This paper explores the reception of Kant's understanding of consciousness by both Romantics and Idealists from 1785 to 1799, and traces its impact on the theory of religion. I first look at Kant's understanding of consciousness as developed in the first Critique, and then looks at how figures such as Fichte, Jacobi, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schleiermacher received this theory of consciousness and its implications for their understanding of religion.

This examination provides a history of the problematic characterisation of Early German Romanticism (or Frühromantik) as subjectivist, and challenges this characterisation in light of recent scholarship. From its earliest critical reception in the early nineteenth century, the movement suffered from a set of problematic characterisations made by popular philosophical figures. Goethe, Hegel, Heine, Kierkegaard and others all criticised the movement for holding a dangerous subjective egoism. This characterisation remained with the Frühromantik throughout the twentieth century until it was (...) challenged by recent re-evaluations offered by figures such as Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Frederick Beiser and Andrew Bowie. Their work has opened new possibilities for the re-interpretation of Frühromantik and our understanding of the movement’s religious thought. (shrink)

This paper considers how women and gender are conceptualised within early German Romanticism and argues that work by early German Romantic women should be addressed in scholarship on this movement. The chapter addresses feminist critiques of early German Romanticism as exemplified by the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, concluding that an essentialist view of traditional gender characteristics informs central aspects of these writers’ work, including their view of the relationship between human beings and nature (...) and their theories of language and poetry. The paper argues that a thoroughgoing critique of gender categories and development of the implications of this critique are found in the early German Romantic writings, not of Schlegel and Novalis, but of Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Karoline von Günderrode. (shrink)

This examination considers the influence of the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonist Cudworth upon the thought of the late eighteenth century German thinker Herder. It focuses upon Herder's use of Cudworth's philosophy to create a revised version of Spinoza's metaphysics. Both Cudworth and Herder were concerned with the problem of determinism. Cudworth outlined a number of difficulties relating to this problem in the thought of Spinoza and proposed amendments, particularly the introduction of the middle principle of plastik, which would mediate (...) between the Ideas of transcendent reason and mechanical materialism. We find these amendments to Spinoza's philosophy also employed in Herder's contribution to the Pantheism Controversy, in which he too offers a revised Spinozism and introduces his own middle principle of Kraft. This demonstrates an important but under-explored English contribution to a key development in German intellectual history. The Pantheism Controversy was an epoch-making event, helping to bring an end to the German Enlightenment and to inaugurate the Romantic movement. Herder's version of Spinoza's thought revived the philosopher's fortunes, and Herder's notion of Kraft became central to Romantic aesthetics. Finally, Herder's use of Cudworth demonstrates the important but overlooked source of Platonic realism in German Romantic thought. (shrink)

In this article I ask how fruitful the concept of alienation can be for thinking critically about the nature and causes of the contemporary environmental crisis. The concept of alienation enables us to claim that modern human beings have become alienated or estranged from nature and need to become reconciled with it. Yet reconciliation has often been understood—notably by Hegel and Marx—as the state of being ‘at-home-with-oneself-in-the-world’, in the name of which we are entitled, perhaps even obliged, to overcome anything (...) in nature that is alien to the human mind. This approach to alienation derives ultimately from the German Idealist philosopher J. G. Fichte. I explore an alternative conception of alienation and reconciliation to be found in the work of the Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The Romantics think of reconciliation as including a dimension of alienation, in the form of an awareness that nature is greater than and exceeds the understanding of human beings, insofar as we are merely limited parts of the all-encompassing whole that is nature. I argue that this is a more fruitful approach to alienation and reconciliation than that pursued by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. (shrink)

This third 2021 issue of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" contains a main dossier of new research articles guest edited by Leif Weatherby (New York University) and devoted to the topic of early German romanticism and science. In addition to the papers of this main section issue number 3 of SYMPHILOSOPHIE includes translations of primary sources and book reviews. All contents are freely available online.

Introduction to: "The Edinburgh Edition of the Complete Philosophical Works of François Hemsterhuis", vol. 2: "The Dialogues of Francois Hemsterhuis, 1778-1787", edited and translated by Jacob van Sluis, Daniel Whistler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 22-41.

‘Romanticism’ is one of the more hotly contested terms in the history of ideas. There is a singular lack of consensus as to its meaning, unity, and historical extension, and many attempts to fix the category of romanticism very quickly become blurry. As a result, the great historian of ideas, Arthur Lovejoy, famously concludes that: ‘the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of (...) a verbal sign’ But his pessimistic advice has not stopped scholars from trying to define romanticism. If anything, it has brought renewed vigour to the determination with which critics try to pinpoint the term. There are several approaches to take, for those who attempt to do so. One class of critics tries to enumerate the features shared by the authors and texts generally considered romantic. An alternative approach would try to identify the fundamental unity that informs romanticism and gives rise to the empirical commonalities. But what would this essential feature be? Both of these approaches take an external perspective on romanticism, seeing it as the object of inquiry. An alternative approach, which we will pursue, looks at romantic subjects, and romanticism as a self-constituting category, rather than merely as an externally imposed one. In other words, we will take as basic neither an (empirical) array of candidate properties constituting romanticism, nor a supposed underlying (rationalist) essence from which properties can be derived, but rather we will focus on how the romantics themselves took up the idea of romanticism and transformed it into a self-conscious movement. We will treat the question of romanticism with respect to England, but above all Germany. Although romantic movements arose and flourished elsewhere in Europe (and in France in particular), German and English romanticism were uniquely theoretically sophisticated and philosophically nuanced. (shrink)

The received view has it that analytic philosophy emerged as a rebellion against the German Idealists (above all Hegel) and their British epigones (the British neo-Hegelians). This at least was Russell’s story: the German Idealism failed to achieve solid results in philosophy. Of course, Frege too sought after solid results. He, however, had a different story to tell. Frege never spoke against Hegel, or Fichte. Similarly to the German Idealists, his sworn enemy was the empiricism (in his (...) case, John Stuart Mill). Genealogically, this stance is not difficult to explain. Frege grew up as a philosopher in the context of the German Idealists. He was a member of Karl Snell’s “Sunday Circle” of university teachers in Jena. The group was influenced with Schelling and the German romanticists. The first Anglophone scholar to point out what Frege's thought owes to nineteenth-century Germany philosophy, Hans Sluga, argued that Frege followed the philosophical-logical tradition originating with Leibniz and Kant which Trendelenburg and Lotze developed significantly. About the same time, a philosophical historian writing in German, Gottfried Gabriel, did much to bring this tradition to light, casting Frege as neo-Kantian. Advancing beyond Sluga and Gabriel, the present paper reveals that through the mediation of Trendelenburg and especially of Lotze many elements of German idealism found their way into Frege's logic and philosophy. (shrink)

This essay proposes to rethink Romanticism through the concept of bliss. I suggest not only that bliss is a core Romantic concept but also, more speculatively, that Romanticism as both a project and tendency is generated out of an antagonistic entanglement between bliss and the world of Western modernity. As the state of immediate fulfillment, free of alienation or negativity, bliss is what modernity at once promises and endlessly defers—and so bliss erupts in Romanticism against the modern (...) world. In bliss, the world is dissolved as in water, consumed as in fire, so that nothing remains except the ecstasy of the world’s annihilation or termination. Romanticism seeks to inhabit the utopia of bliss immanently; however, the world re-mediates bliss into a long-lost past or an unreachable future, because it is through this re-mediation that the world reproduces and justifies itself. As a result, Romanticism falls into endless approximation, into nostalgia and longing—and bliss becomes infinitely not-yet, fragmented, defused by the world. This essay moves through German and British Romanticism so as to collect the scattered fragments of bliss, and to re-assemble Romantic bliss in its a-worldly immanence, its post-Copernican cosmic infinity, and its (often violent) clash with the world. (shrink)

No serious discussion of the forces shaping Schleiermacher could overlook the influence that Romanticism had on the formulation of his thought. Seeing the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason as an obstacle to the effective communication of the gospel, he contrastingly understood Romanticism as an ally, for it emphasized passion over reason — imagination and inspiration over logic. The Enlightenment’s enshrinement of human reason as the autonomous source for truth had advanced naturalistic rationalism as its sole determinant. With the (...) ascendancy of this rationalism came an attendant depreciation of other avenues of knowledge, leaving no possibility for its existence outside of the empirical. This state of affairs produced a climate that had starved the soul. -/- In the Romanticists, Schleiermacher found others that shared his views: a great value placed on inward feeling and the importance of the growth of the individual. Schleiermacher’s efforts sought to gain a hearing among his contemporaries by contextualizing the Christian faith within the paradigm of Romanticism, bringing about the emergence of a movement that would embrace a subjectified view of truth. -/- This work advances the proposal that much of the thought currently associated with postmodernism finds its first cogent expression in the writings of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Widely hailed as the Father of Modern Theology, his influences in the areas of thought that would eventually combine to produce postmodernism have been ignored by both Christian and non-Christian scholars. (shrink)

Largely neglected today, the work of Karl Philipp Moritz was a highly influential source for Early German Romanticism. Moritz considered the form of myth as essential to the absolute nature of the divine subject. This defence was based upon his aesthetic theory, which held that beautiful art was “disinterested”, or complete in itself. For Moritz, Myth, like art, constitutes a totality providing an idiom free from restriction in the imitation of the divine. This examination offers a consideration of (...) Moritz’s aesthetics and mythography, before turning briefly to consider his influence on the authors of Early German Romanticism. An understanding of the role of Moritz’s thought supports a number of recent claims that challenge the conventional reading of Romanticism. At the same time it allows us to see Romanticism’s unconventional realist theological programme, permitting us to overcome the problematic secularising readings of the movement. I would like to thank Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, as well as Fredrick Beiser and Lars Fischer for their help with this project. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the ultimate telos of the world and of the subject’s striving in Schelling, the late Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel—as well as via such concepts as the absolute, bliss, nothingness, God, chaos, and irony—this essay reconfigures German Idealism and Romanticism as spanning the conceptual space between two poles, world-annihilation and world-construction, and traces the ways in which these thinkers attempted to resolve what this essay calls the "transcendental knot," or to think the way the world (...) is without absolutizing it. (shrink)

This article argues for a much more profound interconnection between philosophical romanticism and Walter Benjamin’s theses "On The Concept of History" than has been acknowledged up to now. It particularly reveals a number of parallels between Benjamin’s historical approach and the philosophy of history of the two principal thinkers of Early German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who had already formed the object of Benjamin’s doctoral thesis. It examines Benjamin’s final philosophical work in the light of three (...) central topics inherited from Early German Romanticism, which have been less explored in romanticism studies and Benjamin scholarship, yet are decisive for helping clarify what is at stake in Benjamin’s text: the relation to prophecy; the question of messianism; and the heliotropism of the past. -/- _____________ Cet article défend l’idée d’un lien entre la philosophie romantique et les thèses de Walter Benjamin Sur le concept d’histoire bien plus profond qu’on ne l’a admis jusqu’à présent. Il met plus particulièrement en lumière des parallèles entre la démarche historique de Benjamin et la philosophie de l’histoire des deux principaux penseurs du premier romantisme allemand, Friedrich Schlegel et Novalis, auxquels Benjamin avait déjà consacré sa thèse de doctorat. L’article examine le dernier écrit majeur de Benjamin à la lumière de trois thématiques centrales héritées du romantisme, qui ont été peu approfondies tant dans les études romantiques que dans le commentaire benjaminien et qui sont pourtant décisives pour éclaircir ce qui est en jeu dans ce texte : le rapport à la prophétie ; la question du messianisme ; et l’héliotropisme du passé. (shrink)

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

German Romanticism is commonly associated with nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism. Against this standard picture, I argue that the early German romantic author, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) holds a decidedly cosmopolitan view. Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe” has been the subject of much dispute and puzzlement ever since he presented it to the Jena romantic circle in the fall of 1799. On the basis of an account of the philosophical background of Novalis’s romanticism, I (...) show that the image of the Middle Ages sketched in “Christianity or Europe” plays a symbolic role and should not be taken as a literal description of the historical past or as a blueprint for the future. Rather, the romantic picture of medieval Europe serves to evoke poetically the ideal of a cosmopolitan re-unification of humanity. (shrink)

This chapter explores the importance of writing by early nineteenth-century women for post-structuralist accounts of philosophy of art in German Idealism and Romanticism. Work by Romantic writers Karoline von Günderrode and Bettina Brentano-von Arnim is related to post-structuralist analyses of the sublime, the fragment, the work of art, and the artist/genius.

In the article I discuss the philosophical premises of Kleist's literary work, focussing on the relationship between his conception of moral conscience and Kant's ethics.

Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) has long enjoyed a reputation as a Romantic poet, but her philosophical contributions have largely been neglected. This paper is one of the first to address Günderrode’s political thought, especially her view of the interrelationship between human society and the broader environment. The paper argues that Günderrode develops resources for reconceiving the relationship of human beings to the nonhuman and to each other that work against an instrumentalizing view of nature and programmatic political ideals. Günderrode’s normative (...) restraint, concept of harmony, and view of human beings as part of and the same in kind as the rest of nature contribute to a vision of sociality, grounded in her metaphysics, that envisions small communities fostering connections between human beings and the nonhuman. On Günderrode’s model, these connections can grow and strengthen and eventually, perhaps, enable the emergence of the single, perfect organism that she calls the “realized idea of the earth.”. (shrink)

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner (...) that one would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

Hegel reads the poet Novalis as an expression of terminal irony, a pathological case of Gemüt, where the conscious mind is alienated from reality and turns its negativity inwards on the contents of its own natural soul. The condition of self-feeling, presented in Hegel’s “Anthropology”, is a self-consumption that manifests itself somatically in the physical disease (consumption) from which Novalis dies. The poet’s literary production represents a pathological fixation that impedes the dynamic organicity of Hegelian Science. As such, Novalis’s mental (...) illness and death constitute an expression of romantic irony and an ongoing threat to Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

Friedrich Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are notoriously baffling. They are often regarded as outlandish, or “poetically exaggerated” statements, since they are taken to suggest that there is no difference between poetry and reality or to express the view that there is no way out of linguistic and poetic constructions (Bowie). I take all these responses to be mistaken, and argue that Schlegel’s remarks are philosophical observations about a genuine confusion in theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction and (...) reality. The confusion at stake involves the assumption that this distinction is and must be fixed independently of the ordinary practices of using these terms to mean certain things in specific situations. And this assumption itself is grounded fundamentally in a confused picture about the way language works. I argue that this confused understanding of the distinction between fiction and reality is not an object of the past, but a picture that is still shaping a central strand in the contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics about our emotional responses to fiction. And while I do not use Schlegel’s approach to argue against this contemporary view directly, I suggest that his philosophical method includes the resources for unraveling a central confusion in this contemporary debate. (shrink)

Contra widespread readings of Karoline von Günderrode’s 1805 “Idea of the Earth ” as a creative adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, this article proposes that “Idea of the Earth” furnishes a moral account of the human relation to the natural world, one which does not map onto any of the more well-known romantic or idealist accounts of the human-nature relation. Specifically, I argue that “Idea of the Earth” responds to the great Enlightenment question concerning the human vocation, but from (...) a distinctive romantic-idealist angle. I begin by demonstrating the influence of Fichte’s 1800 Vocation of Humanity on Günderrode’s thinking, which involves an investigation of both Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s critical response to it. I then turn to “Idea of the Earth” where I analyse Günderrode’s understanding of nature and the self in light of her critique of Fichte, and thereby distinguish her position from Fichte’s and from the position espoused by her fellow romantics and idealists. By reading “Idea of the Earth” alongside Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s remarks on it, this article sheds new light on both Günderrode’s understanding and defence of Naturphilosophie – against Fichte’s critique of it – and her distinctive contribution to romantic philosophies of nature. (shrink)

Romantic psychology is first specified in counter-distinction to Enlightenment-informed faculty-psychology, whose scientific paradigm is fundamentally materialistic and mechanistic. Romantic psychology is then presented through Fr. Schlegel’s theory and practice of the literary fragment. In the fragment, we discover selfhood that is self-positing, powered by electro-chemical forces and enlivened by the stimulating Other. Romantic psychology determines the self as an ironic system, complete and yet organically open to other selves. It is phenomenological in nature and its contemporary legacy can be found (...) in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical hermeneutics. (shrink)

In this Element, the author set out to answer a twofold question concerning the importance of music to Wittgenstein's philosophical progression and the otherness of this sort of philosophical importance vis-à-vis philosophy of music as practiced today in the analytic tradition. The author starts with the idea of making music together and with Wittgenstein's master simile of language-as-music. The author traces these themes as they play out in Wittgenstein early, middle, and later periods. The author argues that Wittgenstein's overarching reorientation (...) of the concept of depth pertaining to music in the aftermath of his anthropological turn, and against the backdrop of the outlook of German Romanticism, culminates in his unique view of musical profundity 'knowledge of people'. This sets Wittgenstein's view in sharp contrast with certain convictions and debates that typify current analytically bent philosophy of music. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is rightly regarded as a thinker who extended the development of the so-called expressivist conception of language and world that Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) and especially Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) initially articulated. Being immersed as Humboldt was in the intellectual climate of German Romanticism, he aimed not only to provide a systematic foundation for how he believed linguistic research as a science should be conducted, but also to attempt to rectify what he saw as (...) the deficiencies of Kant’s philosophical system. My aim in this paper is to show how an expressivist thinker like Humboldt has the conceptual resources from within his own framework and, perhaps surprisingly, with some help from the 20th century philosopher of language and mind, Donald Davidson, to reject a criticism commonly made against expressivist conceptions of language and world. This is the charge that this sort of expressivism threatens the objectivity of the world by emphasizing the role of language in the constitution and disclosure of the world. Cristina Lafont makes just this charge against Humboldt (and other philosophers in the German expressivist-hermeneutic tradition). Specifically, she argues that expressivist philosophers of language are all ultimately committed to some pernicious form of linguistic idealism and relativism. In this paper, I first present Humboldt’s reflections on language and give some textual evidence for why he is often read – mistakenly in my view – as a linguistic idealist and relativist. Second, I briefly sketch Lafont’s charge of linguistic idealism and relativism against Humboldt. Third and finally, I show how she misunderstands Humboldt’s expressivist conception of language and world by connecting my rebuttal to her criticism with Davidson’s argument that successful communication does not require the sharing of explicit rules or conventions that govern in advance the use and understanding of words. (shrink)

In dialogue with the critiques of the modern world in Sylvia Wynter and Afrofuturism, this chapter offers a reading of Early German Romanticism as a project of universal construction, where "universal" refers at once to conceptual universality and to the post-Copernican universe. For Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, the joint task of poetry and philosophy is to re-mediate post-Copernican reality across all of its scales. This project of cross-scalar poiesis is inherently ambivalent, entwined as it is (...) with the colonial project of modernity, including the Western-centric racialized construction of global humanity and the ambition to master reality through the human mind. This project is also constitutively impossible due to the infinite, and infinitely fragmented, nature of post-Copernican reality. This impossibility generates, I suggest, the Romantic aporias of incompletion that later come to the fore in poststructuralism, which itself emerges from a renewed crisis of global and planetary reality. Most radically, these aporias call for a no to the meta-standpoint of universal history—for a refusal and ungrounding of the world, which I explore through the non-position of Blackness in Wynter, the antagonistic inhabitation of geocosmic depths in Afrofuturism, and Friedrich Schlegel's insistence on cosmic irony, contingency, and chaos. (shrink)

Susan Neiman pointed out to this reviewer the danger that Carl Jung studies pose to contemporary scholars. It is keeping in mind Neiman's cautionary advice that this review establishes Jung's contributions to Romanticism. "[Craig] Stephenson’s analysis of Aurélia has now superseded Arthur Lovejoy’s (1873–1962) and Mario Praz’s (1896–1982) contributions to the definitions of Romanticism.".

While it is now accepted in the secondary literature to treat Frühromantik - early German Romanticism - as a philosophical movement in its own right, the exact determination of the philosophical nature of this movement still remains one of the central stumbling blocks faced by interpreters. At the heart of this debate is the question of the relationship between the early romantics and Fichtean idealism. One point of rupture with Fichte and his theory of nature seems particularly obvious (...) at first glance: Novalis's substitution of the pronoun "you" for the Fichtean "Not-I". This occurs in one of Novalis’s most famous expressions: "(You). Instead of the Not-I – You.” ((Du). Statt Nicht-Ich – Du). For most commentators, when analyzing the romantic relationship between the human being and nature, this substitution becomes the clearest expression that Novalis rejects the supposed subjectivism of Fichte's philosophy. Here the Nicht-Ich, the Not-I, - i.e. nature – is often read in Fichte as something negative, as an abstract antithesis of the I - as everything that is not human or the subject. - Whereas Novalis, on the other hand, reinjects the human element, the "you", back into nature. It is furthermore argued by these commentators that this radical substitution is motivated by the romantic call to realize not only the inseparability of the human being and nature, but to recognize their equal value. It indicates a necessary departure from transcendental idealism in favor of a rapprochement with Schelling's philosophy of nature. However, could such an interpretation be based on a preconception, or even on a prejudice? I argue that it is; and that it is based on the assumption that Novalis breaks with Fichte’s philosophy. In contrast, I defend the view that the idea of Nature as a “You” is already to be found implicitly in Fichte and that Novalis’s above well-known expression should be read as in continuity with Fichte’s transcendental epistemology and as an original dialogical extension of it. To see this, one needs to retrace the context and the philosophical chain of events from Novalis back to Fichte, and from Fichte back to Jacobi. (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

This essay re-reads François Hemsterhuis's philosophical dialogue Alexis (1787) as a post-Copernican cosmic theodicy that prefigures a central nexus of concerns in Early German Romanticism. This theodicy is cross-scalar, in that it functions across three disparate scales: the history of global humanity, the geo-cosmic history of the Earth, and the broader processuality of the universe. From the perspective of this cross-scalar entanglement, I reconstruct Hemsterhuis's vision of the ages of the world and his theodical narrative of the golden (...) age, the Fall, and the cosmic destiny of humanity. Additionally, I offer a counter-reading of this destiny through the story of the Moon in Alexis, and through the contingency, uselessness, and cosmic failure that the Moon embodies. (shrink)

This paper revisits the rhetorics of system and irony in Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel in order to theorize the utopic operation and standpoint that, I argue, system and irony share. Both system and irony transport the speculative speaker to the impossible zero point preceding and suspending the construction of any binary terms or the world itself—an immanent nonplace (of the in-itself, nothingness, or chaos) that cannot be inscribed into the world's regime of comprehensibility and possibility. It is because the philosopher (...) and the ironist articulate their speech immanently from this standpoint that system and irony are positioned as incomprehensible to those framed rhetorically as incapable of occupying it. This standpoint is philosophically important, I maintain, because it allows one to think how the (comprehensibility of the) world is constructed without being bound to the necessity of this construction or having to absolutize the way things are or can be. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s later remarks on music, those written after his return to Cambridge in 1929 in increasing intensity, frequency, and elaboration, occupy a unique place in the annals of the philosophy of music, which is rarely acknowledged or discussed in the scholarly literature. These remarks reflect and emulate the spirit and subject matter of Romantic thinking about music, but also respond to it critically, while at the same time they interweave into Wittgenstein’s forward thinking about the philosophic entanglements of language and (...) the mind, and also his pervasive pessimism as a philosopher of culture. In this essay I explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. I argue that Wittgenstein appropriates the Romantic focus on the specificity of musical expression by means of the idea that gesture consists in complex vertical interrelations between language games. Understanding what a musical passage is about logically presupposes a myriad of correlate moves in the entire range of our language-games. Wittgenstein explicates the notion of musical aboutness in terms of intransitive understanding, which expresses an internal relation conjoining musical gesture and our culture, our entire life in practice, whereupon the related concepts cannot be identified independently of the relation which holds them together. Wittgenstein responds to the Romantic focus on the unique knowledge of human life which is afforded by musical experience with his idiosyncratic later notion of Menschenkenntnis. I conclude that, in the context of Wittgenstein’s late work, ineffability pertaining to musical meaning is not a shortcoming, but rather constitutional of the type of games, which admit what Wittgenstein calls ‘imponderable evidence’, or indefiniteness. (shrink)

This is the second chapter of my book Transformation of the Self. It concerns Schleiermacher's understanding of the principle of individuation, in dialogue with Kant, Jacobi, Leibniz and Spinoza.

Both Novalis and Günderrode provide grounds for a number of different kinds of hope. The first part of this chapter briefly sketches the most obvious of these: the hope for union with loved ones after death. This section also explains Günderrode’s metaphysics, which entails significant differences from Novalis in the other areas of hope that she identifies. Part two explores “epistemological hope”: the hope for knowledge or experience of that which lies outside the limitations of reason. Part three considers Günderrode’s (...) “moral hope,” which emerges from her critique of Kantian morality. Finally, parts four and five consider “political hope” and “ontological hope,” i.e., hope for improvement in the world as a whole and human society in particular. For Novalis, this famously takes the form of “raising,” “Romanticizing” or “cultivating,” effected by human beings. In Günderrode, this kind of improvement is largely beyond human control (although human beings can contribute to it), leaving us in a state of hopeful ambiguity regarding the possibility of the eventual realization of an “immortal ideal” for the earth and the establishment of ideal human communities. (shrink)

Seeking to determine what it is that incites Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm during Schelling’s early lectures at Berlin, then what it is that thoroughly extinguishes his hope in months to follow, I establish: first, that the criticisms of Hegel in Schelling’s negative philosophy depend upon Kantian distinctions and reflect Kant’s critical methodology; secondly, that the leveling function Schelling assigns to these distinctions corresponds to the notion of irony as a destructive force found in The Concept of Irony; finally, that Kierkegaard will come (...) to concretize an account that adheres more closely to Kant’s transition from negative to positive than to Schelling’s. (shrink)

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, (...) the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other. (shrink)

This is the first chapter of my book Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is a look as some of Schleiermacher's early attempts to critique Kant's ethics, in particular with respect to the idea of transcendental freedom and the problem of act attribution.

This essay focuses on the attention paid to Prometheus by Goethe and Schlegel. Prometheus serves as an archetypal figure for Goethe, in particular, and as such the Titan can be viewed as a figure whose various appearances represent genuine metamorphoses or transformations of the archetype in much the same manner that Goethe takes the archetypes of leaf or vertebrae to function in the plant and animal kingdoms. Schlegel’s treatment of Prometheus takes the organic analogy even further. In his fragmentary work (...) Lucinde Schlegel exploits the metaphorical possibilities provided by plant life when thinking about not only the sessile structure of the text as a whole but indeed the internal literary devices capable of simulating the environmental impacts required for the flowering of the plot. The fact that Goethe and Schlegel deliberately leave their discussions in a fragmentary form is discussed in the final section of the essay in a manner that ties the open-ended quality of such productions to Gadamer’s discussion of the Vollzug or performative character of poetry and other works of art. (shrink)

Karoline von Günderrode’s reputation as a mystical writer makes her a likely candidate as a proponent of a negative philosophy. However, the historical emphasis on Günderrode’s mystical and lyrical writings reflects gender stereotypes about women’s writing and ignores Günderrode’s strengths as an epic and historical writer. It is therefore important to approach claims about Günderrode’s supposed mysticism carefully. This paper is a preliminary attempt to investigate Günderrode’s claims about knowledge, including knowledge of the absolute, asking: What does Günderrode think knowledge (...) is? What does she think the purpose of knowledge is—i.e., what does she think knowledge gets us, or does for us? And how do her claims differ from those philosophers, such as Novalis, whose thinking on knowledge (including of the absolute) seems to resemble hers? I argue that Günderrode maintains that human beings can experience, or “know,” a reality behind the discrete objects and events that comprise the world of appearances, and that she integrates this idea into a coherent worldview in a unique way. Specifically, I argue that Günderrode reconceptualizes the nature of death and selfhood in specific ways that allow her to make sense of the possibility of experiencing the true nature of the world behind the divisions that are characteristic of human knowledge and existence. (shrink)

This paper argues that Karoline von Günderrode’s unique account of the socially constructed self provides a model for satisfying relationships and a stable self on the basis of a fragmented and untransparent subjectivity. Günderrode views experience as a discontinuous series of moments out of which a self can be constructed in two ways, both involving interactions with others. One of these is narrative; the other is a form of immediate experience, including experiencing together with others, that precedes narrative accounts of (...) identity. For Günderrode, the most important ways of interacting with others involve sharing thoughts, feelings and experiences without attempting to integrate these into a more holistic image of, or story about, the person with whom one is interacting. The result is a model for relationships between transitory, opaque selves that creates a basis for social interaction and the construction of identity that can survive and flourish without a stable self that is completely known to itself and others. -/- This journal is open access and includes so many wonderful articles. (shrink)

In 1804, when asked by the aspiring writer Clemens Brentano why she had chosen to publish her work, Karoline von Günderrode wrote that she longed “mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form auszusprechen, in einer Gestalt, die würdig sei, zu den Vortreflichsten hinzutreten, sie zu grüssen und Gemeinschaft mit ihnen zu haben.” In light of this kind of statement, it is perhaps not surprising if, despite some exceptions, much of the still relatively scant literature on Günderrode reads her works largely in (...) terms of how they articulate and manifest Günderrode’s desires, frustrations, and character, for the most part ignoring their imaginary, creative, and intellectual aspects. This interpretation of the author’s works as biography is, in Günderrode’s case, often accompanied by an interpretation of her biography, particularly her suicide, as literary work. This paper is not the first to question the conflation of Günderrode’s life, death, and writing, but it is one of only a handful that aim to address the autopoietic element of Günderrode’s work in a way that does not reduce her writings to biographical and psychological expressions, or Günderrode herself to an image – or a legend – encapsulated by her writings and her relationship to them. This paper argues that Günderrode’s own position on what the self is has been largely neglected as a result of this conflation, and that taking this position into account changes how we understand Günderrode’s articulations of self in her writings. Thus this paper has two goals: to address difficulties in articulating and even constituting oneself sincerely when one’s efforts are unrecognized, belittled, censored, and forced to conform to the conventions of a society in which one is marginalized; and to unearth a neglected and potentially rich account of the modern self. (shrink)

I explore and outline Wittgenstein's original response to the Romantic discourse concerning musical depth, from his middle-period on. Schopenhauer and Spengler served as immediate sources for Wittgenstein's reliance on Romantic metaphors of depth concerning music. The onset for his philosophic intervention in the discourse was his critique of Schenker's view of music and his general shift toward the 'anthropological view', which occurred at the same time. In his post-PI period Wittgenstein was able to reimagine musical depth in terms of vertically (...) interrelated language-games which facilitate Menschenkenntnis. (shrink)

This book sheds new light on the fascinating - at times dark and at times hopeful - reception of classical Yoga philosophies in Germany during the nineteenth century. Written for non-specialists, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany will be of interest to students and scholars working on 19th-century philosophy, Indian philosophy, comparative philosophy, Hindu studies, intellectual history, and religious history.

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

That there is a connection between Romanticism and the sublime seems obvious, and it is indeed evident in the poetic, artistic, and musical production of European Romanticism as a whole. The sublime, as tension toward infinity, as elevation of the soul, and as experience of the absolute in nature, constitutes undoubtedly one of the characterizing features of the poetics of Romanticism. Much less known, however, is the theoretical reflection on the concept of the sublime, and in fact (...) scholarship on the modern sublime tends to neglect its theoretical development after Kant and Schiller, moving directly to Nietzsche and the postmodern. The theoretical definition of the sublime, on the contrary, plays a far from secondary role in the aesthetic of German idealism, where it was not conceptualized in opposition to the beautiful, but rather as one of its constitutive moments. While no longer approached in relation to the aesthetic experience of nature, the sublime has been included in art theory, ostensibly losing its theoretical centrality, but in reality contributing to modify radically the characteristics of the idea of the beautiful. That of philosophers is a form of crypto-sublime that is parallel but distinct from the sublime of poets and artists, and that operates underground to influence the definition of the forms of beauty. The present volume aims to outline the development of the philosophical conception of the sublime from Schiller, who formulated a theory of tragedy based on Kant’s philosophy and thereby laid the foundation of Romanticism, to the philosophers of the Hegelian school, who placed the sublime, together with the comic, the ugly, and the grotesque, at the center of aesthetic reflection. (shrink)

1 More than two centuries later, the aesthetic reflection of Idealism does not seem to have lost interest in philosophical debate at all. It is a multifaceted interest, which has partly historical-conceptual reasons, since it was post-Kantian philosophy that first posed the problem of defining art in systematic and cognitive terms, and partly more genuinely theoretical ones, for instance the contemporary declinations of a typically Idealistic theme such as the socio-historical determination o...

This article focuses on the apparently paradoxical remarks of Novalis on landscape, which followed the famous “Romantikertreffen” of August 1798: that decisive meeting of the “early German romantics” on the occasion of a communal visit to the painting and sculpture galleries in Dresden. We analyze how Novalis surpasses the phenomenological conception of landscape painting proposed by August Wilhelm Schlegel by resorting to the "incorrect" categories of sculpture and haptic sense to talk about the feeling for nature that governs landscape (...) painting. This is the aesthetics of Herder – his reflections in the treatise “Sculpture” (1778) on the actual concrete and tangible force of the beautiful and the central importance it accords to the experience of one’s own body (a highly modern conception) – which is diverted here in a typical Novalisian gesture that we will show is consistent with his philosophy. The reception of Herder has contributed to the development in Novalis of a Pygmalionic aesthetics of contact with things that casts a different light on early romanticism: it is not only the exclusive exercise of a critical reflexivity that assumes distance, but also of a sensibility that seeks a tactile meeting point as it were between what is separated. (shrink)

In "De l’Allemagne", Mme de Staël develops a sophisticated philosophical psychology that centers not on reason, but imagination. She does this by bringing French Enlightenment philosophy, particularly Rousseau and Diderot, into dialogue with German thinkers, including Kant and Herder. For Mme de Staël, imagination transcends the epistemic limits of sensibility and reason by incorporating sentiment.