The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Novalis’ discussion of feeling is not without interest but, without careful interpretation, it reinforces the stereotype of romanticism as a cult of feeling at the expense of cognition. More engaging and less potentially misleading is the discussion of inversion as a strategy for replicating in experience the relation between subjectivity and its ground. Here what bounds and constitutes subjective experience, discursive thought, is itself deployed to show that limitation, and to model in its own terms the absolute as that which exceeds any conceptual determination. It is the elusiveness of the absolute that can be shown. It is here that Schlegel proves to be the deeper thinker, that is, in connection with the issue of how the impact of the absolute may be modeled in terms of experience. But Novalis also offers two such regimens. The first of these is what he calls the ordo inversus, an indirect discursive procedure that models the basic discursive categories in their discursivity under the controlling idea that they stem from a non-discursive source (see FS I: 32, 36, 44, 65; NS II: 126–7, 128, 133–4, 142–3).12 To illustrate the process Novalis deploys a visual analogy. “Inversus” has a specialized meaning in optics, where it refers to mirror-imaging. When one looks in a mirror one sees oneself represented in a way that tempts the thought that what is in the mirror is visually identical to what stands before the mirror. But even a child can tell that images in a plane mirror are not visually identical to what they represent. A mirror-image of a thing is reversed left–right; mirrors present inverted images of what they represent. Novalis’ idea is that this applies to the concept of reflection itself. The idea that reflection is ontologically basic is a byproduct of reflection itself—of it looking for itself in its own mirror—and is, thus, an inversion. Ordo inversus requires one to see the investigation of the root of reflection as always involving reflection-produced artifacts: all that one gets are inversions of the first article, not something independent of it. This is the first stage of ordo inversus, what one might call its “diagnostic” aspect. But ordo inversus also has a second, “constructive” stage in which the inversion itself is inverted. This does not “correct” the inversion back to an original form which is non-representational: to mirror a mirror-image is not to have a non-mirrored image; it is to have an image twice-mirrored. Rather, it makes inversion itself thematic, self-consciously nesting the first inversion in a further one to which it is necessarily related. The moral is that extrapolation of even base reflective constraints from the absolute is an illusion, one that encourages the idea that some sort of Ur-reflection must be a ground for reflection. The more one attempts to represent basic subjectivity the more one heaps reflection upon reflection—something that one is fated to do, yet at the same time, something about which one must be circumspect. The second regimen of inversion is what Novalis terms “romanticizing” (Romantisieren) (see FS I: 37; NS II: 384). Romanticizing is a process also with two aspects, each of which corresponds to one element in what Novalis thinks is the essential tension inherent in living reflectively under conditions of the absolute. On the one hand, the philosopher makes the commonplace or ordinary extraordinary, even supernatural. Novalis calls this part of the romanticizing procedure “potentializing” (Potenzierung),13 holding that it contrasts the ordinary with the “infinite.” This requires the philosopher-poet to treat the given objects of the world (i.e. objects under given schemes of interpretation) as nevertheless only problematically given by showing what they “are not.” In order to accomplish this, the poet dislodges objects from their customary contexts and translates them into foreign contexts that render the objects strange. Second, romanticizing involves treating the infinite, mysterious, or extraordinary as ordinary. This practice accounts for the abundance of supernatural effects in Novalis’ fiction, patterns that are treated as if they were as natural laws. Combining the two aspects of romanticizing—making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary—imposes tasks upon one to invert the conventional priority given to the value of fixity in experience. If one performs these imaginative operations and admits them as broadly constitutive of experience, as Novalis advocates, this could very well have the effect on the subject of disorienting and jostling one’s sense of security in a given mode of thought. But the ontological point is primary: romanticizing is a circumspect way of expressing the elusive absolute by proliferating representations of the possible that run contrary to the sense of stability one might take from the ordinary run of life.

  Schlegel hopes to meet the challenge of expressing the elusiveness to conceptual capture of the ground for subjectivity by inducing an experience in his reader of just that elusiveness. It is the experience of a kind of indeterminacy, and being precise about what kind of indeterminacy is at issue is crucial for entering the orbit of Schlegel’s conception: his account of irony. Subjects are situated in concrete forms of life that are constituted, constrained, and individuated by more or less coherent and reasonably stable stocks of beliefs, desires, feelings, moods, habits, and so on. Each of these forms of life, if made the object of philosophical reflection, will be seen to involve certain core commitments in terms of which things are significant. Being embedded in a particular form of life largely provides the basis for one’s self-understanding and to that extent one must affirm that form of life’s point of view on the world. Schlegel treats this affirmation as one of two components of irony. If one reflects with sufficient acumen one will also realize that there are other possible variations in what the world might be like for others situated in other forms of life that are different from one’s own to varying degrees. There are any number of ways to interpret the world as basically meaningful, expressed in concrete forms of thought and action, the consideration of which drives home the point crucial to a correct view on the nature of subjectivity that the absolute evades capture in the finite terms constitutive of subjectivity, even where those finite terms are in their own concrete domains and in their own rights fundamentally orienting: any given state of affairs must fail to be constitutive of one’s identity as such. Although one cannot help but be beholden to the customs and principles governing one’s form of life (“affirm” them in Schlegel’s sense), one registers within one’s given form of life the fact that qua a form of life it is but one of many expressions of the absolute. Schlegel claims on this basis that a criticism of the appropriate rigor will balance distancing of oneself from one’s perspective with the affirmation of the perspective. This distancing is the second element in irony. Taken as a whole irony, then, involves an acute yet circumspect awareness of one’s own form of life as a form of life, that is, as not definitive of one. It is simultaneously an affirmation and critical distancing from the normative and identity-constituting features of one’s own concrete way of being. Put another way, irony is the acknowledgment that forms of life are “partial” in both senses of the word: those who share them are partial to them, yet should recognize they are but partial ways of representing things.

  Schlegel expresses the balance between the two components of irony as a tension of those components and does so in three main ways. Perhaps the most famous characterization involves the idea that the ironist—one who embraces irony with all clarity—“oscillates” between “self-creation” (Selbstschöpfung) and “self-annihilation” (Selbstvernichtung) (AFr. 51, F. Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 14 2: 172; see also LFr. 43, 48, KFSA 2: 149, 153; AFr 51, KFSA 2: 172–3; PhL Beilage I, i:13; I, vi; I: l).15 The idea here is that, prescinding from certain invariant logical features that dictate discursive judgment form and perception, selves are constructs that attain what stability they have relative to the forms of life in which they develop. Irony requires one to engage in the project of being a self within a given form of life, but also requires distancing from the form of life which perforce exerts a destabilizing effect on identity and thus on one’s conception of oneself. Irony, that is, mandates a reciprocal but non-assimilative relation between thinking of one’s form of life as staving off negation and embracing it. A variant
to this first way of contrasting the twin poles of irony that is more explicitly indebted to Fichte adds to the two structural elements above a third, mediate term, “self-limitation” (Selbstbeschränkung) (LFr. 37, KFSA 2: 150). Here Schlegel is characterizing the effect on the subject of holding the two prior elements together. Taking sustenance from one’s own form of life and at the same time recognizing that there are other (possibly quite incompatible) modes of doing the same that offer substance to others, Schlegel holds, has the effect of reigning in the sense of completion and self-satisfaction one would likely have were one to view one’s form of life as exclusively value-giving. Yet a third way Schlegel expresses the same point—one that brings ontology to the foreground—is that irony allows an “intimation” (Ahnung) of the absolute (I. 69, KFSA 2: 263). What Schlegel means here is precisely not that irony is a substitute for the discredited idea of intellectual intuition. Not only would this commit Schlegel to a concept of immediate access to the absolute that he rejects along with Novalis, it is also clear that irony, bifurcated as it is, could never hope to structurally fit the bill. Instead, Schlegel intends merely to recapitulate points already considered: a thing intimates something else when it exhibits features of its own that indicate the other thing. This tracks common usage of course: intimation is precisely not a mode of direct access. In this case the feature that irony exhibits is a plurality of possible forms of life and what that intimates is that the absolute, as a source of such forms, is not exhausted by any one of them. Irony is, in a sense, a transcendental principle of apperception for him, but only in a sense. It is necessary, synthetic, but does not deliver unwavering identity. It rather grounds a process of unending self-formation that is not necessarily “progressive” in any philosophical standard sense (any progress would be heavily contextual and depend a great deal on contingent factors).

  In sum, one might do worse than think that the pressing question that motivates early German romanticism is that of emergence: on what basis and how does a new form of life come from an old one? What counts as “new” for them is not merely a novel twist in a paradigm already given and accepted. The idea rather is under what conditions is an original way of life possible. This question was not for the romantics merely scholastic, answering it was not an attempt to intervene in an academic dispute or to round off a prior treatment of a philosophical concern. Answering the question was a matter of general cultural orientation and that, in turn, means a matter of understanding how life was to be understood and undertaken. This sense of cultural urgency is present in Kant, and its expression grows more explicit in the idealism of Fichte, Schiller, and Schelling, but it is with the Jena romantics that the lived aspect of the question and of its answer is most palpable. Whatever the new form of life consists in, philosophy is not merely a spectator to its instantiation; it is, rather, a proper part of the form of life. Herder’s reflection on the conditions for cultural emergence and unity, his emphasis on pre-conceptual and linguistic modes of social organization, and his insistence that evaluating cultures not involve armchair prejudice all impressed upon romanticism the contingency, and thus the at hand possibility, of cultural renewal. (It is important for Hegel as well.) The address to the question must be theoretical, but not merely so. Theories can have cultural effects but those effects are not transformative on their own. Even Marx’s views, to name a theory with a great deal of social force, were not effective through sheer theoretical fiat. Marx knew this well; no one was going to satisfy the Eleventh Thesis by writing a treatise. The Jena romantics appreciated this point and did so by implementing various forms of philosophical address—both to foster interchange within the romantic circle (what they called Symphilosophieren) and to convince others to consider seriously the question of inaugurating a new form of life. There was a renewed place within philosophy for rhetoric, poetry, novelistic prose, and even myth. But this is not all. The Jena romantics were dedicated to the project of not spoiling the investigation into emergence by seeding it with prior systematic philosophical aims. They are interested in philosophy taking part in the emergence and commenting on it at the same time. They are not at all concerned to argue back from a stable society taken for granted to its conditions. The group organized around Schlegel and Novalis in Jena conceived of itself as an experiment in thinking and living. The negative assessments of Fichte’s form of monadic foundationalism were crucial in clearing the ground for the experiment to take place but the experiential disciplines of inversion that both Novalis and Schlegel proposed for coming to grips with the realization that what grounds subjects cannot be experienced by those subjects were far from arid regulative posits. The regimens in question involved imaginative forays into the possibilities latent in the philosophical and literary environment in the late eighteenth century across Europe (and beyond in some cases) and then drawing “real time” philosophical consequences from those experiences. Hegel’s project of seeking ultimate conceptual stability while attempting to do justice to the multiplicity of philosophical options is a descendant of romanticism but is also at right angles to the Jena view.

  This difference with the Hegelian attempt to accommodate a great deal of rich dialectical diversity within unitary structures accounts for the first stage in the reception history of Jena romanticism, whose most important figures are Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel’s extremely adverse reaction to what he considered to be the dangerous aspects of Jena romanticism as a historical matter sealed the philosophical fate of German romanticism as a form of thought with which one had to reckon for quite some time. Hegel singles out Schlegel for poor treatment, all but identifying Schlegel’s dialectical irony with what is termed “Evil” (Böse) in the Phenomenology (Hegel, Werke16 3: 485f.). Irony seems also to be associated with several aspects of end-stage romantic art and aesthetics that he dislikes, what he terms in his Lectures on Aesthetics “subjective humor” (HW 14: 229–31). He sometimes seems to discount such art—and this would be most of the German romantic art that modernists consider valuable—to not be art at all (see HW 15: 496–7). The tenor of Hegel’s reaction to Jena romanticism may be governed by the proximity of its conception of dialectic to his own.17 Hegel realizes this, placing “Evil” (aside from returns to questions of the social significance of religion) next to his own “absolute knowing.” Some of Hegel’s views of early German romanticism are colored by his reception of them through a synopsis provided by K. W. F. Solger, which Hegel reviewed in publication. Hegel seems to have considered Solger’s view on the nature of irony final and credits him with anticipating Hegel’s own dialectical analysis of late romantic art (HW 11: 237). Regardless of provenance, Hegel’s complaint is clear. Any determination worth its salt will be treated by Schlegel ironically, as an interpretation that at one and the same time is both put forward as a point of orientation and is subject to potential disavowal. Hegel holds that this conception of cognitive regard is incoherent because potential disavowal is so corrosive of orientation that the only self-understanding of its own force that subjects might attain under these circumstances is in the sheer ability to pass between thoughts. Hegel interprets Schlegel’s irony as a form of dialectical stasis, in which “negative” and “positive” elements—distance and affirmation—are conjoined with the effect that, at their optimum, they cancel one another out. There is no conceptual advance in such a case, merely interpretation and re-interpretation ad libitum. There is dialectical drive—irony is truly dialectical, but it does not and cannot drive itself forward. On Hegel’s understanding of it irony cannot help but collapse back into one of its aspects: cognitive distance. Irony cannot be a form of existence because it is not a form of commitment, at least not a form of commitment that survives reflective scrutiny.

  Kierkegaard presents a more complex case of reception and a much more subtle understanding of the potentialities of Jena romanticism. Kierkegaard’s dissertation, On the Concept of Irony (1841), in many ways adopts Hegel’s (and Solger’s) assessment of Schlegel, but then argues f
or a much more positive role for a suitably adapted romantic irony. This is a precursor to Kierkegaard’s later development of “controlled irony” and “humor” as boundary conditions between, respectively, (1) the aesthetic and ethical and (2) the ethical and religious “spheres of existence” in works like Either—Or and Stages on Life’s Way. In these works, and other interconnected ones, Kierkegaard in essence triangulates Socratic irony, romantic irony, and Hegelian dialectic in order to fashion both a critique of Hegelianism and a new conception of philosophical irony.

  A second stage of the philosophical reception of Jena romanticism took place in the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century in Germany. Dilthey is the main figure here, a polymath whose intellectual interests extended in many directions, mirroring the romantic refusal to specialize at the expense of integrity. Dilthey’s study of the romantics was placed in service to his own version of “life philosophy,” deploying his interpretation of romanticism in part to reclaim for himself a version of Kant over and against rivals. The other main interpreter of Jena romanticism in this second wave was Walter Benjamin, whose dissertation on the subject remains a watershed document.18 It contains an extremely astute, if incomplete, analysis of the aesthetics of Novalis and Schlegel and also provides a window into Benjamin’s own version of dialectical thought. Because Benjamin’s thought was largely untouched by Hegelianism, his reworking of romanticism provides one with a conception of dialectic that is drawn directly from the resources of romanticism, entirely circumventing Hegelian recasting. This internalization of Jena romanticism in Benjamin would later be reformulated (with significant Hegelian modifications) into Adorno’s idea of negative dialectics.