Abstract
German Idealism is notoriously difficult to define: Is it a cultural movement, or a dedication to a certain set of philosophical positions? Should it be considered in terms of chronology and geography? Should it be defined by the unfavorable gaze of its detractors, and thereby, at least if we follow G. E. Moore, overcome? Is it a movement that begins, say, with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), includes Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and then ushers in the work of figures such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)?1 The other articles in this collection shed light on the looming issue of what German Idealism is, so I can leave this particular quixotic chase to others. I will assume for the sake of my story that German Idealism was, at the very least, shaped by a set of critical responses to Kant’s work, responses that preserved Kant’s view of system and the unity of reason, yet sought to overcome some of the troubling dualisms left in the wake of his critical work (in particular the one between intellect and sense).2 While not all post-Kantian paths led to Hegel, Hegel, dubbed by Rüdiger Bubner as “the absolute professor of Berlin,”3 was certainly a central figure of German Idealism. In what follows, a contrast between Hegel’s philosophical convictions and those of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) will be marked in order to clarify some of the differences between German Idealism and another recalcitrant (at least in terms of its definition) movement, early German Romanticism.4
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Notes
See Karl Ameriks’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–17. Ameriks’s collection on German Idealism is noteworthy for going beyond the standard fare of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and bringing discussions of figures such as Goethe, Hamann, Herder, Hölderlin, Maimon, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schopenhauer into the discussion of German Idealism and its legacy. Such diversity is all too uncommon in collections on German Idealism. Of course, there are pitfalls to including the early German Romantics in the company of the system builders, for then unfavorable comparisons between the scientific philosophers (Hegel, Fichte) and the poetic philosophers such as Schlegel and Novalis arise, giving way to the dismissive view of early German Romanticism as merely a literary movement. Indeed, I think that the present volume has opened new space for a consideration of the relation between early German Romanticism and German Idealism, in a way that does not overshadow the contributions of the early German Romantics with the system-building aspirations of the German Idealists.
Rüdiger Bubner, The Innovations of German Idealism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 231.
For a fuller account of the philosophical dimensions of the movement, see Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
Theodor Zielkowski, Das Wunderjahr in Jena. Geist und Gesellschaft 1794–95 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998).
From a letter from Friedrich Schlegel to his brother, August Wilhelm, cited in Hans Eichner, introduction to KFSA 2:xlii. “KFSA” refers to the critical edition of Schlegel’s work, Friedrich Schlegel Kritische Ausgabe (KFSA), 35 vols., ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958-). All further references to Schlegel’s work refer to this edition, noting volume and page number. Some of Schlegel’s fragments have been translated in Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). When I have used Firchow’s translation, I have also cited this in the text parenthetically as “PF.”
For more the misunderstanding of Kant’s project as a search for a first principle, especially in the work of Reinhold and Fichte, see Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel, ch. 5; and Rüdiger Bubner, “Kant, Transcendental Argument and the Problem of Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics 28, no. 3 (March 1975): 453–67.
The story of these three Swabian friends and their time at the Tübingen Stift, where each came to study theology, is told by Franz Gabriel Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom: Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel and the Crisis of Early German Idealism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971). In what follows, I limit my discussion to Hegel, leaving Hölderlin and Schelling aside. Hegel’s later work provides the sharpest contrast to the path opened by the early text, a path that certainly shaped the work of the early German Romantics.
For more on the text and its role in understanding the new mythology, see Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 153–87.
The most detailed account of the text is given by Rüdiger Bubner, Das älteste Systemprogram. Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973).
The full citation is, as Nietzsche is wont to be, dramatic and somewhat hostile: “I loathe this notorious ‘and’: for the Germans love to say ‘Goethe and Schiller.’... Yet there are even worse cases of ‘and,’ for with my own ears I have heard speak, though only amongst academics, of ‘Schopenhauer and Hartmann’“ (from Twilight of the Idols), quoted in Rüdiger Bubner, The Innovations of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 231.
The matter of how the early German Romantics define poetry is not an easy one to settle. I find myself torn between Beiser and Benjamin on this point. Frederick C. Beiser claims that romantic poetry is an aesthetic ideal. He writes: “According to my interpretation,...romantische Poesie designates not a form of literature or criticism but the romantics’ general aesthetic ideal” (The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], 8). Certainly, there is a sense in which “romantic poetry” is an aesthetic ideal, but it is also a form of literature, and it also plays a central role in the early German Romantics’ concept of criticism. Walter Benjamin’s analysis sheds light on the important relation of prose and romantic poetry. As he writes: “The idea of poetry has found its individuality (that for which Schlegel was seeking) in the form of prose; the early Romantics know no deeper or better determination for it than ‘prose.’ In this seemingly paradoxical but in truth very profound intuition, they find an entirely new basis for the philosophy of art. ...The idea of poetry is prose” (Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism [1919], in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996], 173).
E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), 326.
Agnes Arber, “Goethe’s Botany,” Chronica Botanica 10, no. 2 (1946): 86.
For more detail on Frank’s arguments in favor of reading the early German Romantics as realists, see Manfred Frank, Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). Part of this text has been translated as The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
For more on Beiser’s reading of the early German Romantics as idealists, see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Walter Kaufmann, “The Hegel Myth and Its Method,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Garden City N.Y.: Anchor, 1972), 21.
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Millán, E. (2014). The Aesthetic Philosophy of Early German Romanticism and Its Early German Idealist Roots. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_20
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