## 1. Life and Work



Friedrich von Hardenberg was born into a family descending from the
lower-Saxon nobility and spent most of his childhood on the family
estate of the Oberwiederstedt manor. His father, Heinrich Ulrich
Erasmus von Hardenberg, was the manager of a salt mine and was known
as a pietist and member of the Herrenhuter (Moravian) Church. His
second wife, Auguste Bernhardine von Hardenberg (nee von Bolzig),
gave birth to eleven children, the second of whom was Friedrich. After
his initial studies with a private tutor, von Hardenberg went on to
the Lutheran grammar school in Eisleben, where he, in line with the
general educational guidelines at the time, concentrated in rhetoric
and ancient literature. From the age of twelve, he moved to the home
of his uncle, Gottlob Friedrich Wilhelm von Hardenberg, who is said to
have taken an interest in French enlightenment philosophy. Von
Hardenberg later studied law in Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg. He
passed his final exams in 1794 and moved on to work in the Prussian
civil service in Tennstedt, where he also met the young Sophie von
Kuhn. The two got secretly engaged in 1795. Two years later, Sophie
tragically died at the age of fifteen, an event that would move a
whole generation of poets and artists in Germany, including Goethe.
Just prior to Sophie's death, Novalis, following in his
father's footsteps, commenced his studies of mining in Freiberg,
Saxony, and eventually took up an administrative position at the salt
mines in Weissenfels. Throughout this period, he would retain his
interest in philosophy, but also explore subjects such as medicine,
geology, and biology. He advanced to director of the salt mines and
became engaged for a second time.



From his period as a student in Jena onwards, von Hardenberg was well
connected with the dominant intellectual circles of the time. He was
acquainted with Goethe, Fichte, Holderlin, Herder, and Jean Paul
(Richter), and made close friends with Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel
brothers, Schelling, and Schiller (whose lectures he attended in
1790). Friedrich von Hardenberg died of tuberculosis in March
1801.



Von Hardenberg did not publish much during his lifetime. His first
publication, emerging in 1791 in Christoph Martin Wieland's
*Neuem Teutschen Merkur*, was the poem "Klagen eines
Junglings". In 1798, he published *Pollen*
(*Bluthenstaub*), a collection of 114 aesthetic-philosophical
fragments and reflections, in the first issue of the
*Athenaeum*. The text was edited by Friedrich Schlegel, and
Novalis's *Miscellaneous Observations* is as close as we
get to a final version from his hand. Only one other collection of
fragments was published during his lifetime, the controversial
*Faith and Love*, also from 1798. In 1799, Novalis finished his
political-religious tract, *Christianity or Europe*, which
remained unpublished until after the author's death. A year
later emerged the famous lyrical cycle *Hymns to the Night*.
The rest of his writing consists mainly of posthumously published
notes and sketches, including *Notes for a Romantic
Encyclopaedia* (*Das Allgemeine Brouillon*, 1798/99),
studies of Fichte (1795/96), Kant (1797), and Franz Hemsterhuis
(1797). The pen name Novalis--referring back to an old family
name while, all the same, conveying the meaning of "the one who
clears new ground"--was initially introduced in
1798*.*



After Novalis's death, his work was first edited by Tieck and
Friedrich Schlegel and, subsequently, published in a number of
different editions. Since 2006, his complete work has been available
in a six volume historical-critical edition (of which the first volume
was launched in 1960), edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel,
Hans-Joachim Mahl, and Gerhard Schulz, which provides a more adequate
picture of Novalis's philosophical reflections than the previous
editions, helpfully distinguishes between complete and incomplete
texts, and offers a valuable apparatus of historical-philological
footnotes and commentaries.



In spite of its momentous impact in the history of Western art and
thinking, early romantic philosophy lasted for only a short period of
time, and is commonly dated to the few years between 1797 and 1801,
or, in some cases, the period between 1794 and 1808. With its initial
center of gravity in Jena, the famous university town and intellectual
powerhouse of the time, the romantic circle soon moved its foothold to
Berlin, whose vivid salon scene offered welcoming new quarters.
Throughout this period, the early romantic movement evolved around the
work of Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel-brothers Friedrich and August
Wilhelm, as well as the philosopher and classicist Friedrich
Schleiermacher and the jurist and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder.
Among the inner circle were also Caroline Schelling (married to August
Wilhelm Schlegel, later to Schelling), Dorothea Schlegel (married to
the banker Simon Veit, later to Friedrich Schlegel), and Sophie Tieck,
the poet's younger sister. Under the editorial leadership of the
Schlegels, these self-designated romantic writers published the
short-lived, yet influential journal *Athenaeum*, whose famous
manifesto states that romanticism is neither merely an aesthetic, nor
a purely academic pursuit--as von Hardenberg optimistically puts
it: the entire world should be romanticized (LFI #66).



The notion of the *Athenaeum* writers establishing a unified
philosophical group is due, in part, to their call for a shared
philosophizing (*Symphilosophie*)--their envisioning
philosophy as a progressive, collective enterprise, rather than a set
of solitary contributions of the system-building variety--and the
accompanying critique of the idea of intellectual authorship that
would encourage the adoption of pen-names and countless anonymous
publications, which also, conveniently, minimized the impact of
censorship on individual academic careers and allowed the
movement's female companions to publish and distribute their
work. Furthermore, from Hegel onwards, the critics of romantic
philosophy have typically favored sweeping claims and totalizing
rejections rather than careful analysis of particular contributions
and arguments. (I return to this point in Section Eight.) However, the
group in question had rather porous and flexible boundaries. The
*Athenaeum* philosophers were all part of the larger
intellectual life in Germany. And the romantics not only responded to
the most well-known philosophical schools of the time, such as those
of Kant or Fichte, but were also influenced by a whole host of writers
and intellectuals whose work, at least within the Anglophone world,
have long been forgotten outside the circles of historically minded
German scholars and experts on late eighteenth-century European
thought. Rather than falling in rank under one unifying program, the
contributors to the *Athenaeum* stand forth as diverse with
regard to philosophical orientations and insights as well as the
historical-philosophical resources on which they draw.


## 2. The Fragment as Philosophical Form



The very term romanticism is often traced back to the medieval novel
of chivalry in which the hero's lonely fight against evil, sin,
and moral weakness is fuelled by the twin motivation of faith and
love, hence reflecting a universe in which the individual is unified
with and understands himself through the *de facto* tradition
to which he pledges allegiance. However, the turn to the Middle Ages
is not primarily expressive of a sentimental cultivation of the past,
but had long been part of the German Enlightenment and its critique of
political absolutism. Like the enlightenment philosophers, the Jena
romantics were always clear that the organic unity of pre-modern
societies was lost once and for all. When Novalis, in *Christianity
or Europe* and other texts, wishes to revive the spirit of the
Middle Ages, he is frequently referring to the cosmopolitan thrust of
the Hanseatic League rather than a homogenous, tradition-based, and
authoritarian medieval culture. As such, Novalis's philosophy is
responsive to the conditions of modernity. In his work, modern
philosophy is seen as fundamentally self-reflexive in nature, as
belonging to the age of self-critical reason; that is, it is linked up
with the quest not only for first-order knowledge of nature and human
being, but also for second-order knowledge of what human knowledge
involves in the first place.



As a philosophical form, the fragment reflects the conditions of
modernity. In Friedrich Schlegel's view, the hyper-reflexive
expressive registers of irony and humor are particularly suited to
voice the modern mindset, and are, as such, intrinsically linked to
the fragment (such a view is also present in Novalis's writings,
though underemphasized in comparison with Friedrich Schlegel).
Novalis's turn to the fragment has a different philosophical
motivation. The fragment questions the idea that philosophical
system-building, be it of a deductive or a teleological kind, is fit
to capture the nature of reality. Like
*Bluthenstaub*--though the title was added when Friedrich
Schlegel was editing Novalis's text for publication--the
fragment emerges as an intellectual seed or pollen that is meant to
foster critical and independent reflection rather than presenting a
system of self-contained theorizing.



Although the fragment, as a philosophical form, is often associated
with the early Jena romantics, it was not invented by this group.
Rather, the fragment has a long history, stretching back to the
ancient Greeks, but also to modern writers such as Chamfort, La
Rochefoucauld, and Lichtenberg. (Chamfort's work was translated
into German in the 1790s and eagerly read and discussed at the time.)
Within circles closer to the romantics, Herder, from the late 1760s
on, had been exploring the philosophical potential of the fragment.
Herder's turn to the fragment was motivated by a wide-spanning
skepticism with regard to the idea of a totalizing or teleological
system of reason. The young Herder leads this skepticism back to the
philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Novalis makes frequent
references to Herder's work and person.



With its broken form and literary style, Novalis's return to the
fragment has been taken to challenge the distinction between art and
critical thinking that was entirely central to Kant and Fichte.
However, while the fragment draws on the expressive registers of
literature, it does not represent a deconstruction of the difference
between philosophy and poetry, science and art. It is, rather, an
attempt, from *within* the realm of critical reason, to explore
a reality whose complex nature cannot be captured by the work of a
narrowly oriented rationality (*Verstandesdenken*, in the
eighteenth-century glossary). Like Schelling and Hegel, Novalis
challenges the dry and narrow understanding of reason that, in their
view, had come to dominate the post-Enlightenment world of politics,
science, and letters. Like them, he does this not by appealing to the
purely irrational, but by developing a notion of reason that includes
a dimension of historicity and takes into account the experience of
art, literature, and religious and affective sentiments of various
kinds. Unlike Schelling and Hegel, however, Novalis believes that such
a notion of reason can only be obtained by leaving behind the idea of
a final and all-encompassing philosophical system. But as Herder had
been demonstrating already in the early 1770s, to question the idea of
an all-encompassing system is not the same as to endorse intellectual
chaos or unsystematic thought procedures. When reading the early
romantic philosophy of Novalis, one should keep in mind the warning of
his friend Friedrich Schlegel: Just as a fully systematic philosophy
might be an illusion, a completely unsystematic philosophy would
instantly kill off every intellectual ambition. Thus the challenge of
romantic philosophy consists in the attempt to think systematically
but without allowing thought to stagnate in a final set of truths or
dogma. Philosophy ought to be open-ended; it should develop in close
interaction with the natural sciences as well as the humanities. In
short, philosophy should take the shape of a sustained intellectual
experiment; it should be forever on its way and thoroughly inductively
minded. This philosophical credo runs through the entire work of
Novalis, from *Miscellaneous Observations* to *Notes for a
Romantic Encyclopaedia* (*Das Allgemeine Brouillon*) and
*Christianity or Europe*.



Even though the fragment is expressive of the
deeper--anti-teleological, if one likes--motivations of
Novalis's thinking, it is easy to make too much of the form in
which substantial parts of his work is handed down to us. As is made
clear by the publication of the critical edition, many of
Novalis's texts are available as fragments simply because he did
not have the time to polish his thoughts or because they were never
intended for publication. Furthermore, a text such as *Pollen*,
which was indeed intended for publication, was edited by Friedrich
Schlegel, who broke up some of the longer passages into shorter
fragments.


## 3. Philosophy, Encyclopedia, and the Turn to Empirical Science



*Das Allgemeine Brouillon* brings to light the close connection
in Novalis's work between philosophy and empirical science. Yet
the *Brouillon* is not meant to give a final account of
philosophical knowledge, but aspires to recapitulate the state of
knowledge as it currently is, hence providing an impetus to revision
and improvement. In order to enhance its stakes and procedures,
however, reason needs a point of orientation, an idea of what
universal knowledge would amount to, even though such knowledge by
definition is out of reach. In Novalis's work, the very idea of
a philosophical encyclopedia provides such a point of orientation.



The affiliation with empirical science is another point at which
Novalis's understanding of the fragment differs from that of
Friedrich Schlegel. Whereas Schlegel establishes a close link between
philosophy and poetry--at times he even dismantles the
distinction between them--Novalis is convinced that if human
reason seeks everywhere for the unconditioned (*das
Unbedingte*) but finds nothing but things (*Dinge*) (MO
#1), then we better study these things closely and try to make sense
of them. That is, in his view, reason is inevitably driven towards the
idea of an infinite, pre-reflexive, and pre-subjective ground or first
principle, an unconditioned, which it itself can never grasp; what it
can grasp, though, are the manifestations of such a ground in the
world to which it has access through experience and science. Thus
Novalis claims that "Idealism is nothing but genuine
*empiricism*" (AB #402). Novalis also defines philosophy
as a science of science (AB #886); it explores the conditions for the
study of nature, human nature included.



So conceived, philosophy is not cut off from practical purposes. Under
the heading "Encyclopedistics," Novalis explains that
"Half theories lead *away* from
*praxis*--whole theories lead *back* to it"
(AB #537). Or, as he, in the spirit of Kant's teleology of
nature, stages his metaphysical program: "Philosophy cannot bake
bread--however, it can provide us with God, freedom and
immortality--now which is more practical--philosophy or
economics?" (AB #401). And in a slightly earlier work, Novalis,
referring to the Kantian definition of metaphysics, claims that
"We only *know* it, *insofar* we *realize*
it" (KS, 331, cf. also HKA 2, 378).



In Novalis's view, true philosophical insight, addressing issues
of legitimacy as well as the question of meaning (or, in Kantian
language, the regulative ideas of reason), provides a deepened
self-understanding that guides our practice and orientation in the
world. The fragment strengthens this dimension of philosophy in that
it fosters critical distance and independent thinking. Such an
intellectual stance, in turn, is a condition of possibility for
genuine intersubjectivity, ultimately also for the republican ideals
that Novalis is promoting. Before we get that far, however, we need to
look, in more detail, at Novalis's engagement with the ideals of
the Enlightenment and the philosophy of German Idealism.


## 4. Critique, Reflexivity, Subjectivity



Novalis's philosophical readership, his critics and supporters
alike, have paid a great deal of attention to his interpretation of
Fichte. For Novalis's generation, Fichte was seen as the true
heir of Kant's critical thinking. In the *Athenaeum
Fragments,* Schlegel applauds Fichte's move beyond the
Kantian architecture of reason, and in his *Lectures on the History
of Philosophy* Hegel, likewise, suggests that it was Fichte who
provided the speculative unity that Kant's system was lacking.
By emphasizing the I's absolute and immediate positing of
itself, Fichte, it was claimed, suspended the self-imposed limitations
of Kantian idealism. He thus succeeded in overcoming the dichotomies
that had plagued Kant's contemporary readers, including the
dichotomies of reason and sensibility, spontaneity and receptivity,
freedom and necessity. With Fichte, philosophy was grounded in one
ultimate and unifying principle: that of the I's positing of
itself as absolute and free (that is, in the jargon of the period, of
the I positing itself as absolutely self-positing).



As Friedrich Schlegel lays out his philosophical-poetic principles in
the famous *Athenaeum Fragment* 216, Fichte's theory of
the I's absolute self-positing established a *sine qua
non* of the romantic program. If the French Revolution, in its
earlier phases, had opened up a new space of political action,
realizing, *in concreto*, the principle of the rational
self-determination of a people, and if Goethe's *Wilhelm
Meister*, crossing genre boundaries by drawing on philosophy,
poetry, and drama alike, had set a new standard for the modern novel
as a complete and all-encompassing work of art--a literary
*Gesamtkunstwerk*--it was Fichte who had led philosophy
back to the unbound spontaneity of subjectivity, thus realizing the
implicit promise of Kant's transcendental turn.



In his aesthetics, Kant had discussed how natural beauty, in
triggering a free play between imagination and understanding, gives
the disinterested spectator a hint that nature might be designed so as
to facilitate the work of our cognitive faculties, hence also allowing
for the possibility of a system of inductive knowledge and the idea of
a will behind what, from the perspective of the understanding, appears
as the realm of blind causality. In the aesthetic experience,
transcendental imagination is furnished with the regulative function
of providing human beings with a sense of orientation in the
world--a sense of belonging or purpose. Kant also had proposed
that man-made beauty, i.e., art, puts forth a sensuous presentation of
the ideas of reason. And, finally, he had established a close
connection between the work of art and the spontaneous production of
creative genius.



In Kant's system, however, the bridge between freedom and
necessity is restricted to the realm of the aesthetic judgment. The
pure aesthetic judgment can be ascribed a merely subjective
universality. Fichte, however, brought out the full philosophical
potential of the Kantian idea of freedom. In Fichte's theory,
the creative spontaneity of imagination is so to speak
universalized--it is turned into the distinctive feature of the
absolute, positing I, which is free even to posit its ontological
counterpart in the limiting non-I. Hence the cautious "as
if"-status of the purposiveness of nature in the aesthetic
experience is sublated. At a transcendental level, even causally
determined nature is explained in light of the self-positing ego. The
gap between subjectivity and nature, freedom and necessity,
spontaneity and receptivity is ultimately bridged. This, thought
Novalis and many with him, was the achievement of Fichte's
philosophy.



Yet, for all his progress beyond the Kantian framework, Fichte had
failed to address the more deep-seated problem of meaning that was
part of the Kantian agenda: the possibility of there being a will or
rationality behind the universe as such, a will or rationality that is
prior to and constitutive of subjectivity, hence granting it a sense
of meaning and purpose. Whereas Kant had framed this as a question of
teleology and natural beauty, Novalis and his fellow romantics linked
it to the experience of art and poetry in particular. I return to
Novalis's philosophy of art in the next section. What is
important at this point, however, is to realize how Novalis develops
his standpoint in critical response to the philosophical challenges
posed by Kant and Fichte.



Allegedly, Holderlin and Novalis met with Fichte in the home of
Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer in Jena in 1795. The meeting with
Fichte, it is said (though the historical documentation is scant),
strengthened Novalis's interest in his philosophy and led to the
work that would culminate in the *Fichte Studies*. Nonetheless,
the collection was not given its title by Novalis himself but added by
the editor, Hans-Joachim Mahl. The *Fichte Studies* does not
deal exclusively with Fichte's philosophy, but addresses a broad
range of philosophical problems, one of which is Novalis's
worries with regard to subjective idealism. Other topics include the
history of philosophy, the relationship between art and philosophy,
and the relationship between art and science. Nonetheless, this
collection of notes and observations shelters the most coherent
account of Novalis's interpretation of Fichte.



Although Novalis admires Fichte, he is more cautious in his attitude
than many of his contemporaries. In the *Fichte Studies* he
polemically asks whether Fichte has not "too arbitrarily packed
everything into the I" (FS #5). And in *Notes for a Romantic
Encyclopaedia* (*Das Allgemeine Brouillon*), written a few
years later, his critique is poignantly articulated in the analogy
between the Fichtean ego and the desolate main character of Daniel
Defoe's famous novel: "Fichte's ego--is a
Robinson Crusoe--a scientific *fiction*" (AB
#717).



According to Novalis--whose thinking at this point converges with
Holderlin's response to subjective
idealism--Fichte's theory is ultimately rooted in the
immediacy of the I's self-positing, and it presupposes that the
capacity for self-reflection can be traced back to a
non-representational self-relation or intellectual intuition that
evades the very structure of reflectivity and hence also the
subject-object relationship between the reflecting and the reflected
ego. Novalis maintains that in order to take a reflective stance
towards itself, the self needs to represent itself in some form or
another. The I's most original self-relation cannot simply take
the form of an original *Tathandlung* in which the reflecting
self (the subject pole of the self-reflection) claims immediate
identity with itself as reflected (i.e., as the object pole of the
self-reflection). In Novalis's view, self-reflection requires
some kind of external representation. Such a representation cannot,
however, be deduced from the immediate identity (FS #11). The identity
of the reflecting and the reflected I is grounded in a feeling (FS
#11). Thought, however, fails to grasp this feeling.



Novalis follows Kant in claiming that thought and feeling make up two
irreducible sources of experience. Given this dual source of
experience, philosophy cannot, as Fichte would have it, be rooted in
one single principle. To be sure, the idea of such a principle is
attractive to the extent that it would aid in undermining the Kantian
dualism of concept and intuition, and ultimately also guarantee the
self-determination of rational subjectivity. Yet such a principle
cannot be given. Instead of adhering to the completely autonomous
subjectivity of Fichtean philosophy, Novalis argues that the subject
is inwardly split, not just between thought and feeling, but
ultimately also between the hubris of believing that thought can in
fact grasp the basic self-feeling, and the realization that this
feeling cannot be conceptually processed as such. The latter point not
only involves a modification of the scope of reflexive subjectivity,
but also of philosophy itself. As Novalis emphatically puts it,
"[t]he borders of feeling *are* the borders of
philosophy" (FS #15, emphasis added).



If Novalis develops his own philosophical voice through the encounter
with Fichte, he also takes a significant step beyond the
epistemological framework of *The Science of Knowledge*. Some
scholars, such as Manfred Frank and Jane Kneller, see the *Fichte
Studies*, with its insistence on the two sources of experience, as
gesturing back to a more Kantian position--a Kantian moderation
of Fichte's idealism. Such an interpretation is not only
justified by reference to Novalis's critique of Fichte, but also
given historical support in light of Novalis's relatively close
contact with Kantian philosophers such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold and
Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. Furthermore, on having completed his
studies of Fichte, Novalis quickly returns to Kant. In the so-called
*Kant Studies*, whose scope spans Kant's practical as
well as theoretical philosophy, he speaks of Kant's
philosophizing as scholastic, yet celebrates it as "one of the
most remarkable phenomena of the human spirit" (KS, 337). In
critically endorsing Kant's idea of transcendental idealism as
the science of philosophy, Novalis, too, wishes to see philosophy as a
meta-discipline, a rational account of the boundaries of
rationality.



Novalis's work is neither strictly speaking Kantian nor strictly
speaking Fichtean in spirit. On assessing Novalis's reflections
on transcendental idealism, it is important to keep in mind that when
he, in 1797, returns to Kant's thinking, he views it through the
lens of Fichte's philosophy. Furthermore, Fichte's
thinking, for Novalis, did not just consist in the various theses of
*The Science of Knowledge* (*Wissenschaftslehre*), but
also in a certain way of doing philosophy. "Fichtean philosophy
is a call to self-activity," insists Novalis (FS #567). That is,
it is a mode of philosophizing rather than a given claim about the
absolute freedom of the transcendental ego. In this respect,
Fichte's most important work is not the
*Wissenschaftslehre*, but his lecture on the scholar's
vocation, *Uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten*, which he
supposedly read in Jena in 1794 and which would then be eagerly
studied in Jena and Weimar. Even though Novalis had good family
connections to Fichte, we do not know for sure whether he had access
to the unpublished version of this text. However, Novalis's
emphasis on intellectual responsibility, self-thinking, and autonomy
speaks clearly of a responsiveness to this dimension of Fichte's
work. Novalis's reflections on these issues culminate in his
notion of *Bildung*. This is also the point at which Novalis
ceases to present himself as a critical commentator of subjective
idealism and produces an independent philosophical contribution of
lasting force and value.


## 5. Philosophy of Bildung and History



According to Novalis, the "academy ought to be a thoroughly
philosophical institution--only one faculty--the whole
establishment organized--to arouse and exercise the capacity to
think [Denkkraft] in a purposive way" (MO #4, trans. modified).
By emphasizing the need for independent thinking, Fichte endorsed
Kant's critical turn and his transformation of philosophy,
pitched as a set of doctrines and principles, into philosophizing,
pictured as a critical activity. Furthermore, Fichte had realized that
philosophizing is a call of the self to the self (FS #567). Yet the
self to which the philosophizing turns is not understood as an empty
or merely formal capacity for self-positing. True idealism, Novalis
claims, is not opposed to realism, but only to formalism. A proper
account of the self, in its relation to itself, should consider the
self's development in and through history as well as its
externalizing of itself in the encounter with other minds and
nature.



The idea of *Bildung*, education in and through culture,
remains one of the most significant contributions of late
eighteenth-century philosophy. Even though it is most often associated
with Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* (as well as his
slightly later speech "On Classical Studies"), in which
the philosophical mind retrieves its historical-systematic development
as a succession of various philosophical paradigms and thought models,
the notion was widely applied before 1807. We find it in the work of
Herder, the young Schleiermacher, and, expanding the focus to the
realm of literature, the idea of *Bildung* is operative in
Goethe's *Wilhelm Meister*. Goethe's work, as the
sequel commences in the mid 1790s, follows Wilhelm through his
youthful adventures and beyond, seeing how the protagonist gradually
reaches an understanding of his formative experiences and thus gains
an ever-increasing sense of freedom and self-determination.



For Novalis, too, philosophy involves a process of maturity and
self-understanding (though he would eventually grow more critical of
Goethe's work). This is another dimension of his call for a
practical turn in philosophy. In Novalis's words: "Whoever
knows what philosophizing is, also knows what life is" (AB
#702). Philosophy does not manifest itself in a set of theoretical
dogmas, but in a capacity to judge. As such, philosophy cannot be
learned or passively appropriated, but only triggered by such Socratic
provocations as the fragment, irony, the joke, and the essay. Hence
Novalis's call for a romanticizing of the world does not involve
perceiving it through a new or different lens, but the ability to
raise oneself to a state of critical self-understanding. This aim,
Novalis emphasizes, cannot be reached through the means of isolated
soliloquy, but requires an engagement with the larger community as
well as with history, tradition, natural science, and art. It
involves, in short, the realization that the self necessarily belongs
to a more comprehensive, historically developed, and cross-culturally
fertilized totality of meaning. In affinity with
Schleiermacher's *Speeches* (which Novalis studied in the
early fall of 1799), Novalis makes it clear that individuality proper
is only developed in interaction with other individuals. If
"[e]ach human being is a society in miniature" (MO #42),
it still applies that "[e]very individual is the center of a
system of emanation" (MO #109).



The self understands itself as part of a given community, but also as
the product of a historical development that spans the arts and the
sciences alike. Only in this way can the I, in Novalis's
paradoxical formulation, be the I of its I (MO #28). In order to see
oneself as situated within a given historical and intersubjective
context, history cannot be fully objectivized: "[w]e are related
to all parts of the universe--as we are to the future and to
times past" (MO #91). The understanding of history is thus a
matter of self-understanding. However, in the enlightenment
celebration of novelty and progress, history is reduced to a catalogue
of mistakes that are left behind in favor of a more mature
comprehension of reality past and present. In Novalis's view,
philosophical romanticism must take on the responsibility of
overthrowing--at a meta-philosophical as well as
historical-empirical level--such an ahistorical concept of
history. Thus the emphasis on *Bildung* involves a reassessment
not only of the self (it involves recognizing that the self is
fundamentally situated in tradition), but also of the tradition. This
implies, first, the view that tradition extends into the present and,
second, the claim that in order to gain understanding of history,
hence also of the interpreter's own time, historical expressions
should not be judged by the criteria of the present but be seen within
their own context, be it cultural, political, religious, or all of the
above.



For Novalis, the classical world is so to speak the other of
modernity; it is different, yet a fundamental part of it. Furthermore,
any modern culture--and here we see, again, the traces of
Novalis's turn towards the more cosmopolitan spirit of the
Hanseatic League--understands itself in critical interaction with
other cultures, including those of the non-Western world and the
temporally distant parts of the interpreter's own culture. In
his 1798 reflections on Goethe, Novalis writes that spirit by nature
strives to absorb and understand its other. This process of expanding
one's horizon by considering the other's point of view is,
at one and the same time, the nature and the ultimate goal of
*Bildung*. In *Kant Studies* such an enterprise is
presented, along the lines of Kantian anthropology, as the theory of
the causes and remedies of prejudices (KS 330).



The emphasis on understanding others does not involve a relativization
of history and intercultural understanding. Like Schleiermacher and
Schlegel, Novalis takes a strong interest in philology and demands
that every author and reader must be philologically minded
(*Teplitz Fragments* #42). Philology, for the romantic
philosopher, is, among other things, about the reader taking into
account the original context in which the text was produced. Hence,
according to Novalis, "*[p]hilologizing* is the *true
scholarly* occupation. It corresponds to
*experimenting*" (AB #724). Philologizing--and note
again, as in the case of philosophizing, the active form
*philologisiren* and the reference to experimenting--is
about breaking through illegitimate prejudices, trying to understand a
symbolic expression on its own terms rather than reducing it to a
familiar position, which would minimize its capacity to challenge the
reader's system of beliefs and values. Conceived in this way,
philology challenges every scholastic passing down of authoritative
interpretations. It curbs the threat of the dead letter and
counteracts the tendency of modern society to steward the tradition in
such a formalistic way that it overlooks the meaning of the
hieroglyph, as Novalis at one point puts it. In the spirit of the
Enlightenment, he wishes to challenge and critically reflect on
prejudices handed down from tradition. But unlike the enlightenment
philosophers--at least in their most undialectical championing of
progress--Novalis believes that the past can itself offer
resources for a critical-reflexive discussion of and stance towards
the present. In this sense, Novalis can claim that "The theory
of the future belongs to history" (AB #425). Even if the past
cannot be immediately retrieved and even if it is neither desirable
nor rational to long for a revival of times long gone, the past,
providing an alternative to the intellectual framework of the present,
can aid the philosopher, the artist, the scientist, or the politician
in developing a critical attitude to the beliefs and assumptions he or
she had previously left unanalyzed. The past should in other words be
reconstructed on its own terms, but precisely such a reconstruction,
Novalis argues, will ensure its relevance for the present.



While it is entirely crucial to the romantic concept of
*Bildung*, the idea of philology is related to the return to
the classical form of the fragment. At stake in both cases is the
awareness that there are, in philosophy, two ways to look at things,
from above and downward or from below and upward, roughly
corresponding to what Kant in the same period had addressed as
reflective and determinative judgment or Herder, drawing on the
resources of Scottish enlightenment philosophy, had seen as the
difference between inductive-empirical and deductively-minded
philosophy.



Ultimately, Novalis identifies the never-ending process of
*Bildung* with philosophy itself. Doing philosophy, Novalis
explains, is a conversation with oneself (LFI #21), but one that takes
place through the encounter with the other. Thus, the decision to
"do philosophy is a challenge to the real self to reflect, to
awaken and to be spirit" (LFI #21). Philosophy is about the
self's capacity to take responsibility for itself. For, at the
end of the day, "[l]ife must not be a novel that is given to us,
but one that is made by us" (LFI #99).


## 6. Art, Aesthetics, and Poetics



*Bildung* and philosophy, as education to self-responsibility,
are closely related to the realm of art. There are at least two
dimensions of this relationship. First, Novalis is well aware that
*Bildung*, the call to self-understanding and autonomy through
an engagement with tradition and other cultures, cannot proceed by way
of an appeal to formal methodology. No rule can ever guarantee the
successful outcome of the individual's education in culture.
Rather, it is a matter of moving from the particular to the universal,
but without a universal at hand by which this move can be justified.
What is required is a context-sensitive judgment. The process of
*Bildung* is itself an art (*Kunst*) in the sense that
it takes tact or reflective judgment (such a use of the term
"art," as opposed to merely mechanical processes, was
fairly common at the time and can also be found in the work of Herder,
Kant, and Schleiermacher). Along these lines, Novalis speaks of the
will to Fichtecize artistically (LFI #11), and also criticizes Fichte
and Kant for being unpoetic (AB #924). The second sense in which art,
philosophy, and *Bildung* are related has to do with art being
one of the media, maybe even the privileged medium, through which
*Bildung* is achieved. In this context, it is important to keep
in mind that as far as the philosophy of art goes, Novalis's
period is one of transition. Around this time, aesthetics, as a
Kantian investigation into the validity-claim of the pure judgment of
taste, is established as an autonomous philosophical discipline with
the *Critique of Judgment*. Yet it is nonetheless the case that
historical and intercultural engagement was, until and throughout this
period, largely a matter of studying religious and cultural artefacts
from temporally or geographically distant eras. These objects were not
necessarily approached aesthetically--that is, subjected to pure
aesthetic judgment in Kant's meaning of the term--but also,
as in the works of Herder and Hegel, viewed as part of the larger
fabric of the moral sciences. Novalis often leans in this direction,
and at one point even follows Herder in addressing aesthetics as a
psychological discipline (AB #423).



Novalis's philosophy of art does not only lead to a recognition
of the value of intertemporal and intercultural understanding. In
fact, in a work such as Walter Benjamin's study of the romantic
notion of criticism, one encounters the idea that romantic aesthetics
represents a proto-modernist theory of art.



In line with his general philosophy of history, Novalis contrasts
modern art to the art of ancient cultures. As opposed to ancient art,
which was afforded a direct moral and religious relevance, modern art
reflects its status as art. Or, stronger still, modern art sees itself
as art only--yet, precisely as art (only) can it give voice and
expression to experiences that cannot be grasped by a
post-Enlightened, philosophical reason. As part of the Schillerian era
of sentimentality, modern philosophy mourns the absence of a
pre-subjective, pre-reflexive anchoring of reason. Herein consists the
so-called homesickness of philosophy (AB #857). Modern philosophy
longs for a principle that can shore up thought and subjectivity by
reference to a dimension of being that is ontologically prior to it.
Given its discursive nature, philosophy is constitutively cut-off from
such an absolute grounding. Art, however, can testify to this
dimension of being; it can express what modern philosophy wants, yet
is painfully aware that it cannot get. In this sense, "the poet
is the transcendental physician," as Novalis provocatively puts
it (LFI #36). Given its linguistic nature, poetry in particular should
strive to realize its own inherent potential rather than imitating
philosophy and other discursive forms of expression.



Novalis's understanding of art in general and literature in
particular is perhaps best articulated--or, rather,
exemplified--in a novel such as *Heinrich von
Ofterdingen*. Though unfinished, the novel, which includes ample
meta-reflections on aesthetic matters, illustrates the dream-like
atmosphere that has made Novalis's work the prime example of
magical idealism, the romantic prism through which nature itself
occurs as a work of art, as being expressive of a deeper meaning and
perfection that defuses the possible tension between necessity and
freedom, sensuousness and understanding, and gives human beings a
sense of belonging and being at home in the world.


## 7. Political Thought



If there is a relative distinction between poetry and philosophy in
Novalis's work--the two need one another, yet answer to
different human needs and capacities--the situation is more
complicated with regard to art and politics. From Heinrich Heine
onwards, the aestheticization of politics has been one of the
strongest cards played out by the critics of romantic philosophy. And
even among the most sympathetic readers of Novalis's work, the
liberally minded will have a hard time swallowing his attempt to
create a higher union between politics, art, and religion, and his
tendency to valorize religion over philosophy and art. The same
applies for the way in which he, for example in a lyrical work such as
"Hymns to the Night," written in response to the death of
his young fiancee, infuses the erotic yearning for the beloved with a
longing for religious redemption. That said, Novalis's political
thinking neither can nor should be reduced to these potentially
reactionary sentiments. Novalis's idea of a synthesis of art and
politics is far more complex than is typically acknowledged by its
critics.



While Novalis was always sympathetic to the ideals of the French
revolution, he grew increasingly skeptical in his assessment of their
actual realization in late eighteenth-century France. In his view, the
proponents of *liberte*, *egalite*, and
*fraternite* had failed to live up to their celebrated ideals.
For all its good intentions, the revolution had resulted in
inequality, injustice, and terror. It is characteristic of
Novalis's political philosophy that he not only offers a
principled discussion of this predicament, but also a historical
critique. Novalis sees the revolution in continuity with the
Enlightenment, and worries that these movements cultivate a notion of
reason that fails to take historical reality into account. The
proponents of the revolution had forgotten to ask if the people were
ready to take on the admirable ideals of liberty, equality, and
solidarity. Novalis wishes not only to endorse the ideals of the
revolution, but also to offer reflections on how the people can be
brought to a stage where they can responsibly take on the principles
of the revolution and make its ideals their own. This is the ultimate
task and purpose of *Bildung*.



The first political pamphlet of the romantic movement was
Schleiermacher's *On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured
Despisers,* and Novalis is thoroughly influenced by this work. In
*On Religion*, Schleiermacher advocates an egalitarian,
organic, and ecumenical religion, and professes that only such a
religious-political system can provide a framework within which the
individual can fully grow into and take responsibility for itself. At
the same time, such a religion is only possible--it can only be
realized *in concreto--*when the individuals of a given
society have generally reached at least a minimal stage of
self-understanding and respect for others. Hence there is a close
connection between the existence of a broad-spanning group of educated
and mature individuals and the possibility of introducing a sensible
religious and ultimately also political order. The problem, according
to Schleiermacher, is that modern religion has been dominated by
philistines who have placed themselves in between the people and the
true democratic truths of the New Testament. What is needed is a
rethinking of religious life--and, as part of this, a rethinking
of the relationship to tradition. This is why *On Religion*
anticipates Schleiermacher's later writings in hermeneutics. And
this point, as it is appropriated by Novalis, also establishes a
connection between his hermeneutic historicism and his political
philosophy.



Novalis's political reflections inform the *Miscellaneous
Observations*, get more poignantly voiced in *Faith and
Love* and the "Political Aphorisms" (written in 1798),
and find their quasi-religious culmination in *Christianity or
Europe*, the 1799-text that even his *Athenaeum* friends
deemed problematic in its call for a new Catholic unity in Europe. In
spite of Schlegel's willingness to publish the text, the furore
it caused amongst Novalis's peers, including Goethe, Schelling,
and Schiller, held him back, and *Christianity or Europe*
remained unpublished till 1826.



There is an overall unity in Novalis's political writings, as
they span almost the entire ten years of his productive period: the
idea that democracy can only be effectively realized among a people
that is historically ready for it, that such readiness takes a
capacity for critique and independent thinking, and that
*Bildung* is the way in which independent thinking is best
achieved. In combining critical skills, analytic abilities, and the
motivational force provided by art and cultured discourse, Novalis is
hopeful that romantic philosophy will find a way to retain the ideals
of the revolution without, at the same time, repeating its
mistakes.



Romanticism, in his view, aims at preserving the enlightenment
commitment to self-determination and freedom without turning it into a
merely abstract and alienating discourse. Individuality and
self-determination can only be achieved in organic communion with
other self-determining individuals. It needs to be realized as part of
an ongoing discussion of the ultimate meaning, goals, and
self-understanding of a given, historical society. A healthy
intersubjectivity makes up a presupposition for a mature and
well-developed personality. Conversely, the organically developed
community consists of unique, yet mutually recognizing individuals and
their bonds of interaction. Diversity is a condition for the sought
unity. As such, the ideal society is likened to a work of art. No
mechanical rules or abstract theories can guarantee the successful
realization of the community as a unity in manifold. This is the
lesson Novalis takes from Schleiermacher, and which serves as the
determining ground for his political theory. This is also the thought
that undergirds his lasting commitment to republicanism.



In the period between *Faith and Love* and *Christianity or
Europe*, written only two years before Novalis's death,
there is a significant change in Novalis's views on how a good
society is best achieved. In 1798 Novalis was inspired by the idea of
a democracy from above and connected the idea of education to the
motivational force of monarchy. By positing their own lives and
actions as examples, the king and the queen, representing at one and
the same time the community of living individuals and the larger whole
of the tradition, should inspire the people to strive for
self-understanding and freedom through education. That is, by setting
an example of autonomous thinking while, all the same, representing a
continuity with the past, the royal couple would turn the monarchy
into a symbol of the democratic state itself. Around 1799, however,
Novalis's view changes. He now imagines that this motivational
force can only be led back to the unifying power of the church, or,
more precisely, that of the papal state. At this point, the democratic
ethos of his thinking is considerably weakened.



Novalis's turn to the church is indisputably problematic when
judged from a 21st century perspective. Yet it is important to see
that within his own time, most of his political writing, up until
around 1798, is representative of the progressive reformist movement
in Germany. Furthermore, Novalis's democratic, pluralistic, and
egalitarian ideals should not be dismissed because of his later, more
conservative sentiments, nor should the connection he sees between
these ideals and a commitment to *Bildung*. It is this notion
of *Bildung*, the idea that democracy requires a triad of
individual education, societal plurality, and, not least, a capacity
for impartial judging, that will remain Novalis's most valuable
contribution to political thought.


## 8. Novalis's Philosophical Legacy



Soon after Novalis's death, his friends amongst the romantics,
led by Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, started spinning the myth about
the *uber*-sensitive visionary poet and aesthete, the
beautiful soul, forever longing for the unattainable blue flower, the
symbol of eternal love and divine grace that would so enthrall the
character of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The legend of Novalis as the
arch-romantic author rapidly gained credence, and his literary style
became influential for writers from Georg Buchner, via the
symbolists, to Hermann Hesse and the avant-garde movement in France
and Germany. In the philosophical domain, the reception of Novalis has
been more reluctant. Some of this reluctance must be explained by the
fact that until the publication of the critical edition, it was
difficult to distinguish between the posthumously created image of
Novalis, on the one hand, and his real philosophical contribution, on
the other. This difficulty also colors the harsh judgments of Hegel,
Novalis's most rampant critic among his contemporary
Germans.



Hegel is critical of what he takes to be an undue turn to isolated
subjectivity, and in particular its affective and emotional aspects,
in romantic philosophy. He traces this turn to subjectivity back to
the romantic reading of Fichte. The romantics, in his interpretation,
misunderstood Fichte's work. They hypostatized his notion of
spontaneous self-positing, baking it into a largely aesthetic
vocabulary of the creative power of imagination. While he places
Novalis within this framework, Hegel overlooks how he (Novalis) not
only draws on but also criticizes Fichte's philosophy. In
Hegel's understanding, romanticism in general and
Novalis's philosophy in particular leads to a pathological
cultivation of inwardness, a naive and otherworldly position that is
not only philosophically at fault but also constitutes a genuine
political risk in that it represents an alluring conversion from
critical thinking to otherworldly reveries. However, as Otto Poggeler
demonstrates in his 1956 study, as soon as one distinguishes
philosophical romanticism proper from its mythological image, it
becomes clear that Hegel stands far closer to the romantics than he
was ever willing to admit. In Novalis's case, the philosophy of
*Bildung*, a notion that features prominently in Hegel's
own work, would be an important point of connection. Others would be
his philosophy of interpretation and his conception of the
relationship between pre-modern and modern thought.



Hegel's negative assessment proved influential to later times
and readings of Novalis's work. Even though Novalis's
experimenting with the philosophical form of the fragment paved the
way for such stylistically bold and innovative thinkers as Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, these figures would, with few exceptions, stage
themselves as critics rather than followers of romantic philosophy. In
a wider intellectual context, we find Novalis's writing attacked
in Heinrich Heine's work on recent German literature (1836
[1995]), Rudolf Haym's *Die romantische Schule* (1870),
Arnold Ruge and the young Hegelian philosophy of history (which viewed
romanticism through the lens of the later Friedrich Schlegel's
engagement with Metternich and the restoration), and Karl
Mannheim's sociological explanation of the rise of German
conservatism (1925 [1986]). Whereas the young Georg Lukacs
applauds Novalis's aesthetics and philosophy of nature, the late
Lukacs worries about the irrationalism of post-Enlightenment
German thought. From the other side of the political spectrum, there
is Carl Schmitt's 1919 critique of the romantic movement as
effecting a dangerous occasionalism in modern political life.



Among the nineteenth century historians it was Wilhelm Dilthey who, in
his grand effort to rehabilitate late eighteenth-century German
philosophy, was able to see through the myth of Novalis and call for a
reassessment of his philosophical work. As is the case with
Dilthey's return to the young Hegel, his reading of Novalis
emphasizes the humanistic drive of his thinking as well as his
philosophy of art and nature, which gets reinterpreted, in
Dilthey's lexicon, as a budding philosophy of life. Dilthey,
however, situates Novalis with Goethe and Holderlin, and ends up,
quite against his own intention, highlighting the aesthetic rather
than critical-intellectual force of his philosophy.



The philosophical-literary reception of Novalis's work first
took off with Walter Benjamin's 1919 study of the romantic
notion of literary criticism. In situating the young romantics within
the paradigm of Fichte's philosophy of reflection, Benjamin
places himself well within the traditional reception of their work.
Nonetheless, Benjamin's interest in philosophy of history, his
recognition of philosophers such as Herder, Hamann, and Humboldt, and
his general openness towards the late eighteenth-century mindset,
makes it possible for him to transcend the framework of traditional
(Hegelian) prejudices and tease out of the romantic idea of criticism
a pregnant conception of art and subjectivity. Furthermore, because he
views modernity as a period of aesthetic reflectivity and
self-criticism, Benjamin is among the first to see in romantic
philosophy a prefiguration of aesthetic modernism and the European
avant-garde. This idea would later fuel the growing interest in German
romantic philosophy amongst French intellectuals, including
philosopher-poets like Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, and, in the
1970s and 1980s, the chief proponents of literary deconstruction,
Jacques Derrida and, in an Anglophone context, Paul de Man.



The broader literary reception of Novalis's fragments and
poetical work across comparative literature departments in Europe and
North America contributed to the recent rediscovery of his philosophy:
a rediscovery, one might hope, that will lead to a greater awareness
of the breadth of his philosophical contribution and a recognition of
the fact that his thinking, though celebrated for its religious-poetic
sensitivity and aesthetic ambience, encompasses much more than that.
Although it is unlikely that Novalis's work will ever make it to
the front rows of academic philosophy, his contribution deserves to be
revisited, reread, and reconsidered by scholars of post-Kantian
thought. Only in this way is it possible fully to reassess the
systematic impact of his theory of *Bildung*, social
philosophy, philosophy of history, and theory of language as well as
his contribution to aesthetics and philosophy of art.