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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Novalis, 1772–1801, author. | Reid, James D. (James David), editor, translator. Title: Novalis: philosophical, literary, and poetic writings / edited and translated by James D. Reid. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023046889 (print) | LCCN 2023046890 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197574041 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197574065 (epub) | ISBN 9780197574072
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046889
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046890
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197574041.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
VI: Dialogues and Monologue: 1798/9
VII: Marginalia on Friedrich Schlegel’s Ideas: 1799
VIII: Christianity or Europe: 1799
IX: Fragments and Studies: 1799–1800
Group I: 1–243 (June–December 1799)
Group II: 244–497 (August 1799–February 1800)
Group III: 498–574 (Late 1799–April 1800)
Group IV: 575–695 (Summer and Spring 1800)
PART TWO: THE NOVELS
PART THREE: HY MNS TO THE
Preface and Acknowledgments
Novalis is a quotable figure, perhaps better known in the Anglophone world for his suggestive formulations and aphoristic statements, a sort of eighteenthcentury creator of memes, than as a serious thinker worth contending with alongside Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Although he wrote fragments in the spirit of early Romantic theories of self-expression in relation to the unattainability of the Absolute, he was also deeply interested in the possibility, nature, and scope of the systematic philosophical enterprise. His notes and fragments often address questions concerning the possibility of systematic philosophy and envision a more systematic philosophy of his own, albeit one infused with poetic insights and modes of expression and not anchored in incontestable first principles. The present volume is intended to make Novalis more accessible in English as both a poetic thinker and as a serious philosopher, wrestling with issues at stake in Kant and his immediate successors, in a way that brings his poetic ways of speaking into proximity with his more discursive philosophical reflections.
My interest in Novalis goes back to work on a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger, whose engagement with what he calls “essential poets” has shaped my interest in the power of the poetic word to give voice to worlds of significance for as long as I can remember. Although I wrote on early Heidegger and the idea of moral ontology, where poetry plays a rather limited role, I expected eventually to write something on later Heidegger’s essays and lecture courses on poetry, the relationship between poetic discourse and the world, and the troubled and quarrelsome relationship between philosophy and poetry. The final chapter of the dissertation (now Heidegger’s Moral Ontology [Cambridge University Press]), which anticipates so much of what I’ve thought about and written since, weighs in on the nature of language and its fitness to express the importance of what we care about, where our interests incline in the direction of both the universal and the particular, and the philosopher sometimes appears in the guise of the bad poet. Along the way, however, I became increasingly troubled by the political uses and abuses of Heidegger’s ontological musings on such philosophical poets as Hölderlin, and more skeptical that his analyses of poetry can be cleanly divorced from his commitment to the National Socialist revolution. In the interim, I also began to think about the strictly philosophical limitations of his readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Novalis himself and to turn my attention to some of Heidegger’s favorite poets for their own sake. The practical consequences of my worries include, among other things, the present
volume, which is meant to allow Novalis to speak for himself, in the fuller range of his interests.
My first attempts to translate Novalis go back to an advanced seminar I offered at the Metropolitan State University of Denver on Kantian aesthetics, which included a heavy dose of Kant’s Romantic successors in Germany. As the semester unfolded, I decided to translate Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht, partly out of dissatisfaction with several existing translations, partly out of a desire to learn more about how, if at all, his late lyric output bears upon his philosophical interests and agendas and whether the Hymns are able to shed light on his more palpably philosophical commitments. I realized early on that Novalis’s interests in Kantian and Fichtean theories of representation, self-consciousness, moral commitment, and the like are reflected in, at the very least, the vocabulary he deploys in more strictly poetic contexts. When I began to read Novalis’s two unfinished novels in earnest, I became convinced that his literary projects are also as important in any assessment of his philosophical relevance as his more recognizably philosophical reflections. Despite his short life and diverse activities, including studies as a scientist at the Freiberg Mining Academy, Novalis is that rare thinker who writes from a strong sense of the need for unity among the various ways in which we talk about the world. My intuition that Novalis’s poetic and literary work is central to his philosophical investments has only increased with the years, and not merely because the Romantics were, according to a cliché that still finds its way from time to time into academic discourse, fond of blurring important distinctions between discourses and disciplines.
I began to work out my sense of the philosophical implications of Novalis’s poetry and his “philosophical fictions” in response to an invitation to present a paper on fiction in post-Kantian Idealism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2015). This led to the idea of writing a book on Novalis’s views on poetry, philosophy, and the tight connection between the two. But it wasn’t until I’d translated a considerable body of what the reader now has in hand, chiefly for the sake of my work on the monograph but also for use in the classroom, that I decided to pitch a semicomprehensive translation proposal to Lucy Randall at Oxford University Press in late 2020.
Beyond my own intellectual investment in this unique figure in the Kantian aftermath, the time seems ripe for a translation of this sort. Philosophical interest in early German Romanticism is steadily growing in the Anglophone world. And thanks to the comparatively recent publication of a definitive, critical edition of his work, Novalis’s place in the development and interpretation of German philosophy in the wake of Kant is now more generally acknowledged. To be sure, Novalis’s importance, at least as a literary figure, was already recognized in the nineteenth century by such luminaries as Carlyle and Emerson. But a growing number of recent studies have helped to bring Novalis into contemporary
scholarly conversations in English on such topics as the nature and conditions of self-consciousness, the nature of language and its relation to the world, the relationship between human life and its contexts or background conditions in natural and historical worlds, the possibility and conditions of human freedom, the role of art in the economy of human life, the foundations of political authority, and the importance of education for personal and political growth. In light of influential but questionable views, going back at least as far as Heinrich Heine, on the baneful character of early Romantic theories of the political sphere, the time is ripe for even more serious engagement with Novalis in the English-speaking world, and a volume that aspires to bring together his work across genres and disciplines in a single, handy volume.
The present volume makes available in English the most comprehensive selection to date of material from the Critical Edition (1960–2006), carefully edited and arranged chronologically by section (philosophical writings, notes, and fragments; novels; poems). There are still some gaps, as there must be in a one-volume edition. I flirted with the idea of including excerpts from the Fichte Studies and the Romantic Encyclopedia, but both exist in excellent English translations by Jane Kneller and David W. Wood, respectively. I was also tempted to include notes and fragments on the natural sciences, but I decided to work on a separate, companion volume devoted to Novalis’s more technical writings on nature. It would be worthwhile for someone to bring out a volume dedicated exclusively to Novalis’s philosophical poetry. (While the third part contains only the Hymns to the Night, the reader will find a number of poems scattered throughout the volume, which constitutes a considerable share of the poems collected in the first volume of the Critical Edition in German, which includes the two novels translated below.) And Novalis’s correspondence and journals contain material that is likely to be of interest to anyone working on German Romanticism. I hope that the present selection gives the reader a good sense of what Novalis was up to across several areas, beginning with his juvenilia and ending with his final notes and fragments, novels, and poems.
For financial support of this project, I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for an award that made it possible to work without teaching responsibilities for the better part of a year, along with Dean John Masserini at the Metropolitan State University of Denver for additional financial support over the calendar year 2022.
Bill Davis offered helpful comments on Hardenberg’s youthful prose. Luke Fischer, ever the poet, weighed in on my translations of several fragments, with an eye on both philological accuracy and style, and provided invaluable advice on my translation of the Hymns to the Night, which nudged me toward retranslating several lines in some of the formal poems with a better eye and ear for Hardenberg’s rhythmic patterns. Christian Jany’s comments on my translation
x Preface and Acknowledgments
of Heinrich von Ofterdingen were invaluable, as was Daniel Whistler’s feedback on my translation of the Hemsterhuis-Studien. Laure Cahen-Maurel and David W. Wood provided helpful input along the way. The proofreading of Paul Jacobs and Savon Henderson saved me from several minor errors. For meticulous preparation of the Index, with an ever-watchful eye and a keen sense of what’s worth recording, I thank Corey Polster. Candace R. Craig proofread and offered helpful feedback on several sections, including the Introduction and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and also assisted with the completion of the index. On a whim, but in the spirit of Romantic theories of co-philosophizing and poetizing, Candace and I decided to co-translate the final and perhaps most challenging poem in the second part of Heinrich. It was an interesting and, I hope, a fruitful experiment.
I am indebted to Lucy Randall at Oxford University Press for her interest in the project from its humble beginnings, for timely replies to queries, and more generally for making the entire process of bringing out a substantial volume of this kind a smooth endeavor. I should also thank two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for helpful advice on several early translations, including suggestions for bettering the translations of Novalis’s poetry.
I would like to thank the editors of Symphilosophie for permission to reprint a partial translation of Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs and a complete translation of the Hemsterhuis-Studien, including introductions and annotations. The former appeared in the 2021 issue, the latter in 2022 (both in December and available in open access online).
For reasons that can’t be enumerated, I thank Candace R. Craig and my canine son Oberon, two persons without whom life in any sense would be hard to imagine. Although I’m no optimist, our shared existence at the base of Pikes Peak helps to make more credible Leibniz’s view that this is the best of all possible worlds.
Introduction
Novalis and Early German Romanticism
Georg Friedrich Phillip von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known by his pen name Novalis, was a philosopher, poet, and natural scientist, and an important member of the circle of Early Romantics. The Jena Romantics, so-called because they gathered for a season in the university town where Fichte lectured between 1794 and 1799, were a group of friends and intellectual companions that included August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), a classicist and translator, and his brother Friedrich (1772–1829), the author of an important study of ancient Greek literature and a founding figure of the Romantic movement, Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a theologian and translator of Plato, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), an early disciple of Fichte who went on to develop a philosophy of nature, and the poet and literary figure Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853).1
Despite fraught intellectual and personal differences, the early Romantics saw themselves as like-minded pioneers in the work of thinking about modernity and the possibilities of art and philosophy to give shape to a better way of inhabiting and talking about life in the modern world. They were among the first feminists—the group included Caroline Schlegel-Schelling (1763–1809) and the novelist and translator Dorothea Veit-Schlegel (1764–1839), the daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—and they can, with some qualification, be seen to be among the first to argue, in the wake of Herder, for the importance of what we might call multicultural values.2 They developed theories of art as what
1 The Romantic movement in Germany is usually divided into three periods: an early period (roughly 1796–1801), a middle period (roughly until 1815), and a late period running until approximately 1830. Hardenberg belongs, of course, to the period of early German Romanticism (or Frühromantik). Although the boundaries between the periods are somewhat fluid, it is important to mark at least some difference between them, as many of those early Romantics who, unlike Hardenberg, lived well into the nineteenth century changed their fundamental views, often in the direction of increasing conservatism, and the movement itself, going back to its beginnings in the 1790s, came to be seen as conservative at its core, an interpretation that is difficult to square with the documents from its earliest years. For an entertaining portrait of the period, see Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits. A more sweeping history of the Romantic age and its legacy is provided by Rüdiger Safranski in Romanticism: A German Affair. The best account in English of the philosophy of the early Romantic movement, arranged thematically, is Frederick C. Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism
2 Their commitment to cultural diversity went beyond paying mere lip service to the plurality of values across time and place and led some members of the movement to study foreign languages
Nelson Goodman called “world-making,” in opposition to mimetic theories of the arts and slavish commitments to classical forms. They were translators and theorists of translation with views that anticipate the conceptions of the relation between whole and part that such figures as Heidegger and Gadamer made central to their accounts of the “hermeneutic phenomenon.” They thought long and hard about the nature of personal identity and the extent to which our sense of self is a function of what we decide to be, and how far unchosen features of the social landscape and our natural endowments set limits to our capacity for selfdetermination. They had views of politics, at times progressive, at times conservative, and thought deeply about the merits of both the acceptance and rejection of tradition. And they quarreled over the nature of religion in modern life, and what a modern religion might look like, if it were to be enlightened.
If anything can be said to have united this diverse group of thinkers and writers, it was a hearty disdain for mindless convention and a revolutionary ambition to rethink everything from the ground up.3 But they were not naïve revolutionaries, bent on destroying what they dimly understood. Their work shows a careful consideration of the intellectual history and traditions that made the Romantic experiment possible, and they often acknowledged the historical sources that make any productive engagement with present reality in the life of the mind a fructifying experience. They stood with full self-awareness between tradition and a new beginning and hoped to do justice to both.
Their ambition to help usher in new ways of thinking about the world was not fruitless. The Romantic movement to which Novalis belonged constitutes a watershed moment in the history of philosophy and literature, with an impact that crosses national boundaries. Its influence, Novalis’s in particular, can be felt in the poetry and poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the essays of Carlyle, who wrote an early appreciative review of Novalis’s available writings, in the work of the American Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau and, moving into the 20th century, in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger on the continent and the English philosophical poet Owen Barfield, an important influence on T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Marx was officially averse assiduously. Many of the German Romantics went well beyond cheerleading. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, was at home in Greek and Latin, not unusual for the time, but also English, French, and Spanish, and eventually Sanskrit and Persian. Ludwig Tieck produced an outstanding German translation of Don Quixote between 1799 and 1804. And August Wilhelm Schlegel, in addition to important translations of Shakespeare (1797–1810), was responsible for a complete Latin translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, as well as German translations of selections from Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Torquato Tasso, and Luís de Camões.
3 Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799), to take just one notable example, caused a minor scandal for its apparent support of free love. Schlegel himself, having converted to Catholicism and grown increasingly conservative, was subsequently embarrassed by his youthful work and failed to include it in his complete works in 1823. The novel was panned in the nineteenth century by Heine and dismissed as an example of sensuality by Kierkegaard.
to the German Romantics, but his youthful vision of alienation and reconciliation in the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 embraces a mode of nonalienated existence that is inconceivable without Romantic interventions in the late eighteenth century. Nietzsche took himself to be an anti-Romantic thinker, but his views on philosophy and art, his sense of the importance of style and the role of the poetic in the philosophical endeavor, owe more to such thinkers as Novalis than he himself was probably aware of or cared to admit.
The time is long overdue for serious engagement with Novalis and his contemporaries, not merely for historiographical reasons but, as the present translation hopes to reveal, because they have interesting and compelling things to say about issues of contemporary relevance. Novalis himself is an instructive case, as someone with a broad education, strong philosophical investments, a poetic mind, an investment in the hard sciences, and a professional vocation that made the details of practical life central to his sense of what the life of the mind ought to be. He was a polymath, but no dilletante, and his writings are a veritable image and emblem of the age in which he wrote, encapsulating the issues and the conflicts of an era that nearly everyone who reflected on its philosophical shape considered an important time of transition from old forms to new ways of living and thinking about the world we inhabit.
*
Hardenberg studied law briefly at Jena (1790–1791), along with history under Friedrich Schiller and philosophy with the Kantian Karl Leonhard Reinhold (an important system-oriented precursor to Fichte), continued his legal studies at Leipzig (1791–1793), where he became close friends with Friedrich Schlegel, before finally earning his law degree at Wittenberg in 1794. In the same year, he became an assistant to the county bailiff Cölestin August Just in Tennstedt, where he met and became engaged to Sophie von Kühn. The surviving documentary evidence suggests that the young Novalis saw himself as a poet with philosophical and cultural ambitions. His youthful literary remains include several poems, reflections on poetry, and essays relating to culture and cultural identity, history, and the philosophy of history, chiefly under the influence of Herder, but also channeling Enlightenment lines of thought.
According to anecdotal evidence, Novalis met Fichte, along with the poet Hölderlin, at Friedrich Niethammer’s house in May 1795.4 It is unfortunate that no additional information has survived about this possible meeting with Hölderlin, who went on to become one of the period’s most important poets
4 The editors of the HKA note that “On the evening of May 1795, Fichte, Hölderlin, and Novalis met at the house Niethammer, who recorded in his journal, ‘There was much talk about religion and revelation and that many questions still remain open for philosophy’ ” (HKA IV, 588).
and who also left behind reflections on philosophy that invite comparison with Hardenberg’s. But it is no exaggeration to say that Hardenberg’s encounter with Fichte, in fact or in thought, transformed the budding poet and cultural critic into a bona fide philosopher, and set the course for a lifelong engagement with the principal philosophical texts and problems of the age. In the fall of the same year, Novalis began a series of philosophical reflections recorded in a set of notebooks devoted largely, if not exclusively, to themes in Fichte’s early (Jena-period) philosophy, possibly with the intention of publishing an essay on the newly emerging Wissenschaftslehre (theory or doctrine of science). These so-called Fichte Studies (the title is an editorial addition), composed between late 1795 and November 1796 but not published in their present form until 1965, represent Novalis’s first sustained engagement with philosophy and lay the groundwork for many of his subsequent philosophical musings and literary and poetic creations.
After Sophie’s untimely death at the age of fifteen in March 1797, a central event in his intellectual biography, he studied mining at the prestigious academy in Freiberg, where Alexander von Humboldt had also been a student. He eventually became circuit director of the salt mines in Thuringia, and continued in his spare time to pursue philosophical, literary, and poetic projects. His education at the Mining Academy, under the direction of the geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) and others, including the chemist Wilhelm August Lampadius, helped ground Hardenberg in the hard sciences. He also became engaged during this period to Julie von Charpentier, and, more importantly, resumed his philosophical studies, chiefly in the form of reflections upon the work of Kant, Fichte, and the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis.
Over the course of 1798, his scientific pursuits gave rise to an ambitious project to unite all the distinct scientific disciplines, including what we today would call the humanities, in a single, universal science. He began compiling notes to that end in September 1798 and continued to work toward the completion of his Romantic Encyclopedia over the next seven months, through the beginning of March 1799, generating more than eleven hundred entries along the way. His surviving notes and fragments from the period also reveal an intense interest in the nature of the novel and its function in modern life, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and the nature, conditions, and philosophical status of the physical and mathematical sciences. In 1798, he published his first collection of philosophical fragments in the newly launched Athenaeum, the preeminent journal of Romanticism founded by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, which introduced the world to the provocative figure known as ‘Novalis.’
Although he published little during his own lifetime—a short poem, “Klagen eines Jünglings” (1791), a collection of 114 fragments with the title Blüthenstaub (1798), eight political poems bearing the title Blumen, a series of 43 political
aphorisms called Glauben und Liebe (1798), and the lyric cycle Hymnen an die Nacht (1800)—he left behind a voluminous body of notes and fragments touching collectively on nearly every important philosophical and intellectual issue of the day. His posthumous remains also include two unfinished novels, Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs and Heinrich von Ofterdingen/Afterdingen (both published for the first time in 1802), a large number of poems, a lengthy and controversial essay on religion and politics (Christianity or Europe), which he tried, unsuccessfully, to publish in 1799 (the tract didn’t appear until 1826, in the fourth edition of Novalis Schriften), and a considerable body of notes and fragments on mathematics and the natural sciences (1798/9). And all of this was composed within the remarkable span of approximately five years. He died of tuberculosis on March 25, 1801 just shy of his 29th birthday.
Shortly after his death, Hardenberg’s friends, Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, published a tendentiously edited collection of his writings (Novalis Schriften, 1802). The impact of this edition on Hardenberg’s reception cannot be overstated.5 It was this early edition that helped to establish the myth of a melancholic youth, mystical in his basic orientation toward the world, animated by an unhealthy longing for the unattainable, symbolized by a mysterious blue flower, and little concerned with the philosophical problems of the day—the sort of figure upon which Hegel might have modelled his portrait of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the source of Heine’s ire in his discussion of Novalis as a member of the Romantic School. The image of Hardenberg as the world-weary Novalis, a death-intoxicated prophet of sorts, remained influential in his reception well into the twentieth century. It wasn’t until Haering’s Hegelian reading of Hardenberg in Novalis als Philosoph (1954), and the publication, beginning in the 1960s, of a definitive edition of his published writings and surviving notes and fragments, poems, scientific studies, and correspondence that the dismantling of the Novalis myth began in earnest. We are now able to read his work in a more plausible philosophical light, as a response to the Kantian revolution and its aftermath in the last years of the eighteenth century and as an important precursor to lines of thought developed by such figures as Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
Hardenberg did not think in a vacuum. His writings reveal and reflect upon the impact of historical events, notably the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the Enlightenment, and the outbreak and unfolding of the Revolution in France. He shares with Herder a sense of the tight relationship between philosophical thought and its cultural, political, and economic context and, with Schiller, Hegel, and others, a sense of the distinctiveness of the modern age, in
5 For details, the reader is advised to consult the first chapter of O’Brien’s Novalis: Signs of Revolution (“The Making of a Myth: Tieck and Schlegel’s Editing of the Novalis Writings”).
opposition to its premodern counterparts. And the material translated below bears the traces of a wide array of intellectual influences. The impact of Fichte is evident almost everywhere, a fact already noted by Haym in his monumental history of the Romantic School. But Hardenberg was also an astute reader of Kant and Schiller, Herder, Hemsterhuis, and several members of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung, along with the writings of his friends in the early Romantic movement. His work shows signs of his readings in Plato and Plotinus, the French Encyclopedists, Rousseau, and Edmund Burke, the author of an influential critique of the Revolution in France. Traces of an interest in Spinoza are visible, perhaps spurred by the famous controversy over Lessing’s alleged Spinozism initiated by Jacobi. And references to figures all but unknown to most readers today, especially in the Anglophone world, pepper his writings throughout. He had a longstanding interest in Shakespeare, and his poetic and natural-scientific endeavors cannot be divorced from his readings of Goethe’s novels, poems, and scientific writings. He was also conversant with several of the most important scientific developments of the age and their history in the wake of modern mathematical natural science, including the emergence of chemistry in the late 1780s and comparatively recent theories of medicine, anatomy, and physiology.
To be sure, Novalis’s writings stem from an impressionable age, when an intellectual youth is likely to be reading intensely, but they also reveal an astonishing maturity, autonomy, and digestive power. He is never a slavish exegete or disciple. None of the figures whose work he tackles is immune to often trenchant criticism. There is usually something fresh in his comments on the writings of his philosophical and literary mentors, predecessors, and contemporaries, along with a conscientious critic’s aspiration to deal justly with the works under consideration.
On Style
If there is anything that stands in the way of contemporary philosophical appreciation of Novalis, it is likely to revolve around questions of style and what, more specifically, one deems the appropriate way of giving voice to philosophical questions and (tentative) answers. Recent trends in philosophical expression, where a certain kind of rigor is demanded and more poetic modes of writing are shunned, don’t bode well for the reception of Hardenberg’s writings. But we often forget that Plato wrote dialogues and not systematic essays or treatises, and Descartes’s Meditations is a brilliant piece of philosophical semiautobiography. Hume was a master prose stylist, and Wittgenstein an aphorist of sorts. Philosophy’s relationship to what is often dismissed as ‘unphilosophical’ is an
essential feature of the discipline itself, at least prior to the beginnings of its institutionalization in the nineteenth century.
Hardenberg can be playful and witty, and he writes in a poetic mode of condensation that places considerable demands upon the reader. Consider one example of the elusive and allusive nature of his way of voicing his positions. The closing fragment of the aphoristic preface to Faith and Love, a political essay apparently intended to celebrate the newly installed king and queen to the Prussian throne, runs: “Let the dragonflies [Libellen] loose; innocent strangers they are, / Following hither the double-star gaily with gifts.” The “double-star” is almost certainly the king and the queen. But who or what are the dragonflies? And why does he identify the dragonflies with strangers? Is it simply an expression of Hardenberg’s acknowledgment that he’s unknown to the royal couple? Or does he mean to suggest that the thoughts themselves are likely to appear strange to the king and the queen, should they encounter his aphoristic tract? And what gifts might the young unknown have to offer Friedrich Wilhelm II and his wife Luise? Are the gifts mere flattery? Or does he hope to educate the newly installed monarchs? But it gets more interesting. The German for ‘dragonflies’ is sonically akin to the German word for slanderous speech (libel), perhaps furnishing the canny reader with a clue that the straightforward celebration of monarchy suggested by the tract’s subtitle (“The King and the Queen”) should be taken with a grain of salt. But the German word also evokes the Latin word for ‘notebook,’ in a way meant perhaps to draw attention to the origins of Hardenberg’s political reflections in his personal notes. And each of these possibilities draws attention to the possibly esoteric meaning of the collection of fragments. In a subsequent fragment, Hardenberg makes the almost heretical claim that everyone should become capable of the throne, hardly a view easily squared with an un-ironic defense of monarchy. The careful reader of Hardenberg’s writings will find witty plays on words and riddles throughout. Metaphor, simile, allegory, fable, and metonymy are, among other poetic and rhetorical devises, the order of the day.
Another obstacle is likely to be the perceived lack of sustained argument in favor of apparently disjointed observations on a wealth of what contemporary readers may see as distinct topics. Hardenberg’s notes move from topics in, say, epistemology to reflections on politics, art, religion, or morality. The chief members of the early Romantic period in Germany experimented with several modes of writing, with the philosophical fragment at the center. Much of what awaits the reader of Hardenberg’s published and unpublished writings resembles a series of fragments. Those who dismiss Nietzsche as a serious philosopher are unlikely to find Novalis a credible thinker. Aphoristic writers who served as models for both Hardenberg and Nietzsche (the French stand out as exemplary for both) typically fare no better in academic circles.
To be sure, Hardenberg did write fragments in the technical sense, aphoristic statements meant both to capture some important truth, often in relation to an unattainable whole, and to encourage readers to think for themselves about the issue in question. The latter ambition, to invite the reader to think along with him, is an important, and well-supported, pedagogical feature of Hardenberg’s writings. Like Herder before him, Hardenberg viewed philosophy as standing in the service of practical life. Philosophy ought to inspire individuals to think differently about their own lives, and in a way that allows each their own autonomy in the work of thinking. Rather than beating the reader over the head with sustained arguments, Hardenberg hoped to provide seedlings for further thought, and to write in a way that he hoped his audience would find gripping: Hardenberg sees the intellect as an outgrowth of the human heart, which the philosopher has a duty to address. His first published collection of fragments opens with a poetic epigram: “Friends, the soil is poor, we must richly scatter/ Seeds for even a modest harvest.” To be moved and to be moved to think: these are the twin effects that Hardenberg hopes to bring about in his readers. And the fragment is one of the chief ways of achieving this two-fold aim, if not the only one.
The fragment is the Romantic form par excellence, and Novalis is a master of the aphoristic statement, but he is also adept at the extended essay and the novel, along with crisp and witty philosophical dialogue. His poetry counts, with Hölderlin’s, as one of the most important (especially lyric) achievements of the late eighteenth century. And there is reason to think that his Romantic Encyclopedia would have expressed his own system of philosophy and the various sciences, had he lived long enough to complete it. We do Novalis a serious disservice if we reduce him to a philosophical artist in fragments alone. A large body of what he left behind resembles fragments, but this is because much of what we have amounts to notebook entries, which Novalis planned to employ in a variety of literary and philosophical contexts. The form of his surviving work should not be taken as evidence that Hardenberg was incapable of more sustained lines of thought. The careful reader of his philosophical remains is likely to discover continuity and coherence among the many jottings and fragments and more extended discussions he left behind. One of the more exciting tasks for the serious student of Novalis’s writings is to discover how all his reflections hang together. Despite superficial appearances of disorganization, the patient interpreter is likely to find a coherent vision of the world crystallizing across his diverse reflections and literary and poetic writings. Although Hardenberg did not philosophize with a clear sense of boundaries between disciplines and areas of philosophical concern (epistemological, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, etc.), a few words are in order about his views on distinct issues of contemporary concern.
Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem
Hardenberg did not develop his own system of philosophy. Nothing in his published writings and surviving notebooks and fragments compares to the systematic achievements of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. This might have been by design. As scholars have long recognized, Hardenberg’s notes and fragments, going back to the Fichte Studies, contain powerful criticisms of the foundationalist ambitions of Fichte and Reinhold, both of whom played an inspiring role in his own intellectual development. In contrast to Fichte’s attempt to derive a system of philosophy from one or more first principles (in the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, he identifies three6), Hardenberg proposes a model of approximating a system anchored in flexible starting points that have what he calls a ‘fictional’ status. What Fichte calls “the absolute I” that unconditionally posits itself and identifies as the most fundamental principle of the Wissenschaftslehre becomes, in Hardenberg’s hands, a regulative ideal, which the finite I approaches in an asymptotic movement toward the unconditioned.7 Perhaps in anticipation of Hegel, Hardenberg appears to believe that the whole, which the philosopher has the responsibility of figuring, can be approached from several, perhaps infinitely many angles. There is no single starting point that does the trick. In the Allgemeine Brouillion he asks, “Why do we need a beginning at all?” And he goes on to observe that the very idea of a single beginning in philosophy is an “unphilosophical—or semi-philosophical goal” and “the source of all error” (#634).8
But Hardenberg’s lack of a system may also be the consequence of his early death. Several notebook entries furnish evidence of a thinker wrestling with the very idea of philosophy and asking what form it ought to take. In fact, some of the most interesting notes from 1798, translated in their entirety below, explore the possibility of philosophy itself, its relation to the poetic imagination, the role of history and historical knowledge in the emergence and development of philosophy, and the nature of the philosophical ambition to grasp the whole. Hardenberg never abandons the conviction that philosophy is essentially an attempt to capture the whole, which forms a system of some kind. In a late note, he observes that the world should be understood as “a system of necessary
6 Fichte’s Grundlage now exists in an indispensable English translation by Daniel Breazeale, along with related writings from 1794 to 1795. See Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and Related Writings (1794–95), published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
7 To be fair, Fichte himself does not identify the I of original self-positing with the I of an absolute knowledge of and practical command over the whole of reality. The truly absolute I is, for Fichte as well as for Novalis, a regulative idea.
8 For details regarding Hardenberg’s early rejection of the foundationalism of Reinhold and Fichte, see Manfred Frank’s The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, which supplies a good deal of helpful historical and intellectual context, as well as readings of other figures, including Hölderlin, Isaac von Sinclair, Jakob Zwilling, and Friedrich Schlegel.
presuppositions” (#679). The well-known opening fragment in Pollen “We seek the unconditioned everywhere and always find only conditioned things”— should not be read as a renunciation of the search itself. The philosopher’s goal is not simply to record disconnected observations but to unify human cognition as far as possible. And on Hardenberg’s emerging view, the work of achieving the unity the philosopher seeks, if it is to be a truly organic unity and not a mere aggregate, is as much poetic as it is discursive.9 In a note from 1798 that Hardenberg marked as worth developing, he classifies morality and philosophy as arts and defines the latter as “the art of producing the entirety of our representations according to an absolute, artistic idea and thinking a world system a priori, out of the depths of our spirit—to use the organ of thought actively—for the presentation of a purely intelligible world” (Assorted Fragments III, #234).
Although he remained puzzled over the shape his Romantic Encyclopedia of the sciences should assume, his project for an organized presentation of the individual sciences was meant to be systematic in some sense, even if “the complete form of the sciences must be poetic” (Logological Fragments I, #17). Indeed, his encyclopedia project was nothing less than an attempt to locate the basic principles and concepts of the distinct sciences and to discover a way of uniting them in the shape of a single, all-embracing Wissenschaft. If Novalis envisions a more poetic mode of achieving comprehensive scientific unity, and criticizes Fichte for being “absolutely unpoetic” (Brouillon, #924), there can be little doubt that Fichte’s idea of a single, all-embracing science served as a major philosophical inspiration for his ultimately abandoned project. Had he lived long enough to continue his meta-philosophical reflections and philosophical experiments, Hardenberg might well have discovered a systematic form in keeping with his rejection of foundationalism. We will never know.
Realism and Idealism
Plenty of ink has been spilled over Hardenberg’s commitment to idealism or realism, or his efforts to discover some middle way between the two. The prominence of Fichte throughout his intellectual development speaks in favor of some sympathy with his mentor’s version of transcendental idealism, which stresses the underivable and unavoidable activity of the “I” and the primacy of the practical, agent-centered point of view. He often reminds himself in his notebooks that the sphere of the “I” is all-encompassing, as far as our experience of ourselves
9 I develop a reading of Hardenberg’s emerging vision of the poetic philosopher, or the philosophical poet, in the third chapter of Novalis’s Philosophical Fictions: Magical Idealism in Context (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
and the world goes. In the opening note of the Fichte Studies, Hardenberg observes, in connection with the first principle of the Wissenschaftslehre (that the I simply posits its own being): “The sphere of the I must encompass everything for us. As itself content, it can recognize [or know, erkennen] content” (HKA II, 104, Fichte Studies, 4). If we try to envision what might stand on the other side of our field of awareness, we always end up bringing the transcendent into our own domain. The circle of the “I” appears inescapable.
But as Manfred Frank and others have observed, Hardenberg’s criticisms of Fichte, especially in the Fichte Studies, seem to place him in the camp of the realists, for whom the realm of self-consciousness and the “I” is conditioned by an unknowable, transcendent reality. In some early versions of the story, the primal mode of self-consciousness for Hardenberg is not an act of self-positing but an original feeling (Gefühl) beyond which transcendental reflection simply cannot go. While the Fichte Studies resists the tidy conclusion, there are several notes that call into question the Fichtean assumption, shared by Descartes, that the mind is epistemically sovereign and capable of clarifying itself and its mental states in a purely reflective manner.
In still other respects, his thought could be seen, in anticipation of Heidegger, as an effort to overcome the standpoint that generates the conflict between realism and idealism in the first place, one in which we are compelled to choose between an independent subject or an independent object as the explanatory basis of human experience (Fichte’s 1797 Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre draw this distinction quite sharply). In Note 374, again limiting ourselves to the Fichte Studies, he complains that “the question of idealism and realism” is “stupid” (II, 232, 130). And the stupidity seems to consist in the ambition of the idealist to locate ultimate sources of significance in the self-positing I—beyond the more modest task of finding the given to be meaningful and appropriating it in more discursive fashion—and the realist’s quixotic effort to reduce the self-interpreting gestures of the empirical, finite I to mere givens on the part of an independent reality. In the Teplitz Fragments of 1798, translated below, Hardenberg associates Jacobi with just such an implausible position, which he calls transcendental empiricism and defines as the view that “the mode of thinking [die Denkungsart] is an effect of the external world and of fate—the passive thinker—whose philosophy is given” (#56). And in a note from 1799, he sides clearly with Fichte over his empiricist critic: “Jacobi has no artistic sense [Kunstsinn] and so he lacks the sense of the Wissenschaftslehre he seeks robust, useful reality—and takes no pleasure in mere philosophizing—in cheerful philosophical consciousness— doing and intuiting” (#121). But already in the Fichte Studies he asks, “Hasn’t Fichte too arbitrarily packed everything into the I? With what warrant?” (II, 107, 7). And in the Romantic Encyclopedia he describes Fichte’s “I” as a “Robinson Crusoe—a scientific fiction to facilitate the presentation and development of
the Wissenschaftslehre” (#717). The charge of fiction is not meant in a pejorative sense, however, as we’ll see shortly.
Throughout his short life, Hardenberg remains committed to a vision of mind in the world that preserves and expands our sense of self-activity. His investment in the practical point of view, which places the accent on what we do with ourselves and the things of this world, is a constant across the notes and fragments from 1798 to 1800. A vision of the primacy of the practical standpoint arises in the Fichte Studies, and in a note on Goethe from 1798, he observes, “Even the pure philosopher will be practical” (On Goethe, #445). The position he comes in 1798 to identify as his own, what he calls ‘magical idealism,’ can be seen as a way of integrating our sense of being imposed upon by a world not of our own choosing with the expansion of human power in the development of our minds and the organs of thought. In a pregnant note from the Logological Fragments, one of several meditations on the nature of philosophy, Hardenberg notes that the proper “presentation of philosophy” is “only for self-active friends of truth,” those who require only someone who shows the way (ein Wegweiser) to become active seekers. It is this insistence upon the essentially active nature of the philosophical enterprise that convinces Hardenberg that philosophy itself has an artistic or poetic side, where the “poet” is originally a “maker” of something that transcends the given. If the world imposes itself to some degree upon a passive mind, the proper response is to make sense of what gives itself in an active orientation toward our receptivity. In 1798, he comes to associate Fichte’s philosophy with this possibility of philosophizing artistically or poetizing philosophically: “Wonderful works of art could arise in this way—if only one begins to pursue Fichtecizing artistically” (Logological Fragments I, #11). In the following year, he associates the artistic or poetic way of being with Fichtean idealism: “You will readily perceive how Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is nothing but the schema of the inner being of the artist [Künstlerwesens]” (Notes on F. Schlegel’s ‘Ideas’, #96). And in a set of notes on poetry, he calls this combination of philosophy and poetry “transcendental poetry” (Poetry, #47). At its heart is a vision of the active, creative mind coming to grips with an imposing world, for poetry “dissolves a foreign existence into one’s own” (Ibid., #46). The poet as “magical idealist” or “transcendental poet” is the maker infused with a self-awareness of poetic power to remake or reenvision objects of experience.
But there is another reason why Hardenberg comes to associate philosophy with an artistic or poetic attitude, and this relates to its capacity to organize the dismembered into a coherent whole, which he tends to associate with a realm of what he calls “spirit.” Like Hegel after him, Hardenberg thinks of reality as such in neither materialistic nor psychologistic ways but envisions both body and mind as revelations of an intelligible whole, and his term of art for the totality of the real, at once mental and corporeal, is Geist. The language of “spirit” runs throughout
nearly everything he wrote and serves as a holistic antidote to reductive views of reality, as well as a way of talking about history and its meaning, the hieroglyphic aspects of natural phenomena, and the sense of being inspired by a higher power in the creation of works of art. Although it often harbors religious connotations, as it does in Hegel as well, appeals to spirit are usually meant to capture the two-fold sense of living in a world that exceeds the individual mind’s command over and understanding of it, and yet promises to be better understood, while reason and the imagination advance toward better, more comprehensive views of the whole.
Hardenberg’s interest in the whole, which is also to say, in a Kantian register, in ideas, also goes back to the Fichte Studies, but we find several suggestive notes on the problem of the whole in the Hemsterhuis Studies and the Kant Studies (both translated below) as well. In agreement with both Kant and Fichte that the whole is never something given (in Kant’s way of speaking the whole is never “an object of possible experience”), Hardenberg develops a view according to which our orientation toward the whole is mediated by imaginative or poetic figures or fictions. The whole becomes available, if never adequately, in the shape of imaginative visions of an organized body of otherwise dislocated objects and facts. Building upon this early association of the philosopher’s investment in ideas and the poet’s capacity to figure the whole, Hardenberg writes, “Poetry elevates every particular through a singular combination with the rest of the whole [übrigen Ganzen]—and if philosophy with its legislation first prepares the world for the effective influence of ideas, poetry is, as it were, the key to philosophy, its end and significance” (Poetry, #31).
However, the philosophical poet’s holistic ambitions do not carry us away from reality and truth but place us more fully in touch with being, allowing us to catch glimpses of the larger contexts of our intellectual and, importantly, our practical, moral, and political lives. Already in the Kant Studies (#47), Hardenberg associates the tendency toward partiality at the expense of the whole as a fundamental illusion, but also as illness. It is perhaps with this early affiliation of partiality and sickness in mind that Hardenberg speaks in the following year of poetry as “the great art of constructing transcendental health” (Poetry, #42). In a set of notes on Goethe, Hardenberg observes laconically, “Poetry is the truly absolute reality. This is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic, the truer” (#473). Far from constituting defections from philosophy, then, Hardenberg’s late novels and poems can be seen as embodiments of a certain poetic-philosophical vision of life, where the poetic is no mere illustration of the philosophical but an essential dimension of it: “Poetry is the hero of philosophy” (Assorted Fragments III, #280). If truth and health reside properly in the whole, it falls to the transcendental poet, or the magical idealist, to lead us to both or, more in keeping with Hardenberg’s own sense of philosophical expression and its pollinating relation to individual seekers, to point the way to the salvific truth.
These, then, are the centerpieces of Hardenberg’s nascent philosophical vision: (1) A commitment to our sense that the world is larger than our conceptions of it, that it imposes itself upon the mind and furnishes “data” that call for interpretation; (2) an equally important commitment to our self-understanding as agents, as subjects of a life that calls for activity and interpretation of the given; and (3) a consequential acknowledgment that the higher life involves the impossible aspiration to see all things steadily and in the whole. Together, they shape nearly everything Hardenberg has to say about, inter alia, art, morality, and politics, and they are central to his work in natural science, his appreciation of Goethe, and his views on nature and our place in the natural world.
Aesthetics
Those who come to Novalis with interests in aesthetics won’t be disappointed. Hardenberg’s reflections on aesthetic issues go back to his juvenilia, which include an essay on Anacreon and a defense of Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece.” His first serious thoughts on aesthetics come in the Fichte Studies, where Hardenberg muses at considerable length over the imagination’s role in giving shape to a meaningful world of experience and begins to think about the artistic roots of philosophy itself. But he also has much to say about the nature of art itself, its origins, and its relation to the world of human experience. Observations on art and aesthetic experience run throughout his unpublished notebooks, many offered in connection with his own poetic and literary work (especially Heinrich von Ofterdingen/Afterdingen), and several surviving manuscripts translated here are devoted centrally to aesthetic matters (Poetry, Poeticisms, and Studies in the Visual Arts). It is worth noting, too, that Hardenberg writes about art, especially literature and poetry, not as a mere critic or detached philosophical theorist, but as an accomplished poet and budding novelist. In this respect, he shares with his mentor Schiller and his contemporary Hölderlin both a philosophical interest in art and an impressive capacity for its creation. Nietzsche’s complaint that too many aestheticians write as mere spectators rather than as creators does not apply to Hardenberg.
Unsurprisingly, at least in retrospect, one of his chief contributions to the philosophy of art concerns whether art is best understood as an imitation of a preexisting reality or as the creation of a world that transcends the givens of everyday life. Hardenberg stands at the threshold between a mimetic theory of art and a more creative account that has come to be associated with the Romantic era.10
10 A still useful study of the emergence of Romantic theories of art is M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp
In line with his views on the imagination’s role in organizing the world at the most basic level, it is not surprising that he often appears to reject a mimetic theory of artistic creation. There may be moments in, e.g., the theater that seem to imitate an action or a speech that someone might perform or deliver, but the true artist has a more originating task to perform. In an unpublished note that Hardenberg marked as worth developing further, perhaps for eventual publication, he observes that “the beautiful, the object of art, is not given to us, nor does it lie already in the appearances” (Assorted Fragments III, #226). What nature produces might be inspiring, but it remains rough until the skillful artist creates something that transcends the natural order.
But he also takes art to be about things of everyday human significance. Despite the occasional expression of a view of language as untethered to the concrete world of everyday life (this comes forward most strongly in the Monologue translated below), Hardenberg more consistently views art and poetry as responsive to ongoing human concerns, in relation to the things and persons we grapple with and struggle to understand in our daily lives. Already in Pollen, Hardenberg saw the literary form of the novel as a way of organizing the materials of a life into a coherent, if ultimately unattainable, infinite whole: “Whoever has great spirit [viel Geist] makes much of his life—Every acquaintance, every event [Vorfall] would be, for the thoroughly spiritual— the first link [Glied] in an infinite series—the beginning of an infinite novel” (Assorted Remarks, #65). “The novel,” he writes in a notebook entry in 1798, “deals with life—presents life” (Assorted Fragments III, #212). A note in the collection of fragments on poetry further complicates the anti-mimetic interpretation of his theory of art. There he speaks of a “genetic imitation” that “alone is alive,” and comments: “This capacity truly to awaken a foreign individuality within oneself—not merely to deceive through a superficial imitation—is still entirely unknown—and rests upon a most wonderful penetration and spiritual mimicry. The artist makes himself into everything he sees and wants to be” (Poetry, #41).
In several contexts, Hardenberg insists that art means to teach us about the worth of what already stands before us. The successful artist places our fragmented experiences and their dislocated objects in a meaningful whole that grants them a more enduring significance and weight. Poetry often carries us away from the world, but only in order to place us back in it with greater vigilance and expressive force, and with a glimpse of the larger contexts within which our partial perspectives and finite labors find themselves set. The poetic power is the organizing power par excellence—a capacity to bring the disparate elements of our experience into a powerful whole that is at once beautiful (an object of contemplation) and orienting (an object of praxis). In fact, the beautiful and the practical turn out in the ideal to be one; for what we find beautiful is an
occasion to live in closer contact with visions of a better way of life. In Alexander Nehamas’s felicitous phrase, beauty is a promise of happiness.11
There is no better expression of this ambition to be truthful to the world, but in a way that involves the aesthetic sublimation of everyday life and reality, than the following well-known passage from 1798: “The world must be romanticized. In this way, one rediscovers its original meaning . . . When I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the ordinary a mysterious aspect, the known the dignity of the unknown, I romanticize it” (Assorted Fragments I, #105). The task of romanticizing the world is at once aesthetic and practical: art is not there merely for the sake of disinterested contemplation but serves as a vehicle for the construction of a better way of life. Fine art, like philosophy, is a branch of the art of living.12
Political/Moral Philosophy
Hardenberg’s pervasive interest in practical philosophy, morality, and politics, the latter no doubt prompted by the French Revolution, can be discerned in his published writings and in the posthumously published sketches and fragments throughout the course of his intellectual life, extending as far back as his youthful essay on “Ordeals and the Judgment of God,” a fragment, at least as we have it, composed in 1788 at the age of 15 or 16. In addition to two well-known contributions to political philosophy under some description, Faith and Love and Christianity or Europe, political themes show up throughout his notebooks and fragments as early as the Fichte Studies and reach into his final productive months. In the earliest group of notes in the Fichte Studies, probably written in late 1795, after reflecting upon the nature of human subjectivity and its selfpositing character, he observes laconically, “Morality, natural rights, and politics become the three practical sciences—whose basic principles will be drawn from the preceding” (37). His first philosophical publication (Pollen) includes several fragments on politics (approximately one-fifth of the 125 in the extant manuscript are overtly political). Political topics occupy an important place in his notes for the abandoned Romantic encyclopedia. Political concerns can also be discerned in one of his last sustained works, the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen/Afterdingen, which was conceived as a Bildungsroman centered
11 See Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
12 In the Teplitz Fragments (#24/343) Hardenberg writes, “Philosophy of life includes the science of the independent, the self-made in life, what comes within the scope of my own power—and belongs to the doctrine of the art of life [Lebenskunstlehre]—or to the system of precepts meant to prepare for such a life.”
on the life of an emerging poet, a narrative Hardenberg originally envisioned in political terms.
If we construe “the political” broadly enough to include questions about the human good, moral responsibility, the nature of social life, and the grounds of organization and political association; the tasks of education, human development, and culture; and the role of art in the modern age, we can agree with Beiser that Hardenberg and his friends in the early Romantic period were chiefly political thinkers.13 Their multifaceted defenses of art should not be reduced to mere aestheticism (an elitist “art-for-art’s-sake” mentality) but must be situated in larger spaces of human concern, which embrace politics, morality, and religion, along with the theory of nature and natural science and the epistemological investments of Kant and his immediate successors (Reinhold, Maimon, Fichte, et al.). Art is the vehicle of our coming to be ourselves and at home in the world and an organ of our moral and political development.
But beyond certain well-rehearsed clichés about political Romanticism—that, e.g., its representatives envision an organic state in opposition to the atomic, self-interested individualism of liberal political theory—Hardenberg’s political philosophy remains elusive, even if Beiser is right to see in Novalis the “most innovative political thinker of the romantic school.”14 Hardenberg provides no extensive discussions of the foundations of the state, few references to ancient Greek political philosophy and the writings of such figures as Hobbes and Locke, and only occasional allusions to debates among conservatives and progressives in the late eighteenth-century German context. Although scholars today generally reject reactionary conservative interpretations of Hardenberg’s work as both flat-footed and anachronistic, his commitment to progressive causes remains uncertain, especially considering his apparent celebration of political and cultural unity in the Catholic Middle Ages and his diatribes against the Enlightenment in Europa. Burke shows up in a few contexts, but Hardenberg’s remarks are cryptic (the following is characteristic): “Many anti-revolutionary books have been written for the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution” (Assorted Remarks, #115). His assessment of the Reflections on the Revolution in France is still open to debate. Was he in favor of tradition and experience, in the spirit of Burke and in opposition to what the Englishman dismissed as political metaphysics, or sympathetic to theory and innovation in political life, in the spirit of Kant and Fichte? The answer appears to be “both”: “Experience is the test of the rational—and vice versa” (Assorted Remarks, #10). Those who embrace a reductively pragmatic, tradition-oriented
13 See the opening section of Chapter 10 of Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative, which is devoted to religion and politics in early German Romanticism (pp. 171–174).
14 Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800, p. 264.
understanding of politics fail to appreciate the complex relations between theory and practice in political life, as if to say that every practical orientation toward contemporary political reality embodies some theoretical commitments. But we are still left to wonder where Hardenberg stands on the “theory/practice” debate running throughout the political climate of the last decade of the eighteenth century. His approach is inquisitive, and he remains indecisive. The fragment cited above ends with a question: “Is theory for the sake of application, or application for the sake of theory?”
Even such grounding questions of Western political philosophy as “What sort of government is best?” have no definitive answer in Hardenberg’s work. He appears at times to incline toward monarchy, at others toward a republican form of government, often as a critic of democracy who anticipates anxieties about the tyranny of the majority in Tocqueville, but one who sees enduring value in its representative form. Although he was committed to the value of freedom, his thought often moves in directions that affirm our dependency upon how things show up for us in a wise, loving passivity. As readers of the notes and fragments translated below will see, love stands at the very center of his interpretation of the world and our place within it. In this respect, he can be viewed as a champion of the importance of community-building political emotions, in opposition to Kantian views on the sovereignty of reason and the role of selfish conflict in the political domain, and the importance of faith or trust for a healthy modern political life. Occasionally he appears to embrace a vision of the good life that transcends the political altogether, prompting some scholars to interpret his work as apolitical, perhaps in favor of an aesthetic or moral mode of existence that is indifferent to its specific political context. He has also, unsurprisingly, been accused of political naïveté.
His mode of writing only complicates efforts to pin down this elusive figure. His fragments are more elusive than the more systematic and prosaic accounts of the foundations of political life in the writings of Kant, Fichte, and their predecessors in the modern liberal tradition. But as noted above, Hardenberg views the philosophical task as both discursive and poetic, and poetic precisely in relation to questions concerning the grounds of a philosophical interpretation of the world. Philosophical activity moves in two directions, both of which are essential in Hardenberg’s vision: toward the universal, on the one hand, and toward the particular, on the other, toward the elusive grounds of our philosophical and moral commitments and toward the higher ideals to which our more detached and rational investments appear to lead us. And his sense of the Romantic thinker’s responsibility to his audience should be constantly born in mind. The task is to write in a way that gets others to think and to be moved by political, moral, and philosophical discourse. The Romantic use of the fragment is meant to play a pollinating role, without the irritable desire to coerce
readers into embracing readymade systems. As he observes in the final fragment of the Assorted Remarks, “The true reader must be the enlarged author. He is the higher court that takes up the case prepared by the lower court” (#125). His political essays, notes, and fragments are consistent with this fundamental selfunderstanding. If systems (political, moral, or otherwise) are possible, they need to incorporate the unending aspiration toward systematic completeness and the sense of uncertainty that attaches to every finite philosophical endeavor, especially in relation to its starting point. Rather than furnishing a dogmatic philosophical system of political and moral life, then, Hardenberg provides his readers with political and moral fictions and provocations that invite us to philosophize together.
The Philosophy of Nature and Idealism (Again)
Hardenberg’s contemporary Schelling is often singled out as the first to make the philosophy of nature a serious challenge to Fichte’s transcendental idealism. And while some of Schelling’s views on nature found their way into print in the 1790s, whereas most of Hardenberg’s remained unpublished until after his death, the evidence in the surviving notes and fragments makes it clear that Hardenberg shared some of Schelling’s worries about the egocentricity of the Wissenschaftslehre at around the same time and envisioned a theory and poetics of the natural world as a complement to Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. Although some of Hardenberg’s views were developed in response to his readings of Schelling, he was receptive to Schelling’s emerging Naturphilosophie because his thoughts were already tending in certain directions as early as the Fichte Studies 15
Hardenberg also had an advantage over Schelling in having studied the natural sciences closely and formally as a student at the Freiberg Mining Academy, which served as the very first academic institution in Europe dedicated to mineralogy and geology. Although the present translation does not include Hardenberg’s more technical reflections, a large body of the Nachlass reflects his serious engagement with the hard sciences. He left behind pregnant remarks on arithmetic, geometry, and calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology, along with powerful observations on medicine, its scientific foundations and philosophical
15 This makes it somewhat astonishing that Robert J. Richards devotes only a few pages to Hardenberg in The Romantic Conception of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and focuses, oddly enough, on the Hymns to the Night. To be sure, the Hymns are an important document in any evaluation of Hardenberg’s philosophical development and relevance, but they should not take the lead over the many notes and fragments to which the scholar of early German Romanticism has had access since the appearance of the HKA.
