Jane Kneller
Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt und der Cherub hinter uns; wir müssen die Reise um die Welt machen, und sehen, ob es vielleicht von hinten irgendwo wieder offen ist. (Paradise is barred and the cherub behind us; we must travel around the world, and see if maybe somewhere it is open again from the back.)1
(Kleist, “Über das Marionetten Theater”)
Kleist summed up the mix of awe and profound disappointment that many intellectuals in the 1780s and 1790s must have felt in the wake of Kant's philosophy. For although in it human cognitive activity takes on new constitutive powers that define the boundaries of the real, the cost of shifting this constitutive power to human subjectivity was high: loss of access to a world beyond appearances. In spite of Kant's claim to have made room for faith in his philosophy, knowledge of the world of things “in themselves” was barred, so it seemed, once and for all. In his fictional essay “On the Marionette Theater,” Kleist frames the philosophical problem of knowledge as a problem within the context of performance art. His narrator interviews a renowned dancer who aims to move with absolute grace across the floor, freely and without alienation, but recognizes that the impossibility of achieving his goal is rooted in self-consciousness. The great dancer tells Kleist's narrator that the artist should look to the marionette as a model of unselfconscious expression of absolute, unalienated movement.
The dancer's remarks are a metaphor for human striving after that which is beyond the pale of possible human experience: absolute knowledge and perfect self-expression. Kleist's essay captures the problem that seemed almost without exception to plague philosophers in the immediate wake of Kant's relativization of knowledge to the human capacity to know. Kleist is not typically classified as a romantic, but his call for a back-door strategy to solve the problem of knowledge and self-expression is characteristic of much of early German romanticism, and describes the major project of this movement's most fascinating figure, Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Kant's philosophy was a fact of life for Novalis and the philosophers and poets of the famous Jena Circle. Indeed, the “Copernican” paradigm in philosophy was so well entrenched that in his encyclopedic “Allgemeine Brouillon” Novalis could speak of the Copernican turn as established fact:
Here Kant played the role of Copernicus and explained the empirical I along with its outer world as a planet, and placed the moral law or the moral I at the center of the system — and Fichte has become the Newton — the second Copernicus — the inventor of the laws of the system of the inner world.
(3:335)2
Novalis was as convinced as was Kant that the new philosophy of the subject had dissolved past errors in philosophy once and for all. Along with most of the intellectuals of his circle, Novalis abandoned the vaulting structures of Leibnizian and Wolffian rationalism for shelter in the Kantian alternative account of what the human mind can know. Kant himself recognized that human beings would forever be tempted to strive after the absolute, or “unconditioned,” but in the end his tendency was to be rather sanguine about the fact that everyday cognition, science, and even ethics, would have to do without final metaphysical answers. At the same time this great purveyor of rationalist humanism betrayed a fondness, even sympathy for metaphysical fantasizing that has been almost wholly ignored by commentators on his work.3
In the last section of this paper I will return to Kant to examine the place that metaphysical speculation retains in his system, and thus to argue for a continuity between his system and early German romanticism. To suggest that romanticism takes its cue from Kant is likely to raise philosophical hackles. It has become a cliché in many anglophone philosophical circles that German idealism and its pyrotechnical metaphysics jettisoned Kantian limits on knowledge. Early German romanticism is typically cast in this same unflattering role, with the additional offense of “irrationalism and mysticism” added to the indictment. In fact, however, many if not all of the early German romantics associated with the Jena Circle renounced metaphysical knowledge claims and speculative thinking in harsher terms than did Kant himself.4 No one better exemplifies this strict adherence to the Copernican turn than does Novalis, whose philosophical efforts culminate in the glorification of aesthetics and the practice of art as the embodiment of human freedom. This chapter will begin, then, with a look at the surprisingly modest metaphysical underpinnings of this great romantic poet and philosopher. In so doing I hope to exonerate Novalis, and by extension the early German romantic circle, of charges of metaphysical excess and irrationalism. In the second part of the chapter I look at the consequences of Novalis's views for an account of the nature of ordinary cognition.
In 1795–6 Novalis undertook a serious study of Fichte's Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) after having met Fichte, along with Hölderlin, in the home of a mutual friend in Jena. The set of notes on Fichte which comprised the bulk of a large handwritten manuscript written by Novalis has been called “the most significant philosophical work of early romanticism.”5 In it, Novalis comes to grips with the early philosophy of this thinker who had claimed ascendancy to Kant's throne in German philosophy. There is no doubt that Fichte's philosophy was of great importance to Novalis, yet what emerges in the Fichte Studies is not a student's reworking of the master's ideas, but rather a persistent criticism of the fundamental assumption of Fichte's major work. Whereas Fichte had argued that the inner world of the self may be accessed initially via an intellectual intuition of self-activity, in his Fichte Studies Novalis repeatedly insists that no immediate knowledge of the self as it is in itself is possible. He argues that self-observation is a kind of “eavesdropping on the self” in order to learn about it, but by “learning,” he says,
we mean absolutely nothing but intuiting an object and impressing it along with its characteristics upon ourselves. It [the self] would thus become an object again. No, philosophy cannot be self-observation, because it would not then be what we are after [i.e. it would not be immediately known as subject — JK]. It is perhaps self-feeling. What then is feeling?… It can only be observed in reflection — the spirit of feeling is then gone. The producer can be inferred from the product in accordance with the schema of reflection.
(2:113–14, #15)
Novalis goes on to argue that since feeling cannot represent itself, and reflection can only represent feeling in thought, our intuition of our Self is never of a thing as it is “in itself” but is necessarily always mediated or “inferred,” a synthetic product of feeling and reflection (2:114, #16). Novalis may have honored Fichte with the title of the “second Copernicus,” but this did not prevent his rejecting the Fichtean central assumption of the inner world of the self, namely that the “absolute” self can be known. Not only does Novalis reject claims of access to the “absolute I,” his “positive” account of the self resembles Kant's notion of the noumenal, or thing in itself, as a limiting notion. As von Molnár points out, Novalis typically refers to the concept of the “I” as a regulative one:6
I — has, perhaps, like all ideas of reason merely regulative, classificatory use — Nothing at all in relation to reality.
(2:258, #502)
Referring to Fichte's notion of a Tathandlung, the originary intuitive act of positing of the self, Novalis says,
Every state, every fact-act [Tathandlung] presupposes an other… all quest for a First [genus] is nonsense — it is a regulative idea.
(2:254, #472)
Novalis's reaction to Fichte places limitations on the power and reach of the intellect that are essentially Kantian in spirit. Especially as a student of the natural sciences, Novalis was critical of metaphysical speculation, insisting that although a “tendency to seek the universal” [Universaltendenz] is essential to the scholar,
One must never, like a phantast, seek the undetermined — a child of fantasy — an ideal. One proceeds from determinate task to determinate task. An unknown lover of course has a magical charm. Striving for the unknown, the undetermined, is extremely dangerous and disadvantageous. Revelation must not be forced.
(3:601, #291)
Given these strong views on the unknowability of the self as it is in itself, it is not surprising that Novalis's intense study of Fichte led him back again to a study of Kant. The very short collection of notes and commentary now collected under the title of Kant Studien (1797) was found together with a group of notes on the Dutch philosopher Hemsterhuis.7 Probably his renewed interest in Kant's views on the natural sciences was piqued by Hemsterhuis' frequent reference to the “Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences” in Hemsterhuis' “Metaphysics of Nature,” but given his abrupt turn away from Fichtean idealism it is likely that he turned to Kant's works to support his developing views on the limits of philosophizing about metaphysical matters.8
However, a set of very brief notes in this collection suggests that it could also have been another Kantian text, and a far more obscure one, that may have provided Novalis with impetus for the further development of his philosophy as well as his artistic enterprise. Amidst the notes on Kant's philosophy were also found notes on Kant's reply to Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, a well known medical doctor and physiologist from Frankfurt. Sömmerring's book “Über das Organ der Seele” raised the question of the “seat of the soul [der Sitz der Seele],” or the location of the mind in the body. The book was published with a short appendix written by Kant and sent to Sömmerring specifically for the book.9
If I am supposed to make the place of my soul, that is, of my absolute self, intuitable somewhere in space, then I must perceive myself through that very same [spatial intuition] through which I also perceive the matter right around me… Now the soul can only perceive via inner sense, but the body (whether internal or outer) can only perceive through outer sense; hence it can determine absolutely no place for itself, because in order to do this it would make itself the object of its own outer intuition and would have to transpose [versetzen] itself outside itself — which is a contradiction. So the desired solution of the problem of the seat of the soul which is demanded of metaphysics leads into an impossible dimension…and one can, with Terence, call to those who would undertake it: “You wouldn't succeed any more than if you were to try to be rationally insane.” [“Nihilo plus agas, quam si des opera ut cum ratione insanias.”]
(Kant, letter to Sömmerring, 1796)
To Sömmerring's question Kant replies that the spatial location [der Ort] of the soul, where “soul” is understood as “my absolute self” would have to be perceived in the same way we perceive matter around us, namely through outer sense (this includes our physical “insides” as well). But the absolute self can only perceive itself through inner sense, nonspatially, and therefore cannot determine a spatial place for itself. For the soul to make itself the object of its own outer intuition would mean that it would have to transpose [versetzen] its nonspatial being “outside” itself in space — and that is a contradiction, Kant says. The demand that metaphysics solve the problem of the seat of consciousness leads it into an impossible dimension, Kant continues, and he admonishes would-be metaphysical speculators with a quotation from Terence, the context of which involves advice to a spurned lover to give up on the idea of convincing through reason the heartless object of his desire.
The question of the “seat” of consciousness raised by Sömmerring, as well as an apparent dissatisfaction with Kant's deflationary response, might well explain Novalis's strong emphasis on the centrality of feeling to self-knowledge. Although Novalis makes no independent comment in his notes on the Sömmerring passage, later in his notes on the first Critique the question of the “seat” of consciousness is addressed obliquely:
The concept of sense. According to Kant, pure mathematics and pure natural science refer to the form of outer sensibility — What science refers to the form of inner sensibility? Is there yet extra-sensible knowledge? Is there still another way open for getting outside oneself and to get to others, or to be affected by them?
(II:46)
This getting “outside ourselves” is in all probability a reference to Kant's claim in the reply to Sömmerring, that the self cannot without contradiction be said to set itself outside itself. Later, in his well known work Pollen [Blütenstaub], Novalis picks up this thought in the following fragment:
The seat of the soul is there, where the inner world and the outer world touch [sich berühren]. Where they permeate — it is in every point of the permeating.
(Novalis, II: 418, #20)
The “inner world” is the world that Fichte tries to elucidate by recourse to intellectual intuition of an original act of self-consciousness, an account that, as we saw, Novalis rejected on Kantian grounds.10 At the same time, Novalis is unhappy with Kant's refusal to countenance any possibility for “externalizing” the inner world of the self. What Novalis seems to suggest here is a third option involving the redefining of self-consciousness as the interface between the inner world of self-feeling and the outer world of objective self-consciousness. This redefinition, he suggests, might also involve a way of reaching others and in turn being affected by them.
Novalis's insistence on the centrality of feeling to self-consciousness and hence to philosophy in general was very likely due in part to the influence of Hemsterhuis' philosophy. The latter's emphasis on desire, feeling, and the importance of poesy in understanding the sciences must have appealed greatly to the poet.11 A strong commitment to the importance of feeling to knowledge certainly helps explain the following exasperated comment in the midst of Novalis's Kant Studies:
The whole Kantian method — the whole Kantian way of philosophizing is one-sided. And it could with some justice be called Scholasticism.
(II:392 #50)
In another fragmentary note just prior to his pondering the possibility of another way of getting “outside ourselves,” Novalis suggests that the practice of philosophy itself, and practical reason, must move into a new, aesthetic dimension:
Philosophizing is just scientizing [wissenschaften], thinking through thought, knowing knowledge — treating the sciences scientifically and poetically. Should the practical and the poetic be one — and the latter simply signifies absolute practice made specific?
(II:390, #45)
Now, whatever it would it mean to find another way, an extra-sensible knowledge, for Novalis, it cannot involve abandoning the real world or embracing some noumenal thing in itself as known:
Everything absolute must be ostracized from the world. In the world one must live with the world.12
Underlying all Novalis's comments and criticisms, his underlying metaphysical assumption remains Kantian: the unknowability of the thing-in-itself is no longer up for debate. In fact, he makes the rather brash claim that Kant's belaboring of the issue can appear too obvious, “superfluous and wearisome” to thinkers of his own time if they did not keep in mind the historical context within which Kant worked.13 So when Novalis speaks of discovering an extra-sensible knowledge, he is by no means taking issue with Kant's circumscription of cognitive experience. For Novalis, finding a way to get “outside” ourselves is not a matter of conflating the spheres of the cognitive and moral self that Kant had so carefully separated.14 The wisdom of that path is already apparent to the young philosopher-poet as he finishes the Fichte Studies and works on Kant and Hemsterhuis. Novalis saw that getting outside ourselves requires making concrete and tangible in art our inner world based on self-feeling that is impossible to capture reflectively. Novalis's “other way” of locating the seat of consciousness in the world is through its embodiment in art.
Thus what Novalis finds lacking in Kant is not metaphysical, but imaginative commitment.15 The transposition of the self that Novalis seeks and fails to find in Kant's one-sided approach is, for Novalis, an imaginative transformation. Novalis's impatience with Kant appears to stem from his view that Kant fails to see the possibility of poeticizing the world, or as he would soon come to say — of “romanticizing” it. By “romanticizing” the world Novalis means something quite specific: to romanticize is to make what is ordinary and mundane extraordinary and mysterious, and conversely, to make what is unknown and mysterious ordinary.
The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original meaning. romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power [Potenzirung]. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This operation is still quite unknown. Insofar as I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a mysterious countenance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an appearance of infinity, I romanticize it. The operation is precisely the opposite for the higher, unknown, mystical and infinite — these are logarithmized by this connection — they become common expressions. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Alternating elevation and lowering.16
“The world must be romanticized.” This activity was, for Novalis, something Kant failed to theorize in his “one-sided” attempt to explain human knowledge in terms of pure reason. Novalis intended not to reject Kant's system but to complement and complete it, and his notion of romanticizing was a key step in that program. In this sense, Novalis saw himself as opposing Kant, who could certainly come off as a dour old scholastic in the mind of a twenty-four year old poet, by wanting to give free reign to the imagination as a vehicle for externalizing and hence realizing what could only be felt. Imagination, Novalis believed, would produce poetry that would be literally the embodiment and external vehicle for taking the self where it needed to be — outside itself and into the world. Therein lay Novalis's philosophical solution to Kleist's Kant-induced dilemma: the key to the back door to paradise would be aesthetic.
I have argued that Novalis's position in no way betrays Kant's Copernican revolution and does not embrace a metaphysical noumenon. Novalis is not an idealist in this sense. Yet the view that art is a supersession of philosophy appears to lend credence to another common criticism of romanticism, namely that it embraces irrationalism and mysticism. This too is an unfair characterization of Novalis's own views. To see why, it is important to begin with Novalis's characterization of the nature of philosophy itself.
Given Novalis's views on the regulative nature of the “I” and his renunciation of an absolute in any but a negative sense, one might expect him to read Kant's letter to Sömmerring with approval. However, as we just saw, the “seat of the soul” discussion appears to have sent him in another direction, one that marks a departure from Kant's views on self-knowledge. Novalis's philosophical account of self-knowledge depends crucially on the view that our “inner” sense of ourself- self-feeling — is absolute and immediate, but that our knowledge of it, being reflective, is never absolute and immediate. For Novalis the intellectual intuition that Fichte postulated as the basis of knowledge is replaced by what could be called “reflected self-feeling.” Novalis argues that thinking about our self-feeling does not give us direct access to this immediate self-experience, but it does gesture in the right direction, reminding us of it in an image: “Consciousness is an image of being within being” (#2). As Manfred Frank puts it, for Novalis, reflected self-feeling becomes the “orientation towards, or better, the longing for, the absolute.”17 In the Fichte Studies this longing is taken by Novalis to be the very heart of philosophy, or rather philosophizing — the “unique kind of thinking” that is the activity of doing philosophy:
What do I do when I philosophize? I reflect upon a ground. The ground of philosophizing is thus a striving after the thought of a ground.… All philosophizing must therefore end in an absolute ground. Now if this were not given, if this concept contained an impossibility — then the drive to philosophize would be an unending activity. … Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute — the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we can only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute. This absolute that is given to us can only be known negatively, insofar as we act and find that what we seek cannot be attained through action.
(#566)
Novalis's view of the activity of philosophy is that it involves a conscious recognition that it “absolutely” cannot attain its goal. But he also suggests that human consciousness cannot ultimately live with this paradoxical situation. Toward the very end of the Fichte Studies he calls for a free creative response to the limitations philosophy recognizes in reason:
Objects must not do violence to us — They must not hem us in, not determine [bestimmen] beyond the borders.… We must seek to create an inner world that is an actual pendant to the outer world — that insofar as it is in direct opposition to [the outer world] at every point, constantly increases our freedom.… All determinations proceed outward from us — we create a world out of ourselves.… The more we determine, the more we lay out what is in us — the freer — more substantial — we become — we set aside, as it were, more and more that which is inessential and approach the thoroughly pure, simple essence of our I. Our creative power gets as much free play as it has world under it. But since our nature, or the fullness of our being, is unending, we can never reach this goal in time — But since we are also in a sphere outside time, we must reach it there in every moment, or better, if we want, in this sphere we are able to be pure simple substance. Here is morality and peace of mind, because an endless striving after what hovers ever out of reach before us seems unbearable.
(#647)
These musings recall Kant's view that the human being has a higher vocation, a “standpoint” in an intellectual realm where it is possible at any time to transport oneself.18 But whereas Kant says that we can only think ourselves into this world, Novalis argues for the power of imagination to create a “sphere outside time.” Moreover, he claims that it is in this imaginative world that we first “approach … the pure simple essence of our ‘I.’ “The passage is cryptic, leaving the reader to speculate further on the nature of this world. But Novalis's notes seem to suggest a kind of moral oppositional consciousness — a utopian vision — a world of what ought to be as opposed to what is. It is unreal and unattainable, but we nevertheless can dwell in it because we are its imaginative architects. It is a sphere to be accessed “in every moment” precisely because it is outside time and place, in our imagination.
Two points need to be made about this matter of “world-making” in Novalis. First, it is not a mystical or transcendent account. Novalis is quite clear that the “inner” imaginative world is a “pendant” to the outer. It is oppositional and for that very reason dependent upon the world of objects, as any part depends on its counterpart. There is thus nothing ineffable about it. In Pollen he writes:
It is the most arbitrary prejudice that it is denied to human beings to be able to be outside themselves, to have consciousness beyond the senses. Humans may at any moment be supersensible beings. Without this ability they could not be citizens of the world, they would be animals. Of course the composure and self-discovery in this state is very difficult since it is so perpetually, so necessarily, bound up in the alternation of our other states. The more we are able to become conscious of this state, the livelier, more powerful and enjoyable is the conviction that arises from it; the belief in genuine spiritual revelation.
(II:421,#22)
Novalis goes on to describe this “appearance” as a kind of emergent experience rooted in ordinary life:
It is not a sight, a sound or feeling; it is all three together, more than all three: a sensation of immediate certainty, an insight into my truest, most characteristic life… the appearance [Erscheinung] strikes us particularly at the sight of many human forms and faces, especially in a glimpse of some eyes, some demeanors, some movements, or at the hearing of certain words, the reading of certain passages, certain perspectives on life, the world and fate. Very many coincidences, many events in nature, especially times of the year and day, deliver such experiences to us. Certain voices are particularly well-suited to producing such revelations. Most of them [revelations] are momentary, a few last awhile, a very few endure.
Novalis then says that different people will have different experiences of “revelation” depending on their propensities toward sensibility or understanding, and he also allows that this ability to “get outside oneself” is capable of becoming pathological when a person's senses and understanding are out of balance. Romanticism's detractors may or may not agree that this is a case of being “outside” oneself, but it is what Novalis means by the phrase, and it is a far cry from an irrationalist mystic's description of consciousness.
This leads to a second observation about Novalis's doctrine of imaginative world-making. It is an account of at least one important aspect of ordinary human cognition. Very typically his work, along with that of other romantics, is characterized as obsessed by the notion of individual genius. Novalis speaks as if he is characterizing ordinary human consciousness, the objection might proceed, but if self-discovery of what he called the “pure, simple I” depends so heavily on imagination, can this account be true for ordinary people? Or is it a description of the elite domain of artistic consciousness?
There is no doubt that in this section of the Fichte Studies Novalis was working out the rudiments of a theory of artistic process for himself. But in this connection it is important to keep in mind his subsequent views on artistic genius and talent, since they are far more liberal than is generally attributed to romanticism. In his Mixed Remarks, for instance, he advances the view that genius is a universal human faculty. He argues that genius is the ability to treat imagined objects as real and that it should be distinguished from the talent for presentation and precise observation that is necessary for the development of genius. He then quite explicitly states:
Without geniality, none of us would exist at all. Genius is necessary for everything. What is usually meant by genius however, is the genius of genius.19
This is unequivocal. For Novalis, as for Fichte and Kant as well, imagination is a universal, necessary condition of human cognitive experience. It is precisely the naturalness of the capacity that he finds significant for self-knowledge. Revelation itself is natural, and “must not be forced.” It is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence as in revery and day-dreaming that defines the human: a being to be found “there, where the inner world and the outer world touch.”
Novalis's theory of the self aestheticizes and materializes Kant's account of human beings as at any point in time members of an intellectual realm. The one-sidedness that Novalis finds in Kant seems to be the latter's inability to recognize the transformative and transpositional power of the human imagination for turning feeling and inner experience into something concrete and external. Yet Novalis's diagnosis of Kant's one-sidedness is perhaps too hasty. There is much in Kant's work, especially tied to his aesthetic theory, that suggests real sympathy for the sort of position Novalis eventually develops. Frederick Beiser has argued that Kant “divorced” himself from metaphysics after 1765, whereupon he directed his philosophical energies more to practical concerns.20 The locus classicus of Kant's self-avowed conversion to the primacy of the practical is a statement made in his “Remarks on the ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime’”:
I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity. I should consider myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that one consideration alone gives worth to all others, namely, to establish the rights of man.21
Beiser sees the concern expressed by Kant that his philosophizing be “useful” as a concern shared generally by later Enlighteners in Germany:
The Aufklärung was a practical movement insofar as its purpose was not to discover the first principles of reason — most Aufklärer believed that this task had already been achieved by thinkers such as Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant — but to bring them into daily life. In short, its aim was to surmount the gap between reason and life, theory and practice, speculation and action… Most thinkers of the late eighteenth century saw themselves as Aufklärer, not only older figures such as Kant, Herder, and Wieland, but also younger ones such as Schlegel, Hölderlin, and Novalis.22
This turn to the practical explains, according to Beiser, why Kant comes to manifest a “complete skepticism toward metaphysics.” It is so deep, he says, that in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, “he likens metaphysics to the dreams of the visionary or spirit-seer,”23 and he also claims that for Kant
Both metaphysicians and spirit seers live in a private fantasy world and chase after illusory abstractions… the aim of [Kant's] skepticism [about metaphysics] is to expose the vanity of speculation, so that we direct our efforts toward finding what is truly useful for human life.24
In giving preference to practical over theoretical reason, Beiser suggests, the honeymoon with metaphysics is over for Kant. Still, Beiser correctly maintains that the supposed divorce was never fully carried out, and that “the flames of the old love affair burnt to the bitter end” of Kant's life.25 Beiser finds the old flame burning most strongly in Kant's hypostatizing in the second Critique of the conditions under which human beings could hope to bring about a just world — the highest good, that is, in the postulates of metaphysical notions of God and immortality. This return to metaphysics constitutes a “deep betrayal” of the radical spirit of his republican politics, and represents an inconsistency in his philosophy, Beiser says.26
Although Beiser is surely correct to point to Kant's disillusionment with metaphysics in 1765 and even before, he overstates the situation in labeling Kant's position one of “complete skepticism” about the value of metaphysics. While it is true that Kant castigates metaphysics for being schwärmerisch, and prone to fanaticism, it is important to remember that Kant was not himself immune to “enthusiasm,” nor was he ashamed to admit that fact. The oft-cited passage from the “Remarks” is certainly indicative of Kant's own susceptibility to Schwärmerei, both for knowledge and morality: he confesses to a “consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance it” that only gave way after reading Rousseau to an even more consuming desire “to establish the rights of man.” Even more important, from time to time throughout his career Kant actually embraced metaphysical Schwärmerei in the service of morality and eventually even found a limited place for this enthusiasm in the critical system. Thus Kant's critical philosophy by no means forecloses the early romantic option of seeking a back door to paradise.
There are a number of places where Kant discusses Schwärmerei or enthusiasm and admits that it has, or at least is capable of having, a positive moral value. In his “Reflections on Anthropology,” Kant defines the “fantast” as one who takes his own fictions for reality, and he identifies two kinds: the “fantast of sensation” and “of concepts.” The former are “dreamers” who mistake their own feelings for actual perceptions, i.e. they take what is merely in their thoughts to be perceived through the bodily senses (lovers and melancholics are examples he gives).27 Fantasts of concepts are visionaries, or “enthusiasts” who “realize” i.e. take to be real, the idea of the Good. Fantasts of both sorts confuse imagination with reality, but it is for the latter that Kant has the most sympathy. Kant claims that Rousseau and Plato were just such enthusiasts of reason.28
In the essay entitled “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” written in 1794 and published in 1798 as the second section of “Streit der Fakultäten,” Kant writes that
There must be some experience in the human race which, as an event, points to the disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better, and … toward the human race as being the author of this advance.29
Kant uses the question of moral progress to take the opportunity to express his own support for the goals, if not the means, of the French Revolution. Yet the “event” that indicates the human capacity for moral progress is not the revolution, but rather “the mode of thinking [Denkungsart] of the spectators.” That is, the event that indicates human ability to be the “author” of a more moral world is the publicly expressed, unselfish (uneigennützig) feeling of sympathy and excitement for those who participate in struggles to end human oppression. The glimmer of hope that history holds out to those seeking reason to believe in moral progress is the spectators' “wishful participation that borders on enthusiasm,” an enthusiasm that Kant identifies as a “passionate participation in the good.”30 Or, in other words, these spectators' moral passion is aroused by the vision of their moral and political ideals being realized.
As we saw, Kant's reference to enthusiasm is a reference to a particular use of imagination in which ideas are taken to be real. Kant certainly worried that this enthusiasm could be simply a kind of madness, and he by no means glorified the state. The point here is simply to note his ambivalence. In the same passage from the “Old Question” Kant makes a point that he repeatedly made in his lectures on anthropology: “Genuine enthusiasm always moves only toward what is ideal and, indeed, to what is purely moral, such as the concept of right.”31 In his anthropology lectures32 during the 1770s, Kant told his students that “An enthusiast is always a noble Fantast, full of life and strength, and so, in addition, inclined to virtue. Indeed, much that is good disappears from the land where they are purged.”33 Kant is of course not arguing that we all incorporate enthusiastic tendencies into our moral development. He is simply responding to the view that all madness is evil and must be rooted out. During periods of crisis such as the one he knew so well, Kant was no doubt well aware how easily polit- ically radical views could be dismissed and “treated” as a kind of insanity. Spectators to the revolution, whose sympathetic fervor “borders” on enthusiasm, are a mild and even socially useful case of the disease because they approach the state of mind of the “noble fantast” in their ability to visualize and desire the ideal.
In this respect they also resemble the metaphysicians maligned by Kant in “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.” Kant associates Rousseau with this sort of enthusiasm, yet it was Rousseau who awakened him from his dogmatic metaphysical slumbers and caused him to divorce himself from “elitist” metaphysical speculation in favor of the practical! Kant's fondness for Rousseau, and his more tolerant views on moral visionaries in general, may have prompted him in the end to find a systematic place for this sort of “fantastic” thinking in his philosophy. One place where it appears that Kant may be doing precisely that is in the third Critique at section 17 (“On the Ideal of Beauty”). Kant here describes a kind of judging that involves the connecting of intuitive presentations with a moral idea, producing a concrete presentation of what is merely a rational idea. In the exhibition of this idea of reason, imagination makes the realization of that idea subjectively possible — “imaginable.” For instance, perfect human virtue is an unattainable ideal. But “a very strong imagination” can give this intellectual idea a flesh and blood quality that it did not have before, bringing it down to earth, as it were, and enabling a vision of that which moral reason requires human beings to strive for.34 Interestingly enough, Kant hints that this will not be found in all people:
in order for this connection to be made visible, as it were, in bodily expression (as an effect of what is inward), pure ideas of reason must be united with a very strong imagination in someone who seeks so much as to judge, let alone exhibit it.35
The similarities in this section of the third Critique to Kant's account of the “pathological” state of the fantast of reason are clear: the person judging according to an ideal of beauty is seeing genuine reality in his/her idea. And yet here Kant is in no way suggesting that taking ideas for reality is deranged. It is simply a way of putting aesthetic judgment to moral use, although presumably only a few will have the requisite powers of imagination to produce this ideal. Here at last, Kant's abandoned metaphysical longings seem to have found a new home in aesthetic feeling.
Of course, in Kant's account of taste, the pleasure taken in the beautiful object is not bound up with an interest, that is, with the desire for the existence of the object. This is what it means to say that we take a disinterested pleasure in the beautiful. “But,” Kant says, “it does not follow from this that, after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one, an interest cannot be connected with it.”36 Kant then allows two possibilities: one “empirical” and the other “intellectual,” and it is the intellectual interest arising from disinterested pleasure that appears to be a repackaged version of Kant's old desire for metaphysics. Since reason has an interest, as Kant puts it, in the “objective reality” of its moral ideas, it cannot be a matter of complete indifference to us, when contemplating the beautiful, that nature here “shows a trace or gives a hint that it contains some basis or other for us to assume” an orderliness that may be conducive to, or at least not out of sync with, our moral desires.37
Kant is suggesting that in the process of making an aesthetic reflective judgment about the beauty of an object, we may come to care for the nature of which it is but a part. We may come to value the whole of the natural world for its own sake. A condition of this disinterested love of the world may be the fact that we, as moral beings, are charged with the task of bringing moral order into the natural world — a demand on human nature that hardly seems possible. Thus we are intellectually interested in finding that nature outside us, in what appears to be the rational orderliness and purposiveness of her beauty, may be suited to the nature “within.”
At this point we may return to Novalis. For the feeling of pleasure that we take in the “hint” of a rational order outside ourselves is precisely that longing for the absolute that Novalis argued human beings can attain through art. Kant retains a place for metaphysics and the enthusiasm it breeds by reintroducing it into his theory of aesthetic reflection. Here it is no longer “banished altogether” but is nevertheless contained: it may project visions and fantasies in its judgments about beauty and in the course of artistic creativity. It may even take a kind of moral interest in these aesthetic constructions. But they can never be more than regulative longings. The person who comes to love the whole of nature based on disinterested contemplation bears a close resemblance to the “noble fantast” and finds her place alongside Plato's philosopher gazing out of the cave, or with Rousseau, surveying the natural goodness of humanity in the state of nature, or even standing with Kant, gazing in awe at the starry heavens above. In Kant's terms, all these persons take an intellectual interest in the beautiful, And, what is most interesting for our purposes, they are also “romanticizing” in Novalis's sense of the term. The desire to recognize inner human states in the outer world, to make the unknown known, is precisely the way Kant defines the fantast. Kant had already discerned Novalis's recipe for romanticizing the world.
That the desire for metaphysical speculation is inevitable and unavoidable is, of course, a recurring theme in the first Critique. Reason seeks the unconditioned by its very nature. For Kant, as for Novalis, the danger is believing that one has found it. Both Novalis and Kant advocate a certain tough-minded resistance to the urge to take flight in fantasy and to forget the actual world. But as we saw, Kant's attitude toward fanaticism is not uniformly negative, and in a footnote in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (“On the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”) Kant makes the following surprising admission:
In fact man can desire something most fervently and persistently even though he is convinced that he cannot achieve it, or that it is perhaps even [something] absolutely impossible … and it is indeed an important article for morality to warn us emphatically against such empty and fanciful desires, which are often nourished by novels and sometimes also by mystical presentations, similar to novels, of superhuman perfections and fanatical bliss. But some empty desires and longings… do have their effect on the mind.… It is indeed a not unimportant problem for anthropology to investigate why it is that nature has given us the predisposition to such fruitless expenditure of our forces as [we see in] empty wishes and longings (which certainly play a large role in human life). It seems to me that here, as in all else, nature has made wise provisions. For if we had to assure ourselves that we can in fact produce the object, before the presentation of it could determine us to apply our forces, our forces would presumably remain largely unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have except by trying them out. So nature has provided for the connection between the determination of our forces and the presentation of the object [to be there] even before we know what ability we have, and it is often precisely this effort, which to that very mind seemed at first an empty wish, that produces that ability in the first place. Now wisdom is obligated to set limits to that instinct, but wisdom will never succeed in eradicating it, or [rather] it will never even demand its eradication.38
So a “a predisposition” to “empty desires and longings” that appear to be a “fruitless expenditure of our forces” could in fact be an enabling mechanism — part of nature's plan for advancing human capacities unbeknownst to them. In the end, Kant seems to have finally settled on the view that the desire for metaphysics is useful, and may, indeed ought to be, embraced by Enlightenment.
Kant, like Novalis, firmly believed that longing and striving for the absolute, the unconditioned, was an essential characteristic of human reason that neither could nor should be entirely resisted. Both also agreed that knowledge of the absolute could never be attained, and that claims to have done so were necessarily in error. The difference between Kant and Novalis was thus not a difference over the value of unattainable rational ideals or the need to avoid transcendent delusions. What really separates the two is Kant's willingness to simply accept the limitations of human reason and hence of philosophy. Novalis took this resignation to be a kind of “scholasticism” — a “one-sided” approach that assigned philosophy to the domain of reason alone. His innovation, and that of his cohort in Jena, was to redefine philosophy itself as an “unending, free activity” that at its limits may become an aesthetic, creative endeavor.
1 Heinrich von Kleist: Werke in einem Band, Munich, Karl Hanser Verlag, 1966, 802–7.
2 All references to Novalis's works are to Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, Stuttgart, Verlag W. Kohlhammer. The second and third volumes, edited by Samuel together with Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz, contain Novalis's philosophical writings, published in1981 and 1983 respectively.
3 Although Kant was not always comfortable with this attitude. Kant throughout his life was fascinated by apparently “supernatural” phenomena. Cf. Hartmut and Gernot Böhme's Das Andere der Vernunft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996.
4 In this essay I deal only with Novalis and his circle of early German romantics. The later romantics, especially those associated with Heidelberg, but even including Schlegel and Tieck in their later period, are not under discussion here.
5 Manfred Frank, in Einführung in die Frühromantische Ästhetik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989, p. 248. Novalis's work, which included the so-called Fichte Studies and Kant Studies, comprised about 500 pages of handwritten notes that were left unpublished until 1901, when Ernst Heilborn brought out a substantial selection of the notes. The entire set, however, remained unpublished and was lost to scholarship for thirty years between 1930 and 1960, when it resurfaced at an auction in New York.
6 Geza von Molnár argues for this point in Novalis's ‘Fichte Studies’: The Foundations of His Aesthetics, The Hague, Mouton Press, 1970, pp. 41–2.
7 Hemsterhuis lived from 1721 to 1790. See Hans-Joachim Mähl's introduction to the Kant and Eschenmeyer Studies, Novalis Schriften 2:334. According to Mähl, based on the handwriting and the type and format of the paper, these were probably written during or immediately following his work on Hemsterhuis, and within a year after finishing the Fichte Studies in 1796.
8 Ibid., p. 332. The fact that his focus of study seems to have been primarily the preface and introduction to the first Critique as well as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science also supports this view.
9 See the letter to Sömmerring dated 10 August 1795. Kants gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy edn, XII.3:30–5.
10 Although Novalis appeared to believe that some sort of phenomenology, a science of inner sense, is possible. As we saw, he also took Fichte to be the “Newton” of this science. See Allgemeine Brouillon, Novalis Schriften, 3:335 (#460).
11 Cf. Hans-Joachim Mähl's introduction, II: 314ff.
12 This is taken from the Fragmentblatt found along with the Kant notes (Schriften, II:395, #55) It follows a remarkable passage in which Novalis suggests, presumably in opposition to Fichte's notion of an originary self-postulation or Tathandlung, that “the true philosophical act is suicide … only this act corresponds to all the conditions and characteristics of the transcendental act.” I.e. we can't bring ourselves into being, but we can take ourselves out.
13 Kant-Studien #49, 2:392.
14 See FS #649: “we are also in a sphere outside time” — Novalis retains Kant's view that to be human means to be able to “transport” oneself into a realm of intellect.
15 See my “The Failure of Kant's Imagination,” in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-century Answers and Twentieth-century Questions, James Schmidt (ed.), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 453–70, for a discussion of the role imagination did and could have played in Kant's overall theory.
16 2:545, #105.
17 Cf. Frank, Einführung, p. 253.
18 E.g. in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, IV:452ff.
19 Novalis Schriften II, p. 420, #22.
20 Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1992; and in his “Kant's Intellectual Development: 1746–1781” in the Cambridge Companion to Kant, Paul Guyer (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 26–61.
21 Kants Schriften, XX:8–16.
22 F. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, p. 9.
23 F. Beiser, “Kant's Intellectual Development,” Cambridge Companion to Kant, p. 45.
24 In “The Politics of Kant's Critical Philosophy,” Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, op. cit., p. 28.
25 F. Beiser, “Kant's Intellectual Development,” p. 57.
26 F. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, p. 55.
27 Kants Schriften, 15.1:210, #488; and 217,#499.
28 Ibid., 15.1:210, #488. See also the lecture notes. For example, the Pillau notes: 25:2.2:764, 767.
29 The essay, although complete in its own right, was included as the second part of the 1798 publication entitled Streit der Fakultäten. The translation here is from Kant on History, edited by Lewis White Beck (New York, Macmillan, 1986) pp. 137–54. The citation is from p. 142 (AK VII:84–5).
30 Ibid., VII: 85, 86.
31 Ibid., VII:86.
32 Based on the notes taken by a student, Theodor Friederich Brauer, dated 1779, taken from transcripts now available at the Philips-Universität Marburg. I would like to thank Werner Stark for assistance in the use of these materials, and for helpful information about the historical context in which they were written. Although these sources are from student transcriptions of Kant's lectures, and are therefore not the final word on any disputed question in Kant interpretation, nothing that I rely on here is out of character for Kant, but rather corroborates views he expressed elsewhere on enthusiasm. I have relied only on passages from Brauer that also appear in notes taken down by other students during that time.
33 Brauer, ms. p. 88.
34 Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, Minneapolis, Hackett, 1987, V:231ff. All translations here are from Pluhar. Page references are to the Academy Edition pagination indicated in his text.
The potential value of imagination's capacity to enliven morality is especially apparent in the case of Kant's doctrine of the Highest Good, that is, of a moral world in which virtue and happiness are commensurate, or at least in which human beings make every effort to maximize the correspondence of happiness to virtue. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that the moral law requires that human beings strive to bring about such a moral world on earth, but that in order for this command to be legitimate, it must be possible for human beings to believe that such a command could be fulfilled, i.e. they must have some rational hope that the end commanded is possible. As is well known, at this point Kant argues that human beings have no reason to suppose that they can bring about a perfectly moral world in which happiness coincides with virtue, and so they must postulate the existence of God (and the immortality of the soul) to ground their hope, and to make action in accordance with the moral law rational. This is the place, according to Beiser, where we see Kant bringing metaphysics in the service of the practical.
35 Critique of Judgment, V:235.
36 Critique of Judgment, VII:296.
37 Ibid., VII:300.
38 First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Ak 11:230–1, n. 50. Published in Pluhar translation of the Critique of Judgment, pp. 383–441.