8
IRONY AND ROMANTIC
SUBJECTIVITY1
Fred Rush
It is still somewhat commonplace to chart the development of philosophical thought in Germany immediately following Kant as consisting in a series of sophisticated and highly complex systematic attempts to make more rigorously “scientific” Kant's own systematic philosophy.2 Thus do Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel still command center stage in most historical considerations of the period. Yet, there existed a competing strand of thought that developed alongside the great philosophical systems of the day in constant reaction against prevailing reductionist tendencies. This counter-movement to German idealism, which developed in Jena as a philosophical salon des refusés during the height of Fichte's influence in the 1790s, has received comparatively little attention.3 Its major philosophical representatives were Friedrich von Hardenberg (writing under the pseudonym Novalis)4 and Friedrich Schlegel. Both Novalis and Schlegel were also literary minds of the highest order — Novalis, a lyrical poet and poetic novelist, whose Heinrich von Ofterdingen is widely considered a canonical work of German romanticism, and Schlegel, one of the most original and influential literary critics of his time. The literary preoccupations of the Jena school of early German romanticism are not incidental to their philosophical concerns. Two of the main distinguishing features of early romantic philosophy are directly related to the proximity of literary and philosophical concerns. The first of these is the idea that art has an important, if not preeminent, philosophical function. Second, and closely connected with the first idea, is the belief that the form of writing in which philosophy is done and disseminated is itself philosophically crucial.5
In order show what is distinctive, and distinctively Kantian, about early German romanticism's account of subjectivity, I first provide an overview of the central developments in German idealism to which it reacts. Second, I discuss Novalis's criticisms of Fichte and his own reformulation of the problem of subjectivity that provides the basis for the romantic concept of the “absolute” and the anti-foundationalism associated with it. The third section of the paper provides an “interlude” that is meant to give a slightly broader cultural context for the technical, systematic philosophical analysis of the first two sections. I then turn to Schlegel in some detail, discussing the particular ways that he extends and modifies Novalis's work in terms of the central concept of irony. The last section deals with Hegel's reception of Jena romanticism, focusing on his treatment of Schlegel.
The philosophical landscape of later eighteenth-century German philosophy was very diverse, inhabited at the same time by pre-Kantians, Kantians and post-Kantians. Simplifying somewhat, there were four lines of reaction to the critical philosophy: (1) an attempt to re-enfranchise Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics, led by Eberhard and Mendelssohn; (2) Lockean claims that Kant had merely replicated Berkeley's incoherent empirical idealism; (3) counter-Enlightenment responses that either focused on claimed inconsistencies in key Kantian doctrines, i.e. the idea of a thing in itself (Jacobi, Salmon Maimon) or on Kant's inadequate account of the role of language in cognition (Hamann and Herder); and (4) thinkers who saw themselves as furthering the critical philosophy. This last group can be further sub-divided into philosophers (4a) who were intent on disseminating Kant's philosophy with utmost textual fidelity, and (4b) those who understood their task to be building upon and completing Kant's Copernican revolution. Fichte famously labeled these two camps respectively Kantians by “the letter” and by “the spirit.”6 In the first group was the loyal Beck, in the second the insurgent Fichte.7
I would like to begin discussing the philosophical views of the Jena romantics by turning to the thought of K. L. Reinhold, who began of the letter but quickly went over to the ranks of spirit. Particularly important for Jena romanticism is his criticism of Kant's theory of consciousness and attempt to improve on it.8 This is linked with Reinhold's very influential claim that Kant's philosophy is not systematic enough by its own lights and generates Reinhold's own form of monistic philosophical foundationalism centered on the nature of subjectivity.9 Reinhold was dissatisfied with Kant's failure to deduce the various faculties of mind from one common root.10 Absent such a deduction, Reinhold thought, Kant merely assumes the discreteness of the faculties empirically, and has shown an aggregate subject, not a truly integrated one. The thesis that the faculties are fundamentally distinct in terms of their epistemic role is central to Kant's epistemology, as well as to his negative critique of both rationalism and the empiricism; nonetheless, Reinhold believes that defeating skepticism introduced by the critical philosophy itself requires a more rigorous idea of systematicity involving a reduction of Kantian faculties and the rules governing their exercise to one faculty with one self-certifying ground principle (Grundsatz) from which all other rules of thought can be deduced. Reinhold attempts to work out this monistic foundationalism in his so-called “philosophy of elements.”
For Reinhold the concept of representation (Vorstellung) forms the content of the foundational principle whose adoption is required to ground consciousness and, thus, experience. According to the principle, consciousness necessarily involves a distinction by the subject between (1) itself, (2) its object and (3) representation, and (4) a relation of the representation to the subject and to the object. (1)-(3) say that the conscious subject distinguishes itself from the object of its consciousness and the representation of the object in virtue of which it is conscious of it. (4) says that, though distinguishing itself from both the object and the representation of it, the subject nevertheless must view the representation as belonging to itself as subject and as being of the object.11
Fichte sympathized with Reinhold's view that Kant's conception of the ground for subjectivity was not well founded, and shared many of the reasons Reinhold adduced on behalf of that claim. But he thought Reinhold's own principle of representation inadequate. This reaction is evident as early as 1792 in Fichte's positive review of a book by G. E. Schulze, writing under the pseudonym “Aenesidemus”.12 According to the standard view, the primary thrust of Schulze's criticism is that Reinhold's principle results in an infinite regress which robs it of its coherence and its claim to be fundamental. If representation requires the ascription of the representation to the subject, then the subject making the self-ascription would have to have an antecedent ability to recognize herself as the representing subject. But this self-awareness cannot be accounted for in terms of the conception of representation at hand, for that would require the subject to be an object for herself, requiring another subject in contrast to it, and so on.13 Schulze's skeptical conclusion is that Kantianism as a theory of consciousness is doomed, a conclusion he reaches because he accepts Reinhold's characterization of the essential components of Kant's theory of knowledge: (1) that all consciousness is representational, and (2) all representation has the reflective and reflexive quality that Reinhold ascribes to it. Schulze thinks he has shown that the requirement that all consciousness be representational has a secret commitment to some non-representational base state in which the subject has immediate self-acquaintance, and he believes that Kant's epistemological views rule out the only possible candidate for such an item of acquaintance, a Humean impression. Fichte, however, believes there are resources within the critical philosophy to account for this sort of non-representational awareness.14 Fichte attempts to halt the regress — and, in doing so, establish a unitary ground for object-consciousness — by arguing for an immediate, non-reflective, self-awareness by the subject (the “I”) on what he takes to be Kantian grounds. Fichte's theories of self-positing, the Tathandlung and intellectual intuition, are all attempts to elucidate this sort of activity.15
This is not the place to try to detail Fichte's various ways of understanding this implicit pre-reflective awareness. Roughly, intellectual intuition is “pre-reflective” for Fichte in two senses. First, it is a transcendental requirement upon the possibility of reflection and logically prior to it. Second, it is an activity that does not have a reflective structure, yet is one from which reflective states of mind issue. Of course the only way one has to understand the activity is reflectively — as soon as one attends explicitly to the activity, one must avail oneself of precisely the reflective, conceptual apparatus foreign to it. Simply put, one can never capture the immediacy and implicitness of the state as such by representing it as immediate and implicit. Foundational knowledge will be of a different sort — not propositional, not a skill — if it is knowledge at all.
The circle that gathered itself around the brothers Schlegel coalesced in the years 1796–8 in Jena, where Fichte had taken a chair in philosophy and was at the height of his popularity. From the outset, members of the Jena Circle found Fichte's attempts to further systematize Kant's critical philosophy along foundationalist lines misguided.16 This negative reaction follows for essentially Kantian reasons, for the Circle thought Fichte's views on what can be expected from a well grounded philosophical system were insufficiently “critical.” Kantian critique involves inter alia reason's self-limitation and recognition of the abiding nature of dialectical illusion.17 This self-limitation dictates for Kant the form of systematicity that a properly critical philosophy can take. Such a system or form of philosophy will not achieve what might be perfect systematicity by either rationalist or Fichtean lights just because that sort of systematicity is not available to it once critique is in place.18 Thus, the feature of Kant that exercised many post-Kantian idealists — that the system is not “complete” and requires merely regulative bridging principles to achieve what systematicity it has — is not for Novalis or Schlegel a disappointment. Over and against the massive wave of monistic foundational accounts of post-Kantian German idealism, the Jena writers are resolutely anti-foundationalist.19
Novalis was in the lead in pressing objections to Fichte's foundationalism, working out his analysis of and objections to Fichte's views in the 1795–6 notes known as the Fichte-Studien. Novalis agrees with Fichte that Reinhold was incorrect to hold that subjectivity is grounded in a reflective relation of representing subject to thing represented: the reason he cites for this is just the one Fichte forwards in the Aenesidemus review, namely that analytic to the concept of reflection is the problematic distinction between subject and object. He also agrees with Fichte that the basic form of subjective activity is immediate self-awareness. The problem with Fichte's view lies elsewhere: with the idea that the immediate self-relation of the subject has a cognitive status that permits it to serve as a deductive ground for knowledge. Novalis claims that Fichte impermissively accords the immediate self-relation of the “I” a status that is proper only to reflection. But, if the I's immediate self-awareness is not conceivable on the reflective model, then the I cannot be something of which we can even be implicitly conscious. For, we can only be conscious of what, tacitly or otherwise, can stand as an object for consciousness and this holds as well for the I. In short, if such acquaintance were immediate, as Fichte insists it is, it would have to be unconscious. Yet if it is unconscious, we can have no direct awareness of it, intellectual or otherwise.20 One might experience such a ground at best indirectly, through feeling (Gefühl), to which Novalis assigns the epistemic status of “non-knowledge” (Nicht-Wissen) or “faith” (Glauben).21 In thinking of access to the root of subjectivity as faith, Novalis attempts to capture both the fact that the root can never be known and that a coherent account of consciousness is forced to rely upon it and posit it as unknowable in principle. It is against this general epistemological background that one must understand the term that Novalis uses to refer to this ultimate ground, the “absolute” (das Unbedingte). Unbedingt means unconditioned, but Novalis is also exploiting what he takes to be the substantival root of the verb from which the adjective is derived, Ding (“thing”). Unbedingt therefore also means “un-thinged,” i.e. what cannot be experienced with any determinacy.22
The point Novalis is making is essentially a Kantian one, i.e. that the primordial non-reflective state of subjectivity from which other forms of consciousness must be said to arise can never be an object. Philosophy is not going to be able to achieve much in the way of penetrating beyond reflection, since it is the reflective enterprise par excellence. Thus Novalis writes that philosophy, in deploying this all-important conception of feeling, can indicate the limit of reflection — philosophy is, in effect, the result of reflection's self-critique. Reflection, by critically assessing its inability to reconstruct the ground for its own possibility, realizes the limits of reflective thought. Novalis does not think that the stricture against the incursion of reflective thought into its own origin precludes everything we can say about the relation of the ground for subjectivity to our experience of that subjectivity. For instance, from the fact that one can only feel the I's immediate self-awareness, Novalis concludes that the I must have the status of a datum for consciousness and not, as Fichte argued, a factum. Further, Novalis argues that, since anything like feeling that is passive must be the effect of something active, the I must be active (he sometimes says “spontaneous”).23 But this is as far as philosophy can go and, crucially, it can go this far only by transcendental regression on the conditions required for the possibility of consciousness. The rest is left to art and, particularly, to poetry.
The historical significance of early German romanticism is often put in terms of its reaction to Enlightenment's “disenchantment” of nature. Beginning roughly with Bacon and Galileo, human understanding of nature is increasingly dominated by the idea that our knowledge of its basic structure is possible without assuming that it is the product of a divine will. Non-naturalistic features of the world incrementally migrate into the structure of the cognitive subject so that, by Kant's time, one is left with a minimalist account of non-natural forces: the idea of a thing in itself, a thing as it is abstractly thought as being independent of the apparatus of experience. This naturalizing of nature is paired with a radical reconceptualization of ethical life with the idea of autonomous rationality at its center that makes no necessary appeal to religious experience.
But the story is radically incomplete as stated, for the divinity once attributed to nature — the impulse, one might say, to make such an attribution of divinity to the world — did not just disappear. Rather, it is transposed into the aesthetic sphere. Again, Kant is the summation of one phase in this displacement of enchantment and the beginning of another, that of “aesthetic theodicy.”24 It is striking that Kant incorporates those elements of what he calls “dogmatic metaphysics” that secured prior conceptions of nature as (partly) enchanted in regulative principles that govern viewing nature as purposive for various goals. One main category of experience that is governed solely by the implication of purposiveness is aesthetic; Kant analyzes beauty as a non-conceptual, purposive accord between the freedom of the imagination in sheer synthesis and objects of perception. Indeed, the a priori principle of the purposiveness of nature for judgment is the normative basis for a capacity for judgment that Kant holds bridges the “great gulf”25 that exists between the sphere of theoretical reason, constrained by the causal principle, and the domain of the non-natural moral law.
The weight that Kant gives to natural beauty in his aesthetics marks him as an early case of the reenchantment of nature through art. But the crucial effects of the metaphysical turn to aesthetics are all present in his thought. The first of these is a reconceptualization of the philosophical status of feeling. Non-discursive representation or feeling becomes a point of unity between the two radically divergent aspects of the subject, phenomenal and noumenal. In the wake of the loss of significance that followed from the disenchantment of nature — it was not for nothing that Moses Mendelssohn called the author of the Critique of Pure Reason the “all-destroying Kant” — aesthetics and feeling give hope for a re-unification of the subject, for a basis for overcoming alienation from nature, and for the ideal of a human community in which inclination and reason harmonize. Schiller's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) are perhaps the most famous expressions of the melancholy loss of and hope for reconciliation of nature and freedom that take their leave from art, although one might cite the final sections of Schelling's 1800 system or his 1802 Jena lectures on the philosophy of art to similar effect.
The second component of the introduction of aesthetics as the bearer of the enchantment of nature has to do with the manner in which art reflects that enchantment. Theories of the significance of art as a reaction to Enlightenment desacralization that take their cue from Hegel — I have in mind here Horkheimer and Adorno, Lukács, Charles Taylor — observe that nature is reenchanted via art in a compensatory way, in a way that both preserves the idea of divine nature and the melancholy of its retreat. There are many ways to approach this phenomenon, but the one that I would like to stress involves the material of art or of aesthetic experience more generally. Alienation from nature on the modern paradigm is expressed in the requirement that experience be mediated discursively. Concepts are rules for thinking things together in terms of their similarities, not in terms of their singularity. Concept use introduces our purposes into nature, for any deployment of a concept involves taking the world to be a particular way, if only defeasibly. The capacity to encounter things as singularities of which one can have knowledge is ruled out on this picture. Because they do not involve subsuming intuitions under concepts, aesthetic encounters with nature allow a much closer relationship between subjects and the material element present in things. In a line of thought beginning in Kant and continuing on through Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno, art is seen as the unique sphere in which (1) nature (including human nature) can be encountered without the alienation expressed in antecedent conceptual categorization, and (2) the formal capacities definitive of human agency are still present (non-conceptually) in a general, non-determining way. It is this species of the content/form dichotomy that characterizes artistic activity and the structure of its products.26
Novalis deploys the concept of feeling at precisely this point, but not with the result that the alienation from nature is entirely overcome. There is a sense in which feeling is “knowledge” of a radically non-discursive sort for Novalis which constitutes a mode of “experience” that he thinks makes discursivity possible. Following through on this thought may require something like criteria of truth and falsity to apply to feeling, as well as the idea of a subject's more or less “proper attunement” with nature. Even though the absolute outruns any possible conception of it, non-discursive “fittingness” of feeling might still constrain interpretations or expressions of the absolute. It is fairly clear that Novalis assumes something like this general picture; no matter how individualistic points of view on the absolute might be, they will, if attuned enough to “natural subjectivity,” share a great deal. It also seems that Novalis does not think that the impossibility of conceptually grasping the absolute undermines the objectivity of experience that it grounds. In fact, throughout the Fichte-Studien he experiments with showing how a method he calls ordo inversus provides an interpretation for the Kantian categories and forms of intuition consistent with the requirement that the absolute be posited as reflectively inaccessible. The results he obtains are not very impressive, but the fact that Novalis does not think that “correct” intuition so underdetermines conception that there are no possible universal constraints on discursive experience shows again that he is pursuing a transcendental program of a generally Kantian sort: Kantianism with a radicalized conception of the thing in itself.
At the time that Novalis is deep into his study of Fichte's philosophy, Schlegel is completing a period of intensive classical research. As were Winckelmann, Lessing and Schiller, Schlegel is concerned with understanding the relationship of ancient to modern art and literature.27 His interest in this contrast is not academic or merely literary. Although they differ fundamentally on the issue of the appropriate response to modernity, Schlegel, like Schiller, diagnoses his contemporary scene as one of upheaval of a prior order that calls for reflection on what sort of new orientation is possible.
According to most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German speculation on the nature of Greek culture, Attic art expresses an almost immediate unity between subject and community; its making and content reflect no essential division between what is and what should be. By contrast, modern art reflects the active and constitutive agency of artists who seek to create something original out of inherited forms, implicating distance between the ideal and actual and between individual and social existence. Modern art is inherently philosophical on this view because it must be reflective — it must seek to establish normative coherence in a situation in which the very idea of a definitive normative structure is deeply problematic. Schlegel works out his reflections on the role of art in experience against this general background and in terms of its demand for explicitly reflective art. Two ideas stand at the center of his analysis: irony and the nature and importance of what he calls “fragments.”
Schlegel endorses Novalis's view that the ultimate ground of subjectivity is forever unavailable to thought, restricted as thought is to the deployment of concepts to manifolds of intuition. And he holds with Novalis that, in the train of philosophy's default, poetry can display, not the absolute, but its elusiveness. Poetry does this in virtue of its elliptical manner, indeterminate content and metaphoric structure — suggesting more than it could possibly be interpreted as saying. To the extent that a poetic work presents a specifiable content, it is only to, at the same time, indicate that the content is not an exhaustive expression of the absolute. Structured in this way, art indicates one's reflective inability to grasp final content in the very act of trying to do so, paralleling one's situation as a discursively bound being in relationship with a fundamental, unbounded nature that can never be known as such.28 Expressing just this situation — one in which one forms and discovers oneself by striving to display the absolute — dominates Jena literary output. Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, whose title character embodies the structure of the work in his development toward ever more differentiated and esoteric experience, is exemplary.29
All art has the character of indeterminacy or “infinity” that reflects our inability to represent the absolute,30 but not all art does so self-consciously and explicitly of course. Some art openly draws attention to its inherent incompleteness and some does not. Schlegel counts as ironic both implicit and explicit artistic expressions of the problematic relationship of finite beings to the absolute. Irony is not for Schlegel, in the first instance, a literary device or trope; it is a general, transcendentally mandated property of a work or a philosophical position.31 Each work has a content, if but indeterminate, and expresses insights, feelings, beliefs, or philosophical propositions to which it is committed. The work affirms the point of view expressed in it, and Schlegel treats this affirmation or commitment as one of two components of irony. But, Schlegel thinks, if one reflects with sufficient acumen, one will recognize that no single expression or group of expressions can plumb the ground for expressivity — there are other possible ways that the world may be like for others, expressive of points of view that are different from one's own, yet expressive of the absolute. In fact, there is any number of ways to express the absolute by representing the world as being a certain way. If one is conscious of this, one registers within the work the fact that, as a work having a point of view, the work is merely one of many attempts to express the absolute. Schlegel thinks, therefore, that a correct cognitive stance toward the absolute balances a critical distance from the work in the work with the affirmation of its expression, and this is the second element in irony. Irony thus involves an acute and circumspect awareness of a work as perspectival. Put another way, irony is the acknowledgement that works are “partial,” in two senses of the word — one who shares the affirmation they contain is partial to them and one recognizes they are but partial representations of the world. Schlegel expresses the tension inherent in irony in terms of many schemata, but two stand out. Both borrow from Fichte. Perhaps the most famous characterization involves the idea that the ironist “oscillates” between or “hovers” over (schwebt) self-creation (Selbstschöpfung) and self-annihilation (Selbstvernichtung).32 A slight variant identifies three elements, adding self-limitation (Selbstbeschränkung) as a median term.33 Romantic poetry, and by extension romantic philosophy, is “infinite” because the oscillation is constant: there is no resolution of the tension in favor of either element.
When Schlegel writes that ironic poetry is “transcendental,” “critical,” or “poetry of poetry” he means to emphasize that it contains within it a statement or view and the grounds for the statement's or view's possibility,34 which “excites a feeling of the insoluble antagonism between the conditioned and the absolute, between the impossibility and necessity of complete communication.”35 These are not claims limited to “poetry” in the usual sense of the word. Schlegel is willing to extend all of these “poetic” requirements to philosophy, for he expands his early credo that all poetry must be philosophical to include its converse: that all philosophy must be poetic. By the time of Schlegel's mature Jena writings, “poetry” is an umbrella term whose extension includes lyric and epic poetry, novels, painting, music, and philosophy. In fact, Schlegel states that what he seeks is a unification of poetry and philosophy36 and that philosophy, and not poetry “is the true home of irony.”37
It is possible and profitable to understand irony as a version of what has come to be known as “perspectivism,” although Schlegel never uses that term. Sometimes Schlegel speaks of ways of viewing the world as varying with individual points of view, so that we may all be said to inhabit different perspectives on the world, indeed any one of us at different times may inhabit many such. This may seem to ratify the received opinion that romanticism extols first-person perspective above all else. And since what is apt to differentiate any two person's perspectives in the standard case is often emotive content, another received view of romanticism is reinforced, i.e. that it harps on feeling at the expense of discursivity. But Schlegel also talks about ways of life that may be shared by people and as varying greatly between peoples, both synchronically and diachronically. And this brings up the interesting question of conceptual variance, and indeed variance in the base or core concepts that might be said to differentiate fairly comprehensive alternative ways of understanding the world.
What exactly does irony require in the way of “recognizing” other perspectives? Is it enough to recognize their possibility, and if so, what does “possible” mean in this context? Or does distancing in irony recommend or require “entertaining” or “entering into” other perspectives as ways to deepen the sense of the ineffability of the absolute? It may seem that it is sufficient for Schlegel that one has a rather formal recognition that one's own expression of the absolute cannot be definitive. One need not for this even think about other discrete, actual perspectives in any concrete way; one need only know that there are (must be) other possibilities. But there is good reason to interpret Schlegel otherwise, for he often exhorts his reader to be open to and investigate different expressions of the absolute. The romantic notion of Symphilosophie requires this, not just co-authoring texts. Of course exhortations are not requirements, but there is an argument to be made that entertaining other possible perspectives (and not just entertaining their possibility) is a precondition to ironic distancing. The thought would be that merely thinking abstractly about one's perspective as one amongst many possible perspectives is too insubstantial to motivate treating as “real” the alternatives that might loosen easy identification with the “home” perspective.38 In turn, this would influence the level or force of affirmation in irony, since affirmation is tempered by distancing — which is just to say that the two elements in irony are dialectically related. Schlegel seems to think about interpretation rather like Schleiermacher, i.e. he believes that one can experience another point of view as it is experienced by those for whom it is native (Winckelmann's writings on classical art provide Schlegel with just this model of understanding a culture “from the inside out”). The experience of alternative perspectives could have a very strong subjective impact, assuming this view on interpretation — one that might provide real friction for the components in irony. The thoroughgoing ironist might even attempt to enter as many other ways of thinking as she can, thereby developing and adopting other points of view and, where possible, incorporating them into her own perspective (or not). The more perspectives one occupies, the more ways one has available to take the world and adumbrate the absolute.39 Still, to entertain is not to endorse, and one would want to insist that one need not discount one's perspective against all comers. I can benefit from seeing things as Oblomov does and still get out of bed.
Here is where art, and in particular ironic art, reenters the discussion. Art is a means through which one can imaginatively enter into a point of view in a substantial way, yet one that stops short of actually living in terms of that point of view. An artwork presents the richness of the world from the perspective of the artist and its indeterminacy solicits intersubjective understanding and communal participation through critical interpretation. This criticism is supposed to be “poetic” as well.40 That is, criticism is no more final and determinate than is poetry, at least in its best ironic form. This is so in two senses. First, criticism does not determine its critical object; it cannot achieve a definitive understanding of the work. Second, as an object for further criticism, criticism is indeterminate. This is why Schlegel adds the injunction that criticism be poetic to his earlier idea that poetry should be critical. The idea that perspectives solicit unending intervention by other perspectives is closely tied to the idea that perspectives are “partial,” in both senses I mentioned above. A work, philosophical or otherwise, is never completed. The value of “going on” is in increasing the richness of the ways that one can try to understand it.
Schlegel thinks he has found a device uniquely suited to express the ineliminable tension in endorsing a view in the face of its perspectival nature, or, alternatively, between the closed and the open character of system: the fragment.41 Schlegel uses the term “fragment” to denote both a particular genre of literary and philosophical writing and to designate a property that other types of writing have, i.e. essays, plays, novels, dialogues, lectures, even philosophical systems.42 Although Schlegel was eager to praise contemporary writers like Tieck and Jean Paul for their fragmentary works in which effects such as parabasis43 were put in the service of explicit irony, Schlegel also deemed the work of authors as diverse as Goethe, Diderot, Sterne, Cervantes, Leibniz and Plato as “fragmentary.” Schlegel ascribes to fragments two opposing properties that track the two cognitive aspects of irony we discussed above. The first of these is that a fragment must be complete. In this vein, he writes that “[a] fragment, like a miniature work of art, must be wholly isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog [Igel].”44 But a fragment is also a fragment, i.e. it is incomplete by design, overtly elliptical and suggesting various interpretations. A well-crafted fragment is supposed to offer a discrete opinion, view, or assertion, but at the same time it suggests, either through its internal ellipsis or its inclusion in a system or collection of like fragments, that there is much more to be said and that any determinate thought is yet highly provisional and even artificial. What I said earlier with respect to the role of imagination and interpretation in irony holds as well in the case of the romantic fragment: although no fragment will be made non-fragmentary by its interpretations, interpretative interactions with fragments fuse perspectives and create a community of thought.45 In the best of all romantic worlds this process is continuing: the interpretations will themselves be art, and self-consciously fragmentary art at that. It is this convergence of fragment upon fragment that makes for an infinitely complex nesting of perspectives,46 the idea of which is crucial to early romantic conceptions of community and state.
Novalis was not always as keen as was Schlegel to think of irony as primary, but there is a concept in Novalis that does similar work. Novalis writes that “the world must be romanticized”47 and “romanticizing” is a procedure with two aspects. On the one hand, the commonplace or ordinary is made to be seen as extraordinary, even supernatural. This requires the poet to treat the given objects of the world as problematically so, by showing what they “are not” — i.e. by taking them out of the contexts in which they can appear to be normal. Novalis calls this part of the romanticizing procedure “potentializing,” and says that it contrasts the ordinary with the “infinite.” On the other hand, romanticizing the world also involves treating the infinite, mysterious, or extraordinary as ordinary. This is done in order to emphasize the “remote closeness” of the absolute. Combining the two aspects of the one operation, Novalis thinks that life is characterized by a tension between endorsing the way of life that we find ourselves in and endorsing it critically, i.e. in the face of the fecundity of the absolute.
Hegel's unstinting opposition decided the philosophical fate of Jena romanticism as a historical matter. Because his reception of early German romanticism has had such great influence — many contemporary criticisms of philosophical romanticism are just versions of Hegel's arguments against it48 — a consideration of his interpretation of romanticism is an important part of assessing its present significance. I shall concentrate on his criticisms of Schlegel and, in particular, of the romantic concept of irony.
Hegel's reaction to Schlegel is quite complex and separating out its various motifs a substantial task that I can only begin here. Even a cursory reading of Hegel cannot miss his animus against Schlegel, so a word about the tone of Hegel's critique is pertinent. Schlegel provoked strong reactions, and Hegel was hardly alone in viewing him as arrogant and condescending. Especially in his literary criticism, Schlegel's tone is often superior, dismissive, and his wit exercised at the expense of others. Beyond a general dislike for Schlegel's snide manner, his choice of target also upset Hegel's tame Weimar sensibility. Schiller, revered by Hegel, came under criticism by Schlegel as something of a “young fogey” (after an earlier period of intense admiration by Schlegel of Schiller), causing Schiller to respond in kind in Xenien. Some of Hegel's own mockery when discussing romantic irony can also be taken in this spirit; in places the usually staid and sententious Hegel attempts to turn the tables and write ironically in the person of the romantic ironist in order to undercut irony's seriousness as a philosophical position — in essence playing what Hegel takes to be Socratic irony off against its romantic counterpart. Hegel also appears to have been a bit of a misogynist and a prude; the rather liberal ideas of the Circle with regard to “open marriage” and the liberation of women set him on edge, as did Schlegel's mildly racy novel Lucinde.49 Schlegel's conversion to Catholicism in 1808 was also highly problematic.50 This latter point is not a matter of sheer personal bias, for Hegel believes that he has philosophical grounds for rating Protestantism superior to Roman Catholicism in terms of its conception of autonomy.
If personal animosity were the end of Hegel's negative reaction to the Jena romantics, his views would not merit any philosophical scrutiny. But Hegel has more properly philosophical reactions to Schlegel, which are part of a larger project of discrediting “subjective” idealism. The main focus of this critique is Fichte, and Hegel interprets the Jena romantics in general, and Schlegel in particular, as followers of Fichte. I have already indicated where both Schlegel and Novalis depart in significant ways from Fichte's early Jena program. The question then becomes: assuming for the purpose of argument that Hegel's interpretation of Fichte is sound, does Schlegel's own Fichte critique insulate him from Hegelian objection?
Generally the problem with subjective idealism according to Hegel is its alleged withdrawal into the self as the sole basis for normativity. Subjective self-activity alone cannot furnish real constraints upon thought or action; therefore, any theory that takes such activity to be exclusively foundational cannot provide an account of how and why a principle or pattern of action is truly binding on an agent. Any account of freedom on such a basis would be one merely of the freedom to act arbitrarily or capriciously (willkürlich).51 Fichte's concept of the “check” (Anstoβ) that acts as a constraint upon the I's activity is purely formal (indeed, it too is a posit of the I), and thus provides no real constraint on subjective action. Hegel believes that romantic irony is the logical extension of this empty self-reference. It is an “aestheticized” form of Fichte's philosophy that substitutes feeling for intellectual intuition as the founding state or activity and conceives of expression or realization of the self in the world in terms of an “art of life,” where the relevant faculty is not reason seeking a systematic whole of laws, but rather rhapsodic imagination.52 Although Schlegel is not mentioned by name, in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel labels just this lack of external constraint on the “mere play” of subjectivity and the resulting “God-like geniality” of the ironist who holds herself above any particular set of constraints “evil,” and likens it to the defiant self-involvement of Lucifer.53 Schlegel's ever-becoming poetical philosophy is nothing but a prescription for what Hegel calls “bad infinity” and the famous claim in Athenäum Fragment 116 that romantic poetry is “progressive” no more than an idle boast.54
There are two tendencies in Hegel's treatment of romantic irony that draw upon this general critique of subjective idealism. Mostly Hegel portrays the ironist as a knowing celebrant of the relativity and ultimate interchangeability of all alleged principles, not caring at all about offering a viable account of subjective constraint or normativity. This makes Schlegel out to be a self-conscious nihilist, and, in this vein, Hegel stresses over and over again the negative or critical element of irony almost as if it were the only component present: ironic distance is simply disdain. Now, in moments of high spirit Schlegel indeed does dwell on indeterminacy for indeterminacy's sake, but I hope to have shown that he does not think that he is offering a relativistic theory or one that begs for an account of normativity. Of course, he may be mistaken about that; perhaps what he believes to be an alternative to standard accounts of normative commitment is incoherent. But it is a vast oversimplification to present the structure of irony as Hegel often seems to, as if the only component Schlegel claims on its behalf were skeptical. The better tack from a Hegelian standpoint is to acknowledge that Schlegel wants to account positively for what binds one to a particular form of life, but then argue that he is unable to maintain the dialectical structure claimed for irony because it necessarily collapses into its “negative” pole — in other words, that romantic irony, unlike its Socratic counterpart, is not truly dialectical.55 Ironic identification or commitment is so dependent upon ironic distance that it ceases to be “real” commitment: i.e. perhaps I can identify with X only to the extent that I can destroy it (or perhaps even because I can do so).
On the other hand, Hegel sometimes seems to lump Schlegel in with other romantics as a failed foundationalist, seizing upon the alleged absence of a rational account for commitment to assume for Schlegel an irrational way to fill in the gap. One way that romantics are typically thought to provide for the sought constraint is mystically, in terms of a foundational role for feeling. The controlling idea would be that (unalienated) human feeling is not so divergent as to create problems for ethics or science and holds out the prospect for converging in final reconciliation when inauthentic elements are filtered out. As do others, Hegel sometimes interprets romanticism as a type of non-discursive foundationalism that holds out the prospect of actually reaching the absolute by means of art.56 From Hegel's point of view the problem with this sort of foundationalism is its intuitive character. At best, it owns up to what Fichte did not: i.e. that such immediacy is not “intellectual” at all. However one finally views Novalis along these lines, this sort of foundationalism is at odds with Schlegel's skeptical concept of ongoing critique and, with it, the idea that the absolute can be striven for but never achieved. Hegel did not, after all, have the benefit of Novalis's and Schlegel's mid-1790s notebooks that contain much of their anti-foundationalist assessment of Fichte.
Another way romanticism might be taken to be a foundational enterprise that is somewhat closer to Schlegel's thought involves not mysticism but mythology. Perhaps romanticism can make good on its claims for normativity if it can, largely through the experience of a common art, engender unity of life from establishing a new faith-inspiring religious base to replace decadent religious forms.57 On the outer cusp of the period under consideration, Schlegel writes his Gespräch über die Poesie (1800), where he begins a consideration of the place of myth in philosophy that was to occupy him for the rest of his life. Of course the relation of myth to philosophy and of both to art is something that would have concerned Schlegel, given his early classicism. How these thoughts sit with the relentlessly critical nature of irony is a complicated issue. One possibility, and to my mind the most plausible interpretation of their relation, is that Schlegel calls for a new mythology not in order to install a cosmology nor in order to clothe older mythic or folk forms in superficial modern trappings. Rather, he wants a background of fairly implicit and shared experience that can nurture precisely the requirements of the modern sensibility famously described in Fragment 116. Part of these requirements will be viewing experience as lying on a continuum between identification and distance that typifies irony, along with the commitment to constant self-criticism. The resulting mythology, developed through ironic communal discovery, would not orient agents in terms of the non-reflective immediacy of faith, but rather would be a spur to further criticism.
I return to the claim that Schlegel is an unknowing nihilist and the related charge that romantic irony is not truly dialectical. Assessing this criticism of Schlegel requires becoming more precise about the sense in which subjectivity has priority for him. Schlegel's rejection of Fichte's foundationalism is supposed to involve a denial that the subject can entirely determine what stands opposed to it as an object. Reality for Schlegel then is not reducible to subjectivity; rather, the capacity of a subject to comprehend reality itself presupposes much on the part of reality that is not due to the constitutive role of the subject, or, even stronger, is incomprehensible. Put more in terms of the problematic concept of the self-positing I, Schlegel's claim is that the subject encounters itself with its most basic form of subjectivity already there for it, not as the result of a posit, empirical or otherwise. The problem concerning Fichtean escapism and sheer play in self-creation is not supposed to arise on this picture at all, and precisely for the epistemological reasons we have discussed concerning the mode of “givenness” proper to the romantic account of subjectivity. Schlegel's conception of irony tracks this “realism.” The ability to detach (in part) from one's life involves at least an intimation that what transcends experience constrains experience in ways that cannot be exhaustively understood. In dialectical terms, subjects externalize themselves in the world, partly forming it, but likewise they “come back to themselves” from that world, internalizing it and coming to recognize limitation in virtue of that activity. Schlegel does not think that commitment is compromised by the recognition that it does not fully express the absolute — irony is a form of commitment, not its lack. Irony is just what it is to be a committed, finite being. One commits in the face of the knowledge that any finite mode of life cannot exhaust the absolute, one does not fail to commit because of it.
Still, one might respond that the sought constraint is ineffable and, because of that, its constraining nature is indeterminate, not accessible to reason and no better than Fichte's formalism. It is as if Kantian things in themselves and the relations between them were able to stand in the place of the laws of the understanding. This is, it seems to me, the crux of the matter. Although much has been done to recruit Schlegel into the ranks of postmodernists by interpreting his conception of the absolute to preclude laws, principles, or norms of general application, there is scant evidence in his writings that he holds such views. It is true that Schlegel emphasizes above all else the variation amongst practices, beliefs and concepts, and fashions his notion of the absolute to underline the inexhaustibility of the particular instantiations of life. But this does not entail in the least that there are not laws that abstractly unite life in general ways.58 As is Hegel, Schlegel is wary of an overemphasis of the universal at the expense of the particular and especially the tendency to think of one's identity as consisting mostly or only in abstract universal terms. Schlegel takes over from Schiller (and others) a view of especially Kant's ethics where duty and inclination are adversaries and duty singled out as the significant component of character. Fichte's Sittenlehre is even more rigoristic in attempting to deduce very specific duties from abstract moral principles. Schlegel may be taken to offer a corrective to this formalism that takes for granted the universalistic component, but tempers its force by arguing for a dynamic interaction of it with the particulars of sentiment and culture that are its expressions. For Schlegel, identity has more to do with the unity of particularity and universality and, crucially, in the great underdetermination of the former by the latter. All general norms: (1) support any number of particular instantiations, some of which vary in the particulars to great degrees and (2) are subject to potential revision. A modest interpretation of Schlegel, which orients him in terms of his Kantian rather than Fichtean legacy, can charitably render the critical moment in irony not as a subjective free-for-all, but rather as a provocative way of insisting upon both (1) and (2). None of this implies skepticism about norms, unless one thinks that a norm must have the form of a strict law that holds true come what may. It does, however, involve a certain skeptical/critical willingness never to close the door on experience.
This extension of Kantian critique naturally connects up with Schlegel's concern to do justice to the availability of the particular qua particular by representing at a reflective level what is pre-reflective, without appealing to some form of immediate intuition. According to Schlegel this will not be an experience of pre-reflectivity as such — that would be impossible — but it will be a special sort of reflective experience that makes certain adjustments at the reflective level in order to, as best one can, acknowledge and discount for the distorting effects introduced by reflection. This “correction” will itself be reflective and thus will self-consciously and imperfectly represent the pre-reflective. The claim is not that reflection blocks some more truthful sort of experience that one can have once reflection is out of the way. It is rather an attempt to treat the category of immediacy integrally while holding that all one can do is experience reflectively. Irony is this corrective procedure. It reconstructs at the conceptual level what is below the level of concepts. It is concerned with what it means to come to have a concept or principle and is an attempt to represent the passage from indeterminacy to relative determinacy at a point in which the very idea of indeterminacy having a positive role is in danger of being lost. From the point of view of reflection the only way to represent its pre-reflective “past” is to emphasize the potential defeasibility of determinative understanding of the world in the face of a demand that the world be understood in one way rather than another. One of Schlegel's fundamental thoughts is that the coming to have a concept or rule can never be deemed complete and thus that pre-reflectivity will always potentially inform normative practice.59
Compare this treatment of the category of immediacy in Schlegel with the same in Hegel. Hegel also disdains simple immediacy, but this disdain takes the form in Hegel of discounting the relevance of immediacy that is not resolved to a higher-order account of reflection. To be sure, this resolution is not to reflective, representational awareness, but rather to what Hegel calls “the Concept,” which is supposed to contain immediacy as one of its mediated elements. To Schlegel this appeal to a special sort of “speculative” thought, depending as it does upon Hegel's teleology, would be unconvincing (it is, in essence, not speculative enough for Schlegel). Hegelian dialectic preserves immediacy only by denying immediacy as such any ineliminable role in experience. Nowhere is Schlegel closer to Kant than in refusing to eliminate immediacy because of the impossibility of its reflective capture.
Schlegel explicitly presents his theory of irony as a form of historical dialectic; irony is a synthesis of antitheses in which the individual character of both constituents is preserved and, indeed, enhanced.60 Schlegel's Jena Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy of 1800–1 develops in greatest detail his notion of dialectic. Hegel attended these lectures61 and they were no doubt important for the development of his own account of dialectic. Indeed, some of his contemporaries angered him by suggesting (improbably) that he cribbed his own concept of dialectic directly from Schlegel.62 In Hegelian dialectic the two elements held in tension in their contradiction are eventually shown to be contradictories only in virtue of an inadequate set of background assumptions about the relationship of subjects to objects in the world. Any dialectical conflict resolves into an initially indeterminate further theory that preserves the content of the prior tension in the superior terms of the successor theory. Romantic irony juxtaposes a definite content with the fact that it is not definitive, in this way obliquely indicating an unspecifiable total context forever beyond reach. While it is true that irony does not involve a contradiction involving the content of two claims, an ironic work does contrast the apparent completeness of a work or fragment with its “opposite,” i.e. with its ultimate incompleteness. Ironic dialectic is historical, contextual and open-ended; Hegelian dialectic is historical, teleological and closed.
When one stresses the dialectical dimension of Schlegel's thought, one can see in early German romanticism an anticipation of an important post-Hegelian development — indeed one from within the ranks of Hegelianism — i.e. what Adorno came to call “negative dialectic.” In recognizing that the fragments of modern life cannot be perfectly reassembled into a whole that coheres come what may, Schlegel rejects idealistic retrenchments designed to do just that. Considered in this light, Hegel's reaction to Jena romanticism may date his own views as a reaction to modern life so bent on rational sobriety that it misses the radical shift in modern self-understanding for which contingency and historicity are so crucial.
1 I thank Karl Ameriks, Richard Eldridge, Lydia Goehr, Gary Gutting, Pierre Keller, Pauline Kleingeld, Nikolas Kompridis, Stephen Watson, and Allen Wood for helpful and challenging comments and conversation.
Citation to Novalis is to volume and page number in Novalis Schriften, eds R. Samuel, H.-J. Mähl and G. Schutz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–88) [= NS]. The Fichte-Studien [= FS] are also cited according to their paragraph number. Citation to Friedrich Schlegel is to page and volume number in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, eds E. Behler, J.-J. Anstett, H. Eichner et al. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958B) [= KFSA]. The fragments are also cited according to their Minor numbers and the following abbreviations: AFr. = Athenäum-Fragment, LFr. = Lyceum-Fragment, I. = Ideen. Citation to the Critique of Pure Reason utilizes the customary A/ B format to refer to its first and second editions. All other citations to Kant are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902—) [= AA]. Citation to Hegel is to Werke, eds E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1970) [= HW].
2 Excellent in this vein is Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) which charts the development of idealism with reference to Kant's theory of apperception without papering over the real differences among those in the Kant-Hegel line. For perhaps the most optimistic account of a direct and seamless passage from Kant to Hegel (except, of course, Hegel's own), see Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Mohr, 1961).
3 Exceptional is the work of Manfred Frank, especially his Unendliche Annäherung (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1997); see also Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1989). Dilthey's Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1905, repr. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961) is still relevant and Benjamin's brilliant Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, Vol. I.1 in Gesammelte Schriften, eds R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1991) is much more than that. Fred Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) provides a stimulating account of the immediate reaction to Kant, concentrating on figures important to the Jena school, primarily Jacobi, Reinhold and Herder.
4 The choice of pseudonym is interesting. A novalis is a species of ager under Roman and medieval civil law. The term can refer either to a field that is ready for cultivation, or one that has been fallow for a year.
5 This paper focuses on the thought of Novalis and Schlegel and is restricted to their conceptions of subjectivity, certainly the most important philosophical contribution of Jena romanticism. I shall not discuss the significance of Friedrich Hölderlin, whose views were developed with no substantial contact with the Jena philosophical scene (although he had met Novalis and Schlegel at least once at the home of their common friend Immanuel Niethammer, himself an important figure in the development of German idealism after Kant). For Hölderlin's views and their immediate intellectual context, see Dieter Henrich's magisterial Der Grund im Bewuβsein: Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992). Another limitation: I am only interested here in the views of Novalis and Schlegel prior and up to 1800, the period that they are most concerned to explicitly extend what they understand to be the most important inheritance of Kant's critical thought. Novalis dies in 1801 and afterwards Schlegel's thought undergoes significant change, becoming philosophically, politically and religiously more conservative, as was the general trend in German romanticism.
6 “Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie in einer Reihe von Briefen,” in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845–6) VIII: 270–300.
7 Kant and his closest allies fought hard not only to secure transcendental idealism against rationalist counter-attack, but also to protect it from appropriation by more “friendly” forces who did not, in Kant's opinion at least, share his modest proposals concerning the rightful role of pure reason. The high-water mark of Kant's own aversion to this second line is his so-called “open letter” to Fichte, dated 7 August 1799 and first published in the Intelligenzblatt der allgemeinen Litteratur no. 109, 28 August 1799 (AA XII, 370–1).
8 Reinhold's response to Kant is much more complicated than I can indicate in this chapter. For one thing, he subscribed (as did almost all of the post-Kantian idealists) to Jacobi's famous claim that the notion of a thing in itself is incoherent. According to Jacobi, it is incoherent because it is, strictly speaking, unthinkable if one stays within the strictures of the critical philosophy. This is because things in themselves allegedly cannot be represented at all and thus are unintelligible. This view may rest on a mistake; one may maintain that Kant does think that the thing-in-itself can be represented, just not in a way that produces knowledge. On this view the categories, albeit unschematized, would condition such thought, i.e. a thing-in-itself is the idea of a thing with its sensible conditions abstracted. In short, one cannot know what things in themselves are because they cannot be objects for us. But we do know that they are, and perhaps something of what they are not — e.g. they are not spatiotemporal, are not bearers of only relational properties, etc. Versions of Jacobi's complaint still surface, most famously in Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), part IV. For a more recent vintage of the objection, under the Strawson influence, see John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and A. W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 119–20.
9 The claim that the final form of the critical philosophy is not well grounded is a commonplace among post-Kantian idealists and takes many forms. In addition to the claim that the discreteness of the faculties is not proved, there were claimed problems with the unity of theoretical and practical reason (Fichte), the unity of empirical and rational subjectivity (Schiller), the unity of the categories as a system (Hegel) and others. The verso of these claims is the notion that Kant is still open to a variety of skeptical attacks. The most sophisticated treatment of this aspect of post-Kantian idealism is Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Skepticism, Transcendental Arguments, and Systematicity in German Idealism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For the importance of skepticism to Hegel, see the excellent Michael Forster, Hegel and Scepticism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
10 Although Kant never claimed to have discovered such a faculty, there are passages from his work that encouraged those searching for such a “common root.” But it is important to note right at the outset how un-Kantian the idea that such a root could ever be discovered is. This is brought out by a closer consideration of the passage that is often cited for the proposition that Kant thought such a root in principle discoverable by us: section VII of the introduction to the first Critique, where Kant says that such a common root is “unknown to us” (uns unbekannt). A15/B29. While it is true that this formulation does not literally rule out the possibility of locating such a common root, as would be the case if he wrote that the root is “unknowable”, it is a bad inference to reason that from something being unknown it is knowable. There might be plenty of things unknown to us that remain so, and not because of any lack of trying. It is worth recalling the final form of the critical philosophy, in which Kant presents subjects as having “dual citizenship” in both intelligible and sensible worlds. Such bifurcation might certainly introduce tensions in life that are not reconcilable at some “deeper” level. On all available evidence, Kant believed this to be a true and complete analysis of the basic constitution of subjectivity and would have disagreed with the reasoning implicit in the “common root” objection to the Kantian program, i.e. that lack of this sort of unity of the subject shows a theory that ascribes it to the subject to be deficient. There is nothing implausible, and certainly nothing contradictory, about a theory whose final understanding of the nature of being a subject ascribes to that subject the sorts of ultimately discrete faculties that Kant's theory does.
11 Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Miβverständnisse der Philosophen (Jena: Mauke, 1790), I: p. 167: “in consciousness, the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and the object, and relates it [the representation] to both.”
12 Aenesidemus, oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Prof. Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie (Jena, 1792).
13 See Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 69–70, 73 n. 9 for a clear statement of the standard view. Cf. Wayne Martin, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte's Jena Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 88–9. Dieter Henrich implicitly challenges this reconstruction of Reinhold's position (as well as his own earlier interpretation of it) in “Origins of the Theory of the Subject,” in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, eds A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe et al. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 64–6 and n. 22. See also Franks, All or Nothing §4.4. I cannot go into the complex question of the correctness of the standard view here.
14 This is what Henrich calls Fichte's “original insight.” See “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht,” in Subjektivität und Metaphysik, eds D. Henrich and H. Wagner (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 1966), pp. 188–232.
15 The idea has some provenance in the first Critique, but not in Kant's idea of intellectual intuition. The direct counterpart to Fichte's conception of intellectual intuition in Kant is located in the account of the transcendental unity of apperception, where Kant discusses the question of non-representational, immediate states of awareness in his analysis of the sense in which one is aware of the “I think” when one is aware that the contents of thought belong to oneself. Kant famously holds that the “I think” is a representation, not of an introspectable self or soul, but of a logical unity of thought through synthesis (B132). But he also suggests that, in the activity of thinking as such, one is immediately aware of one's “existence” or of the activity as thinking, in short, of the spontaneity of thought (B157–58n).
16 In fact, at about the time the Circle was forming there was in place, thanks to August Wilhelm Rehberg and Niethammer, a similar reaction to Reinhold's foundationalism. See Frank, Unendliche Annäherung, Vorlesungen XIII-XV.
17 As Hans Vaihinger was the first to note, “critique of pure reason” must be understood as both a genitivus subiectivus and obiectivus: the critique is carried out by pure reason and the critique has pure reason as its object. Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Spemann, 1881) I, 117–20.
18 That Kant thought his views were presented in a perfectly systematic manner can be seen from his 1787 letter to Reinhold, in which he forwards the third Critique as the completion of the system (AA X, 513–15). From the Kantian perspective, the inference from presence of dualism to non-systematicity is a bad one. System for Kant preserves a harmony between the two contrasting aspects of our finite natures and does not require their unity.
19 Yet another feature of Kant's philosophy that involves issues of the form and task of philosophy that also was deemed wanting — his insistence that the proper form of philosophy is to give arguments for the necessity of the assumption of certain claims to explain the possibility of certain antecedently given “facts,” i.e. experience — was amenable to the development of romanticism in Jena. Here Niethammer's interpretation of Kant is decisive. Niethammer argued, against the current of the time, that Kant need not prove that experience is possible. Rather, transcendental argumentation assumes experience to be actual and then argues regressively from that fact to the necessary conditions for its possibility. On this interpretation of Kant's project, the problem of radical skepticism drops away (at least in some of its more intractable forms). See Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 64–6. Neither Novalis nor Schlegel finally accepted Niethammer's “common sense” philosophy, however, arguing instead that Fichte was right to demand proofs in this area. See, e.g., Philosophische Lehrjahre no. 25 [1796–7], KFSA XVIII, 21. The power of Niethammer's critique for the romantics lies in the simple fact that it cuts against systematic pretensions, a point that Ameriks stresses.
20 See FS I.16, NS II, 114 where Novalis writes that, at best, intellectual intuition can display the limit of reflection.
21 FS I.15–22, 32–43, NS II, 113–20, 126–33.
22 See especially Blüthenstaub 1, NS II, 413: “Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge.”
23 FS I.15, 17, NSII, 113, 115.
24 For the concept of aesthetic theodicy, see Raymond Geuss, “Art and Theodicy” in his Morality, Culture, and History: Essays in German Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 78–115.
25 AA 5:176–8; AA 20:246–7.
26 The best accounts of the development of this idea of which I am aware are J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) and Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For a detailed criticism of the idea that art should shoulder this metaphysical burden, see Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L'art de l'âge moderne: l'esthetique et la philosophie de l'art du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: PUF, 1992).
27 I use the term “modern” in the sense that it was used in the late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century debate on the relative values of “ancient” and “modern” art and culture.
28 Cf. I. 69, KFSA II, 263.
29 Whereas Goethe's Meister develops from the inchoate and diffuse dreams of youth to an acceptance of the possibilities offered him by the real world “as it is,” Novalis's hero moves from a conventional everyday life to one that is suffused with possibilities of his own making.
30 Cf. I. 95, KFSA II, 265.
31 Schlegel treats Socratic dialectic as an important precursor to his views on irony. LFr. 26, 42, KFSA II, 149, 152. Clarifying the Socratic element in Schlegel's thought is a very important part of any full analysis of romantic irony, and in particular, its relation to Hegel and Kierkegaard. I cannot hope to do that here, but it is worth mentioning that influential deconstructive interpretations of Schlegel tend to ignore this and to stress instead the connection to the European rhetorical tradition. See, e.g., Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony” in his Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 163–84. This is not to say that Schlegel develops his conception of irony in utter isolation from the rhetorical tradition. In particular, he is very interested in Quintillian's Institutio oratoria which was hugely influential in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century thought, where it became the model for acceptable Latin argument. But what is decisive for Schlegel is that Quintillian is not just a manual on stylistics, but provides a general pedagogical framework that promotes a vision of how life should be lived — one that presents itself rather explicitly as a turn away from Seneca and Lucan (i.e. Neronian decadence) and as a return to older models (i.e. Cicero). Schlegel is also very interested in Isocrates, whose Panegyrikos influenced both Cicero and Quintillian.
32 AFr. 51, KFSA II, 172; see also LFr. 37, 48, KFSA II, 151, 153; “Über Goethes Meister” KFSA II, 137.
33 LFr. 28, KFSA II, 149.
34 AFr. 22, 238, KFSA II, 169, 204.
35 LFr. 108, KFSA II, 160.
36 LFr. 115, KFSA II, 161.
37 LFr. 42, KFSA II, 152.
38 AFr. 121, KFSA II, 184–5.
39 Schlegel need not be committed to the idea that the ironic philosopher must proliferate all manner of life-styles, in order to become more whole by being more differentiated and transgressive. Cf. Bataille's notion of transgression and Foucault's advocacy of it. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-memory, and Practice, eds D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 29–52.
40 LFr. 61, 115, 117, KFSA II, 154, 161–2; AFr. 249, 304, 439, KFSA II, 207, 216–17, 253; cf. AFr. 116, KFSA II, 182–3.
41 Schlegel develops his conception of the fragment partially in terms of prior literary models, ancient and modern, perhaps the most notable being the eighteenth-century French aphorist Chamfort. See Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 151–2. Charles Rosen argues for a direct and general musical influence on the Jena school's account in The Romantic Generation (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), ch. 2.
42 In an often quoted fragment, Schlegel states that “it is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and to have none. It will have to decide to combine the two.” AFr. 53, KFSA II, 173; cf. Novalis, FS VII.648, NS II, 288–9. Benjamin emphasizes that Jena romanticism does not forsake all ideas of systematicity, only ones inconsistent with the idea of a fragment. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften I.1, 40–53. The issue of the systematicity of Jena romanticism is very important, but I cannot address it here.
43 Parabasis is a convention in Old Comedy in which the chorus steps forward and addresses the audience in the poet's name. A more modern example would be Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (1797) where the audience members are supposed to become characters in the play. Perhaps the high-point of the use of this device within romanticism is found in Clemens Brentano's novel Godwi (1801), where the characters finish the book for the narrator, who has died.
44 AFr. 206, KFSA II, 197. This might remind one of Leibniz's dictum that monads have no windows. Comparison of the fragment to the monad is interesting and one that Schlegel averts to fairly often. See, e.g., Philosophische Lehrjahre [1798] KFSA XVIII, 42–53.
45 I take it that this is one of the main points in Schlegel insisting on “incomprehensibility” (Unverständlichkeit) from fragments and essays. “Über die Unverständlichkeit,” KFSA II, 363–71. Schlegel means for the reader to be aware of the Kantian notion of Verstand as the faculty of deploying concepts in order to determine manifolds of intuition. A fragment is not subject to conceptual determination and does not have, therefore, a comprehensive rendering.
46 LFr. 103, KFSA II, 159; AFr. 77, 112, 125, 342, KFSA II, 176, 181, 185–6, 226.
47 FS I.37, NS II, 384.
48 See, e.g., György Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Verfunft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962); Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Hegel-like criticism persists today even among those open to reassessing the contemporary significance of romanticism, for instance the excellent Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 82–5. Kierkegaard's influential treatment of Schlegel is also very indebted to Hegel.
49 For an example of Schlegel's views, see AFr. 34, KFSA II, 170. For Hegel's, see Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts §164 Zusatz, HW 7:317.
50 Letter to Niethammer, 7 May 1809 in Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952) I, 283; Philosophie des Rechts §141 Zusatz, HW 7:290.
51 “Vorrede,” Phänomenologie HW 3: 15–16; ibid., pp. 70–1; see also “Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie,” HW 11: 61; Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, HW 20: 415–16.
52 HW 13: 93–4.
53 HW 3: 563.
54 KFSA II, 182. For a discussion of the progressive element in irony, see Peter Szondi, “Friedrich Schlegel und die romantische Ironie mit einer Beilage über Tiecks Komödie,” in Schriften (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1978) II, 21–2.
55 “Rezension von Solgers nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel,” HW 11: 234, 255. Hegel distinguishes here sharply between Schlegel's views on irony and Socratic dialectic. See also Philosophie des Rechts §140(f) and Zusatz, HW 7:277–9, 284–6. Schlegel claims a rather direct influence from Socratic elenchos. See supra note 31.
56 See, e.g., HW 13: 93–8; see also ibid., pp. 348–9. Hegel's own aesthetic theory of course reverses the romantic emphasis on art as the foremost access to the absolute. Although he accords art some role as a vehicle for “truth,” he holds that it was only the most adequate expression of truth at a relatively underdeveloped stage in human self-consciousness, i.e. in Attic Greece. It may be something of a dig at romanticism that Hegel denominates any art that is outstripped by the truth that it attempts to present “romantic.”
57 This of course is not an aim limited to romanticism — there is a fairly continuous strain in German intellectual history from Herder to Heidegger that rings changes upon this idea. Hegel stands in this continuum as well, arguing a very close relationship between art and religion in the formation of character (e.g. the idea of Kunstreligion that he takes over from Schleiermacher).
58 I am especially indebted to discussions with Karl Ameriks and Manfred Frank on this issue.
59 A fully satisfactory account of Schlegel on this issue would include a lengthy technical analysis of how he thinks universals and particulars dialectically co-determine.
60 I. 74, KFSA II, 263; see also AFr. 121, KFSA II, 184–5.
61 See “Über den Vortrag der Philosophie auf Universitäten,” HW 4: 420–1.
62 This allegation continued throughout nineteenth-century Hegel reception, provoking defenders like Karl Rosenkranz to issue pointed rebuttals. Hegels Leben (Berlin, 1844, repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), p. 223. Hegel does admit vaguely that his conception of dialectic bears a resemblance to Schlegel's. See HW 20: 415.