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The Romantic Absolute

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09608788.2011.563524

1469-3526

Alison Stone,

Abstract In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of it that motivates our striving. I then examine two different Romantic accounts of this feeling. The first, given by Novalis, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to the absolute which logically precedes any conceptualisation. I argue that this account is problematic and that a second account, offered by Friedrich Schlegel, is preferable. On this account, we feel the absolute in that we intuit it aesthetically in certain natural phenomena. This form of intuition is partly cognitive and partly non-cognitive, and therefore it motivates us to strive to convert our intuition into full knowledge. Keywords : absolutebeingknowledgenatureNovalisRomanticismSchlegel Notes 1A good review of this literature is Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, 'The Revival of Frühromantik in the Anglophone World', Philosophy Today (Spring 2005): 96–117. 2I will argue against interpretations on which Romantic being is merely 'the Being of the I'; for example Charles Larmore, 'Hölderlin and Novalis', in the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 154. 3Beiser speaks of the absolute to bring out that his view that the whole is knowable, amenable to reason (albeit a higher, aesthetic form of reason), so that Romanticism anticipates Hegel's 'absolute idealism' on which reality is intelligible to reason. See Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) 349–74. In contrast Frank speaks of being to bring out his view that the 'ground of unity of mental and physical reality' is not discursively knowable but just is in a way transcending explanation and understanding; Frank, Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997) 27. I will explain presently why I think that for the Romantics 'being' and 'the absolute' are actually synonymous. 4This claim that we originally feel the absolute does not conflict with the Romantics' anti-foundationalism, because for the Romantics this feeling is not fully cognitive and so cannot provide the first principle of a philosophical system. 5See K. L. Reinhold, 'The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge' (1794) in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, translated by George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, revised edition, 2000) 67, 70. The key problem, for Fichte, is that the representing subject must already be self-conscious to be able to ascribe its representations to itself, but to be self-conscious the subject must – on Reinhold's account of consciousness – have a representation of itself which it ascribes to itself, requiring a prior level of self-consciousness, and so on in an infinite regress. Fichte's solution is that the self-consciousness that precedes and enables consciousness must consist not in the self's representation of itself as an object but rather in an immediate, intuitive self-acquaintance. See Fichte, 'Review of Aenesidemus' in Early Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) 63; and Dieter Henrich, 'Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht' in Subjektivität und Metaphysik, edited by Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1966). 6The following abbreviations for repeatedly cited works are used: AB=Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, translated by David W. Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); AF=Schlegel, 'Athenaeum Fragments' in Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); DP=Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968); FS=Novalis, Fichte Studies, translated by Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); GS=Schlegel, 'Über die Grenzen des Schönen' in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, edited by Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 1958–) vol. 1. Translations are sometimes modified without special notice in light of Novalis, Schriften, edited by Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–75) and Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe. Citations are to fragment number (#) where applicable then page number. 7Novalis, Schriften vol. 2, #1, 412. 8Frank, Philosophical Foundations, translated by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004) 175. 9In claiming that for the Romantics 'the absolute' is a real synthetic whole akin to Spinoza's substance I disagree with Charles Larmore's and Fred Rush's view that, for Novalis at least, 'the absolute' or 'being' only denotes immediate pre-reflective self-acquaintance (Larmore, 'Hölderlin and Novalis', 154; Rush, 'Irony and Romantic Subjectivity' in Philosophical Romanticism, edited by Kompridis, 176–7). Fichte made knowledge of our immediate self-acquaintance the first principle of his 1794 system. Novalis objects that this self-acquaintance cannot be known. If knowledge (Wissen) is necessarily conscious (bewusst) and if, following Reinhold, consciousness involves a subject/object distinction, then any attempt to know immediate self-acquaintance must falsely describe it in terms of subject and object poles, even if these are described as united. If we cannot know our self-acquaintance, then we cannot derive a system from any knowledge thereof. We can only feel self-acquainted, Novalis concludes. Now for Rush and Larmore Novalis understands our original pre-reflective selfhood to be our ultimate ground and so to be 'the absolute', and the goal of our striving in so far as we seek endlessly to 'invert' ourselves back into self-feeling out of reflection. Novalis does sometimes use 'the absolute' in that way, speaking of the 'absolute I'. But he also uses 'the absolute' to refer to the whole of the universe, as we have seen. Moreover, this latter usage has a more central place in Novalis's (and Schlegel's) thought as a whole, for it explains why they think that we seek systematic knowledge of the connections between natural and mental phenomena, and why they try to contribute to providing this knowledge (e.g. with Novalis's Brouillon). 10Beiser, German Idealism, 372. For Beiser the Romantics believe in aesthetic intuitive knowledge as well as discursive knowledge and hence do think we can know the absolute. Yet Schlegel is emphatic: 'Knowing already means a conditioned knowing. The unknowability of the absolute is therefore an identical triviality' (Philosophische Lehrjahre, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 18, #64, 511). Still, the Romantics do not see our feeling of the absolute as entirely non-cognitive, as we will see. 11See James Kreines, 'Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant's Epistemic Limits and Hegel's Ambitions', Inquiry, 50 (2007) no. 3: 306–34. Frank and Jane Kneller argue that the Romantics agree with Kant that our form of sensibility precludes our knowing the absolute (Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 29; Kneller, 'Novalis' Other Way Out' in Philosophical Romanticism, edited by Kompridis, 201–2). 12Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1929) A417/B445, 391. 13Ibid., A645/B673, 533–4. 14Schlegel, 'Blütenstaub' in Philosophical Fragments, translated by Firchow, #3, 17. 15At FS #211, 65, Novalis suggests that (spatio-temporal) intuition results from the organisation of feeling (or sense) under the imagination (and by implication, the latter being organised in conformity to the understanding). 16Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) §77, 274–7. 17On Novalis's familiarity with Jacobi, see Frank, Philosophical Foundations, chs 4 and 9. 18Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A598–9/B626–7, 504–5. 19Jacobi, 'David Hume on Faith (Preface, 1815)', in Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, edited by George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994) 582. 20For a different reconstruction of Jacobi's use of Kant, see Frank, Philosophical Foundations, ch. 3. 21Jacobi, 'Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn' (1785) in Main Philosophical Writings, 230. 22'Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza', second (1789) edition in Main Philosophical Writings, 376. 23In David Hume Jacobi concedes that certainty must be certain knowledge, contrary to the first edition of the Spinoza-Letters which opposed faith to knowledge as feeling/sensation to reason/concepts/judgement. In David Hume he says that faith gives us certain 'knowledge of actual existence' ('David Hume on Faith', in Main Philosophical Writings, 255). He now claims that he always believed in immediate perceptual knowledge of real things, but did not previously call this immediate perception knowledge in deference to the doxa that knowledge must be judgemental and conceptual. 24John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 25Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, translated by T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) 41–2. 26Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 'General Remark on the First Section of the Analytic', 125. 27Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) 33. 28This term is Ronald Hepburn's in 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty', in British Analytical Philosophy, edited by Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge, 1966) 290–1. 29Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 'General Remark on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments', 151. 30'The sublime … is the appearance of the infinite – infinite abundance [Fülle] or infinite harmony … Sublime beauty [Erhabne Schönheit] affords a complete pleasure'; On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797), translated by Stuart Barnett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001) 69. 'Beautiful is what is at once charming and sublime' (AF #108, 30). And the 'highest beauty' is that of the 'infinite fullness of life [Lebensfülle]' as found in nature, in 'Ideas' (1800), in Philosophical Fragments, #86, 101. 31Novalis speaks of our imagining the absolute: 'the element of imagination – … the one and only absolute anticipated – that is to be found through the negation of everything finite' (FS #567, 171). 32'In the whole everything must be whole' (Novalis says; FS #646, 185). 33The phrase 'partial totalities' is Songsuk Susan Hahn's, in Contradiction in Motion: Hegel's Organic Concept of Life and Value (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 95. I am influenced by Hahn's account of how for Hegel the Idea of life is both beyond and within particular living organisms. 34Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics', 294, 307–10. 35Ibid., 296. 36See Hahn, Contradiction in Motion, chs 4 and 5. 37I thank Emily Brady, the anonymous referees and the editors for comments on earlier drafts.