Jan Urbich
‘There’s a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in’
LEONARD COHEN
Friedrich Schlegel’s poetology, like early German Romantic philosophy and aesthetics in general, participates in the claims which are linked with the highest possible position of art in the idealistic systems elaborated by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel and Solger. In Hegel’s words: ‘Als ein Mittelglied zwischen dem reinen Gedanken, der übersinnlichen Welt, und dem Unmittelbaren, der gegenwärtigen Empfindung, [...] versöhnt die Kunst [...] Begriff und [...] Natur’ [As a bond between the pure thought, the extrasensory world, and the immediate, present sensation, art reconciles concept and nature].1 Still more emphatically than Hegel, the young Schelling asserts: ‘Die Kunst bringt den ganzen Menschen, wie er ist, dahin, nämlich zur Erkenntnis des Höchsten, und darauf beruht der ewige Unterschied, und das Wunder der Kunst’ [Art takes the whole person, as he is, to the knowledge of the highest, and on that the eternal difference, and the miracle of art is based].2 A philosophical ‘Liebhaberei fürs Absolute’ [amateur enthusiasm for the absolute]3 as the understanding that ‘alles Filosofieren muß bey einem absoluten Grunde endigen’ [all philosophy has to end on an absolute ground]4 is concentrated in the following statement of Schelling, which brings in its wake an epistemological consequence that becomes the foundation of most of early Romantic thought: ‘Jeder ist von Natur getrieben, ein Absolutes zu suchen; aber indem er es für die Reflexion fixiren will, verschwindet es ihm. [...] Es ist nur da, inwiefern ich es nicht habe, und inwiefern ich es habe, ist es nicht mehr’ [Everybody is driven by nature to search for the absolute; but as soon as he wants to fix it by reflection, it disappears. [...] It is only there when I do not have it; and when I have it, it is not there].5 The romantic ‘Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen’ [longing for the infinite] is often misunderstood.6 It is based on the paradoxical notion — inspired by Kant’s theory of ‘regulative ideas’ — that the completion of all knowledge and being in the absolute must necessarily be sought for, while at the same time it cannot be made present within the space of the finite mind: ‘Erkennen bedeutet schon ein bedingtes Wissen. Die Nichterkennbarkeit des Absoluten also eine identische Trivialität’ [To know already means to have limited knowledge. The unknowability of the absolute is thus an identical triviality].7 The problem becomes more complicated for the early Romantics owing to the differences between the various media by which one might hope to grasp the absolute, reflected in the difference between the activity of knowing and the presentation of knowledge: ‘Das reine Denken und Erkennen des Höchsten kann nie adäquat dargestellt werden’ [The pure thinking and knowledge of the highest can never be represented adequately] — a principle that Schlegel calls the ‘Prinzip der relativen Undarstellbarkeit des Höchsten’ [principle of the relative unrepresentability of the highest].8 The assignment of poetry is linked closely to that principle: ‘Der Sinn für Poesie hat viel mit Mystizism gemein. [...] Er stellt das Undarstellbare dar’ [The sense for poetry has a lot in common with mysticism. [...] It represents the unrepresentable].9
Early Romantic poetics therefore persistently revolves the possibility and the form of an ‘indirect representation’ of the ‘only negatively knowable absolute’,10 through processes which annihilate the finiteness of all determinations, using both the logic of form and the figural or semantic techniques of art — including irony, wit, and so on.11 The finiteness of the significant elements must be exceeded by the aesthetic network of expressions; but the illusion of the prevailing ‘symbol’-concept which simply identifies the finite and the infinite in symbolic representation must be avoided. Thereby the temporality of an infinite aesthetic dynamics becomes the microcosmic image of the infinite within the finite.12 The negativity of its permanent transgression of every closed, determined finiteness without its ever becoming positively infinite provokes (in the wake of Lessing’s Laokoon) the search for the inner form of temporality that marks the aesthetic space of poetry. The absolute as the Beyond of intentionality and consciousness13 enters into view in early Romantic poetics through the infinity and inexhaustibility of the poetic meaning which is produced by works of literary art.14 Subsequent to Kant’s theory of ‘aesthetic idea’15 (and in opposition to Karl Philipp Moritz’s notion that meaning is suspended within the beauty of poetic works),16 then, the constitutional semantic ambiguity of poetic works becomes understood as the indirect expression of the epistemological and ontological unease that blurs the clear distinction between the finite and the infinite.
Friedrich Schlegel is above all concerned with how to set nature and poetry in a specific relation. His basic intuition is therefore ‘enthusiastic’, in a sentimental, pantheistic sense,17 emphasizing the unity, wholeness and ontological harmony of the universe within the plurality and diversity of nature. Early Romantic thought considers the organic dynamics and harmonic interplay of nature as the expression of the eternal, divine ‘creative principle’ to be the basis and creative power of poetic activity: ‘Die Natur hat Kunstinstinkt’ [Nature has an instinct for art], and Novalis asserts that it would be ‘[ein] Geschwätz, wenn man Natur und Kunst unterscheiden will’ [idle to want to distinguish between nature and art].18 The natura naturans becomes the substance of poetic creativity — for the infinite harmonic productivity and beauty of its forms of expression as well as for the organic unity und inner necessity of its works19 — and ensures at the same time in its Spinozistic harmony the translatability of its elements into every possible relation of expression.
Early Romantic thought longs to understand everything from language to poetry in analogy to nature:20 ‘Im Universum der Poesie aber selbst ruht nichts, alles wird und verwandelt sich und bewegt sich harmonisch’ [In the universe of poetry nothing rests, everything becomes and changes and moves harmoniously].21 Only as ‘genetische Nachamung’ [genetic imitation] is poetry alive and romantic.22 Rejecting the Aristotelian concept of ‘mimesis’ (as set out in Charles Batteux’s ‘Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe’ of 1746, which posits art as imitation of reality), Novalis as well as Friedrich Schlegel emphasize the autonomous law and self-reflexivity of art, which only imitates nature by reproducing analogically its infinite power to produce (‘natura naturans’):23 it creates forms and sets everything in harmonic dynamics within the medium of the ‘nous’ (spirit). This infinitely creative natural force is at work in nature and art at different levels of power. This notion enables Schlegel to redefines the tradition of the ‘genius’. It ensures at the same time the relation of art to the ‘absolute’, which represents itself in poetry without being representable by knowledge or poetry at all: ‘Das Wesen der höhern Kunst und Form besteht in der Beziehung aufs Ganze’ [The essence of art and form is its relation to the whole].24
In the Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy that Schlegel delivered in Jena (1800-01), the relation to the whole of the creative natural power which articulates itself in poetry within the limits of aesthetic representation is founded in a logic of expression of the ‘absolute’. Here for the first time Schlegel’s central thought concerning the term ‘symbol’, which explains the participation as well as the distance of the poetic representation to the infinite, is expressed clearly:
Warum ist das Unendliche aus sich herausgegangen und hat sich endlich gemacht? — das heißt mit andren Worten: Warum sind Individua? Oder: Warum läuft das Spiel der Natur nicht in einem Nu ab, so daß also gar nichts existirt? Die Antwort auf diese Frage ist nur möglich, wenn wir einen Begriff einschieben. Wir haben nämlich die Begriffe eine, unendliche Substanz — und Individua. Wenn wir uns den Übergang von dem einen zu den andern erklären wollen, so können wir dies nicht anders, als daß wir zwischen beyden noch einen Begriff einschieben, nämlich den Begriff des Bildes oder Darstellung, Allegorie (εἰκών). Das Individuum ist also ein Bild der einen unendlichen Substanz. (Man könnte dies auch ausdrücken: Gott hat die Welt hervorgebracht, um sich selbst darzustellen.)
[Why has the infinite gone out of itself and made itself finite? — that is, in other words: Why are individua? Or: Why isn’t the whole game of nature executed in just a single moment, so that nothing exists at all? The answer to this question is only possible if we insert a term. That is to say, we have the terms one, infinite substance — and individua. If we want to explain to ourselves the transfer from one to the other, we cannot do this except by inserting one more term, namely that of the image or representation, allegory (eikon). The individual, then, is an image of the one, infinite substance. (One could also express this in the following way: God has produced the world to represent himself.)]25
The curtailed, indirect and somehow broken image — ‘Welt im verringerten Maasstabe [world in reduced size]26 — which marks the energetic centre of the lively, individual image, is denominated by the term ‘allegory’ to indicate its relation to the infinite. In the ‘Wesen des Geistes [...], sich selbst zu bestimmen und im ewigen Wechsel aus sich herauszugehn und in sich zurückzukehren’ [being of the spirit [...] to determine itself and to go out and return to itself in everlasting movement], a movement in which ‘die unbeschränkte Fülle neuer Erfindung, durch die allgemeine Mitteilbarkeit und durch die lebendige Wirksamkeit aufs herrlichste offenbart’ [the unrestricted fullness of new invention is most splendidly revealed by the universal mediacy and vivid potency], there emerges the unity of a common harmonic productivity between the finite and the infinite, by which both mirror each other as elements of a divine relation without erasing their difference.27 Far from being eradicated, indeed, their difference constitutes precisely the impulsion to move continuously towards each other and to represent each other in themselves as that image of their common harmonic striving which Schlegel calls the ‘spirit of love’. With this phrase Schlegel alludes to the platonic conception of ‘eros’ as everlasting striving, which figures the very harmony of its elements as an inability to bring each other to the completion of non-differential identity. ‘Nie wird der Geist, welcher die Orgien der wahren Muse kennt, auf dieser Bahn bis ans Ende dringen, oder wähnen, daß er es erreicht: denn nie kann er eine Sehnsucht stillen, die aus der Fülle der Befriedigungen selbst sich ewig von neuem erzeugt’ [The spirit which has experienced the orgies of the true muse will never penetrate to the end of this road, or attain the delusion of having reached it: for it can never allay a longing that eternally generates itself anew from the fullness of fulfilments itself].28 Schlegel here assimilates a concept from Aristotle that describes the fulfilment of an infinite movement in which deficiency and fulfilment are identical within the dynamics of their mediation, because this movement is at the same time completed in every moment of its infinite striving.29 This open dialectic of absence and fulfilment, of dynamic restriction and self-transcendence, by which the irreducibly positive quality of aesthetic indirectness, limitation and negativity is conceived, plays a central role in Schlegel’s theory of the artwork and at the same time informs his theory of symbol and allegory. The concept of the inner infinity of the artwork as effect of its aesthetic composition is enhanced by the idea of a ‘medium of art’:30 ‘Darum sind alle Werke Ein Werk, alle Künste Eine Kunst, alle Gedichte Ein Gedicht. Denn alle wollen ja dasselbe, das überall Eine, und zwar in seiner ungeteilten Einheit. Aber eben darum will auch jedes Glied in diesem höchsten Gebilde des menschlichen Geistes zugleich das Ganze sein’ [This is why all works of art are just One work, all arts just One art, all poems just One poem. For everything wants the same, that which is everywhere One in its undivided unity. But therefore every element in this highest unity of the human mind wants to be the unity itself].31 For Schlegel, poetic works of art are linguistic structures of expression, which are not primarily determined by the substance of their content, but rather by the special formal, individual, self-reflexive, autonomous order of their formation.32
In the richness of the relations of its elements, in the interplay of contrast and reconciliation, in the liveliness of its inner movement of meaning and structure, as Schlegel explains paradigmatically in his philosophical review of Goethe’s Wilhelm-Meister, the artwork creates an individual organic internal harmony which becomes at the same time the basis of its transcendence into the universal. The individual unity of the work preserves itself precisely in the resistance mounted by the greatest possible internal differentiality against the effort to unify. This unity, as a kind of an abridged image of art itself, therefore depends upon the whole ‘medium of art’ as a final unity that all works of art aim for. In its inner completion, the individual artwork recapitulates a unity which it actually lacks in its own individuality, yet at the same time exhibits in a lower and abridged form. Symbolically, the aesthetic completion of the formation of the work of art points to an absence that is at the same time fulfilled; organically, the whole is present in the single work in such a way that its absence is no longer mere absence. The ‘external’ means by which the single work of art may be raised to that complete unity of art that is already smouldering in the artwork is ‘criticism’, understood as a completion of the individual disposition of the artwork. It is here that Walter Benjamin’s concept of criticism has its origins.33 The internal structures of the work of art that make this kind of ontological criticism possible are the symbol and the allegory.
By what means can the individual work of art, with its constitutively self-reflexive dimension, simultaneously relate to the whole of art? ‘[D]urch dasselbe, wodurch überall der Schein des Endlichen mit der Wahrheit des Ewigen in Beziehung gesetzt und eben dadurch in sie aufgelöst wird: durch Allegorie, durch Symbole, durch die an die Stelle der Täuschung die Bedeutung tritt, das einzige Wirkliche im Dasein, weil nur der Sinn, der Geist des Daseins entspringt und zurückgeht aus dem, was über alle Täuschung und über alles Dasein erhaben ist’ [By the same means by which everywhere the appearance of the finite is connected with the truth of the eternal and so is dissolved into the eternal: by allegory, by symbols, through which the appearance is replaced by the meaning itself, the only real thing in existence because only the meaning, the spirit of existence arises and returns from that which is elevated above all deceit and above all existence].34 The self-transcendency of the work of art as a result of its internal unity that relates the limited sign and the unlimited meaning without erasing one side, is bound to the reflexive self-relation that Walter Benjamin has called the ‘Reflexionsmedium’ [medium of reflection]: ‘[Die] höhere Kunst [...] ist selbst Natur und Leben und schlechthin eins mit diesen; aber sie ist die Natur der Natur, das Leben des Lebens, der Mensch im Menschen“ [The higher art is itself nature and life und utterly one with both; but it is the nature of nature, the life of life, the human in the human being].35 Schlegel coined the term ‘Transzendentalpoesie’ in order to describe the constitutive function of self-reflexivity of poetic works of art, which represent ‘das Produzierende mit dem Produkt’ [the producer along with the product] and are ‘überall zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie’ [always simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry];36 so that the work of art hovers ‘auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte’ [at the midpoint on the wings of poetic reflection], ‘diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen’ [raising that reflection over and over again to a higher power and multiplying it in an endless row of mirrors].37 For Schlegel, at this time a follower of Fichte, it is only this structure that guarantees the spiritual nature of art: ‘Sinn, der sich selbst sieht, wird Geist’ [Meaning that becomes aware of itself is spirit].38
The levels of self-relation that are realized in poetic representations and that dynamize their ironic movements are also counter-forces to the bare symbolic identity of being and meaning. While they turn the non-identity of consciousness as form of the difference of the sides of reflection into the constitutive fact of aesthetic representation and aesthetic meaning, at the same time they prevent the closure of the aesthetic process of meaning and guarantee that every work of art in its very unity and closure initiates a movement of opening the finite to the infinite. The distance between the signifier and the signified, in which the relation of reflection as well as the concept of aesthetic form is grounded, not the thing-like unity of both, becomes the meta-logic of poetic representation. The self-reflexivity and intransitivity of the romantic concepts of art and language39 express allegorically a model of the relation of being and meaning: the thing-like closeness of poetic language, its ontic aspect is inseparably bound to forms of reference and difference, in other words to the reflexive aspect of signifying. Being and meaning do not form an identity in the symbol as Moritz’s or Goethe’s symbol-conception posits. The reflexive non-identity of signs and meaning that neither issues in the extreme of the thing-like identity of both nor in purely arbitrary, purely differential sign-like non-identity propels the inner force of Romantic representation: ‘Jedes Kunstwerk ist eine Anspielung aufs Unendliche’ [Every work of art is an allusion to the infinite].40
That also explains why the distinction between ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ is not a central one in Schlegel’s concept of poetics: for the pure and metaphysical difference between being-like identity (symbol) and meaning-like difference (allegory) is invalid. The open space of this difference is filled by different degrees and kinds of poetic ‘Hindeutung auf das Höhere, Unendliche’ [allusion to the higher, infinite]41 as ‘indirectly telling’, and by the emphasis on the dynamics of a ‘repeatedly different representing’ as only possibility to dynamize the unignorable ‘Zeichen, Repräsentanten d[er] Elemente die nie an sich darstellbar sind’ [signs, representations of elements that cannot be represented as themselves]42 for their infinite approach to the absolute: ‘Alle Wahrheit ist relativ Alles Wissen ist symbolisch’ [All truth is relative all knowledge is symbolic].43 In this basic sense, the expressions ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ are interchangeable for Schlegel, who in fact employs the term ‘allegory’ far more often. The ‘höhere idealische Ansicht der Dinge’ [higher idealistic view of things] as ‘Wesen der Poesie’ [essence of poetry], in which the individual entity becomes ‘Zeichen, Mittel zur Anschauung des Ganzen’ [sign, means to the view of the whole]44 is defined as follows: ‘Alle Schönheit ist Allegorie. Das Höchste kann man eben, weil es unaussprechlich ist, nur allegorisch sagen’ [All beauty is allegory. The highest can only be represented allegorically because it is itself inexpressible].45 In any case, Schlegel uses the term ‘allegory’ in a more homogeneous way, always related to the idea of ‘alluding to’ or ‘indirectly representing’ the infinite. Allegorically, the infinite appears in poetic representation, because the finite negates itself and thereby opens up the space of a figurative and semantic otherness without completely filling it in a positive sense,46 even if finite representation and infinite absolute are tied together by numerous internal, organic relations in a more than only sign-like arbitrariness: ‘[A]lles hat [...] eine eben so tiefe als unendlich reiche Bedeutung und allseitige Beziehung’ [Everything has a deep as well as infinitely rich meaning and relation to every other].47
The term ‘symbol’ in Schlegel is far more vague and ambiguous than the term ‘allegory’, which suggests the likelihood that he uses it in a less strict manner. On the one hand, Schlegel uses ‘symbol’ in the sense of ‘arbitrary sign’ (as in the subsequent analytic tradition), often referring to an object as ‘bloß symbolisch’ [merely symbolic].48 Connected with this meaning is the use of ‘symbolic’ as external, rhetorically shaped form of linguistic expression.49 On the other hand, Schlegel uses the term ‘symbolic’ to describe the special aesthetic logic of artistic meaning in a work of art which also pertains language as such: ‘Die modernen Sprachen sind symbolischer in d[er] Wortartung besser beziehungsvoller, reicher, bedeutender’ [the modern languages are more symbolic, in their word-formation better, more allusive, richer, more meaningful].50 And thirdly, the most common use of ‘symbolic’ in Schlegel describes a partly motivated relation between sign and meaning which is not a relation of identity but rather of metonymic continuity51 as a relation of expression between the whole of something and its parts.52 In this context the term ‘symbol’ denotes the organic harmony of nature that refigures the whole as ‘verkürztes Bild’ [abbreviated image] within its parts. Furthermore, this use of the term ‘symbol’ preserves the ‘secret’ of the relations between the constituent elements and the whole, the finite and the infinite: for ‘symbolic’ signifies the traces of relations53 (such as analogy or metonymy) that can be made visible through represented objects but cannot be fully grasped conceptually and therefore express by the miracle of distance between sign and meaning the secret of hidden unity of all being.
We have seen that for Schlegel the blurring of the distinction between ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’ is based on the denial of the abstract unity of being and meaning in some versions of the symbol-concept around 1800 (such as Schelling’s) in order to elaborate the idea of an open interplay between being and meaning as ‘symbolic’.54 This interplay fundamentally roots every relation between the finite and the infinite, goes through the movement of harmony between spirit and nature and reveals itself in the various levels of the work of art in an intensified way. It is always Schlegel’s purpose to conceptualize the movement between meaning and being as a fundament that cannot be derived any further; in other words, neither one of the two parts of this relation may be grasped as a single, fundamental principle for the other. The only presence of the absolute lies in the symbolic (that is to say allegorical) relation within the work of art and thereby in the relation to the absolute via the interplay of sign and meaning, meaning and being. Therefore, Walter Benjamin’s development of the term ‘Reflexionsmedium’ [medium of reflection] to describe the concept of the absolute in Schlegel seems legitimate. Rethinking the paradigm of symbolic presence also as a theological pattern, this reflexive theory of symbolical difference and unity of being and meaning gains a specific meaning that was unfolded by Schlegel in his collection of fragments entitled Ideen [Ideas]. The allegorical, ironical, symbolical movement of the work of art is seen as a keeping-open for the completely exterior intrusion of the divine that can be prepared by the work of art but not procured by it.55 Exactly in that sense the later Paul Ricœur had deintentionalized the term ‘symbol’ against its culturalization by Ernst Cassirer: ‘Symbole des Heiligen [...] bezeichnen [...] den Einschlag der Realität in die Kultur, einer Realität, welche die Bewegung der Kultur nicht enthält; sie sprechen vom Absolut-Anderen, vom Absolut-Anderen jener Geschichte’ [Symbols of the divine [...] mark [...] the impact of reality in culture, a reality that does not contain the movement of culture; they speak of the absolute-other, the absolute-other of history].56
Schlegel’s symbol-concept raises an objection against the abstract theological mode of symbol that has been claimed as a general pattern for the so-called Goethezeit,57 while at the same time partaking in the discussions of German Idealism about the relation between mind and world, meaning and being, finite forms of representation and denotation and the infinite that transgresses every one of it. The so-called ‘classical’ concept of symbol cannot reason the presence of the identity of its different aspects (the general and the particular, the meaning and the being, the finite and the infinite) as a representational unity, without considering the constitutional level of difference that emerges from the logic of aesthetic representation itself: to mean and represent this symbolic identity, the symbolic mode of presentation has to differentiate the identity of being and the non-identity of meaning within itself without erasing one of its counterparts in their difference. Furthermore, the effect of being-like presence in the symbol is not the other to meaning but the other of meaning: the way in which meaning conveys the insight into the relational and meaningful nature of being itself, its necessity to express itself by meaning as constitutional foundation of the concurrent contrast to meaning. The relational knowledge that every form of identity carries within itself the difference of meaning as reasonable mediation,58 together with the insight that every difference rests on a ground of unity from which it derives its possibility of relation,59 is the metaphysical core of Schlegel’s concept of symbol. In this way, Schlegel participates in discussions of an axiomatic nature that define the actuality of Early German Romanticism and German Idealism precisely in their blending of the fields of aesthetics and ontology, the theory of aesthetic representation and the theory of knowledge.
1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, ed. by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Hamburg: Meiner, 2003), p. 5. All references to Friedrich Schlegel are to the following critical edition: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols published (Paderborn, Darmstadt, Zürich: Schöningh, 1958–). Henceforth cited using the abbreviation ‘KFSA’, by volume and page number, and fragment-number where applicable.
2. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, ed. by Horst D. Brandt and Peter Müller (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), p. 301.
3. KFSA II, 164 [26].
4. Novalis. Die Schriften Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 6 vols published (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–), II, 269.
5. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, in id., Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), II, 77–169 (p. 101).
6. KFSA XVIII, 418 [1168].
7. KFSA XVIII, 511 [64]. See Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 359. For a survey of critical discussion of the Romantic absolute see Jan Urbich, Darstellung bei Walter Benjamin. Die ‘Erkenntniskritische Vorrede’ im Kontext ästhetischer Darstellungstheorien der Moderne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 64–67, 350–59.
8. KFSA XII, 214.
9. Novalis. Die Schriften Friedrich von Hardenbergs, III, 685 [671].
10. Ibid., II, 270 [566].
11. Concerning romantic irony and wit, see Ernst Behler, Frühromantik (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 247–55; Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 231–307; Martin Götze, Ironie und absolute Darstellung (Paderborn and Munich: Schöningh, 1999), pp. 195–217; Jan Urbich, ‘Epoche und Stil. Überlegungen zu zwei Deutungsmustern der Jenaer Frühromantik’, in Jena. Ein nationaler Erinnerungsort?, ed. by Jürgen John and Justus H. Ulbricht (Köln and Weimar: Böhlau, 2008), pp. 123–38.
12. See Manfred Frank, Das Problem ‘Zeit’ in der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn and München: Schöningh, 1990), pp. 22–97; Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, pp. 262 ff.
13. KFSA II, 153 [47].
14. KFSA II, 215 [297].
15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. by Manfred Frank and Véronique Zanetti (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 664 [B 192–93 (§ 49)].
16. Karl Philipp Moritz, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik, ed. by Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), p. 95.
17. KFSA VIII, 49.
18. Novalis. Die Schriften Friedrich von Hardenbergs, III, 650 [554].
19. See Ernst Behler’s introduction in: KFSA XVIII, pp. xii–xxi.
20. See Tzvetan Todorov, Symboltheorien (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 163–69.
21. KFSA II, 252 [434].
22. Novalis. Die Schriften Friedrich von Hardenbergs, II, 535 [41].
23. On Schlegel’s theory of the ‘genetic method’ of art and philosophy, see Urbich, ‘Epoche und Stil’; Urbich, Darstellung bei Walter Benjamin, pp. 350–59.
24. KFSA II, 414.
25. KFSA XII, 39.
26. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Anmerkungen zur Antigonä’, in id., Theoretische Schriften, ed. by Johann Kreuzer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), pp. 101–11 (p. 109).
27. KFSA II, 314.
28. KFSA II, 284–85.
29. Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX, 6–7, 1048b.
30. See Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in id., Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), I.1, 9–123 (pp. 36–37).
31. KFSA II, 414.
32. See KFSA II, 328.
33. See Jean-Michel Palmier, Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp. 819–46.
34. KFSA II, 414.
35. Ibid.
36. KFSA II, 204 [238].
37. KFSA II, 182–83 [116].
38. KFSA II, 225.
39. See Todorov, Symboltheorien, pp. 169–73, Novalis’s famous ‘Monologue’ (Novalis, Monolog, in id., Werke, ed. by Gerhard Schulz, 2nd edn (Munich: Beck, 1981), p. 426), and KFSA II, 364. See also Jan Urbich, ‘ “Mysterium der Ordnung”. Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Absolutem und Sprache bei Friedrich Schlegel und Walter Benjamin’, in Sprache und Literatur, 1 (2009), 93–111.
40. KFSA XVIII, 416 [1140].
41. KFSA II, 334.
42. KFSA XVIII, 420 [1197].
43. KFSA XVIII, 417 [1149].
44. KFSA II, 323.
45. KFSA II, 324.
46. See KFSA XVIII, 249 [663], KFSA XIX, 5 [26], KFSA XIX, 25 [227], KFSA XIX, 167 [106].
47. KFSA XIX, 242 [319].
48. See KFSA XIX, 219 [142], KFSA XIX, 239 [298], KFSA, XIX 331 [219]. For the use of ‘symbol’ as ‘sign’, see KFSA XIX, 24 [215], KFSA XVIII, 138 [195], KFSA XVIII, 290 [1127], KFSA XVIII, 417 [1149], KFSA XVIII, 463 [315], KFSA XVIII, 420 [1197].
49. See KFSA XVIII, 205 [105], KFSA XVIII, 218 [284].
50. KFSA XVIII, 132 [120].
51. See Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 16, 25; Paul de Man, ‘Allegorie und Symbol in der Frühromantik’, in Ty pologia litterarum, ed. by Stefan Sonderegger et al. (Zürich: Atlantis, 1969), pp. 403–27 (p. 406); David Wellbery, ‘Rhetorik und Literatur. Anmerkungen zur poetologischen Begriffsbildung bei Friedrich Schlegel’, in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn and Munich: Schöningh, 1987), pp. 161–74.
52. See KFSA XVIII, 105 [907], 156 [398], 158 [427], 159 [434], 160 [445], 175 [598], 229 [421], 410 [1084], 578 [157]; KFSA XIX, 126 [381], 135 [452], 212 [195/196].
53. See Novalis. Die Schriften Friedrich von Hardenbergs, II, 650 [481].
54. See Manfred Frank, ‘Wechselgrundsatz. Friedrich Schlegels philosophischer Ausgangspunkt’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 50 (1996), 26–50.
55. For a detailed account of this concept, see Jan Urbich, ‘“Die Kunst geht auf den letzten Messias”. Friedrich Schlegels Ideen-Fragmente und das Verhältnis von Revolution und Religion’, in Romantik und Revolution. Zum politischen Reformpotential einer unpolitischen Bewegung, ed. by Klaus Ries (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), pp. 171–95.
56. Paul Ricœur, Die Interpretation. Ein Versuch über Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 540. See Jeffrey Andrew Barash, ‘Was ist ein Symbol? Bemerkungen über Paul Ricœurs kritische Stellungnahme zum Symbolbegriff bei Ernst Cassirer’, Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik, 6 (2007), 259–74.
57. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986), pp. 76–87.
58. See e.g. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 8 of Werke in 20 Bänden, p. 18.
59. See Hölderlin, Urteil und Sein, in id., Theoretische Schriften, pp. 7–8.