romanticism appeared too late to be included in the introductions and notes to our volume. Much like our own volume, Behler concentrates on Early or Jena Romanticism, by far the most creative and "contemporary" among the various strands of German Romanticism. Particularly valuable is his attempt to relate Romantic theory to Romantic practice, using as his examples Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, among others. Herman, Antoine. The Experience, of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. This study is a systematic inquiry into the theory of translation in thinkers such as Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Holderlin. "The translating practice here is accompanied by a reflection, sometimes purely empirical or methodological, sometimes cultural and social, sometimes outright speculative, on the meaning of the act of translation, on its linguistic, literary, metaphysical, religious, and historical implications, on the relation among languages, between same and other, between what is one's own and what is foreign" (12). Berman's study is important not only to the history of ideas but also to contemporary discussions in literary theory and cultural studies. Blackwell, Jeannine, and Susanne Zantop. Bitter Healing: German Women Writers 1700—1830. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. This anthology introduces German women writers whose writings have previously been unavailable to an English-speaking audience. It includes a histori463

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Bibliography

cal introduction to German women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a preface and annotated bibliography to each writer translated. Included are selected letters from Caroline Schlegel-Schelling and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism. Bern, Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 1983. Friedrichsmeyer reads androgyny as a moment within Early German Romanticism when there is a search for wholeness. In an age where the sexes were seen to possess complementary powers, their union symbolizes a merger between the rational and the non-rational. In Friedrich SchlegeFs Greek period, the androgyne functions as a model for sexual equality. Later, in the "On Philosophy. To Dorothea," Schlegel expands the concept of wholeness to where in heterosexual union, the relationship between male and female does not eradicate, but encompasses, the polarized attributes of the masculine and the feminine. Hannah, Richard W. TheFichteanDynamic of Novalis's Poetics. Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981. This study claims that Fichte "created romanticism," and that Novalis can be understood only when his principal ideas are seen in the light of Fichte's early writings. To substantiate this claim, the author develops the philosophical (i.e., Fichtean) context in which Novalis's reflections on art and poetry arose. After a brief chapter on Fichte's concept of the imagination, Hannah focuses on three fundamental notions of Novalis's poetics: time, chance, and the sign. These analyses lead him to an elucidation of the proposition the author considers fundamental to Novalis's enterprise, namely, that "poesy = art of stirring the mind [Gemuethserregungskunst]," Kuzniar, Alice A. Delayed Endings: Nondosure in Novalis and Holderlin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Kuzniar traces the Romantic rejection of progressive or ideological temporality, taking as her examples Novalis's and Holderlin's practices of narrative, semantic, and thematic rionclosure in their theoretical and poetic texts. Although she grounds their loss of "belief in endings and ultimacies" in the historico-philosophical moment of upheaval called the French Revolution, she also locates significant affinities between Romantic and more recent poststructuralist concerns in their shared perception of a radical breach with received models of time. Intended for specialists and nonspecialists alike, the volume includes a selective, thematically organized bibliography of critical/ theoretical works on issues of temporality and closure. Kuzniar, Alice A. "Hearing Woman's Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen." PMLA 107.5 (October 1992): 1196-1207.

Selected Studies in English

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In this article, Kuzniar discusses the representation of female voices in Romantic texts by men. She focuses on Novalis's novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, addressing the complexities of gender differentiations and transformations in his text; Helene Cixous's and Luce Irigaray's theories, as well as feminist film criticism, inform her analyses. Woman's poetic power, she suggests, is idealized in the novel as the protagonist, Heinrich, attempts to mimic female, otherworldly, poetic voices, ultimately becoming a transsexual being in the process. Kuzniar, Alice A. "Reassessing Romantic Reflexivity—The Case of Novalis." Germanic Review (32.2 (1988): 77-86. This article takes issue with interpretations of Romantic reflexivity that argue that reflexivity merely leads to the reconstitution of a whole or transparent self. Reading Novalis's reinterpretation of the Fichtean subject and his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Kuzniar argues that Romantic reflection avoids simply becoming a means for intuiting the self. Instead, it foregrounds language as that which determines and splits the subject. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, early German Romanticism (the Athendum) elaborated and thus defines the horizon of the critical project, and therefore also the horizon of "the age we live in as the critical age par excellence" (16). They claim that the concept of "literature" arises as a response to theoretical problems that idealism was unable to solve. Jena Romanticism, and especially the texts collected in Athendum, thus represents the inauguration of the theoretical project in literature. This project is, however, not merely concerned with literature; rather, it is the indication of a general crisis and critique for which literature is the privileged locus of expression. Literature "devotes itself exclusively to the search for its own identity" (16). The literary, in the Romantics' definitions of the fragment, the poem, the novel, and criticism, becomes the center of the ambiguous enterprise in which, on the one hand, "romanticism completes idealism," and on the other hand, "opens up the ongoing history of its completion" (122), in which we still partake. Molnar, Geza von. Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalu and Artistic Autonomy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Geza von Molnar's book provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between Novalis's literary and philosophical texts. He discusses the connections between Novalis's work and that of Kant, Fichte, Schiller, and Goethe; Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, for instance, is seen as the foundation for Novalis's literary pursuits, with its emphasis on the freedom and morality of the self's agency in relation to the outside world. He also shows how Novalis's personal life, espe-

466

Bibliography

cially his love for Sophie von Kiihn, is intertwined with his intellectual and artistic endeavors. Newman, Gail. "The Status of the Subject in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Kleist's Die Marquise von O... ." German Quarterly 62.1 (winter 1989): 59-7 !• Newman argues for a comparative reading of the work of Novalis and Kleist in light of the fact that both authors address "the possibilities, problems, and paradoxes inherent in the post-Kantian conceptual environment." Although the two authors arrive at different literary solutions to the problems of subject-object relations (a fact that Newman grounds largely in their different personal experiences with models of individuality and community), both can be read as tracing the dilemma of the modern individual subject as it emerged at the close of the eighteenth century. On the basis of an investigation of the love relationships in Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Die Marquise von O... , Newman asserts that the narrative process itself is the site where self and other either connect and merge (Novalis) or bear witness to an ever-widening gap of communication and understanding (Kleist). Padilla, Katherine. "The Embodiment of the Absolute: Theories of the Feminine in the Works of Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Novalis." Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1988. This study discusses the genderization of the Absolute in Romantic theories of epistemology and mimesis. It traces how the creative male self exploits the feminine's interpreted absence of subjectivity in his attempt to attain identity and knowledge. In the works of the writers examined, the terms Subject and Object are assigned gender in the attainment of identity; the male self is opposed and thus denned by the feminine nonself. By adhering to this binary opposition, the feminine is equated with the Absolute. Pfefferkorn, Kristin. Novalis: A Romantic's Theory of Language and Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. One of Pfefferkorn's main concerns in this book is to determine whether Novalis's belief that divine inspiration is crucial for the creation of art was genuine or not. In order to answer this question, she draws on biographical and historical information as well as her own interpretations of his texts; she also investigates his theories on language, nature, and the fairy tale, the influence that thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, and Herder had on his thinking, and the connections between his theories and those of Heidegger. She concludes that Novalis was indeed led by genuine experience (and not by poetic conceit) in developing the notion of the intimate relation between the spiritual realm and art. To counteract what she sees as one-sided misreadings of his texts, she argues throughout her detailed study for both the philosophical validity and the poetic value of his work.

German Romanticism in English Translation

467

Seyhan, Azade. Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, I99aSeyhan situates the critical discourse of the f'ruhwmanlikvnihm a tradition of philosophical inquiry into problems of representation. She investigates the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, as well as the "transcendental poetry" of Schiller, claiming that Early Romantic theories constitute a response to questions of representation posed by German Idealism. Throughout the study, Seyhan juxtaposes Romantic thought and contemporary criticism in an attempt to demonstrate how the Romantics anticipated current debates in literature and philosophy. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and Its Institutions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. This is an exhaustive study of the links between Romantic writing and dominant social institutions of the era. Ziolkowski defines Romantic literature quite broadly as fiction and critical texts produced between the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. He analyzes the institutions of mining, the law, museums, universities, and mental hospitals. Reading the Romantics "in the context of the institutions that shaped them and that they in turn helped to shape," Ziolkowski identifies a relationship of reciprocal influence between the literature and the institutions of its day.

German Romanticism in English Translation Behler, Ernst, ed. Philosophy of German Idealism. New York: Continuum, 1987; The German Library, vol. 23 (Fichte,Jacobi, and Schelling). Furst, Lilian R., comp. European Romanticism: Self-Definition. London and New York: Methuen, 1980 (short selections from Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, A. W. Schlegel, and W. H. Wackenroder). Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Owen, 1842. . Henry von Ofterdingen: A Novel. Trans. Palmer Hilty. Prospect Heights, 111.: Waveland Press, 1990. Reprint; originally published: New York: F. Ungar, 1958. -. Novalis: His Life, Thoughts, and Works. Ed. and trans. M. J. Hope. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1891. -. Pollen and Fragments: Selected Poetry and Prose of Novalis. Trans, and introductory essay Arthur Versluis. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes Press, 1989. -. Hymns to the Night. Trans. Dick Higgins. Rev. ed. New Paltz, N.Y.: McPherson, 1984. -. Hymns to the Night and Other Selected Writings. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960.

468

Bibliography

. Spiritual Saturnalia; Fragments of Existence. Trans, and in trod. John N. Ritter. New York: Exposition Press, 1971. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Ages of the World. Trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolmanjr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. . Bruno; or, On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things. Ed. and trans., and introd. Michael G. Vater. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. -. Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F. W.f. Schelling. Trans, and ed. with a critical introd. by Thomas Pfau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. -. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science. Trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath, introd. Robert Stern. Cambridge, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1988. -. Of Human Freedom. Critical introd. and notes by James Gutmann. Chicago: Open Court, 1936. -. On University Studies. Trans. E. S. Morgan, ed. and introd. Norbert Guterman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966. -. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Critical introd. and notes by James Gutmann. La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1989. -. The Philosophy of Art. Ed., trans, and introd. Douglas W. Stott, foreword by David Simpson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989-. System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Peter Heath, introd. Michael Vater. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. -. The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays. Trans. Fritz Marti with commentary. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, ad ed. Trans. John Black. London: H. G.: Bohn, 1846. . A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on German Literature from Gottsched to Goethe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1944. Schlegel, Dorothea. Camilla: A Novel. Trans. Edwina Lawler. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. . Florentin: A Novel. Trans. Edwina Lawler and Ruth Richardson. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Schlegel, Friedrich von. The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous works of Friedrich von Schlegel. Trans. E. J. Millington. London: G. Bell, 1900. . A Course of Lectures on Modern History; to Which Are Added Historical Essays on the Beginning of Our History, and on Caesar and Alexander. Trans. Lyndsey Purcell and R. H. Whitelock. London, 1886. -. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans., introd., and annotations by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968. -. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. -. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1818.

Sources for Translations

469

. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, New ed. Philadelphia: Moss, 1848. -. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow, foreword by Rodolphe Gasche. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. The Philosophy of History: In a Course of Lectures Delivered at Vienna, with a Memoir of the Author. Trans. James Burton Robertson. London and New York: G. Bell and Sons, 1893. Reprint: New York: AMS Press, 1976. The Philosophy of Life, and Philosophy of Language, in a Course of Lectures. Trans. A. J. W. Morrison. New York: Harper, 1848. Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel. Selected letters, in Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, Bitter Healing: German Women Writers ijoo-i8jo, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990 (Caroline, pp. 279-96; Dorothea, pp. 333-47)Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977. . Soliloquies. With a critical introduction and Appendix. Ed. Horace Leland Friess. Chicago: Open Court, 1926. Simpson, David, ed. and introd. German Aesthetic Idealism and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984. Tieck. Ludwig. Letters ofLudwig Tieck, Hitherto Unpublished, 1792—r $53. London: Oxford University Press, 1937. . Letters to and from Ludwig Tieck and His Circle, Letters from the Period of German Romanticism, Including the Unpublished Correspondence of Sophie and Ludwig Tieck. Coll. and ed. Percy Matenko, Edwin H. Zeydcl, and Bertha M. Masche. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Wheeler, Kathleen, ed. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The, Romantic Ironists and Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Willson, A. Leslie, ed. Foreword by Ernst Behler. German Romantic Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1982; The German Library, vol. 21 (Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and others).

Sources for Translations Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels "dltestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. " Ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Novalis. Schriften: Die, Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. 3d ed. 5 vols. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981. Ritter, Johann Wilhelm. Fragments aus dem Nachlasse einesjungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch fur Freunde der Natur. 2 vols. Heidelberg, 1810. Schelling, Caroline. Caroline: Briefe aus der Fruhromantik. a vols. Ed. Georg Waitz and Erich Schmidt. Bern: Herbert Lang, 1970. Reprint of Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1913.

47°

Bibliography

Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen. Ed. Ernst Behler. Vol. i: Vorlesungen uberAsthetik [1798-1803]. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1989. 181-266. Schlegel, Friedrich. KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler et al. Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Schoningh, 1958. . Theme der Weiblichkeit. Ed. and with an Afterword by Winfried Menninghaus. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982. Schulz, Walter, ed. Briefwechsel Fickte-Scheiling. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968. 105-143. Sitzuhgsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschqften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse, Jahrgang 1912. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1912. (Second review [of the Musenalmanach 1805], originally published in thejenaische Attgemeine Literaturzeitung, no. 107.) Veit-Schlegel, Dorothea. Caroline und Dorothea in Briefen. Ed. Ernst Wienecke. Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1914.

Index

Absolute, the, 22, 34, 74, 80, 85, 86, 89, 108, 116, 242, 243, 248, 256, 258, 260, 336 Absolute activity, 85 Absolute book, 328 Absolute consciousness, 82 Absolute determinedness, 82 Absolute ground, 107, 108 Absolute harmony, 399 Absolute I, 12, 28, 42nl4, 51-53, 67, 69nlO, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 231, 232, 307, 308-9, 310, 311, 371 Absolute identity, 51, 81, 85-87, 323; of thought and intuition, 85 Absolute indifference, 54, 85, 88 Absolute knowledge, 80, 170, 241, 304, 336, 343 Absolute love, 142 Absolute progressivity, 28, 329 Absolute sphere, 51 Absolute thetic faculty, 90 Absolute unity, 21, 85, 206, 243, 338, 339 Absolute universality, 331 Abstraction, 77, 244, 260, 321, 432, 435 Aeschylus, 195 Aesthetic idea, 163, 164, 205 Aesthetic ideology, 2, 4-6, 26, 29, 37, 39, 40 Aesthetic judgment. See Judgment of taste Aesthetic philosophy, 73 Aesthetic pleasure, 16, 18, 29. See also Pleasure Aesthetic religion, 114, 115 Aesthetic sense, 73 Aesthetics, 14, 16, 20, 24, 117, 157-61,

163,165,166, 233, 240, 273, 324, 330, 331, 350 Algarotti, Francesco, 424 Alienation, 7, 60 Allegory, 1-6, 9, 12, 25, 35, 37, 38, 41, 65, 170,189,256,397,455 Alterity, 36, 37. See aha Otherness Analytic writer, 318 Anarchy, 48, 115, 159, 169, 230, 293, 310 Annihilation, 89, 332, 335-37, 340, 347, 350. See also Self-annihilation Annihilators, 354, 390 Anschauung, 14, 19. See also Intuition Anschauung: intellektuelle. See Intellectual intuition Antithesis, 92, 94, 103 Appearance, 84 Apperception, 9 Arabesque, 186 Aristophanes, 201, 280n33 Aristotle, 217, 267, 338, 405, 407, 416 Aspasia, 419 Astrology, 190 Atheism, 81 Atheism dispute, 88 Athendum, 119, 123, 124, 126, 151n53, 171, 178n8, 319, 353, 355n7, 363, 367, 375, 378, 379, 445, 461n71 Autonomy, aesthetic, 159, 160, 163, 191 Baader, Franz von, 150n41 Bardili, Christoph, 148nl 1 Bardilianism. See Bardili, Christoph Batteux, Charles, 213, 281n51 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 157, 159, 160, 165

471

472 Beauty: the beautiful, 2, 13, 40, 72, 103, 110,127,157-64,177, 187, 189, 195, 197-200, 204-6, 208, 209, 213, 219, 279n25, 293, 339, 367, 369, 397, 400; male and female beauty, 382, 397 Behler, Ernst, 169, 178n3, 279n24, 463 Being, 82, 84,85,91,92, 106 Belief, 7, 8, 33, 38, 40, 58, 67, 87, 88, 233, 237, 247, 260, 261, 283n76 Benjamin, Walter, 284n91, 301, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 381nl3 Berman, Antoine, 463 Bernhardi, August Ferdinand, 152n59 Bible, 328 Blackwell, Jeannine, 463 Blood of the state, 131 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 192, 193, 278nl9 Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 285n94 Body, 74; female, 361, 363, 369, 371, 372, 425; male, 424 Bohme, Jakob, 190, 278nl6 Boileau, Nicholas, 216, 281n54 Bonstetten, Karl Viktor von, 448, 461n78 Book market, 270, 284n92 Boufflers, Stanislas Chevalier de, 124, 152n67 Boundary, 235, 237 Burke, Edmund, 159, 160 Businessmen, 139 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 224, 282n63 Causality, 240, 249 Cervantes, Miguel de, 186, 192, 193, 194, 278nl 1,334, 353 Chance, 40, 239, 240 Chaos, 30, 32, 91, 159, 169, 183, 194, 230, 243, 277n4, 327, 342 Characteristics, 331, 334, 356n26 Characterization, 276-77, 320, 323, 356n26 Chemical process, 79 Chrysippus, 405 Cicero, 347 Civil servant, 133 Classic, 192, 397 Classification, 247 Cognition, 106, 207, 261 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 3-6, 8, 41 Combinatory experimentation, 166 Cornbinatory thinking/spirit, 30, 167, 170

Index Common sense, 343 Conditioned (das Bedingte), 18, 85, 86, 89, 101,124,242,318 Conscious infinity, 262 Consciousness, 3, 6, 7, 74-76, 81-83, 91, 96, 99, 104, 106, 167, 206, 234, 243, 244, 248, 254, 257, 260, 261, 263, 398, 447, 458n37; of the infinite, 21, 244, 245, 248, 254, 261,277n4 Contemplation, 95, 118,194, 199, 219, 335 Correggio, Antonio, 192 Cosmogony, 190 Crisis, 134 Critique, 268, 271, 273, 274, 276-77, 284n91, 317, 320, 321, 331, 332, 334, 335, 341-43, 345, 347-53, 356n26 Cyclical reading, 296, 311n2, 352 Cynic, 142 Dante Alighieri, 185, 191, 194 de Beauvoir, Simone, 49 de Man, Paul, 1-7, 10, 12, 25, 26, 30, 38, 39, 41,71n42, 178nl Deity-, 262 Democracy, 143, 144, 145, 416, 418 Democritus, 450, 454 Demosthenes, 417 Denner, Balthasar, 218, 282n58 Descartes, Rene, 8, 9, 10, 15, 151n49, 266, 281n55 Desire, 11,17, 21-23, 26, 27, 37, 235, 249, 317, 384, 400; for the infinite, 22; sexual, 387. See ahn Longing; Yearning Despotism, 144 Determinability, 265 Determinable consciousness, 83 Determinacy, 250, 265 Determination, 11, 29, 32, 53, 75, 90, 91, 95, 102, 219, 229, 236, 237 Determined (dasBestimmte), 22, 80, 82-84, 91,92,94, 98, 105, 108, 168, 202, 249, 251, 257, 258, 263, 265, 347 Determined I, 58, 91 Determinedness, 83 Diderot, Denis, 217 Difference, 116 Differentiation, 23, 27, 33, 51-53, 69n9, 105 Dispersal, 11,12,25 Dissolution, 30, 169

Index Divination, 79, 154n86, 228, 262, 263, 265, 356n26, 447 Divinatory critique, 321 Divinity, 72 Division, 248 Dogmatism, 250, 251 Domesticity, 136,421 Drive to be I, 102 Dualism, 246, 251, 278n8 Dykjohann, 122 Economics; economy, 153n85, 231, 233, 328,418,421,448 Ecstasy, 300, 312nl6 Electricity, 78 Elegy, 323 Elsasser, Michael, 277n4 Empirical, 264 EmpiricalI,2S, 91, 101,238 Empiricism, 239, 252, 341, 343 Encyclopedia, 170, 173, 177, 255, 282n64 Enlightenment, 7, 48, 112, 121, 150n35, 153n85, 154n87, 277n2, 280n39, 283n73, 285n94, 292, 301, 306, 310, 312nl7, 326, 356n33, 357n40, 369, 380nl2 Enthusiasm, 30, 150n35, 182, 186, 242, 244, 248, 255, 259, 277n4, 315, 332, 397-99, 410, 428, 438, 439, 454, 458n37; feminine, 410 Enthusiast, 130 Epic, 191, 192, 193, 223, 319, 386 Erotic, 329 Eternal peace, 132, 141 Eternity: versus time, 19, 73, 108 Eternity of reason, 87 Ethics, 72, 76, 106, 174, 175, 209, 267, 332 Euphony, 13, 16 Experience, 72, 95, 198-200, 207, 221, 236, 265, 302, 303, 304 Factory, 138 Fairy tale, 177, 192, 194, 229, 230, 231, 235, 239, 240, 421 Family, 132, 135, 141, 143, 145, 393, 394, 421 Fanaticism, 114, 150ii35, 150n40 Fancy, 195, 197, 203, 217, 424 Fantastic, 125, 215, 240, 273, 333, 404 Fantasy, 29, 30, 32, 33, 40, 116, 147n3, 169, 174, 175, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186,

473 187,192,194, 204, 209, 211, 212, 216, 235, 238, 240, 244, 333, 395, 398, 399 Feeling, 33, 58, 59, 93, 96-99, 100, 101, 148n23, 455n4; of identity, 34; of the sublime, 245, 249, 277n4 Feminine, 363, 365, 367, 371, 387, 389, 398, 425 Feminine beauty, 397 Feminine consciousness, 398 Feminine mysticism, 382 Feminine philosophy, 362, 363, 368, 370, 385 Femininity, 339, 362, 365, 367, 369, 371, 375, 379, 385, 390, 397-^tOl, 405, 407, 408,410,412,420,423,424 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9, 10, 12, 15, 73-90,92,98, 109, 112, 114, 116, 121, 123, 209,234-36, 239, 241-43, 247, 259, 263, 266, 322, 324, 331, 335-37, 339, 340, 351, 435, 436, 447, 451; Theory of Scientific Knowledge, 50, 69n7, 74, 76,107,121,122, 173, 187, 324, 343, 379, 452. See also Theory of scientific knowledge Fiction, 7, 23, 38, 39, 67, 74, 77, 133,175, 214, 234, 237, 247, 324 Figuration, 34, 38, 148n24 Finite, 27, 87, 89, 102, 209, 244, 251, 265 Finitude, 83 Fonlenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 216, 424 Foucault, Michel, 154n86, 179nl3 Fragment, 22, 239, 289-92, 298, 299, 309, 312nl2, 312nl3, 314, 320, 322, 333, 444, 445, 455 Fragmentary, the, 47, 66, 291-92, 302, 455 Frank, Manfred, 42nlO, 43n55, 54, 59, 68n3, 69nl3, 69nl6, 149n29 French Revolution, 322 Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, 380n5, 464

Gall, Franz Josef, 200, 279n32 Garve, Christian, 119,151n54, 317, 330, 344, 346, 357n47, 460n58 Gender, 423, 424 Gender politics, 380n5 Geniality, 314, 398 Genius, 2, 3, 90, 170, 200, 202, 314, 389, 397, 400 Genre, 316, 320, 321, 329, 334

474 GeBner, Salomon, 216, 281n56 Girlanner, Christoph, 120, 152n58 God, 38, 51, 84, 87,92, 277n4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 121, 122, 123, 213, 234, 322, 323, 331, 332, 334, 355n21, 358n66, 392, 442, 446, 451; Werther, 230, 452; Wilhelm Meister, 121, 122, 230, 422, 429 Gold, 120, 131 Golden Age, 40, 107, 188, 237, 324, 327, 334 Gottsched.Johann Christian, 277ii2, 312nl7 Graphs and charts, 73 Grotesque, 213, 325 Habermas.Jurgen, 20 Harmony, 255, 324, 339, 398, 399, 427, 438; of the ideal and the real, 185; universal, 176, 177 Harris, James, 350 Heeren, Arnold, 354 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25, 26, 33, 37, 43n41, 47, 59, 69n, 146nl, 151n46,173, 290 Hemsterhuis, Franziscus, 174, 178, 318, 345, 356n32, 401, 419, 438, 457n24 Heracleitus, 267, 450 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 280n39, 331, 356n28, 457n24, 461n77 Hermaphroditism, 191 Hermeneutics, 345, 347-49, 351 Herodotus, 416 Hetaera, 367, 384, 401, 403, 409, 455n6 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 346, 347 Hieroglyph, 120 Hieroglyphic expression, 172, 186, 424 Hieroglyphical power, 148n24; of the I, 56, 92 History, 73, 319, 322, 323, 341, 344, 354 Holderlin, Friedrich, 34, 43n56, 47, 146nl, 149n29 Homer, 185,203,333,414 Horace, 413 Hovering, 30-32, 51-53, 92, 105, 106, 371; hovering reflection, 55, 58 Hiilsen, August Ludwig, 318, 354n4 I of feeling, 101 I of reflection, 101 Idea, 72,132, 242

Index Ideal, 74, 75, 323 Ideal ground, 82 Ideal of philosophy, 265 Idealism, 75, 77, 81, 87, 183, 184, 187, 251, 278n8, 328 Ideal-real, 53, 74-77,97, 278n8. Ideal-realism, 76 Identification, 5 Identity, 2, 4, 21, 33, 37, 50, 56, 58, 69n9, 76, 81, 82, 90, 91, 116, 148n23, 246, 264, 265; of ideal and real ground, 85 Ideology. See Aesthetic ideology Idyll, 323 Illusion, 7, 8, 23,64,102,105,214,233, 235, 246, 247, 265 Image; imaginary, 90, 91, 94, 219 Imagination, 2-4,18, 25-27, 29, 40, 52, 55, 74, 79,90,95,101,105,106,108, 110,115, 161,168,174, 189,198,199, 204, 205, 219, 235, 237, 266, 277n4, 315, 322, 333, 412, 432, 454 Imitation, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219, 281n49, 329. See also Mimesis Indeterminacy, 258, 263, 337, 424 India, 187 Indifference, 27, 33, 52, 53, 85, 110, 374, 392, 393, 394. See ako Absolute indifference; Point of indifference Indifferentiation, 59, 394 Indiffereiitists, 142 Individuality, 187, 334, 399, 423, 427, 451 Infinite; infinity, 6, 22, 27, 87, 89, 102, 107,162,164,177, 209, 238, 243-45, 247, 254, 257, 259, 263-65, 316, 326, 328, 347, 384, 424, 432, 437, 438 Infinite being and becoming, 437 Infinite book, 328 Infinite contradiction in human beings, 209 Infinite knowledge, 260 Infinite poem, 183, 277n5 Inner sense, 11, 13, 16, 300 Intellectual intuition, 14, 16, 19-21, 26, 56, 57, 70n24, 75, 97-100, 254, 256, 259-61,291,304 Interpretation, 348, 354 Intuition (Anscttauung), 19, 39, 74, 75, 82, 85,96, 97,103, 108, 201, 205, 246, 280n46, 399. See also Intellectual intuition Ironist, 6, 7,12, 19

Index Irony, 6-7, 12, 30, 33, 40-41, 121-24, 186, 189, 314, 316, 318, 321, 325, 354, 368, 399 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 150n42, 151n43, 343 Japan,121 Jones, Sir William, 275 Judgment, 304-6, 310, 318, 319, 330, 341, 343, 352; determinant, 74, 79; reflective, 74, 79, 161, 292, 293, 310; synthetic, 152n55, 236 Judgment of taste, 16, 195-98, 204, 205, 208, 269, 296, 329 Kant, Immanucl, 3, 8, 9, 10-18, 20, 24, 31, 32, 48, 56-58, 72, 74, 86, 87, 89, 115,119, 122,147-49, 152, 159-64, 169,173-77, 194-208, 210, 236, 237, 239, 252, 266, 273, 277n4, 283n75, 290-93, 295, 303-7, 310, 317, 324, 331, 332, 337, 338, 339, 346, 351, 355nl4, 356n35, 356n37, 378, 435, 455, 459n56; analytic unity of apperception, 9; Critique of Judgment, 13, 16, 85, 159, 161, 194, 206, 277n4, 279n27, 281n48, 284n83, 291, 310; Critique of Pure Reason, 8, 148n25, 152n55, 304, 305, 307; synthetic unity of apperception, 9, 10, 17 Knowledge, 8, 23, 34, 76, 77, 80, 81, 87, 88,91,105,113,161,165, 233, 240, 244, 248, 258, 338, 347, 352. See also Absolute knowledge Koch, Erduin Julius, 345 Kuzniar, Alice, 381nl5, 464, 465 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 34, 35, 40, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 70nl8, 70nl9 Lack, 23, 56, 108 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 47, 70n32, 71n39, 178nl, 293, 298, 308, 381nl3, 465 Language, 70n30, 92, 145, 146, 205, 211, 228, 233 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 200 Law, 132 Le Clerc (Jean Clericus), 347, 358n57 Legislature, 72 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 8, 9, 10, 122, 267

475 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 116, 150n42, 268, 272-76, 283n90, 293, 318, 328, 331,334,345,346,435 Letter, 39, 132, 255, 317, 337, 342, 344 Linne, Carl von, 325 Lockejohn, 11, 13, 358n57, 455 Logic, 78, 235, 240, 241 Longing, 7, 22, 133, 362, 383, 393, 398, 425; for the infinite, 23, 245, 246, 249; for unity, 25. See also Yearning Love, 182, 226, 229, 391, 392, 395, 396, 400 Luther, Martin, 436 Lycurgus, 143 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 36, 178nl, 3l2nlO Machine; machinery, 37, 65, 72, 228, 428 Magical idealism, 175-77, 238 Magnetism, 78 Manifold, 3, 9, 32, 36, 89, 103, 107, 108, 162 Marriage, 329, 385, 398, 421, 456n7 Masculine; masculinity, 365, 367, 369, 380n2, 387, 389, 397, 398, 408, 412, 423 Masculine beauty, 397 Masculine power, 398 Materiality of language, 35 Mathematics, 74, 78 Mechanical, the, 72 Mediated I, 102 Menandcr, 402 Mendelssohn, Moses, 150n42 Menstruation, 375, 386, 394 Menstruum universal, 30, 43n46, 231, 283n70 Metaphor, 211 Midpoint, 133, 170, 171, 181, 182, 243, 247, 249, 257, 261, 263, 277n3, 327, 340 Mimesis, 159, 160, 212, 213. See also Imitation Mirror; mirror relationship, 2, 64, 95 Modern, the, 192, 224, 332, 333, 346, 352,412 Modernism, 21 Modernity, 20, 21 Moliere, 433 Molnar, Geza von, 43n38, 69n8, 69n9, 69nl 1,465

476 Monarchy, 133, 143, 145 Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, 344 Moral sense, 227 Morality, 105, 206, 228, 328,439 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 219, 331 Morocco, 121 Miiller,Johannes, 448, 461n77 Multiplicity, 342 Musaeus, Johann Karl August., 230 Mystic, 38, 336 Mystical expression, 130 Mysticism, 119, 174, 187, 230, 236, 252, '321,325,335-43 Mythologist, 37 Mythology, 37, 38, 73, 88,146n3, 150n37, 171, 172, 182-88 192, 271, 325, 354, 398, 432, 455 Mythology of reason, 73 Naive, 332-33 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 30, 33, 36, 40, 43n46, 47, 68n2, 70n32, 71n39, 178nl, 283n70, 293, 298, 308, 312nl6, 381nl3, 455, 465 Narcissism, 39 Nationalism, 39 Nature, 75, 80, 83, 84, 88, 113, 262 Negation, 109 New mythology. See Mythology New religion, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 38, 362 Nonbcing, 92, 113,150n36 Nondifferentiation. See Indifference Non-I, 16, 27, 37, 49, 50-53, 55, 59, 67, 92, 94, 101, 105-7, 148n23, 226, 233, 238, 242, 243, 263, 284n82, 317, 338, 339

Noumcnon, 79. See also Thing-in-itselt Novalis, 23-24, 25, 32, 33, 34-35, 36, 37, 39-40, 47, 48-68, 157,158,159,170, 171, 173-77, 361, 362-63, 364, 371-72, 379, 445 Novel, 192-94, 314, 320, 326, 329, 331, 333, 399 Objective I, 52 Obscurantists, 135 Opera, 215 Ordo inversus, 30, 33, 43ii55, 102, 149n29 Orient, 185 Original abstraction, 260

Index Original consciousness, 262 Originary act, 99, 102 Originary activity, 277n4 Otherness, 49, 50, 52, 62. See also Alterity Padilla, Kathcrine, 466 Pantheism, 115, 151n42, 232; of fantasy, 117 Paradox, 316 Parmenides, 267 Pathetics, 273 Perspective, 34, 84, 139, 199, 223, 239, 267, 436 Petrarca, Francesco, 399, 451 Pfcfferkorn, Kristin, 70n35, 466 Philemon, 402 Philistines, 135 Philologist, 324 Philology, 119, 229, 230, 234, 274, 326, 340,344-50,352-54 Philosophy of art, 18, 76, 124, 318 Philosophy of nature, 73-78, 82, 84, 88, 113, 114, 124, 316, 373, 434, 447 Philosophy of religion, 78, 247 Physics, 72, 76, 113,147n8, 150n37, 184, 187,188,190, 218, 226, 241, 242, 253, 254, 255, 257, 273, 278n8, 325, 328, 387, 452, 453 Physiognomy, 200 Pietism, 179nll Pindar, 323, 408 Plato, 113, 190, 220, 246, 267, 338, 400, 401, 404, 405, 407, 413, 419, 435, 436, 438, 448 Pleasure, 3, 111, 161, 162,207,216, 272, 332, 370, 383. See also Aesthetic pleasure Plotinus, 239 Plutarch, 406 Poesy, 73, 180, 210, 399, 429 Poetics, 158,159,181, 211, 226, 236, 268, 274, 275, 347 Poiesis, 158,159, 172, 177 Point of indifference, 21, 30, 34, 53, 61, 244, 248, 253, 254, 259, 278n8, 395 Polemics, 268, 274, 284n91, 316, 325, 333, 342, 351 Politics, 328, 331, 340, 341, 343, 385 Polyclitus, 198, 279n30 Popularity, 438 Postmodernism, 21

Index Principle of all ideas, 243 Printing press, 270, 271 Proclus, 403 Progress, 434 Progressive, the, 330, 331, 338, 344, 346, 348, 350, 397 Progressive poesy, 330 Progressivity, 329. See also Absolute progressivity Provencal ballads, 271 Public, 335, 353, 382 Public opinion, 136 Public sentiment, 136 Pure I, 24, 91, 102,103, 105 Purpose, 83, 208, 341 Purposiveness, 161, 207, 208, 356n35 Pythagoras, 338, 404, 405 Pythagoreanism, 404 Quilting point, 34, 40 Raphael (Raffaello Santi), 192, 218 Rape, 372, 388, 455n3 Reading, 235, 269, 296, 31 In2, 326, 329, 335, 350, 352, 353 Real, 74, 75, 104, 323 Real ground (Realgnmd), 82, 84-87 Realism, 81, 88, 184, 190, 251, 272 Reality, 75, 85, 105, 252 Reason, 72, 79, 83, 84, 87, 108, 116, 117, 144, 180, 206, 209, 235, 236, 250, 318, 328, 382, 398, 432 Reflection, 17, 33, 36, 55, 56, 58, 59, 79, 87,92,95-101, 103, 105, 108,113, 133, 148n23, 201, 205, 254, 256, 262, 264, 309, 321, 325, 398, 399, 447 Reflection: aesthetic, 277n5; beautiful, 133 Rehberg, August Wilhelm, 347 Reification, 26 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 79, 122, 148nll,152n64, 339 Religion, 114, 326, 328, 425, 426, 431, 442 Representation, 4, 37, 54, 91, 92, 95, 100, 103,110,141,143,146, 147n3, 148n23,175,185,190, 201, 205, 210, 215, 226, 230, 231, 237, 330, 332, 432; reciprocal, 176, 230. See also Universal representation Republic, 134, 143

477 Revolution, 138, 141, 142,145, 183, 397 Rhapsody, 444 Rhetoric! 37, 211, 212, 216, 316, 320, 322, 329,332 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 364, 373, 374, 446 Romance, 333 Romantic (as used by the Romantics), 187,192,193, 224, 231, 271, 322, 329, 332, 333, 334, 443 Romantic poesy, 186,189,192, 270, 320, 321 Romanticism (as used by the Romantics), 229, 230 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13, 322, 380, 385, 397, 410, 434, 455n7, 456n 17 Ruhnken, David, 347 Sappho, 408, 409, 419 Satire, 323, 329, 333, 349, 353 Saturn, 278n8 Scaramouche, 124 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, 137 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 8-10, 12, 15-20, 23, 26-29, 31, 38, 40, 50-52, 55, 73-90, 113,116,158, 163-65, 209, 325, 373, 442, 446-48; Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, 11,

41n4; Philosophy of Art, 21, 38, 41, 163; System of Transcendental Idealism, 25,

41n4, 165 Schema, 33, 94, 96, 107, 187, 234, 247, 253, 340, 391, 39.3; originary schema, 94,95 Schiller, Friedrich, 27, 28, 153n85,161, 178n2, 330, 331, 353, 355n20, 358n66, 381n22, 442 Schlegel, Adolf, 281 n51 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 79, 246, 355n7, 355nl4, 368, 380nl2, 441, 442, 448, 460n65, 460n66 Seeing, 82, 86 Self-annihilation, 315, 325, 331, 353 Self-apprehension, 82 Self-conscious, 72 Self-consciousness, 3, 6, 8-10, 17, 20, 21, 32,58,75-76,79, 165,238 Self-destruction, 332 Self-determination, 11, 79, 94, 148nlO, 225, 265, 267 Selfhood, 238 Self-interest, 138

478 Self-limitation, 315, 316 Self-parody, 318 Self-penetration, 82 Self-reflection, 56, 64, 204 Self-representation, 257 Self-sensation, 236 Sensation, 13, 15, 57, 79, 109, 110, 210, 236, 237, 238, 455n4 Sense, 331, 332, 352, 353 Sensibility, 15, 249 Sensuality, 138 Sensuous religion, 73 Sensus communis, 295, 296, 299 Sentimental, 28, 192, 321, 329, 333, 353, 397 Sentimentality, 353, 452 Sexual politics, 363 Seyhan, Azade, 47, 54, 56, 68nl, 69n8, 70n22, 466 Shakespeare, William, 125, 192, 224, 319, 329, 330, 399, 443, 445 Sign, 90-93,95,132,189,209,230, 241 Signifier; signified, 35, 60, 63, 93, 94, 230 Signifying person, 93 Skepticism, 242, 248, 255, 257 Society, 132 Socrates, 338, 342, 400 Socratic irony, 123 Solon, 143, 402, 415, 416-18 Space; spatiality, 5, 18, 28, 41, 74, 78, 85, 91,92,93, 197,233 Speculation, 201, 262, 319, 321, 399 Spinoza, Baruch, 87, 89, 113, 115, 150n42, 151n43, 168, 171, 176, 185, 187,188, 190, 191, 243, 247, 259, 263, 266, 278n8, 398, 419, 436, 448 Spinoza debate, 150n42 Spinozism, 79, 151n52 Spiritual center, 193 Spontaneity, 90 State, 27, 39, 48, 49, 65-68, 68n3, 72, 110,114,118,131,133,136,138,139, 140-42, 153n79, 174, 175, 230, 231, 232, 237, 317, 330, 382, 385, 405, 418, 456n7 Stoics, 316 Striving, 28, 107, 108, 166, 181, 199, 206, 219, 230, 240, 244, 245, 249, 251, 329, 331, 339, 399, 449, 453; infinite striving, 158, 177 Style, 220, 222

Index Subjectivity, 3, 4, 17, 36, 52, 86, 167 Subject-object of consciousness, 76 Sublime, 13, 22,160-62,164,165,177, 194,195, 209, 244, 277n4, 316, 339, 369, 370, 397, 424, 426, 431, 440, 458n37 Sulzer,Johann Georg, 331 Supernaturalism, 281n57 Symbol, 2-6, 9, 25,132, 206, 209, 211, 226, 246, 251. See also Universal symbolism Symphilosophy, 319, 355n5, 373 Sympoesy, 319, 355n5 Synthesis, 92, 94, 95, 103 Synthetic writer, 318 System: versus fragment, fragmentary, 48, 64, 65, 72, 75, 76, 79,92, 95, 98, 112, 115,116, 126,161, 163,166,167, 168, 170,172, 185, 226, 228, 243, 246, 248, 255, 258, 259, 267, 290-92, 296, 303, 316, 320, 323, 333, 335, 342, 366, 410,437 Systematic, 22, 147n3 Szondi, Peter, 5-7, 42n6 Taste, 90, 195, 204. See also Judgment of taste Techno, 356n37 Technism, 341,356n37 Teleology, 232, 341 Temporality, 5, 18, 27, 28, 32, 107. See also Time Theogony, 437 Theory, 104, 252, 264, 279n23, 335, 398 Theory of knowledge, 14-17, 161 Theory of scientific knowledge, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86,103, 226, 234, 247, 322, 324, 331, 332, 336, 338, 339, 343, 435, 448, 452. SeeafaoFichte.Johann Gottlieb Theosophy, 190 Thesis, 92, 94, 103 Thing-in-itself, 15, 55, 108, 176, 228, 233, 305, 306, 307 Tieck, Ludwig, 122, 152n69, 441, 448, 451,461n74 Time, 5, 17, 18, 20, 27, 28, 32, 36, 41, 91, 93, 106-8, 233, 238, 240, 304. See also Temporality Totality, 74, 242, 338, 342, 343, 389, 399; of the manifold, 89

Index Tragedy, 329, 331 Transcendental idealism, 77, 79, 122, 163, 208, 209, 290-92, 301-3, 307, 310 Transcendental philosophy, 74, 75 Transcendental subject, 57, 305 Transcendentalism, 79 Translation, 316, 349-51 Unconditioned (das Unbedingte), 86, 100, 102,124, 206, 242, 316, 318, 336, 354n3 Unconscious, 60, 62, 204, 248, 266, 353 Understanding, 147n3, 161, 207, 249-62, 281n47, 385, 398, 432 Undetermined (das Unbestimmte), 257, 263, 265, 333 Unifying principle, 226 Union, 324; of history and philosophy, 277 Unity, 193, 243, 317, 324, 331, 334, 339, 343, 389 Universal, 83, 91 Universal consciousness, 84 Universal harmony. See Harmony, universal Universal representation, 147n3 Universal solvent, 30, 231, 399. See also Menstruum universal? Universal symbolism, 147n3 Universality, 331, 399, 427 Universe, 130, 264 Useful, 231

479 Value, 272 Verisimilitude, 215 Voltaire, 337, 341, 400, 434 Wholeness, 277n5, 331, 353 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 203 Winckelmann,Johann Joachim, 191, 195, 222, 225, 278nl8, 279n26, 282n62, 294, 295, 312n7, 331, 344, 345, 346, 348, 352, 353, 354 Wit, 186, 283n69, 314, 315, 318, 320, 321, 325, 333, 334, 346, 353, 425, 433 Wolf, Friedrich August, 35, 117, 275, 285n99, 345, 346, 348, 357n50 Wolff, Christian, 272, 285n95 Women's destiny, 421 Women's domesticity. See Domesticity Wordsworth, William, 1 Writing, 34, 92, 145, 230 Yearning, 22, 180, 185, 245, 396; female, 393, 394; male, 393. See also Longing Zantop, Susanne, 463 Zeno, 405 Zeus, 191 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 467 Zizek, Slavoj, 70n33, 71n35


Jochen Schulte-Sasse is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and coeditor (with Wlad Godzich) of the Theory and History of Literature series published by the University of Minnesota Press. Haynes Home (University of Alabama), Andreas Michel (Indiana University), ElizabethMittman (Michigan State University), Assenka Oksiloff (NewYork University), Lisa C. Roetzel (University of Rochester) received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and Mary R. Stand (American School, Hamburg, Germany).

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