In 1941, when A.O. Lovejoy addressed the meaning of Romanticism for the historian of ideas, he lamented the trouble with coming to clarity regarding this term. In answering the question, “what is the meaning of Romanticism,” Lovejoy wrote, “one’s answer would express a judgment about what chiefly makes the historical thing called ‘Romanticism’ if there is any such thing—’important’ what aspect or what effects of it are most noteworthy or momentous.”1 In the past decades, any doubt concerning whether Romanticism exists has vanished, and more and more work has illuminated its enduring importance not only for literary scholars but also for philosophers and historians of science. With this volume, I seek to offer a broad picture of early German Romanticism and of its philosophical importance. The volume is dedicated to a careful investigation of the meaning of early German Romanticism/Frühromantik for philosophers. Investigation into the meaning of Romanticism for philosophers has been an ongoing one for me. In 2005, upon the invitation of my colleague David Pellauer, I prepared a review article for Philosophy Today in order to explore what I dubbed “The Revival of Frühromantik in the Anglophone World.”2 Since 2005, the revival has continued, indeed morphed into a kind of romantic renaissance, and the volume of scholarly work on the philosophical dimensions of early German Romanticism has increased in exciting new directions.3 One of the main aims of the Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy is to provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in philosophy, intellectual history, literature, science, and the arts a comprehensive view of German Romanticism, one that will enable new connections to be made between the fields of philosophy, literature, history, and science.
Early German Romanticism was unique for many reasons. The early German Romantics were interested in languages and cultures different from their own. For example, they were some of the first to translate Shakespeare and Cervantes into German. The German Romantics were some of the first European thinkers to break from the Eurocentric gaze that held many of their contemporaries hostage. They looked East and helped to develop the field of Sinology in German-speaking lands. They were also among the first to call for the inclusion of women in philosophy. The German Romantics were also most decidedly not deferential when it came to receiving the canonical figures of the period, and their trenchant critiques of figures such as Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte helped to open the post-Kantian period in fruitful ways. The early German Romantics were also some of the first truly interdisciplinary thinkers, and centuries after their call to unite the fields of poetry, philosophy, and science, we are far from heeding and acting on that call. In the spirit of romantic interdisciplinarity, this collection includes the work of philosophers, Germanists, historians, and literary scholars. The following 28 chapters explore several facets of early German Romantic philosophy. In Part I, the historical context of the period is discussed. In Part II, the contributions to aesthetics are the focus, as issues of irony, the fragment, the romantic conception of critique and of the novel, as well the cinematic afterlife of German Romantics, are explored. In Part III, the connections between Romanticism and the sciences are addressed. And in Part IV, the rich legacy of romantic thought is discussed, with a special emphasis on the inclusion of new voices, and the connections between early German Romanticism and both critical theory and continental philosophy are addressed. The collection thus offers accounts of the controversies that shaped the romantic period, while also addressing themes that formed the core set of issues of the period; issues not only of the post-Kantian period, for example, the issues of how German Romanticism relates to classical German Idealism, but also how later developments in modernism and critical theory were shaped by early German Romanticism.
The early German Romantics questioned the power of philosophy to solve problems in isolation from the other disciplines. They also pushed away from the model of the lone thinker working in isolation from the happenings of the world and the collaboration of other people. Symphilosophie was not merely a catchword for the early German Romantics; the thinkers of early German Romanticism saw collaboration, community, and friendship as part of the tapestry of their approach to philosophy, an approach that changed the conception of philosophy itself. In place of hierarchies of authority, we find a horizon of voices, each with authority and each contributing to the romantic dialogue. The call to fuse disciplines is resolutely sounded in Schlegel’s Critical Fragment Nr. 115, where he claims that “[t]he whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.”4 A fusion of disciplines led to the development of a new form of expression, one that challenged readers. Adding to the problem of comprehensibility (and incomprehensibility) were the difficult philosophical, political, and social issues addressed by the early German Romantics: questions of the limits of reason, questions of reason and faith, and charges of nihilism all contributed to the intellectual soil of early German Romanticism. The French Revolution ushered in cultural and political changes and the early German Romantics responded to the erosion of political, cultural, and philosophical certainties. The philosophy of the early German Romantics is steeped in the fraught historical circumstances of their time, and the romantic thinkers did not shy away from a direct engagement with divisive cultural and political issues. Both the form and the context of German Romantic philosophy are incredibly diverse and complicated. The new literary forms and the unconventional content of romantic philosophy challenged readers of the late 1700s and continues to hinder reception of the early German Romantic Movement.
1 Frühromantik and Its Reception
Early German Romanticism flourished in two cities, Berlin and Jena, between the years of 1794 and 1808. Leading figures include the Schlegel brothers (Friedrich and August Wilhelm), Caroline (née Bohmer) Schlegel Schelling, Dorothea (née Mendelssohn) Veit Schlegel, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Wilhelm H. Ludwig and Sophie Tieck, and Wilhelm Wackenroder. The movement was short-lived, lamentably, due in part to the short lives of some of its members: Wackenroder died in 1798, Novalis in 1801. After having been active in Jena and Berlin, in 1802, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel left for Paris.5 So brief was the burst of activity that one of the period’s leading scholars, Theodore Ziolkowski, has located the heart of an already brief intellectual movement in one year, 1794–1795, which he calls the Wunderjahr of early German Romanticism.6
A few years after the Wunderjahr, in 1798, after having left Jena for Berlin, Friedrich Schlegel and his brother founded Das Athenäum , a journal dedicated to pushing the boundary between philosophy and poetry and pushing its readers’ hermeneutical limits. The journal, like so many aspects of early German Romanticism, was also short-lived, published only between 1798 and 1800. It was a reaction to the conservatism of some of the other journals of the period. As Schlegel put it, the journal would welcome contributions that were “sublimely impudent” (displaying “erhabene Frechheit”), that is, all contributions that were “too good” for other journals.7 With such a goal, the seeds were sown for a disastrous reception on the part of the reading public, which all too often misunderstood the impudent romantic wink of irony, and found the contents of the journal not only offensive but also incomprehensible.8 But seen in another, more charitable way, the romantic texts, in their refusal of finitude, of final words, or of closure, were meant to unsettle readers, to keep the process of understanding open and infinite. After all, for Schlegel, one could not be a philosopher, but only become one, and to stop the striving after the goal would be tantamount to relinquishing the goal. Alas, incompleteness, a romantic trope, has been (and for some remains) a perennial source of misunderstanding of the work of the early German Romantics. The chapters of this volume open many new paths for approaching and comprehending the work of the early German Romantics.
The contributors of this volume include Germanists, philosophers, and literary scholars, and each of the contributors brings the intellectual value of the early German Romantic Movement into sharp focus. Some of the contributors take paths that intersect with the disciplines of literature or science, but all of the paths converge on philosophy, which provides a vantage point crucial for an accurate assessment of the movement’s contributions and an understanding of what the meaning of Romanticism for philosophy is.
2 Overview
Each of the four parts of the Handbook will contribute to the creation of fuller presentation of the philosophical contributions of early German Romanticism. The nine chapters of Part I, Historical Context, bring German Romantic philosophy into conversation with key figures and problems of the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century. In this section, Spinoza, Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Schiller, and Herder figure prominently as issues of the limits of reason, religion, salon culture, and hermeneutics are explored through the lens of early German Romanticism.
In Chap. 2, The Poem of the Understanding: Kant, Novalis, and Early German Romantic Philosophy, Jane Kneller argues that in order to fully appreciate the contributions of early German Romanticism, it is necessary to recognize the important metaphysical and social commitments that this movement shared with Kant. Her focus is on one of the leading philosop...