Of the women associated most closely with the Jena Circle, Caroline Michaelis, later Boehmer/Schlegel/Schelling was an even more central female force than Dorothea. She was born in 1763 into an academic family. Her father, Johann David Michaelis, was a distinguished professor of Semitic languages at the university in Göttingen, and translated Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa into German. She received an education and longed for the independence to express her thoughts in writing even as a child. Those hopes were dashed when a marriage to an older man was arranged for her by her family, but her husband’s death, four years and three pregnancies after her marriage, enabled a fateful move to Mainz, where she became an ardent supporter of the French revolution, remaining in Mainz after the French took over the city. On the eve of the recapture of Mainz by the Prussians, she left Mainz, but was seized and imprisoned by Prussian soldiers for revolutionary loyalties and for having slept with a French soldier. In jail, and it turned out, pregnant, she wrote letters pleading for help in securing her release. Among the recipients of these pleas was August Wilhelm Schlegel, who, after Caroline’s brother secured her release, provided a place where she could give birth to her child in relative anonymity. There, at August’s request, his brother Friedrich also visited her. Both brothers were smitten by her wit, intelligence, and independent spirit. She became August’s lover, and later married him at the behest of her family. She maintained her friendship with Friedrich and, later, with Dorothea. Thanks primarily to Caroline’s sociable nature and her willingness to host large gatherings and frequent house guests, August and Caroline’s home in Jena became the site of the famed “Circle” that is now synonymous with early German romanticism.9 She eventually fell in love with the well-known philosopher and occasional member of the Jena Circle, Friedrich Schelling. The discord caused by the ensuing love affair together with Caroline’s absence from home due to her own serious illness contributed greatly to the demise of the Circle, and provided the context for Dorothea’s comment that the Circle had become a quarrelsome “republic of despots.” Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the conviviality and creativity of the Circle up to that point secured the fame of early romanticism and could not have occurred without Caroline’s contributions to the conversations, welfare, and ambience of their setting.
Just as important, and generally overlooked by historians of the philosophical aesthetics of this period, however, was Caroline’s contribution to epistolary style. Her collected letters have been praised as “masterpieces” of aesthetic form,”10 and the “crown of female letter-writing.”11 She was a prolific and gifted letter writer who maintained correspondence with the leading intellectual figures of the time, including not only the leading lights of early German romanticism but also the literary titans Schiller and Goethe. Yet Caroline did not write novels or poetry, and some otherwise sympathetic critics explain her conscious decision to limit herself to letter writing as a capitulation to her male cohort, many of whom found the very idea of women writers distasteful and condemned the prospect of women making an entrance into the public sphere of literary publication.12 It may be true that she gave up any dreams of publication for that reason, but the suggestion that women writers capitulated to men in refraining from writing for publication assumes that they had any real choice in the matter. That is, it fails to keep in mind the psychological depth of the sexism, not uncommonly manifested in visceral disgust and vocal animosity, that male intellectuals directed at women intellectuals.13
Moreover, contemporary explanations for why Caroline “only” wrote letters mistakenly assumes the insignificance of letter-writing as an art. This was an assumption that the early German romantics by and large did not share. Novalis, in Blüthenstaub, claims that “The genuine letter is poetic by its very nature” and he and Schlegel intended that their correspondence be published.14 It is arguable, in fact, that precisely her gift for the conversational genre heavily influenced Schlegel’s, Novalis’, and Schleiermacher’s theories of romantic sociability and their hope that they could develop an art of philosophizing. In the end it must be admitted that in spite of the long odds against women accomplishing anything at all in an intellectual world defined by men and for men (of a certain class and heritage), there was an undeniable “women’s touch” present and influential in the philosophy of early German romanticism.15 The fact that the contributions of Henriette Herz, Dorothea Veit/Schlegel, and Caroline Boehmer/Schlegel/Schelling were appropriated often without acknowledgment or even conscious recognition by the men whom history has credited with inventing romanticism is par for the course of patriarchy. But this misappropriation in no way changes the fact that central aspects of the early romantic project were due to women. It is this fact that invites—even demands—that early German romanticism be studied more closely as potentially fertile ground for a growing feminist philosophy.
27.3 ROMANTIC SOCIABILITY
The social, collaborative aspect of early German romanticism cannot be over-emphasized. All the members of this philosophical poetic group understood their project to be through and through a shared one.16 For this very reason a strong case can be made that the women of the early German romantic (Jena) circle fundamentally determined the nature of it. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that the women who were integral to the sociable conduct of early German romanticism were also central to that movement’s redefinition of philosophy as itself an essentially social enterprise. These women in concert with men who could at least partially see through gender stereotypes, introduced a type of intellectual discourse that came to define early romantic philosophy and made it more susceptible, open, and hospitable to philosophical feminism.
The practice of what Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel called “symphilosophizing,” in which two or more persons share ideas and in the process create philosophy or poetry, defined the sociable character of their movement. As Friedrich Schlegel saw it, sharing thoughts with others with the aim of combining them “like two halves” that can only be whole when combined was the artistic and scientific way of the future—the intellectual way forward:
Perhaps an entirely new epoch in the sciences and arts would begin, if Symphilosophie and Sympoesie were to become so common and so internalized that it would no longer be unusual for several mutually complementary natures to jointly create works.17
From the perspective of much feminist theory, this gesture towards a new epoch of collaboration and mutuality is a welcome antidote to the standard “individual genius” model in the arts and sciences. On the other hand, as Sara Friedrichsmeyer points out, the ideal of symphilosophy was a double-edged sword for the women who contributed to it, since the radical experiment in fusing voices had the effect that women’s individual contributions—already invisible except in the private sphere—were even further removed from the public eye and were inevitably attributed to the men of the group.18
Friedrich Schlegel’s famous (and, at the time, infamous) novel, Lucinde, presents a complicated case in point. Written during the time of his co-habitation with Dorothea after her divorce from Simon Veit (the much older banker with whom her parents had arranged her marriage at 18 years of age), the fragmentary novel centers upon the intellectual/sexual relationship of the male protagonist Julius (Friedrich) to the “light” of his life, Lucinde (Dorothea). Thanks to Schlegel’s signature romantic-ironic style, which he defined as a “permanent parabasis” (continual interruption and fragmentation), the novel defies adequate summary. Yet whatever else Schlegel manages or fails to achieve in this unique work, he emphatically succeeds in portraying the main (male) character’s struggle to nurture and sustain the creative intellectual reciprocity of his and Lucinde’s very much embodied relationship. In the novel, Schlegel’s ideal couple have managed to free themselves from bourgeois taboos to devote themselves to developing and ultimately expanding their lover–companion–friend relationship. In one remarkable passage that finds echoes in Schlegel’s other writings, Julius/Friedrich describes his favorite of the couple’s
amorous games:
…when we exchange roles and in childish high spirits compete to see who can mimic the other more convincingly, whether you are better at imitating the protective intensity of the man, or I the appealing devotion of the woman. But are you aware that this sweet game still has quite other attractions for me than its own…I see here a wonderful, deeply meaningful allegory of the development of man and woman to full and complete humanity…19
This conception of the possibility of the progressive development of genders to a point where “full and complete humanity” in each individual is attained is an important moment in the novel, even apart from the gender-bending aspects of the couple’s sex play.
From a feminist perspective there is much to criticize in this novel. It is written almost exclusively from the perspective of the male authorial figure, and revolves around his perspective and development; it often adopts essentialist language to characterize women, and seems to portray Lucinde’s independence and strength as the exception to, not the norm of, femininity. And not least, the publication of such a thinly-veiled story of their transgressive love-life predictably brought down the wrath and opprobrium of official culture upon Dorothea in far greater measure than upon her well-known husband.
Nonetheless, the novel has moments of redeeming feminist value. The transgressive nature of Lucinde’s and Julius’ relationship—eschewing “forced” marriage, exchanging roles, mutually encouraging each others’ artistry, and their general equality and respect for each other—are venerable feminist themes. Although Schlegel does claim that men can only be friends with other men, the very meaning of “friendship” is called into question at several points in the novel.20 Julius refers to Lucinde as his “most perfect friend,” and to “a unique woman who moved him to the very depths of his heart for the first time”(clearly a portrait of Caroline Schlegel/Schelling) as his “sublime friend.”21 His relationship to Lucinde over time fosters in him an ability to be more relaxed and open in all his friendships, so that he learns “to discover the noble in the ordinary” and to give up his tendency to “love the idea of friendship in his friends [and] love them for themselves.”22 In the novel, this new conception of friendship allows Julius and Lucinde to create a “free society” which is, of course, an allusion to the Jena Circle.
Even self-centeredness is dealt with in a way that has strong feminist overtones: in the fragments of the proposed continuation of the novel, Schlegel fends off criticisms of literary egocentrism in the voice of a woman, and indeed in the voice of his “sublime friend,” Juliane/Caroline, in a letter to Lucinde/Dorothea:
I want to talk about myself, for why should I deny that I relate everything to myself and to my suffering? For in the end everyone has to escape back into himself, though he might gladly wander about ever so far in restless striving. This is how humanity is, a curious race, with egoism rooted deeply in it. And if I could only speak: oh, how good that would be!
Am I one of those people who think their fate is unusual? Oh no, I can’t come to terms with myself that easily.
She goes on to describe her suffering but dismisses it as a fate shared with many women. She understands that what she has gone through, the death of her children, a loveless marriage, was “certainly nothing unusual!” She describes how she “longed for death” and how “an equally deep longing prevented me from satisfying it. I wanted to become clear about myself.” Juliane/Caroline gets the last word of this unfinished novel, and it is the very moving, clear-eyed statement of a woman whose great communicative abilities were never fully realized and never fully appreciated, but who continued to try to find, or rather to become, herself.
Schlegel’s sympathetic characterization of Caroline’s plight underscores another aspect of romantic sociability, namely that although the experiment of symphilosophizing and sympoetizing could not allow self-aggrandizement, it nevertheless at the same time required participants to eschew an equally destructive self-effacement and servility: symphilosophizing could only succeed when each individual contributed to the process equally and enthusiastically. Early romantic sociability required the respectful recognition of the unique contribution of each participating individual. The novel Lucinde comes close to portraying this ideal in a way that the Jena Circle itself fell far short of with respect to gender.
Romantic sociability was also influenced, of course, by the friendships and interchanges of the men in the group, especially Schlegel’s friendship with the young and passionate Friedrich von Hardenberg, who took the pen-name Novalis. Often caricatured as inward-focused to the point of solipsism, Novalis was in fact of precisely the opposite view. Philosophy, he believed, was philosophizing: that is, it is (or should become) a progressive social activity dependent upon the mutual exchange and completion of ideas. Friedrich Schlegel inserts, symphilosophically, this fragment into Novalis’ text:
When in communicating one’s thoughts [with another] one alternates between understanding absolutely and not understanding at all, this can be called a philosophical friendship.23
The activity of thinking through something with another person, of progressively working out and completing one’s ideas with others is the very definition of philosophy. Schegel suggests in the same fragment that by extension what we call inner contemplation is only a special case of this social activity, namely an internalization of it. “And is the life of a thinking person anything other than a continuous inner Symphilosophie?”24
For Novalis and Schlegel, philosophizing “solo” presupposes the possibility of philosophizing with others. Mere thinking about the world only takes the philosopher to further removes of abstraction and reflection in an endless process that never arrives at an “absolute.”25 Although the process of perpetual striving for an absolute that we can never grasp—that is fully beyond us—is part of philosophizing, it cannot capture the entire truth about what we as human beings are capable of becoming. Novalis famously describes this problematic and the early romantic response in a fragment that begins with the observation that we often fantasize about an afterlife in the heavens or in the depths, and we dream of traveling through it. But in that case, he continues, the true “absolute” must lie in ourselves:
Is not then the World-All in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit—the mysterious path leads inward. Eternity with its worlds is in us, or nowhere.26
Contrary to stereotypes about romanticism, and about Novalis in particular, this famous passage is not a commitment to finding oneself in a form of mystical solipsism. True, for Novalis the “inward” path refers to finding one’s innermost self, or to use Nietzsche’s phrase, to “becoming who one is.” But it should be noted that the concept of the “seat of the soul” was a philosophical term of art at that time, tied to the metaphysical problem of interaction between mind and body.27 The early romantics were very much Kantians about this issue: finding ourselves cannot be a matter of metaphysical discovery. There is no absolute self to be grasped. The “true” self that philosophy seeks can only be found in a space of human interaction with other human beings and the world. We are, that is to say, social beings with fundamentally shared and therefore universally communicable experiential possibilities. As Novalis puts it:
The seat of the soul is there where the inner world and the outer world touch each other [sich berühren]. Where they permeate each other—it is in every point of the permeating.28
Elsewhere he comments that after Kant, pure mathematics and pure natural science focus on the forms of outer sensibility, and he wonders “What science focuses on the forms of inner sensibility”:
Is there still another knowledge beyond sensibility? Is there yet another way open, to get out of ourselves and to get to other beings, or to be affected by them? (Kant-Studien #46, Novalis Schriften, vol. 2, 390)
For Novalis, as for other romantics, getting outside oneself in the sense of being at home in the world is a recurring theme. Novalis doesn’t answer his own question here, but elsewhere his view is
clearly that of his early German romantic cohort: getting outside oneself is the path to becoming ourselves, and that requires that we find a way to connect with others, socially, intellectually, intuitively, and physically. This process of self-discovery is at the same time one of self-creation, and for this reason, philosophizing in the old way is not sufficient: “The world must be romanticized” was Novalis’ famous dictum. In a fragment that came to serve as manifesto for the early German romantic program, he made a case for a new way of approaching philosophy through art and invention that he conceived to be inherently social: “romantic philosophy” amounts to a “potentializing” operation that lifts the self in concert—symphilosophically—with others. In that process we are, in his terms, transformed exponentially, to a higher power, a “better self.”29
Novalis provides the metaphysical underpinnings of early romanticism’s commitment to sociability and he too was part of the great experiment of the Jena Circle, but his relationship to women was fraught with angst and tragedy. An early love affair was broken up by his father, and shortly thereafter he was smitten by and secretly engaged to the 13 year old Sophie von Kühn. Although his father this time approved it, Novalis’ happiness was shattered when she died just one year later. Shaken to the core by her suffering and moved by her courage, he only gradually recovered, and eventually became re-engaged to a woman whom he very much admired and respected. His early death (at almost 29 years) left posterity with no way of knowing whether or how his views of women would have developed as a result of that relationship.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 100