Abstract
In the “Preface” to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared his time to be “the genuine age of criticism.” Little did he know how much criticism would flourish in the decades that followed. This chapter argues that the early German Romantics were at the center of this development, making important contributions to debates about the nature of philosophical critique and literary criticism during the 1790s and early 1800s. It is through these new conceptions of philosophical critique and literary criticism that the early German Romantics were able to bridge the divide between history, philology philosophy, and poetry in the early nineteenth century.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Axi. The English words “critique” and “criticism” are used throughout this chapter to render the German word Kritik—sometimes spelled Critic or Critik in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I have used “critique” to translate Kritik when it is used in philosophical contexts and “criticism” to translate the same term when it refers to art and literary criticism. Differentially translating the same German term creates the appearance of a difference, which helps to clarify the different functions Kritik served in different contexts. However, it may not reflect a fundamental conceptual distinction between philosophical and literary Kritik, least of all for the early German Romantics.
- 2.
Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings (Schlegel, On Incomprehensibility) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 261. For the purposes of this chapter, “early German Romanticism” (Frühromantik) refers to the movement associated with Novalis, Schelling, August and Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, in Jena and Berlin, between 1794 and 1808.
- 3.
See, for example, the entry on kritik by Claus von Bormann, Giorgio Tonelli, and Helmut Holzhey in Joachim Ritter, et al., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 4 (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1976), 1250–1282.
- 4.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axii, Bxxii, A10/B24-A13/B26. See also J. Colin McQuillan, Immanuel Kant: The Very Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 63–88.
- 5.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxii.
- 6.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A841/B869. See also Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (Metaphysics of Morals), trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 365.
- 7.
Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy After 1781 (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science), ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 184–185; Immanuel Kant, Correspondence (Kant to Christian Gottfried Schütz, September 13, 1785 & Kant to Christian Garve, September 21, 1798), ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 229, 551.
- 8.
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen, Bd. 1, ed. Faustino Fabbianelli (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), 193. A similar argument is found in The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge (1791), where Reinhold notes that Kant’s critique “fails to ground the whole of philosophical knowledge; on the contrary, it only grounded ONE PART of it.” “In short,” he continues, “the only part of philosophical knowledge that Kant grounds is that philosophical science called metaphysics,” which is understood as “the science of objects proper, that is to say, of objects that are distinguished in consciousness from all mere representations or the properties of representations.” See George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Reinhold, The Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge) (Revised Edition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 63–64.
- 9.
Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen (Bd. 1), 193.
- 10.
Di Giovanni and Harris, Between Kant and Hegel (Reinhold, The Foundations of Philosophical Knowledge), 72.
- 11.
Reinhold first argues that the concept of representation is presupposed by but undefined in Kant’s Critical philosophy, as well as being the ultimate condition and first principle of all philosophy in Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation, trans. Tim Mehigan and Barry Empson (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 25–26.
- 12.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre), ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 96.
- 13.
Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre), 104.
- 14.
Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre), 97.
- 15.
Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre), 97.
- 16.
Di Giovanni and Harris, Between Kant and Hegel (Beck, The Standpoint from which Critical Philosophy is to be Judged), 206–207.
- 17.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15–28.
- 18.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Early Essays by F.W.J. Schelling (On the I as Principle of Philosophy), trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 80. Schelling suggests that the adherents of the critical philosophy—Kant and Reinhold—initially privileged “the empirically conditioned I” over the “absolute I,” at least until they discovered that “the perfect system of philosophical science proceeds from the absolute I … as the one unconditionable” that “conditions the whole chain of knowledge, circumscribes the sphere of all that is thinkable and, as the absolute all-comprehending reality, rules the whole system of our knowledge.” See Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge (On the I as Principle of Philosophy), 80–81.
- 19.
Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), 161.
- 20.
Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), 169.
- 21.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, ed. and trans. David W. Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 77. On this passage, see Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 72.
- 22.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encylopedia, 77. It is noteworthy that Schlegel not only calls Fichte a second Kant, but also refers to him as “a Kant raised to the second power.” See Peter Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 202.
- 23.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, 76.
- 24.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, 9.
- 25.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 168.
- 26.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 161.
- 27.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 166.
- 28.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 167.
- 29.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 167.
- 30.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 202. Similar point in Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, 463–464.
- 31.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 202.
- 32.
On the importance of tea, coffee, and chocolate shops as sites for public discourse in early modern Europe, see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 32–33.
- 33.
Friedrich Nicolai, Kritik ist überall, zumal in Deutschland, nötig: Satiren und Schriften zur Literatur (Briefe über die itzigen Zustand der schönen Wissenschaften, 17. Brief), ed. Wolfgang Albrecht (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1987), 197, 201.
- 34.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi.
- 35.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Critical Fragments), 153.
- 36.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 175.
- 37.
On the cosmopolitanism of early German Romanticism, see Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth Century Germany,” 521–524.
- 38.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 190.
- 39.
Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Athenaeum Fragments), 158.
- 40.
J.M. Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 281.
- 41.
Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister), 281.
- 42.
This aspect of the early German Romantic theory of art is emphasized in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926 (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 153–156.
- 43.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings (On Goethe), ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 117.
- 44.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings (On Goethe), 117.
- 45.
Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister), 281.
- 46.
Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister), 281.
- 47.
Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister), 281.
- 48.
Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Schlegel, On Goethe’s Meister), 269, 285.
- 49.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 268.
- 50.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 268.
- 51.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 269.
- 52.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 269–270.
- 53.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 270.
- 54.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 271.
- 55.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 271.
- 56.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 273. On Schlegel’s critique of aesthetics, see also Lacoue-Labarth and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 103–104.
- 57.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 273.
- 58.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 274.
- 59.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 274–275.
- 60.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 275.
- 61.
For an account Schleiermacher’s practice as a translator, see Susan Bernofsky, “Schleiermacher’s Translation Theory and Varieties of Foreignization.” The Translator 3, no. 2 (1997), 175–192.
- 62.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato (General Introduction), trans. William Dobson (London: John William Parker, 1836), 1–2.
- 63.
Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato (General Introduction), 4–5.
- 64.
Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato (General Introduction), 14.
- 65.
Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato (General Introduction), 18–19.
- 66.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.
- 67.
Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 3–4.
- 68.
A.W. Schlegel refers to the work of art as “an immeasurable field, an infinite domain in the most authentic sense,” so it follows that the work of the critic would be also an “infinite task” that could only ever approximate completeness. See Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926 (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism), 174. See also Frank, Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 23–37.
- 69.
Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 158.
- 70.
Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 161.
- 71.
Quoted by Elizabeth Millán in her introduction to Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 13–14. See also Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 117–132.
- 72.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 276.
- 73.
Schulte-Sasse, Theory as Practice (Schlegel, Concerning the Essence of Critique), 276–277.
- 74.
Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 59.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McQuillan, J.C. (2020). Philosophical Critique and Literary Criticism in German Romanticism. In: Millán Brusslan, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53567-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53567-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-53566-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-53567-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)