Abstract
Miller considers early German Romanticism’s influence on contemporary continental philosophy, in particular that of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière. The chapter outlines the distinctive ways in which Schiller, Novalis, and F. Schlegel transform the Kantian concept of aesthetic reflection, which Benjamin called the foundation of early Romantic philosophy, into an ontological phenomenon. In so doing, the purely subjective reflective judgment described by Kant as the experience of the spectator becomes the objective activity of the artwork itself. For Benjamin and Rancière, this transformation has political implications, as the emphasis of aesthetics shifts from symbolizing morality through an indirect reference to the supersensible, to the expression of the materiality of embodied existence and the often exclusionary ways in which humans perceive the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Shepherdson, “Aesthetic “Sense” in Kant and Nancy,” New Literary History 48:2, (Spring 2017):197–221.
- 2.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. David Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), #942, 167.
- 3.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), #25, 54.
- 4.
Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Selected Writings Volume 1, 116–200. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 129.
- 5.
Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in Early German Philosophy,” 121.
- 6.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Second Version. Selected Writings Volume 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133.
- 7.
Rodolphe Gasché, “Ideality in Fragmentation,” Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), vii-xxxii.
- 8.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 314. All page numbers refer to the German Akademie edition, as given in the margins of this text.
- 9.
This is the way in which Novalis described his own fragments.
- 10.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, Deduction of Aesthetic Judgments, 141–209.
- 11.
Shepherdson, “Aesthetic “Sense” in Kant and Nancy,” 1.
- 12.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 315.
- 13.
Ibid, 316.
- 14.
Ibid, 314.
- 15.
Ibid, 317.
- 16.
Ibid, 316.
- 17.
See Jaques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”
- 18.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 340.
- 19.
Ibid, 342.
- 20.
Ibid, 343, my emphasis.
- 21.
Gasché, “Ideality in Fragmentation,” xii.
- 22.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 344.
- 23.
Ibid, 351.
- 24.
Ibid, 353.
- 25.
Ibid, 352.
- 26.
Ibid, 353.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid, 204.
- 29.
Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55–57.
- 30.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 354.
- 31.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 122.
- 32.
Ibid, 122.
- 33.
Ibid, 157.
- 34.
Ibid, 165.
- 35.
Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 126. To be considered in greater detail in the following section.
- 36.
Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1964) and Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,” in Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1971), 259–271.
- 37.
Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 131–32.
- 38.
Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, in Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1971), 118.
- 39.
Ibid, 86.
- 40.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 49.
- 41.
Ibid, 50.
- 42.
Nuzzo, “The Productive Imagination in Hegel and Classical German Philosophy,” 68.
- 43.
See Angelica Nuzzo, “The Productive Imagination in Hegel and Classical German Philosophy,” in Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning, and Significance, ed. Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 66.
- 44.
Kneller argues that this is the meaning of “romanticizing” as “setting right,” in Kneller 2017, 131.
- 45.
Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?” in Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
- 46.
Jennifer Ann Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 5.
- 47.
Novalis, Fichte Studies, trans. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Nr. 555, 164.
- 48.
Ibid, 164.
- 49.
Novalis, Fichte Studies, Nr. 3, 6.
- 50.
As Jane Kneller also argues, in Kant and the Power of Imagination, 123.
- 51.
Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, 120.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Although Schlegel’s descriptions of physical and spiritual love at times seem reductively heteronormative, as Tobin shows, the characters in Lucinde take on roles that transcend the bounds of their gender. See “The Emancipation of the Flesh: The Legacy of Romanticism in the Homosexual Rights Movement,” Romanticism on the Net, July 27, 2005.
- 54.
Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde, 120.
- 55.
Novalis, Logological Fragments 1, in Philosophical Writings, 50.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Ibid, 50–51.
- 58.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 314.
- 59.
Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment Nr. 21 in KFSA 2, 149/Philosophical Fragments, 2.
- 60.
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment Nr. 116 in KFSA 2, 182–83/Philosophical Fragments, 31–32.
- 61.
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment Nr. 336 in KFSA 223–25/ Philosophical Fragments, 66–69.
- 62.
See Elaine P. Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in the Feminine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
- 63.
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment Nr. 336 in KFSA 223–25/ Philosophical Fragments, 66–69.
- 64.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 12.
- 65.
Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, 117.
- 66.
Ibid, 178.
- 67.
Ibid, 128.
- 68.
As Walter Benjamin puts it, “For Fichte, consciousness is ‘I [Ich], for the romantics, it is ‘itself’ [Selbst].” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 128.
- 69.
Schlegel, Ideas Fragment Nr. 28, in KFSA 2, 258/ Philosophical Fragments, 96.
- 70.
Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundation of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 178.
- 71.
Ibid, 178.
- 72.
Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 121.
- 73.
Ibid, 135.
- 74.
Ibid, 129.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ibid.
- 77.
Friedrich Schlegel, Vorlesungen, as cited in Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 131.
- 78.
Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 134.
- 79.
As he states in a letter to Gershom Scholem from March 5, 1924. In The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 238.
- 80.
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 28.
- 81.
Ibid, 28.
- 82.
Ibid, 28.
- 83.
Ibid, 43.
- 84.
Ibid, 28.
- 85.
Ibid, 29.
- 86.
Ibid, 34.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid, 32.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New Haven: Angelico Press, 2014), 58.
- 92.
Ibid, 59.
- 93.
Ibid, 60.
- 94.
Ibid, 63.
- 95.
Ibid, 64.
- 96.
Ibid, 69.
- 97.
Ibid, 72.
- 98.
Ibid, 78.
- 99.
Ibid.
- 100.
Ibid, 79.
- 101.
Ibid.
- 102.
Ibid, 77.
- 103.
Ibid, 80.
- 104.
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliana Battista (New York: Berg Press, 2001), 8.
- 105.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2004).
- 106.
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 11.
- 107.
Ibid, 12.
- 108.
Ibid.
- 109.
Ibid, 5.
- 110.
Ibid, 14.
- 111.
Ibid, 24.
- 112.
Ibid, 29.
- 113.
Ibid, 23.
- 114.
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html#_ftnref1.
- 115.
Jacques Rancière, Flim Fables, 160.
- 116.
Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, 37.
- 117.
Ibid, 38.
- 118.
Ibid, 39.
- 119.
“Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, 23.
- 120.
Cited in Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, trans. James Swenson, 2014), 77.
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Miller, E.P. (2020). Sensibility, Reflection, and Play: Early German Romanticism and Its Legacy in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. 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_27
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