By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the repercussions of Kantâs critiques had extended beyond philosophy proper into wide-ranging forms of cultural expression. Kantianism , now largely out of the hands of the philosopher of Königsberg himself, had become a cultural phenomenon that, however exaggerated or distorted public perception of Kantâs ideas may have been, inspired some and exasperated others. Of those who paid attention to such things, some were fired with passion for the new ideas. Certain young men took up Fichteâs response to Kant, for example, more as a lifestyle of boldly personal freedom than simply as of a system of knowledgeâan attitude he encouraged himself.1 Others were less enthusiastic. Goethe in 1794 accused Schiller of being so under the sway of a subject-focused Kantianism that he had come to see nature as a mere âidea.â2 The young Heinrich Kleist suffered a âKant crisisâ in 1801 that plunged him into a dark epistemological depression.3 Fresh from the TĂŒbingen theological seminary in the mid-1790s, three friends and former roommatesâFriedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegelâthough trained by the state of Swabia for a life in the Protestant clergy, tossed aside all plans for service within the Lutheran church. Inspired by the revolution of the spirit they encountered in the new philosophy (as well as by political revolution in France), all three were caught up in the philosophical issue of their day, and, in their own ways, would devote their lives to coming to terms with it. Schelling, the youngest of the three, framed the central question succinctly in his lectures at the University of Jena in 1797: âHow is perception within me possible?â4 How, in other words, am I to understand the relation between myself as a subject here, and the otherness that appears beyond my subjectivity over there?
This book is about a mode of response to this question that emerges at an intersection of philosophy and literature in the years around 1800. From a philosophical perspective, we can view this response to the question of the borders of the self as part of what Frederick Beiser calls âthe struggle against subjectivism.â He has in mind discursive strategies against âthe doctrine that the subject has an immediate knowledge only of its own ideas, so that it has no knowledge beyond its circle of consciousness .â5 This fear of a lack of reliable knowledge beyond his own âcircle of consciousnessâ is indeed precisely what drove Kleist to distraction in 1801 (more on this âcrisisâ in Chap. 3). Though some might argue that German idealists, as they responded to Kant, created their own crisis of subjectivity simply by being so idealist, Beiser argues that much of German thought in the years around 1800 was, in fact, creatively engaged in a solution, in finding a way to bridge the gulf between idealism and realism as part of a route beyond the subjectivist conundrum.
In this study, I suggest that we can read one version of an answer to the fear that consciousness might comprise a confining and isolating âcircleâ in the works of philosophical poets of the periodâHölderlin, Goethe, and Percy Shelley âas well as in the philosophy of nature of a poetic philosopher, Friedrich Schelling. All turn in their ways to metaphors of the one with all as an antidote to subjectivism, exploring the possibility of discovering or creating a restorative unity with what lies beyond the subject. This longing for unity thus forms the primary trope I hope to investigate. As we will see, oneness has epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, as well as erotic dimensions. The desire for love and beauty works against solipsistic isolation. As the poetic narrator of Percy Shelley âs Episphychidion puts it: âWe shall become the same, we shall be one/Spirit within two frames, oh! Wherefore two?â6
This entanglement of art and philosophy heralds the fact that for these writers the answer to the problem of the subjectâs relation to the object lies ultimately not in philosophy or theory alone but in an act of the aesthetic imagination. Overcoming subjectivism and dualism (the subjectâobject split) is possible only through the creative apperception of the beautiful . In order to deploy beaut y as a weapon against the potential solipsism of a subject cut off from the world of objects, the texts I have in mind take advantage of two interconnected cultural forms that were ready-to-hand by the end of the eighteenth century: the philosophy of nature and Romantic Hellenism. I thus argue that much of the Romantic valorization of Greece is intimately intertwined with natural philosophy. Contemporary natural sciences presented scientifically inclined thinkers like Schelling and Goethe with a dynamic view of nature that allowed for vital connections between subject and object. In this vein, Schelling worked out his own Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) in the final years of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, at least since Winckelmann âs Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), which idealized Greek classical ânoble simplicity and quiet grandeurâ (âeine edle Einfalt und eine stille GröĂeâ)7 to the detriment of any art that came after it, a reinvented Hellenism was taken up in the discourse of art and ideas as a dominant aesthetic ideal. By the time they were rooming together at the theological seminary in the early 1790s, the notion that an idealized âGreeceâ lay behind Western culture as a lost form of aesthetic and ontological wholeness was something the TĂŒbinger three could take for granted.
The discursive strategy, however, is not simply to rely on the philosophy of nature and a Romanticized Hellenism as tools in the post-Kantian struggle but to employ both cultural forms as inextricably interconnected, as parts of a single, two-pronged, mode of representation. The dynamic view of nature, which conceives the universe as shot-through with a single life force that Schelling sometimes Platonically calls The World Soul , finds support in the classical ideal. âThe classicalâ in turn cannot exist in the absence of a dynamic conception of nature. That is, were humans not capable of connecting directly and intuitively with nature, Greek art, in the sense that Winckelmann idealizes it, would never have come about. Because of their intuitive and immediate connection with the natural world, a unity now lost for overly self-conscious moderns, these âGreeksâ were able to produce works that were at once natural, yet filled with spirit. Goethe thus defines the beaut iful as âspiritually organic (geistig organisch).â8 In this expression we find the two prongsâhuman creativity (Geist) and organic natureâwelded together. Much of this study, in one way or another, is in the service of explaining both terms of Goetheâs adverb/adjective pairing, as well as their interconnection.
It follows from Goetheâs nearly oxymoronic combination of Geist (mind, thought, reason) with organisch (organic, natural, not characterized by reason) that the path towards the beautiful, or the way beyond the circle of oneâs own consciou sness, lies in a particular conception of materiality, within a view of the object as vibrantly (geistig) alive. We might indeed characterize all of the literary texts I examine here as texts of the vibrant object.9 With this term I designate an aspect of Schellingâs philosophy of nature that appears in a variety of forms in literary texts of the period, the insistence that natural objects are not dead things, butâorganic and inorganic alikeâliving potentialities, constantly in flux and part of a vast natural process leading from simple matter to the heights of human self-consciousness: âthe entirety of nature is at work in each of its products,â as Schelling puts it.10 At the end of his long lyric poem, Epipsychidion, Percy Shelley captures the paradoxical sense of the vibrant object with the metaphor that compares the body aflame with love to a bush that, like the one Moses encountered, is âever still/Burning, yet ever inconsumable.â11 S...