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Romanticism,
Philosophy,
and Literature
Edited by
Michael N. Forster · Lina Steiner
Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature
Michael N. Forster • Lina Steiner
Editors
Romanticism,
Philosophy, and
Literature
Editors
Michael N. Forster Lina Steiner
Bonn University Bonn University
Bonn, Germany Bonn, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-40873-2 ISBN 978-3-030-40874-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
Chapter 4 is a revised and translated version of Johannes Korngiebel, “Schlegel und Hegel in
Jena. Zur philosophischen Konstellation zwischen Januar und November 1801,” © 2018
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, an imprint of the Brill Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,
Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill
Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany)Chapter 9 is reprinted by permission from The
Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism by Philippe Lacou-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the State University of New York Press, © 1988, State
University of New York. All Rights Reserved.
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Acknowledgements
This volume is loosely based on a conference that we organized at Bonn

University in March 2015 with the help of generous financial support
from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: “Romanticism:
Philosophy, Literature, and Music.” “Loosely” because in the interest of
generating the most coherent and useful volume possible, some of the
papers that were presented at the conference have been omitted and oth-
ers have been added. We would like to thank Bonn University and the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for making the conference itself
and subsequent editorial and translational work on the volume possible.
We would also like to thank SUNY Press for allowing us to reprint an
extract from their English translation of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe’s L’absolu littéraire (Seuil, 1978), titled The Literary
Absolute (SUNY Press, 1988). Warm thanks also go to all of the partici-
pants in the original conference and to all of the additional contributors to
the volume. In addition, we would like to thank Michael McGettigan and
Justin Morris for editing and translating the contributions by Manfred
Frank and Andreas Arndt, Moritz Hellmich for translating those by
Helmut Hühn and Johannes Korngiebel, and Anne Birien for translating
that by François Thomas. We would also like to thank Alex Englander,
Alexandra Nagel, David Tain, and Simon Waskow from Bonn University
for their editorial work on the volume. Finally, we would also like to
express our gratitude to the editors at Palgrave Macmillan and to two
anonymous reviewers for thoughtful advice that helped us to shape the
volume in significant ways.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Michael N. Forster and Lina Steiner
Part I Philosophy 17
2 Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational” Approach 19

Manfred Frank
3 Dialectic and Imagination in Friedrich Schlegel105

Andreas Arndt
4 Hegel as an Attendee of Schlegel’s Lectures on

Transcendental Philosophy in Jena119
Johannes Korngiebel
5 Schleiermacher and the “Consideration for the Foreign”:

The Need to Belong and Cosmopolitanism in Romantic
Germany135
François Thomas
6 Romantic Antisemitism153
Frederick C. Beiser
vii
viii Contents
Part II Philosophy and Literature 171
7 Mythology and Modernity173

Helmut Hühn
8 Schlegel’s Incomprehensibility and Life: From Literature

to Politics193
Giulia Valpione
9 The Fragment: The Fragmentary Exigency217

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
10 Hölderlin and Romanticism229

Rainer Schäfer
11 Romantic Self-Transformation in Kierkegaard245

Fred Rush
12 Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy265

Michael N. Forster
13 Shandeanism, the Imagination, and Mysticism:

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria297
James Vigus
14 The Experience of Everything: Romantic Writing and

Post-Kantian Phenomenology315
Paul Hamilton
15 Dostoevsky as a Romantic Novelist335

Lina Steiner
Index359
Notes on Contributors
Andreas Arndt is Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology of

the Humboldt-University in Berlin, and Director and Research
Coordinator of the Schleiermacher-Research-Center at the Berlin-
Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is the author of
eight monographs. His recent book publications include Die Klassische
Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant (with Walter Jaeschke, C.H. Beck, 2012),
Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Walter de Gruyter, 2013), and
Geschichte und Freiheitsbewusstsein. Zur Dialektik der Freiheit bei Hegel
und Marx (Berlin: Owl of Minerva, 2015).
Frederick C. Beiser is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University,
New York. A graduate of Oriel and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, he lived
and studied in Berlin from 1980 until 1996. He is the author of many
books on German philosophy. Those most relevant for Romanticism
include, in addition to the ones described in the Introduction, also Schiller
as Philosopher (2005) and Diotima’s Children (2009). In 2015 he was
awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz for his work on German philosophy.
Michael N. Forster was educated at Oxford University and Princeton
University. He is Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair
in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Centre for
Philosophy at Bonn University in Germany. Previously he taught for
twenty-eight years at the University of Chicago, where he served for
ten years as Chairman of the Philosophy Department, held the Glen
A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professorship, and still retains a regular
visiting professorship. His work combines historical and systematic aspects.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Historically it focuses mainly on ancient philosophy and especially German

philosophy. Systematically it focuses largely on epistemology (especially
skepticism) and philosophy of language (in a broad sense of the term that
includes hermeneutics and translation-theory). He is the author of many
articles and eight books: Hegel and Skepticism (1989), Hegel’s Idea of a
Phenomenology of Spirit (1998), Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002),
Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (2004), Kant and Skepticism
(2008), After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition
(2010), German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond
(2011), and Herder’s Philosophy (2018). He is also co-editor of several
volumes, including the Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the
Nineteenth Century (2015), The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
(2019), and two volumes on German Romanticism: Die Aktualität der
Romantik (LIT, 2012) and Idealismus und Romantik in Jena: Figuren
und Konzepte zwischen 1794 und 1807 (Wilhelm Fink, 2018).
Manfred Frank is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of
Tübingen. A leading contemporary authority on German Romanticism,
he is the author of twenty-six books. Besides those described in the
Introduction, these include Selbstgefühl. Eine historisch-systematische
Erkundung (Suhrkamp, 2002) and Ansichten der Subjektivität
(Suhrkamp, 2012). Frank has held numerous guest professorships at
American, European, and Australian Universities. In 1996 he was
named Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary College, University
of London. He was previously a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and
Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His most recent
books are Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (2013)
and The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (2016).
Helmut Hühn is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-
University, Jena, where he directs the Research Center for European
Romanticism, Schiller᾿s Gardenhouse, and the Goethe Memorial. He is
the author of many scholarly articles. He is also co-editor of the Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vols. 1–13 (Schwabe, 1971–2007).
Johannes Korngiebel studied Philosophy and History of Culture at Jena
(Germany) and Padua (Italy). Undertaking doctoral research on “Friedrich
Schlegels Jenaer Vorlesung zur Transcendentalphilosophie (1800/01),”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
he is also a visiting lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the

University of Jena and an academic member of the research project
Propyläen: Goethes Biographica. He has published several papers, arti-
cles, and reviews on German Idealism and Romanticism, with par-
ticular emphasis on Friedrich Schlegel, and he is co-editor of the
volume Idealismus und Romantik in Jena. Figuren und Konzepte zwischen
1794 und 1807 (Wilhelm Fink, 2018).
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007), was a French philosopher, lit-
erary critic, and translator. He was a member and President of the Collège
international de philosophie in Paris. Lacoue-Labarthe wrote several books
and articles in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy, including Le Titre de la
lettre: une lecture de Lacan (1973; trans., The Title of the Letter: A Reading
of Lacan) and L'Absolu littéraire: théorie de la littérature du romantisme
allemand (1978; trans., The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in
German Romanticism).
Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the Marc Bloch University,
Strasbourg. His first book was Le Titre de la lettre: une lecture de Lacan
(1973; trans., The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan), written in col-
laboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is also the author of
many other works, including La Remarque spéculative (1973; trans.,
The Speculative Remark), Le Discours de la syncope (1976), Ego sum
(1979), Le Partage des voix (1982), and L’Impératif catégorique (1983).
In La communauté désoeuvrée (1990; trans., The Inoperative Community)
Nancy reopened the question of the ground of community and poli-
tics, which led to a worldwide debate across several disciplines.
Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
He is the author of On Architecture (2009) and Irony and Idealism (2016).
He also edited The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (2004) and
for several years co-edited the Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen
Idealismus.
Rainer Schäfer is Professor of Philosophy at Bonn University. He is the
author of seven books, including Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in
Hegels Logik—Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen
(Meiner Verlag, 2001), Hegel. Einführung und Texte (Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2011), Ich-Welten. Erkenntnis, Urteil und Identität aus der egologischen
Differenz von Leibniz bis Davidson (Mentis Verlag, 2012), and WAS
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
FREIHEIT ZU RECHT MACHT—Manuale des Politischen (De Gruyter

Verlag, 2014).
Lina Steiner received a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University
and taught as an assistant and associate professor at the University of
Chicago before joining Bonn University, where she teaches philoso-
phy of literature and directs the Research Center on Philosophy and
Literature. She is the author of For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman
in Russian Culture (2011), and co-editor (with Marina Bykova and
Michael N. Forster) of the Palgrave Handbook to Russian Thought
(forthcoming).
François Thomas is Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, France.
From 2015 to 2019, he was research fellow and teaching assistant in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn in Germany. His
PhD dissertation was on “The Art of Translation: Philosophical, Ethical,
and Political Translation Issues from the Historical Context of the German
Romantics’ Criticism of the French Practice of Translation in the 17th and
18th Centuries.” He is also the author of a monograph on Georg Simmel,
Le Paradigme du comédien (Herman, 2013) and he wrote a chapter on the
“Translation of Philosophy” for the volume Histoire des traductions en
langue française XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Verdier, 2014).
Giulia Valpione is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua
(Italy), having previously studied at the University of Jena (Germany). She
has conducted research in Italy, Germany, France, and Brazil. She has pub-
lished articles in several languages on the political philosophy of
German Romanticism, Kant, and Hume. She has also written on
Salomon Maimon’s philosophy. She is the editor of L’Homme et la
nature. Politique, critique et esthétique dans le romantisme allemand (LIT
Verlag, forthcoming). She is also Editor in Chief together with Laure
Cahen-Maurel of the online, open-access, peer-reviewed international
journal of philosophical Romanticism Symphilosophie. She is writing a
monograph on the influence of the natural sciences on the political
thought of German Romanticism from von Baader to Görres.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
James Vigus is Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at the School of English

and Drama, Queen Mary College, University of London. His work on
literature, philosophy, and religion in the period of European Romanticism
includes Platonic Coleridge (2009), Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on
Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics (2010), and edited collections on
symbol-concepts and on Shandean humour (2013).
Abbreviations
Fichte
EPW Early Philosophical Writings. Translated by Daniel Breazeale.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
FNR Foundations of Natural Right. Translated by Frederick
Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
GA Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Edited by Reinhard Lauth et al. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1962–2012.
IW Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings.
Translated by Daniel Breazeale, Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.
SK Science of Knowledge. Translated by Peter Heath and John
Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
SK 1804 Science of Knowing: J.G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the
Wissenschaftslehre. Translated by Walter E. Wright. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2005.
Hegel
GW Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Gesammelte Werke. In Verbindung
mit der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Edited by Rheinisch-
Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1968–.
xv
xvi ABBREVIATIONS
TWA Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Theorie-Werkausgabe. Auf der

Grundlage der Werke von 1832–1845 neu edierte Ausgabe.
Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp, 1970–.
Hegel/Hölderlin/Schelling
EPS Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism. In Theory as
Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings.
Edited by Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996. 72–73.
Herder
FHA J ohann Gottfried Herder Werke. Edited by U. Gaier et al. Frankfurt
am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–.
S Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke. Edited by B. Suphan
et al. 33 vols. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–1913.
Hölderlin
StA Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Friedrich Beissner. Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1943ff.
Kant
AA Kant, Immanuel. [Immanuel] Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Edited
by the Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Later
by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin
and Leipzig: Reimer/de Gruyter, 1900/1911–.
KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In Immanuel Kant, Theoretische
Philosophie. Texte und Kommentar. Edited by Georg Mohr. Vol. 1.
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004.
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft. Cited from the amended second edition
(B) of 1793: Schriften zu Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie, critically
edited and with commentary by Manfred Frank und Véronique
Zanetti. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996. New
impression with identical pagination in 3 vols. as pocket edition:
Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. In one volume: Frankfurt a. M.:
Insel TB 4, 2009.
ABBREVIATIONS xvii
Kierkegaard
KW Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Edited by H. Hong
and E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978ff. Cited
by abbreviated individual volume title and page number.
SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Edited by Søren Kierkegaard
Forskningscenteret, København: Gads, 1997 ff. Cited by volume
and page number.
The following abbreviations refer to the English translations:

CI The Concept of Irony, KW II
CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII.1
E–O 1&2 Either/Or, KW III & IV
FT Fear and Trembling, KW VI
PV Point of View, KW XXII
R Repetition, KW VI
SLW Stages on Life’s Way, KW XI
Nietzsche
KSA 3 Nietzsches Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. III.3. Edited by
F. Bornmann. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1993.
Novalis
AB Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia. Das Allgemeine
Brouillon. Translated by D.W. Wood. New York: State University of
New York Press, 2007.
FS Fichte-Studies. Edited and translated by Jane Kneller. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
NS Novalis Schriften: Die Werke von Friedrich von Hardenberg. Edited
by Richard Samuel, H.-J. Mähl, P. Kluckhorn, and G. Schulz.
Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960–1988. Cited in the format “NS
2:494, no. 4” indicating volume and page number (as well as frag-
ment number, if applicable).
PW Philosophical Writings. Edited by Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1997.
xviii ABBREVIATIONS
Schelling
SW Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by
K.F.A. Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61.
Schiller
NA Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe. Edited by Julius Petersen et al.
54 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943.
TGG “Die Götter Griechenlandes.” In Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe.
Edited by Julius Petersen, 1:190–5. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus
Nachfolger, 1943. The English translation: The Poems of Schiller.
Translated by E. A. Bowring. London: George Bell and Sons,
1874, 72–7.
Schlegel, Friedrich
DP “Dialogue on Poesy.” In Schulte-Sasse, Jochen et al. (eds.),
Theory and Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German
Romantic Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997. 180–94.
KFSA Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Edited by E. Behler,
J. J. Anstett, and H. Eichner. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–.
SZ Friedrich Schlegel im Spiegel seiner Zeitgenossen. Collected and
annotated by Hans Eichner, edited by Hartwig Mayer and
Hermann Patsch. 4 vols. Würzburg: Königshausen und
Neumann, 2012.
Schleiermacher
KGA Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst. Kritische Gesamtausgabe.
Edited by Hans Joachim Birkner, Gerhard Ebeling, Hermann
Fischer, Heinz Kimmerle, and Kurt-Victor Selge. Berlin and
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Michael N. Forster and Lina Steiner
German Romanticism has not received the attention it deserves from phi-
losophers and literary scholars in the Anglophone world. This volume is
concerned with German Romanticism’s ideas about philosophy and litera-
ture, especially during its first and most important phase: the early German
Romanticism of roughly the period 1796–1801. The volume is also con-
cerned with the influence of those ideas on later thinkers both within
Germany and beyond it.
As is well known, German Romanticism was philosophically ambitious
not only in a general way, but in particular metaphysically. One of its lead-
ing representatives, Schleiermacher, already in the early 1790s embraced a
version of Spinoza’s monism, which he attempted to reconcile with the
epistemological strictures of Kant’s critical philosophy, and he then con-
tinued to propagate such a position in his famous On Religion: Speeches to
Its Cultured Despisers from 1799. Friedrich Schlegel, after an initial flush
of enthusiasm for the subjective idealism that Fichte developed in Jena
during the 1790s, in 1796 turned to criticizing it, and by 1800–01 was
instead committed to a project of synthesizing Spinoza’s monism with it
(a project that Hegel would continue subsequently). Similarly, Novalis
M. N. Forster (*) • L. Steiner (*)

Bonn University, Bonn, Germany
e-mail: mnforste@uchicago.edu; lsteiner@uni-bonn.de
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. N. Forster, L. Steiner (eds.), Romanticism, Philosophy, and
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_1
2 M. N. FORSTER AND L. STEINER
from about 1796 on developed criticisms of Fichte’s subjective idealism,

instead preferring a realist monism.
What is equally important, but less well known (at least in the
Anglophone world), is that German Romanticism also had a hard-edged
“scientific” (in the broad German sense of wissenschaftlich) side, in par-
ticular a side that was devoted to issues that are fundamental to the human
sciences (as contrasted with the natural sciences). For one thing,
Romanticism—especially as it was represented by Friedrich Schlegel and
Schleiermacher—was one of the most empirically well-informed and radi-
cal champions of what later came to be known as “historicism”: the real-
ization that human mental life—concepts, beliefs, values, perceptual and
affective sensations, genres, and so forth—change in profound ways over
historical time (as well as varying deeply between cultures and even
between individuals at a single time and place).
Romanticism was also the heir to an important “linguistic turn” that
had then recently been undertaken by Herder and Hamann, a turn away
from conceiving the relation between thoughts or concepts on the one
hand and language or words on the other in dualistic terms, as the
Enlightenment had usually done, and toward instead conceiving thought
as essentially dependent on and bounded by language, and concepts as
consisting in word-usages. Moreover, Romanticism effected some impor-
tant improvements in this new philosophy of language, including substi-
tuting for a strong tendency of the Enlightenment that Herder and
Hamann had sustained to conceive words and concepts atomistically a
new insight into various forms of linguistic holism.
Relatedly, Romanticism essentially founded modern linguistics. It
achieved this by recognizing that thoughts’ and concepts’ essential depen-
dence on and bounding by language made the investigation of language
an ideal means for discovering the nature of people’s thoughts and con-
cepts, thus providing a sort of empirically accessible and reliable window
on them; developing the insight that grammar is fundamental to language;
perceiving the deep variability not only of other aspects of language, such
as word-meanings, but also of grammars; recognizing that grammar is the
best criterion for discerning the genealogical relationships between lan-
guages (more reliable than lexicon, for example); generating a taxonomy
of different types of grammar; and mapping out the genealogical relation-
ships between the members of what are today known as the Indo-European
family of languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, the Romance lan-
guages, etc.). These achievements were originally due to Friedrich Schlegel
1 INTRODUCTION 3
in his revolutionary book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians

(1808). They almost immediately stimulated a great wave of closely related
work in linguistics by August Wilhelm Schlegel, Franz Bopp, Jacob
Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others.
On the basis of all of the aforementioned achievements—especially in
response to the challenge to interpretation that is posed by historicism, as
well as in light of the fundamental role that is played by language in
thought and by words in concepts—Romanticism also developed a revo-
lutionary new theory and methodology of interpretation, or “hermeneu-
tics.” This achievement is most famously associated with Schleiermacher
in his hermeneutics lectures, which he delivered from 1805 on. But it was
also in large part due to Friedrich Schlegel.
Again on the basis of the aforementioned achievements, Romanticism
in addition developed a radical new theory and methodology of transla-
tion—one that in particular aimed to make it possible to bridge the intel-
lectual, and especially conceptual, gulfs that historicism implied through
translation by drawing on the new philosophy of language that has been
mentioned. This was above all an accomplishment of Schleiermacher in his
groundbreaking essay On the Different Methods of Translation (1813).
In addition, Friedrich Schlegel’s brother August Wilhelm Schlegel
developed the science of analyzing the meters of poetry to new heights of
sophistication that were previously unknown (so that, for example, Goethe
would consult him about questions of meter that were relevant to his own
poetry).
These various extraordinary theoretical achievements of the Romantics
also formed the indispensable foundation for seminal work that they did
on the history of literature. Indeed, they constituted the foundation of
virtually all of the most important work that would be done in the human
sciences over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in
fields such as literary studies, classical scholarship, biblical scholarship, his-
toriography of law, historiography of philosophy, general historiography,
and (eventually) cultural anthropology.
Another noteworthy and laudable dimension of German Romanticism
during its most important, early period was a strikingly progressive politi-
cal and moral philosophy. During the 1790s and the early 1800s German
Romanticism’s leading representatives, Friedrich Schlegel and
Schleiermacher, both championed moral cosmopolitanism,
republicanism/democracy, liberalism, feminism, and a rejection of racism
and antisemitism. They also found important allies in these ideals in
Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who can in many ways be seen as
associate members of German Romanticism.
In addition to all of these philosophical achievements, the German
Romantics were also profoundly concerned with poetry or literature (and
to a significant extent the arts more broadly as well). Several aspects of this
preoccupation can be distinguished. First, they aimed to overcome the
“old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” of which Plato had already
written in the Republic (607b) in a very radical way, namely by effecting a
sort of synthesis between philosophy and poetry, or science and art. As
Friedrich Schlegel put it in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798), Romanticism
aims “to bring poetry and philosophy in contact” (KFSA 2, no. 116, cf.
no. 451), “in philosophy the only way to science is through art, as the
poet … only becomes an artist via science” (no. 302, cf. no. 255).
This goal can easily be misunderstood. The Schlegels knew enough
about the history of literature (for example, about Homer and the ancient
tragedians) to avoid the mistake that is often made by philosophers even
today of equating literature either with fiction or with mere entertain-
ment. Consequently, their goal of bringing philosophy and poetry together
does not, as it might seem to, imply any trivializing of philosophy.
Moreover, that goal is at least as much about making poetry more philo-
sophical or theoretical as it is about the converse (see on this especially
Athenaeum Fragments, no. 255). In this connection, it is important to
avoid another seductive mistake, one that is likely to be especially tempt-
ing to Anglophone readers: that of assimilating German Romanticism’s
ideal for poetry to the sort of return to nature in rejection of artificiality
that at around the same period constituted the ideal of English Romanticism,
in particular Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). Instead,
German Romanticism’s ideal for poetry was born out of Schiller’s defense
in his essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795) of sentimental, or in
other words theoretically reflective, poetry as contradistinguished from
naïve poetry, incorporated criticism into poetry, and reveled in the reflex-
ive meta-structure of “poetry of poetry” (see especially Athenaeum
Fragments, no. 238), so that it was virtually the opposite of that English ideal.
The German Romantics’ ideal of a philosophically or theoretically
sophisticated literature already found implementation by themselves and
their circle to some extent, especially in that paradigmatically Romantic
form of literature, the novel, or Roman (note that in German the words
Roman and romantisch are obvious cognates). Examples of this imple-
mentation are Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Novalis’s Heinrich von
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Ofterdingen, and Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie. However, the

ideal’s influence also outlived the Romantics themselves, continuing to
serve as a foundation for many later and arguably greater novels, such as
those of Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann.
Second, the leading Romantics were also path-breaking researchers
into the history of literature—indeed virtually inventing the discipline.
Friedrich Schlegel’s works in this area include his On the Study of Greek
Poetry (1795/7), History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans (1798),
and Lectures on the History of Literature (1815). August Wilhelm Schlegel’s
works include his History of Classical Literature (1802–03), History of
Romantic Literature (1803–04), and Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature (1809). The Schlegel brothers’ treatments of the history of
literature are informed by a deep knowledge of the relevant literary works
in their original languages and in their historical contexts, so that they can
still be read with profit even today. While it would be a mistake to read
them reductively as merely illustrations of such a theoretical position, they
are guided by a theoretical distinction, originally due to Friedrich Schlegel,
between Classical literature (which he mainly associated with antiquity)
and Romantic literature (which he mainly associated with modernity).
Friedrich first developed this distinction (albeit using slightly different ter-
minology) in On the Study of Greek Poetry and he gives his best-known
explanation of it in Athenaeum Fragment, no. 116. Among the criteria
that he and August Wilhelm see as distinguishing Romantic poetry from
Classical, and which they moreover advocate, are a striving for the Infinite,
interesting individuality, a mixing of genres, a fusion of striving for God
with striving for a female beloved, Christianity, rhyme, and a preference
for the novel as the main literary form. Friedrich and August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s main models of Romantic poetry are not, as is often supposed,
contemporary German authors such as Tieck or Goethe, but instead
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio from Italy, Cervantes from Spain, and
Shakespeare from England. Accordingly, their broad, deep preoccupation
with the history of literature made an enormous contribution to the devel-
opment of the age’s interest in “world literature” and to the eventual
founding of such disciplines as Romance languages and literatures
[Romanistik] and comparative literature [Komparatistik].
Third, most of the leading Romantics were also involved in writing
literature. Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde has already been mentioned,
but he also wrote a tragic play Alarcos (which no one less than Goethe
himself put on in Weimar) and some lyric poetry. Novalis’s novel Heinrich
von Ofterdingen has already been mentioned, but he was also the author
of the hauntingly beautiful lyric poems Hymns to the Night and other
poems. Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne ou l’Italie has already been men-
tioned, but she was also the author of several other novels and literary
works. Moreover, the broader Romantic circle included a number of peo-
ple whose primary achievements were literary rather than theoretical,
among them Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and Clemens
Brentano.
Fourth, leading Romantics were also heavily involved in a (theoreti-
cally–methodologically informed) translation of literary and other works.
For example, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Tieck together published
extraordinarily fine translations of Shakespeare’s plays in German and
Schleiermacher equally excellent translations of most of the Platonic dia-
logues. Both the translation theory and the translation practice of the
Romantics exercised an enormous beneficial influence on subsequent
translation theory and practice down to the present day. For instance, in
the early twentieth century Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s transla-
tion theory and their connected translation of the Hebrew Bible into
German were profoundly indebted to them, as is the most important con-
temporary approach in translation theory, Antoine Berman and Lawrence
Venuti’s “foreignizing” approach.
Fifth and finally, it is worth noting that the Romantics’ deep preoccupa-
tion with literature has the potential to be philosophically fruitful not only
for the sorts of reasons that they themselves developed explicitly—for
example, their official project of erasing the division between literature
and philosophy—but also for a reason about which they were less explicit
and of which they were perhaps less consciously aware, namely that litera-
ture can serve a sort of paradigmatic function in relation to a number of
important broad philosophical issues with which they were dealing. For
example, in hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation)
it makes good sense to focus on literature because literature tends to be
the most difficult type of communication to interpret, so that a hermeneu-
tics that has concentrated on and succeeded in coping with this specific
case has good prospects of being able to cope with all other types of com-
munication as well. Relatedly, but more specifically, the Romantics’ focus
on literary genres as constitutive features of literary works, on their histori-
cal, cross-cultural, and individual variability, and on the severe difficulties
for interpretation to which such variability leads illustrates vividly in micro-
cosm a situation concerning genre that in fact obtains for all forms of
1 INTRODUCTION 7
communication—not only literary texts but also non-literary ones, not

only texts but also discourse, indeed not only linguistic media but also
non-linguistic ones such as painting and music. That the literary case illus-
trates such a broader situation was first clearly recognized by one of the
Romantics’ earliest and most important followers: Schleiermacher’s stu-
dent, the eminent classical philologist and hermeneutic theorist, August
Boeckh, who in his Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences
(published posthumously in 1877) presented the exact identification of
the relevant genre as an essential part of all interpretation. Similarly, the
Romantics’ tendency to focus on literature in their theories of translation
reflects not merely a general perception of the importance of literature but
also the fact that the challenges that face translation are especially severe,
or at least especially clearly severe, in the case of literature—where, for
example, the translator obviously needs to do justice not only to semantic
features of the text translated but also to musical ones—so that a theory of
translation that can cope even with this most difficult of cases has good
prospects of being able to cope with any case. It is therefore probably no
accident that many of the deepest insights in the theory of interpretation
generally, genre-theory in particular, and the theory of translation have
been achieved by thinkers who were seriously interested in literature—for
example, the tradition of the Romantics themselves, including the Pre-
Romantic Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher (to the extent that
the Platonic dialogues and the New Testament can be counted as litera-
ture), and Boeckh, or more recently Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin,
Tzvetan Todorov, Alastair Fowler, and Antoine Berman—rather than by
the more narrowly philosophical thinkers who have tried to make contri-
butions in these areas (for example, Heidegger, Gadamer, Quine, and
Davidson).
The scholarly contributions in the present volume address a wide range
of aspects of the Romantics’ relationship to philosophy and literature
(though certainly not all). The contributions that are mainly concerned
with philosophy alone come first in order of appearance (Part I), those
concerned with both philosophy and literature follow subsequently
(Part II).
Let us, then, try to give a brief overview of the contents of the volume.
Both in the interest of achieving optimal quality and in a spirit of inclusive-
ness that mirrors that of the Romantics themselves, we have tried to
include in the volume contributors who belong to different nations, gen-
ders, and age groups. In the spirit of that approach, the following
overview will be a bit more ample in discussing three contributors whom

we have selected as representatives of contemporary research on German
Romanticism in Germany itself, the Anglophone world, and France:
Manfred Frank, Frederick Beiser, and Jean-Luc Nancy, respectively.
Manfred Frank is arguably the most prolific and accomplished specialist
on the philosophy of German Romanticism from post-war Germany. His
works include an ambitious book on the metaphysics and epistemology of
early Romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung (1997), in which, among
other things, he shows that Friedrich Schlegel in the mid-1790s, under
the influence of a skeptical circle around Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer,
renounced the Reinhold-Fichte program of finding a single, certain first
principle for philosophy in favor of espousing the ideal of a “reciprocal
proof [Wechselerweis].” Frank is also the author of Einführung in die früh-
romantische Ästhetik (1989), a wide-ranging work on the aesthetics of
early Romanticism that includes treatments of Schelling, Novalis, Friedrich
Schlegel, Tieck, and Solger, and which in particular gives a detailed
account of the development of the distinctively Romantic concept of irony
by the last three of these thinkers. In addition, Frank is the author of a
seminal book on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, Das individuelle
Allgemeine (1977), which, in addition to exploring the subtle interplay
between the collective and the individual in communication and interpre-
tation that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics foregrounds (as its title implies),
also argues that his hermeneutics is grounded in a conception of consensus
as the criterion of truth that he develops in his lectures on dialectic. In a
related book, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (1980), Frank continues his
treatment of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics but this time in relation to
more recent French theorists such as Sartre. Frank is also the author of
further works on the Romantics’ fellow-traveler Schelling, including the
book Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (1995). And he is the edi-
tor of important editions of Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik and
Dialektik.
Frank’s contribution to the present volume focuses on the leading poet
of early Romanticism, Novalis, whose Fichte-Studies from 1795/6 Frank
considers to be early Romanticism’s most important philosophical contri-
bution. On Frank’s reading, the Fichte-Studies, under the influence of
Niethammer’s skeptical circle, react against Fichte, aiming to replace his
subjective idealism with a monistic realism. According to Frank, the earli-
ness and the sophisticated detail of this project make it at least rival in
importance Hölderlin’s similar but much less detailed contribution from
1 INTRODUCTION 9
around the same period, whose seminal role in the development of German
Idealism has been emphasized by Dieter Henrich (Frank accordingly criti-
cizes Henrich for his neglect of Novalis’s contribution). On Frank’s inter-
pretation, Novalis’s version of a realist monism retains a strongly skeptical
character, though: philosophy is in the end only a form of infinite striving,
not a task that can ever be fully accomplished.
The second contribution to the volume is by Andreas Arndt, who is
another of the leading experts on German Romanticism from post-war
Germany. Arndt is the author of the book Schleiermacher als Philosoph
(2013) as well as of numerous scholarly articles on German Romanticism.
In addition, he is the editor of many scholarly editions of the works of
Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher. In his contribution to the present
volume Arndt discusses the concept of dialectic that Friedrich Schlegel
already developed as early as 1796. Arndt argues that, unlike Kant’s and
Fichte’s conceptions of dialectic, Schlegel’s conception of it acknowledged
the validity of contradictions. In this respect, as in some others, it antici-
pated the version of dialectic that Hegel would more famously develop a
few years later. In connection with this topic Arndt also touches on two
further important aspects of German Romanticism that receive fuller
treatment elsewhere in this volume: Romantic irony and the Romantic
ideal of a new mythology.
Johannes Korngiebel is a younger specialist on German Romanticism
from Germany who is currently completing doctoral work on the subject
at the University of Jena—the city that gave birth to German Romanticism
in the late 1790s and early 1800s. In his contribution to this volume
Korngiebel considers the relationship between Friedrich Schlegel and
Hegel in Jena, especially Hegel’s well-attested attendance of Schlegel’s
lectures on “transcendental philosophy” in 1800/1. Korngiebel points
out that there are some striking similarities between Schlegel’s philosophi-
cal approach and that developed later by Hegel, especially in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) (incidentally, a subject on which Frederick
Beiser and Michael Forster have amplified elsewhere). But Korngiebel’s
emphasis is instead on Hegel’s disagreements with Schlegel. He argues
that, although Hegel’s well-known explicit critique of Schlegel—espe-
cially, of his concept of irony, which Hegel castigates as subjectivist or rela-
tivist—as it has been explored in detail by Otto Pöggeler and others, only
occurs relatively late in Hegel’s career (mainly in the Philosophy of Right
from 1820 and in a review of Solger from 1828), the earliness of Hegel’s
first encounter with Schlegel’s work in Jena suggests that he must already
have begun his critique of Schlegel considerably earlier. Accordingly,

Korngiebel discerns just such an earlier critique of Schlegel in the first
article of the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie that Hegel and Schelling
co-authored in 1802.
François Thomas is a young French specialist on German Romanticism,
especially its theory of translation, who has taught at Bonn University and
now teaches at the University of Paris, Nanterre. In his contribution to
this volume he discusses the role that foreignness plays in Schleiermacher’s
philosophy. He argues that while Schleiermacher recognizes that a certain
rootedness in a single culture is important, he also valorizes an encounter
with the foreign, holding (as Hegel also does) that this is an essential part
of the individual’s formation [Bildung]. According to Thomas,
Schleiermacher accordingly assigns to translation and dialectic the impor-
tant function of complementing rootedness in a single culture with just
such an encounter with the foreign.
Frederick Beiser is the leading specialist on the philosophy of German
Romanticism in the Anglophone world. Like Manfred Frank, he has pub-
lished extensively on the subject. In German Idealism (2002) he prob-
lematizes the traditional distinction between German Idealism and
German Romanticism, in particular by arguing that it was in fact Friedrich
Schlegel who, in his Jena lectures on “transcendental philosophy” from
1800/1, gave the first public presentation of an absolute idealism (even
before Schelling’s and Hegel’s early public presentations of such a posi-
tion). In The Romantic Imperative (2003) Beiser develops a wide-ranging
account of the philosophy of early Romanticism, including its positions on
literature and art. Among other things, he challenges the widespread con-
ception that Romanticism’s preoccupation with these domains was apoliti-
cal or an evasion of politics: according to Beiser’s account, it was on the
contrary deeply political, and moreover politically radical. In Enlightenment,
Revolution, and Romanticism (1992) Beiser discusses the political philos-
ophy of the era to which the Romantics belonged, including the political
philosophy of the early Romantics themselves, especially Friedrich
Schlegel. The early Romantics who emerge from Beiser’s account are rep-
resentatives of a political philosophy that is both imaginative and progres-
sive—in particular, championing republicanism, liberalism, and
cosmopolitanism. Relatedly, Beiser is also the editor and translator of an
important collection of the Romantics’ political writings, The Early
Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996).
1 INTRODUCTION 11
In his contribution to the present volume Beiser qualifies his own very
positive picture of the political philosophy of early Romanticism in a cer-
tain way, though, especially in connection with the issue of antisemitism.
Beiser argues that the so-called Hochromantik of the period 1803–15,
which included such important figures as Clemens Brentano and Achim
von Arnim, was deeply antisemitic. In particular, he shows that the influ-
ential Berlin intellectual club, the Berliner Tischgesellschaft, founded in
1811, to which those Romantics and Schleiermacher belonged, made
antisemitism a prominent part of the German nationalism that it champi-
oned in reaction to Germany’s recent invasion by France. However,
Beiser’s case is not restricted to Hochromantik, but also concerns early
Romanticism to a significant extent. For one thing, on Beiser’s account
the ideal of a Christian state that undergirded much of this antisemitism
was largely an invention of Novalis in his Christianity or Europe (written
in 1799; partly published in 1802; fully published in 1826). For another
thing, on Beiser’s account Schleiermacher was not only a founding mem-
ber of the Tischgesellschaft from 1811 onward, but even the early
Schleiermacher of the Letters on the Occasion of the Politico-Theological
Task and the Open Letter of Jewish Householders [Briefe bei Gelegenheit der
politisch-theologischen Aufgabe und des Sendschreibens jüdischer Hausväter]
from 1799, who at first sight seems to be making a strong case in support
of political rights for Jews, was in fact implicitly pursuing an agenda that
was in certain ways antisemitic. (Beiser does not, however, extend this
critical case to certain other early Romantics and allies of Romanticism
who seem to be more unquestionably philosemitic rather than antisemitic,
such as Friedrich Schlegel and Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt.)
At this point our volume turns from contributions that are mainly con-
cerned with philosophy to ones that are also heavily concerned with litera-
ture. Helmut Hühn is another leading specialist on Romanticism from
Germany. He has not only published widely on the subject but also co-
directs the Research Center for European Romanticism [Forschungsstelle
Europäische Romantik] in Jena. In his contribution to the present volume
he considers the German Romantics’ central project of developing a “new
mythology.” He explains the background of this project in the historicism
of the period and in Schiller’s diagnosis of the ills of modernity in his
poem The Gods of Greece (1788). He then turns to an investigation of the
most important versions of such a project, namely those in the Earliest
Program for a System of German Idealism (1796/7) and in Friedrich
Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry (1800), in order to show that poetry played
a central role in these versions of the project and that their goal was in
important part political. He argues that the project ultimately succumbed
to certain aporias, or deep problems, especially the problem of how, as an
essentially collective possession, such a new mythology could possibly be
brought into existence. However, he also argues that the project and its
failure remain with us as an important part of our intellectual heritage.
Giulia Valpione is a young scholar of German Romanticism from Italy
who did her doctoral work on the subject in Jena. Her contribution to the
present volume focuses on Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of Life and its
significance for his views on both literature/art and politics (for, as she
points out, these two spheres are intimately connected for Schlegel).
According to Valpione’s interpretation, in both of these cases Schlegel’s
application of the concept of Life to the domain in question implies a
conception of the limitations of reason and intelligibility.
Jean-Luc Nancy is a leading French expert on German Romanticism’s
treatment of philosophy and literature. Accordingly, we have chosen him
as our representative of French research on the subject. Together with
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (now deceased), Nancy is the author of the
book L’absolu littéraire (1978), an important work on German
Romanticism’s positions concerning philosophy and literature that has
been very influential not only in France but also in other countries. In
their book Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe devote separate chapters to the
Romantics’ conceptions of a system, the fragment, religion, poetry, and
critique, in each case translating key texts by the Romantics into French
and providing a substantial commentary of their own. Nancy is also the
(co-)author of a number of articles that continue the book’s treatment of
those topics, sometimes in a more contemporary mode, such as the article
on the fragment “Noli me frangere.”
The contribution by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy that we have selected
for this volume is an excerpt from their chapter of L’absolu littéraire on the
Romantics’ conception of the fragment. This genre, which is paradigmati-
cally exemplified by the Athenaeum Fragments (1798) that Friedrich
Schlegel authored in collaboration with the other leading Romantics, con-
stitutes—together with the novel (the subject of Lina Steiner’s contribu-
tion to this volume)—the Romantics’ most important innovation in
relation to genres or types of writing. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy begin
their contribution with some brief but helpful general remarks about the
Romantics’ conception of the relationship between philosophy and litera-
ture, in which they in particular emphasize that their conception of this
1 INTRODUCTION 13
relationship was neither reductive nor exclusive in spirit. They then turn to
the Romantic fragment itself. They note that this is only one of a number
of genres that the Romantics use. They explain some of its historical back-
ground, especially the work of Nicolas Chamfort. They also carefully dis-
tinguish it from various other sorts of “fragment” that can be found either
in the Romantics themselves or in other sources—such as the Romantics’
own rough notes and sketches of projects or the “fragments” of lost works
of the ancients. In contrast with these, the Romantic fragment is charac-
terized by being the way it is deliberately rather than accidentally, standing
in an ambiguous relation to systematicity, (paradoxically) representing
incompletability in a complete way, essentially being plural (part of a col-
lection of fragments), and essentially being a collective achievement (a
product of “symphilosophy” or “sympoetry”).
Rainer Schäfer is an expert on Classical German Philosophy from
Germany who teaches at Bonn University. In his contribution to the pres-
ent volume he considers the relation of the philosopher-poet Hölderlin to
German Romanticism. Schäfer points out that Hölderlin does not himself
explicitly address the question of his relation to Romanticism and he
argues that it was only a certain nineteenth-century scholarly tradition—
saliently including Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Karl Rosenkranz,
and Rudolf Haym—that generated a sort of myth that Hölderlin was a
Romantic. Schäfer himself holds that Hölderlin is best seen as both
Romantic (in virtue of his focus on such themes as love, nature, and infin-
ity) and Classical (especially in virtue of the seriousness with which he
takes the Greek gods). Schäfer gives a detailed account in accordance with
this picture of Hölderlin’s varying treatments of history from Greek antiq-
uity to modernity in his novel Hyperion (1797/9), his unfinished drama
The Death of Empedocles (1797–1800), and works that date from
1801 onward.
Fred Rush is another leading expert on German Romanticism from the
Anglophone world. His recent book, Irony and Idealism: Rereading
Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard (2016) is the most detailed treatment
available in English of the Romantics’ distinctive concept of irony and its
influence on subsequent thinkers. In a continuation of the latter topic
(that of influence), Rush’s contribution to the present volume considers
Kierkegaard’s response to, and repurposing of, the concept of irony that
he found in Socrates and Friedrich Schlegel. On Rush’s account,
Kierkegaard made irony serve as the means for effecting the transition
from the aesthetic sphere to the ethical sphere—just as he made comedy
or humor serve as the means for effecting the transition from the ethical
sphere to the religious sphere.
Michael Forster is another specialist on the philosophy of German
Romanticism from the Anglophone world, now working at Bonn
University in Germany. His research on the Romantics has mainly focused
on their contributions to the philosophy of language, linguistics, herme-
neutics, and translation theory (see especially his books After Herder:
Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (2010) and German
Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (2011)). His
chapter in the present volume argues that Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth
of Tragedy (1872), is profoundly indebted to the German Romantics—to
the point, indeed, that it can reasonably be considered a Romantic work.
Accordingly, Nietzsche himself later classified the work as Romantic in the
Attempt at a Self-Criticism that he added to it in 1886. Moreover, this
classification turns out to be justified not only by the features of the work
that are uppermost in his mind when he advances it, such as its artists’
metaphysics and its tendency toward Christianity, but also by the fact that
the work is deeply indebted to the Romantics—especially to Friedrich and
August Wilhelm Schlegel—for several other features of its philosophical
project and for its detailed views about the nature of ancient tragedy.
James Vigus is another leading specialist on Romanticism from the
Anglophone world, specifically from Great Britain, though he has also
done extensive research in Jena. His work focuses mainly on the relation-
ship between German and British Romanticism. His contribution to the
present volume concentrates on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia
Literaria (1817). Vigus argues that Coleridge’s book combines British
and German modes of thought—the latter saliently including ideas from
Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Schelling, and Jacob Boehme. Among
the British influences that Vigus identifies are Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, which Coleridge often imitates, and Wordsworth’s literary theory
and practice, which he sharply criticizes. According to Vigus, an important
part of this critique of Wordsworth, and an important achievement in its
own right, lies in Coleridge’s criticism and rejection of British association-
ist psychology, which he repudiates in light of the sort of emphasis that
Kant and his German followers had placed on the active role of our minds
in cognition. Vigus argues that Coleridge, on the basis of his rejection of
British associationism in favor of a more active model of the mind’s role in
cognition, in particular develops a new, more active conception of the
faculty of imagination that plays a central role in poetry. And he argues
1 INTRODUCTION 15
that Coleridge draws on this new conception of the imagination in order

to criticize Wordsworth’s more mundane conception of the faculty as
merely reproductive. Vigus concludes his account of the combination of
British and German influences on Coleridge’s work by in addition tracing
its mysticism back to both George Fox and Jacob Boehme.
Paul Hamilton is another leading specialist on Romanticism from the
Anglophone world, again specifically from Great Britain. His research
similarly encompasses both German and British Romanticism. Accordingly,
his book publications include Metaromanticism (2003), Coleridge and
German Philosophy (2007), Realpolitik: European Romanticism and
Literary Politics (2013), and (as editor) The Oxford Handbook of European
Romanticism (2016). In his contribution to the present volume Hamilton
argues that, even beyond such obvious cases as Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and Henry Crabb Robinson, the British Romantics were deeply influenced
by post-Kantian German aesthetics. Hamilton in particular suggests that
Byron’s Don Juan, with its strikingly European rather than merely English
perspective, is continuous with such German Romantic projects as
Novalis’s Christianity or Europe and Friedrich Schlegel’s journal Europa
(1803–05). And he suggests that Shelley’s last, unfinished work The
Triumph of Life—which considers philosophical questions such as the
nature of being and the meaning of life through an imaginary encounter
with the philosopher Rousseau—pursues a project of phenomenologizing
philosophy that is part of the legacy of German Romanticism.
Finally, Lina Steiner is of Russian origin, but was also educated and
then taught in the United States, before eventually moving to Germany,
where she now teaches at Bonn University. She is a leading expert on
Russian literature, especially in relation to German thought. Her contri-
bution to the present volume focuses on what is arguably the German
Romantics’ main contribution to literature: their distinctive conception of
the novel. Steiner points out that while Dostoevsky has often been inter-
preted in ways that abstract from his intellectual context, the background
from which his work emerged centrally included the views of Schiller and
Friedrich Schlegel as well as debates surrounding them that were taking
place in nineteenth-century Russia. She also argues that Dostoevsky’s
most insightful commentator, Mikhail Bakhtin, was influenced in his well-
known dialogical interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novels by Friedrich
Schlegel’s model of the novel as a type of work that mixes different genres
and voices in infinitely expandable ways. It thus turns out that Bakhtin’s
success as an interpreter of Dostoevsky was no accident, but can in part be
attributed to their shared roots in German Romanticism. Steiner also

argues that Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is, among
other things, a sort of re-writing of Schiller’s play The Robbers, in particu-
lar that Dostoevsky reworks Schiller’s theme of a father’s relationships to
a “good” son, Karl Moor, and a “bad” son, Franz Moor, in terms of
Ivan’s, Dmitry’s, and Smerdiakov’s relationships to their common father
(noting that Dostoevsky himself explicitly mentions the connection to
Schiller’s play in the novel). Similarly, on Steiner’s account, the youngest
Karamazov brother, Alyosha, turns out to be a version of Schiller’s ideal of
the “beautiful soul”—whose definition, though, caused Dostoevsky con-
siderable difficulty. Although Dostoevsky wanted to avoid the sort of rela-
tivism that Friedrich Schlegel and Bakhtin embrace, in the end he found
no satisfactory way of doing so.
PART I
Philosophy
CHAPTER 2
Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational”

Approach
Manfred Frank
Translated by Justin Morris
1 The “Jena Constellation”

The ways of assimilating Kantian philosophy in the Jena years between
1789 and 1796 ran a very different course to the one that official history
of philosophy would have us believe.1 A majority of scholars trace, roughly
speaking, a path from Kant’s critical dualism to a new idealist monism,
which first began covering fresh ground following the appearance of
I wish to thank Justin Morris for translating this demanding text. I also thank
Simon Waskow for careful proofreading that brought to light some
inconsistencies between the original and the translation, and Michael McGettigan
for his generous help as a second proofreader. Thanks to them, many
formulations became clearer, missing passages were added, and all already
existing English translations of the Fichte and Novalis passages were carefully
checked and included. Differences between the translations provided in this text
and already existing ones are noted in brackets.—Manfred Frank
M. Frank (*)
University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: manfred.frank@uni-tuebingen.de
© The Author(s) 2020 19

M. N. Forster, L. Steiner (eds.), Romanticism, Philosophy, and
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_2
20 M. FRANK
Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794), before being expanded and “objec-

tified” by Schelling and Hegel in an idealism of nature and history. Coined
“German Idealism,” this movement began as epistemological fundamen-
talism (Reinhold 1789–92; Fichte 1793–95) before crossing the finishing
line as a theory of “absolute knowledge” (Hegel 1807). The central thesis
in this interpretation implies that German Idealism took the “absolute” as
object in the confidence that our “knowledge” was capable of exhaustively
comprehending it.
Only later, as part of a large-scale “Jena Project”2 under the direction
of Dieter Henrich and his colleagues was this dominant picture to undergo
radical transformation. They showed, firstly, that the Jena assimilation of
Kantian philosophy by Carl Leonhard Reinhold and his students was of
much greater complexity than had hitherto been presented by accepted
philosophies of history. Above all, there can be no question that they
aspired to a kind of “absolute idealism,” the reach of which extended
beyond the “Kantian boundary line,” as Hölderlin characteristically put it
(in his letter to Neuffer on October 10, 1794). The second piece of infor-
mation in so-called constellational research relates to the concept of “rep-
resentation” (Vorstellung), which Reinhold believed he had identified as
the suitable candidate for the highest principle, a notion that the most
intelligent among his students—Johann Benjamin Erhard, Franz de Paula
von Herbert, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and Friedrich Karl
Forberg—began to question as early as 1790. Among their fellow students
and close friends was Friedrich von Hardenberg. Hardenberg, who had
maintained life-long contact with them, did not write down his critique of
“fundamental philosophy” in note form until autumn 1795, when he did
so on Niethammer’s request; these notes were only later identified as a
unified collection of texts in his estate, and were clearly dated and pub-
lished by Joachim Mähl in volume two of his Schriften in a critical and
judiciously organized edition in 1965.3 These notes provide persuasive
arguments that run counter to the idea of allocating the philosophy of
Reinhold’s students to “German Idealism.” This holds all the more for the
philosophy of early Romanticism, the most important contribution of
which is available to us in the form of Novalis’ Fichte-Studies.
Meanwhile—in 1795—Reinhold’s philosophy from a first principle
found powerful endorsement in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Science of
Knowledge. The latter replaced Reinhold’s “Principle of Consciousness”
(according to which “in consciousness, the subject distinguishes the rep-
resentation from the subject and the object and relates the representation
2 NOVALIS’ FICHTE-STUDIES: A “CONSTELLATIONAL” APPROACH 21
to both”4) through his own doctrine of the “absolute I.” This doctrine, as
it were, set Reinhold’s highest principle idealistically higher and, above all,
suspended any effect of an actually existing external reality. (Reinhold was
an ontological realist: he explained the causal effect of “things in them-
selves” by the “distinction” of the representation from the subject and the
“relationship” to an independent reality. The “direction of fit” is reversed
in the case of spontaneous acts or perceptions in which the representation
“belongs” to the subject.)
In the spring of 1794, Fichte, who was by no means familiar with the
Jena constellation, entered the stage as Reinhold’s successor before a pub-
lic largely composed of erstwhile Reinhold students. In Fichte’s concep-
tion of philosophizing from a highest principle, they recognized the
revitalization of an idea the sustainability of which they believed they had
definitively disproved in their lengthy correspondence (Niethammer
1795b). The articles in Niethammer’s journal (Philosophisches Journal),
newly founded in 1794—a forum of sorts for the investigation of the sus-
tainability or untenability of philosophy from a first principle—reflect the
reaction to Fichte’s adoption of the Reinhold line. The critical arguments
are presented and discussed in the first part of Unendliche Annäherung
(Frank 1998) and in greater detail in Henrich’s Grundlegung aus dem Ich
(Henrich 2004). Here hitherto unknown sources—above all letters—have
come to light which fundamentally change our picture of the genesis of
“absolute idealism,” and of contemporary reservations about it. However,
the perception of the phenomenon of “German Idealism” continues to
encounter difficulties in assimilating, or even acknowledging the insights
of, constellation research.
2 Reinhold’s Core Idea and the Critique

of His Students
On what did the critique of Reinhold’s students rest, above all that of the
dominant figure Johann Benjamin Erhard? The erstwhile lecturer at the
Tübingen seminary, Immanuel Carl Diez—who moved to Jena to study
medicine in the spring of 1792 and attended Reinhold’s lectures, where
he later made his acquaintance—and Carl Christian Erhard Schmid—for-
mer private tutor to Novalis—arrived at similar results independently of
one another around the same time. Evidently, these two authors, Erhard
and Schmid, exerted a formative influence on Novalis.
22 M. FRANK
In a letter (characteristically) written to Erhard from June 18, 1792,

Reinhold refers to Schmid and Diez as equally important, saying that their
“compelling doubts” have given him “material for the second part of the
aforesaid treatise in the forthcoming edition of the Beyträge
(Contributions)”5 (Reinhold in Diez 1997, 912). In short, aside from
Diez’s orally conveyed objections, it was Reinhold who, above all, referred
to Schmid’s review of his work Über das Fundament des philosophischen
Wissens (1791), which was published on April 9 and 10, 1792, in the
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (nos. 92 and 93, columns 49–60).6 In this
case, however, Schmid’s lecture course Empirische Psychologie in the sum-
mer semester of 1791 had already vehemently attacked fundamental phi-
losophy, and Novalis may have himself attended this lecture during his
studies in Jena (from October 1790 to October 1791).7 At any rate, he
possessed the printed version and would occasionally quote from it—quite
apart from the fact of his close personal contact to Schmid (for further
details on this see Frank 1998, 563ff.).
The critique of Reinhold’s students (and C. Chr. E. Schmid) was
directed against the fundamental ideas of their teacher, or in Schmid’s
case, Reinhold’s colleague. It is generally held that Carl Leonhard
Reinhold’s achievement in the philosophy of history was in the founding
of a so-called elementary philosophy. In this connection, his seminal idea
was that the hitherto tentative and uncertain search for knowledge—this
was his very apt translation of the Greek word philosophia—had to be
grounded on an ultimate foundation. He somewhat loftily referred to the
discovery of this foundation as “the one thing needed by humanity”
(Reinhold 1791, XVI). The problem, for whose solution his discovery
commended itself, was outlined by Jacobi in 1789, in the expanded sec-
ond edition of his work on Spinoza: If we attempt—following a venerable
(still current) tradition—to account for knowledge as justified true belief,
we become enmeshed in an infinite regress (Jacobi 1789, 389–434, esp.
424ff., 430ff.). We ground our knowledge claims on justifications which,
in turn, only express knowledge on the condition that they are grounded
on justifications that express knowledge, and so on. This regress could
only terminate in a principle which is “un-conditionally” valid.
“Unconditionally” means not depending on a higher condition. It must
be possible to accept such a principle as valid without further qualification:
“neither requiring nor admitting of proof.” Hence, it is necessarily evi-
dent, since “evident” (literally) means that which is intelligible in and
through itself.
As mentioned, Reinhold believed himself to have discovered such a

principle. He designated it the “Principle of Consciousness” (Satz des
Bewusstseins). Further principles claiming truth were to be developed from
this principle—either by way of logical derivation or else analytically. By
“analytic” Reinhold meant, roughly speaking, the same thing that gave
contemporary analytical philosophy its name: that which results from
understanding the meaning of the used expressions (including function
words).8
Soon doubts began to emerge among Reinhold’s students in connec-
tion with this project, which, so it appears, culminated in Fichte’s philoso-
phy of the absolute I of 1794. These doubts led in four directions. Firstly,
it was disputed whether a system of convictions could be supported by
evidence, since evidence is restricted to private conscious experience.
Reference to it cannot account for the development of intersubjective
consensus; private experience is merely an essential epistemic criterion for
knowledge.
Furthermore, on closer analysis the system cannot be clearly distin-
guished from the “claims of common sense” (Niethammer 1795a). These
too can only be based on so-called intuitions in most cases; in short, we
believe in them. Belief statements possess a similar character to Euclidean
axioms (axioma means something believed). If they could be proven, they
would immediately forfeit their status as ultimate principles, since a prin-
ciple which bases its justification on another principle does not constitute
an ultimate principle. Justified knowledge thus becomes an article of faith.
Novalis remarked, “It is a product of the imagination, which we believe in,
without being able ever to know it according to its nature or to ours [syn-
tactically sic!]” (NS 2:273, no. 568; FS 171).
Thirdly, the “cogito” or the “principle of consciousness” are examples
of singular propositions that express a “fact of consciousness,” but remain
ill-suited as universal rules of inference from which conclusions can be
“deduced” (e.g., Schmid 1795, 101; Feuerbach 1795, 314f.).
The most serious and consequential objection, however, was the fourth:
Reinhold’s highest principle by no means stood on its own feet. It rather
tacitly presupposed other principles for its justification, which were sup-
posed to follow from it.9 This is also the essence of Carl Christian Erhard
Schmid’s critical review of Reinhold’s Fundament-work, to which
Reinhold makes reference in his letter.
Diez had shown, above all, that Reinhold could not deduce from his
principle of consciousness “consciousness of self and consciousness of
24 M. FRANK
one’s own spontaneity, neither of which lie in consciousness in general,”

but had to simply “presuppose” them as facts (in Diez 1997, 913). This is
because neither the relation of the representation to nor its distinction
from the subject yielded insight into its spontaneity. (Forberg had already
shown that Reinhold’s distinction between the spontaneity and simplicity
of the “form” and the givenness and manifold nature of the “matter” was
obtained surreptitiously; cf. Frank 1998, 253f.)
Schmid pointed out something similar with regard to the relationship
of the object (the thing in itself) to the representation (see Reinhold in
Diez 1997, 912f.; and in greater detail to Baggesen as early as April 7,
1792, immediately following the review [in Baggesen 1831, part 1, 176];
see Frank 1998, 348ff.). Attempting to deduce the concept of causality
from the distinction and relationship of both meant smuggling it into the
premises. By distinguishing representation and object, I do not generate
the concept of causal effect: according to Schmid, causal effect follows
from Reinhold’s second principle, which is logically independent of the
basic principle and which must first be postulated hypothetically before
anything can be deduced from it. As with Diez, the critique states “that
the principle of consciousness has done so little for demonstrating those
propositions that [in these so-called deductions] other propositions tacitly
come to its aid unobserved” (Schmid 1792, 57f.).
For philosophy from a first principle, this would be a ruinous conclu-
sion, which is something that Novalis nevertheless considers inevitable.
He therefore complicates matters for an entire legion of researchers on
early Romanticism, who consider his early thought as a somewhat jum-
bled, fantastic variety of contemporary philosophic fundamentalism. He
makes it even harder going for editors of the critical Novalis edition. The
great merit of these editors is that they were the first to edit and re-establish
the structure of the entire corpus of Hardenberg’s earliest philosophical
notes; though, by virtue of the choice of title (namely, Fichte-Studies), they
gave an entirely inappropriate and one-sided mapping of Hardenberg
onto Fichte’s early Idealism, thereby distorting the effective history.
Indeed, Novalis’ fundamental Kantian impulse only becomes comprehen-
sible by way of his early experience as a Reinhold student and his—at least
indirect—knowledge of the critiques of Reinhold and Fichte by his former
private teacher (and guardian) Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, together
with those of his former fellow students at Jena: Friedrich Immanuel
Niethammer, Franz Paul von Herbert, Friedrich Carl Forberg, and, above
all, Johann Benjamin Erhard. This necessitates a more detailed discussion

of this last item on my critical list.
I limit myself here to Schmid’s and Erhard’s critiques, since not only
may Novalis have heard Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie as a lecture course
in Jena in 1791, but he indeed occasionally cited it (NS 3:356, no. 524;
cf. annot. 943) and possessed a personal copy (NS 3:1008, no. 81). And
Novalis refers in 1797 to Erhard as his “real friend” (NS 4:203; cf. 85f.),
for whom he had tried to secure a position in Ansbach (through
Hardenberg’s uncle, a minister in Berlin and later the Prussian Chancellor)
and whose correspondence he protected from police spies in their search
for Jacobins by sealing it with his seal bearing the von Hardenberg name
while they resided in a spa in Teplitz in August 1798 with their friend von
Herbert.10 Erhard was without doubt the intellectually outstanding figure
among the circle of Reinhold students, even though we are forced to labo-
riously extrapolate his brilliant objections from correspondence and the
occasional review or essay, many of which are either unavailable or must be
assumed as missing.
(1) In the Empirische Psychologie (1791), Schmid sharply but fairly criti-
cized Reinhold’s starting point of the concept of representation as the
elementary term of philosophy with reference to Crusius (section one,
§§IXff.). The concept “representation” (Vorstellung) is unsuited as a phil-
osophical first principle, since it can be attained only by means of abstrac-
tion from a multiplicity of psychic experiences or acts (Schmid 1791,
section one, 158, §VII). However, drawing inferences from a genus con-
cept thus acquired is trivial due to the patently obvious circularity: I obtain
from particular events via abstractionis a higher order concept from which
I then claim to deduce those particulars.11 It may well be that Novalis was
already familiar with this objection through his Leipzig teacher Karl
Heinrich Heydenreich, who had asserted it in a highly respected review
against Reinhold in 1790 (Reinhold 1790, 427f.). Reinhold had been so
deeply impressed by it that he included it in the appendix to volume I of
his Beyträge. Indeed, it was on this basis that he modified his concept of
deduction from a highest principle (Reinhold 1790, 424ff.; on his own
conclusions from Heydenreich’s critique, cf., for example, 115ff.). From
this time forth, he distinguished “contained-in” (Enthaltensein-in) from
“contained-under” (Enthaltensein-unter), where the first signifies implica-
tion in nuce, and the second merely the relation of an object to a class (or
rather the relation of an instantiation of a particular to a universal) (Schmid
1791, 163f. [§XII], 167f. [§XIV]). In the first case, we are concerned with
26 M. FRANK
the relation between part and whole, which trivially encompasses the parts
without exception. The latter relation, by contrast, is very weak and worth-
less as a deductive principle. That which is subsumed under a concept is by
no means contained within it as part (cf. Kant, KrV B40). Thus, for exam-
ple, whoever understands the genus “law” knows nothing about the con-
temporary practice of English law, although, as a species, it falls under the
generic term. Or, whoever properly grasps the concept “mammal” knows
nothing about the existence of possums. The specification cannot be con-
structed a priori from the generic term. Hence, Kant prudently refrained
from declaring the genus concept “representation” to be a principle, much
less a principle of deduction, although he had himself shown that all con-
cepts of mental functions and affections are subsumed by it (cf. A320/
B376f.; and further B676f.—a section to which Schmid himself refers in
the Empirische Psychologie: I, §X, 161). Unlike mathematics, philosophy
does not work with “made,” but with “given concepts.” That which falls
under them cannot be developed from them, which, by contrast, is the
case with mathematical constructions. This is also the reason for Kant
assuming that philosophy could not give definitions, but only expositions
(expositiones) (A727ff./B754ff.). That he had neglected this distinction
was the Leibnizians’ standard objection to Reinhold (Frank 1998, 314ff.,
341ff.), an objection taken up by Rehberg and found in Erhard as well.12
Similarly, Novalis offers potent formulations of this type of objection in his
Fichte-Studies. In note no. 438 he writes, “Only an exposition [Exposition]
of essence is possible. Essence is absolutely not cognizable” (NS 2:238; FS
137, cf. 239). And in no. 445 he states that philosophy cannot begin with
a “definition”; a definition of the genus is only conceivable “beforehand”
[anticipando] (NS 2:243; FS 141). In the case of notes nos. 466ff. (NS
2:250ff.; FS 148ff.) on the nonsense of comprehending the upper limit as
highest genus, he makes critical reference to Reinhold. It was he who not
only claimed that the expression “principle” stands for a “genus concept”
(Beyträge I, 117), but also called upon philosophy to continue along the
course of species-genus distinctions, that is, to ascend by analysing the
concepts
of the genus proximum [and the] differentia proxima into the next genus
and next difference as long as one is not convinced that one has attained
something unanalyzable, which thus is not a composite concept.
(Beyträge I, 117)
And Reinhold spoke of this no longer analysable concept, which, naturally,

could only be singular, “as the only possible principle to determine the
highest genus” (Beyträge I, 358 in context).
(2) We shall now turn to the much more impressive objections formu-
lated by Erhard, for these objections were more effective in the further
development of philosophy along Kantian lines. They capture in a nutshell
what constituted common convictions among the more critical of Reinhold
students, and what they had collaboratively evolved in correspondence.
Initially, Erhard did not contest the fact of self-consciousness as a first
principle (or starting point) of philosophy. While Reinhold, influenced by
his critics, above all Diez, initially refrained from conferring on self-
consciousness the status of a first principle, by the summer of 1792 he felt
compelled to adopt this direction. In fact, as the standard formulation of
his theory on the faculty of representation (from 1790) stated, it is the
subject who appears as the sole actor of all the operations mentioned in the
“principle of consciousness”: in other words, it is the subject who in con-
sciousness in one respect refers representation to itself and to the object,
while in another respect it distinguishes itself from them. Were one to spell
out such possibilities thus opened up, one would quickly arrive at the view
that they must all be characterized as conscious self-references, and that it
is only the subject who is active. (In 1790 this prompted Reinhold to
introduce the phrase “through the subject” into the formulation of the
principle of self-consciousness [Reinhold 1790, 167; Reinhold 1791,
78].) Novalis noted with reference to Reinhold’s starting point: “The sub-
ject is presupposed in all consciousness—it is the absolutely active state of
consciousness” (NS 2:253; FS 151). While Erhard accepts this, he refrains
from assigning to self-consciousness any special epistemic status. A sarcas-
tic review of Schelling’s treatise on the I had so piqued and rattled the
author that the latter was moved in an excessively ponderous and aggres-
sive retort to deny having ever aimed in this text at a fundamental philoso-
phy (SW I/1, 242); in his review,13 Erhard accuses those who speculate on
an apparently absolute I of describing it in phrases that radically distin-
guish it from a possible object of our (empirical) consciousness. We
become conscious only of what is determinate, and thus has a limit in
something else. According to Erhard, because such consciousness exhausts
the sphere of all consciousness (naturally, alongside the consciousness of
our moral personality [Erhard 1796, 91]), the I is, for us—in its absolute
freedom—unconscious. Its apparent absoluteness and purity rest on its
objective indeterminacy (Erhard 1796, 91). For this, Schelling employs
28 M. FRANK
the expression “intellectual intuition” (Erhard 1796, 90). Erhard con-

cludes with cutting ridicule:
Insofar as he [the reviewer] can grasp it, the real object of it [Schelling’s
system] is underwritten by nothing more than an intellectual intuition,
which does not even merit this name to the extent that nothing is intuited
in it. For the reviewer can find nothing anywhere within him to which the
predicates of the absolute I could correspond, unless one takes it to be the
intentionally thoughtless state into which one may be transported by utterly
inhibiting the imagination’s workings and where one has no feeling besides
that of self-determinability. Now, this particular feeling is admittedly some-
what mysterious, for within it one can distinguish nothing, and a philosophy
based upon it can have no other outcome than the life story of a Nobody:
one can say anything one likes about it without ever courting the danger of
having to answer for it, since anything that is refuted by another was not
meant that way. Meanwhile it cannot be supposed that in Germany a phi-
losophy should be erected that has the same principle and ultimate end as
the submersion into the great nothing which several Indian sects praise as
the highest good. There must necessarily be something nobler at bottom.
This can be nothing but the feeling of our personality … as moral beings we
are [in fact] not the object of knowledge, but obligated to act. (Erhard
1796, 90f.)
While Novalis by no means draws this moral philosophical conclusion,

he does concur with Erhard in the conviction that “[there is] no more an
absolute subject than … an absolute space” (NS 2:253; FS 151). In his
initial foray in the Fichte-Studies, Novalis considered the conditions under
which a transcendent being (or “Urseyn”: original being) can be brought
to consciousness. He does not regard the highest consciousness as self-
posited, but as the (passive) feeling of a limit beyond which something
must first be assumed that is only to be believed: “[T]he I is fundamentally
nothing … everything must be given to it”; and “Thus philosophy always
needs something given”; “We are born [with empty categories]—i.e., with
compartments without contents … They want to be filled—they are noth-
ing without content—they have a drive to be, consequently to have con-
tent, because they exist only insofar as they have content actually” (NS
2:273, 113, 250; FS 171, 13, 148). Naturally, this conferring of content
must be suited to the structure of our consciousness, which Novalis con-
ceives as reflection and thus as a displacement and an inversion of the
given. Reflection, however, is able to comprehend its “inverted being”
and thereby rectify it. In the opening pages Novalis still operates on the
assumption of “intellectual intuition,” which is differently structured than
that of Schelling (it does not present a plenitude of being—plenitudo reali-
tatis—but is understood as our incapacity to recognize such a plenitude:
“the spirit of feeling is then gone”; “the borders of feeling are the borders
of philosophy” [NS 2:114; FS 13]; “Human beings feel the boundary that
circumscribes everything for them including themselves, the first act; they
must believe it, as certainly as they know everything else” [NS 2:107; FS
6]). Over the course of the Fichte-Studies, intellectual intuition then
increasingly forfeits its function and is finally abandoned in favour of a
recourse to the Kantian doctrines of ideas and postulates, in the same spirit
as Schmid and Erhard even more effectively shook the belief of many con-
temporaries in the possibility of a philosophy based on a highest principle
by a methodic doubt:
The philosophy [he says] that sets out from a fundamental principle and
presumptuously derives everything from it, always remains sophistical sleight
of hand; only the philosophy that ascends to the highest principle and por-
trays everything else in complete harmony with it, not as deriving from it, is
the true one. (Letter to Niethammer from May 19, 1794 [in Niethammer
1795b, 79])
He calls this method in letters to Reinhold and Niethammer (from

June 1792 and from May 1794) analysis.14 It moves—in the parlance of
the Wolff school to which Kant was also still attached—from the grounded
to the ground. By contrast, Reinhold’s and Fichte’s deductions would be
synthetic. Philosophy cannot proceed synthetically since the principle of
consciousness, or the principle announced in Fichte’s I, is not yet justified,
which is to say, does not stand on its own two feet. Its truth is instead tied
to presuppositions which are not already contained within it from the
beginning. Only in the abductive ascent from the conditioned to its sub-
sequent condition can they be obtained, though invariably only as a
hypothesis. If, furthermore, one should now assume that this step leads to
infinity, which means that absolute certainty is never attained, then one
must entirely abandon the idea of a definitive ground. Accordingly, the
place of the infinite is taken by the (Romantic) “yearning” for it; and the
place of the theory of evidential truth comes to be occupied by one that
must show all the relations of the world and consciousness in the most
precise possible “harmony” (as Erhard states). We thus have a coherence
30 M. FRANK
theory of sorts to which Novalis also subscribes, as is shown when he des-

ignates the ground by which philosophy justifies its beliefs as not given,
but as showing forth in the “interconnection [of each single thing] with
the whole.” Giving one’s beliefs coherence, he continues, is the only pos-
sible way to make them plausible to someone who dismisses the givenness
of an “absolute ground” and therefore must affirm the “actual absolute
ground … through totalizing [Verganzung; translation amended, J.M.] of
that which is to be explained/to a whole” (NS 2:270; FS 168). As already
mentioned, Novalis refers to this procedure as “totalizing” [Verganzung].
For the Romantics, the search for the latter replaces the unconditional.
“We seek everywhere the absolute, and only ever find things” (NS 2:412,
no. 1, PW 23).
A more detailed study would be required to show the way in which
Reinhold’s and Fichte’s philosophies of first principles left their flanks
open to sceptical objections, and why they saw the recourse to the Kantian
theory of ideas and his theory of postulates to be the only feasible way out
of the aporias of a fundamental philosophy. I have provided an exhaustive
discussion of this in section II of Unendliche Annäherung, and Dieter
Henrich’s Grundlegung aus dem Ich has, to some extent, opened up
entirely new sources of the critique of Reinhold and Fichte (especially that
of Diez).
3 Novalis in the Jena Constellation. The Origins

of the “Fichte-Studies”
In his constellation research, Henrich focused primarily on the ways in

which the critique of basic principles influenced Friedrich Hölderlin.
However, Hölderlin was not among Reinhold’s students and most prob-
ably drew most of his information from his distant cousin Niethammer in
Jena, under whose supervision he intended to write his habilitation thesis
in philosophy. Novalis, by contrast, was himself a student of Reinhold and,
as already mentioned, was in more frequent communication with his for-
mer fellow students than literary records suggest. It is difficult to under-
stand why Henrich has almost completely ignored the works of early
Romantic philosophers such as Friedrich von Hardenberg and Friedrich
Schlegel (he makes cursory mention of this in Henrich 1991, 228; 1992,
127). I dealt with this evident deficit in my series of lectures “Unendliche
Annäherung.” Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frank
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stands looking sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his
countrymen. But there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new
Soudan, where men live at peace under the Union Jack, and slavery
is at an end forever.
XXV
A. D. 1896
THE OUTLAW
DAWN was breaking of a summer’s day in 1896, when Green-

Grass-growing-in-the-water, a red Indian scout, came trotting into
Fort MacLeod with a despatch from Standoff for Superintendent
Steele, of the Mounted Police. He brought news that the body of a
Blood warrior, Medicine-Pipe-Stem, shot through the skull, and three
weeks dead, had been found in an empty cabin.
The Blood tribe knew how Bad-Young-Man, known to the whites
as Charcoal, had three weeks before come home from a hunting trip
to his little cabin where his wife, the Marmot, lived. He had found his
wife in the arms of Medicine-Pipe-Stem, and by his warrior’s right to
defend his own honor, had shot the intruder down. Charcoal had
done justice, and the tribe was ready to take his part, whatever the
agent might say or the Mounted Police might do for the white man’s
law.
A week had passed of close inquiry, when one of the scouts rode
up to the ration house, where the people were drawing their supplies
of beef, and gave warning that Charcoal was betrayed to the
Mounted Police. Charcoal demanded the name of his betrayer, and
learned that Mr. Wilson, the agent, was his enemy. That evening
Charcoal waited outside the agent’s house, watching the lighted
windows, where, on the yellow blinds there were passing shadows
cast by the lamp within, as various members of the household went
about their business. At last he saw Mr. Wilson’s shadow on the
blind, fired and shot the agent through the thigh. The household
covered the lamps, closed the shutters, sent for help and hid the
wounded man on a couch behind the front door, well out of range
from the windows. Next morning, in broad daylight, Charcoal went up
to the house with a rifle to finish Wilson, walked in and looked about
him, but failed to discover his victim behind the open door. He turned
away and rode for the hills. The Mounted Police, turned out for the
pursuit, were misled by a hundred rumors.
D Troop at the time numbered one hundred seventy men, the
pick of the regiment, including some of the greatest riders and
teamsters in North America, and led by Colonel S. B. Steele, the
most distinguished of all Canadian frontiersmen. After he had posted
men to guard all passes through the Rocky Mountains, he had a
district about ninety miles square combed over incessantly by strong
patrols, so that Charcoal’s escape seemed nearly impossible. The
district however, was one of foothills, bush, winding gorges, tracts of
boulders, and to the eastward prairie, where the whole Blood and
Piegan tribes were using every subtlety of Indian craft to hide the
fugitive.
Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts, had been
seventy hours in the saddle, and camped at Big Bend exhausted,
when a rider came flying in reporting Charcoal as seen at Kootenai.
The white men rallied for the twenty-eight-mile march, but the
Indians lay, and were kicked, done for, refusing to move. The white
men scrambled to their saddles, and reeled off on the trail,
unconquerable.
One day a Mormon settler brought news to Mr. Jervis that while
cutting fence rails, he had seen Charcoal creep out from the bush
and make off with his coat. So this Mormon led them to a little
meadow, where they found and surrounded a tent. Then Mr. Jervis
took two men and pulled aside the door, while they covered the
place with their revolvers. Two Mormons were brought out, shaking
with fright, from the tent.
Further on in the gray dawn, they came to another clearing, and
a second tent, which they surrounded. Some noise disturbed the
Marmot, who crept sleepily to the door, looked out, then with a
scream, warned her husband. Charcoal slashed with his knife
through the back of the tent, crept into the bush, and thence fired, his
bullet knocking the cap from the officer’s head; but a volley failed to
reach the Indian. The tent was Charcoal’s winter quarters, stored
with a carcass of beef, five sacks of flour, bacon, sugar and deerskin
for his shoes, and there the Marmot was taken, with a grown
daughter, and a little son called Running Bear, aged eight.
So far, in many weeks of the great hunt Charcoal had his loyal
wife to ride with him, and they used to follow the police patrols in
order to be sure of rest when the pursuers camped. Two police
horses, left half dead, were taken up and ridden by this couple an
extra forty miles. An officer and a buck were feeding at Boundary
Creek detachment when Mr. and Mrs. Charcoal stole their chargers
out of the stable. But now Charcoal had to face the prospect of a
lone fight, and with the loss of his family, fell into blind despair. Then
all his kinsfolk to the number of thirty-seven, were arrested and
lodged in prison.
Since his raid on the horses at Boundary Creek, all police
stables were locked, and visited frequently at night. Corporal Armour,
at Lee’s Creek came out swinging his lantern, sniffing at the night,
bound for the stable, when he saw a sudden blaze revealing an
Indian face behind the horse trough, while a bullet whisked through
his sleeve. He bolted for the house, grabbed his gun and returned,
only to hear a horse galloping away into the night. Charcoal for once,
had failed to get a remount. Sergeant Wilde was universally loved by
the tribes. The same feeling caused his old regiment, the Blues, at
Windsor, to beg for Black Prince, his charger, after his death, and
sent the whole body of the Northwest Mounted Police into mourning
when he fell. Tradition made him a great aristocrat under an
assumed name, and I remember well how we recruits, in the olden
times, were impressed by his unusual physical beauty, his stature,
horsemanship and singular personal distinction. Ambrose attended
him when he rode out for the last time on Black Prince, followed by
an interpreter and a body of Indian scouts. They were in deep snow
on a plain where there stands a line of boulders, gigantic rocks, the
subject of weird legends among the tribes. Far off against the sky
was seen riding fast, an Indian who swerved at the sight of the
pursuit and was recognized for Charcoal. Wilde ordered Ambrose to
gallop the twenty miles to Pincher Creek, turn the people out in the
queen’s name, send a despatch to Fort Macleod, and return at once.
The Indians tried for Charcoal at long range, but their new rifles were
clogged with factory grease hard frozen, so that the pin failed of its
impact, and they all missed fire. Wilde’s great horse was drawing
ahead of the ponies, and he called back:—
“Don’t fire, or you’ll hit me by mistake!”
As he overtook Charcoal he drew his revolver, the orders being
to fire at sight, then laid the weapon before him, wanting for the sake
of a great tradition, to make the usual arrest—the taking of live
outlaws by hand. Charcoal’s rifle lay across the saddle, and he held
the reins Indian fashion with the right hand, but when Wilde grabbed
at his shoulder, he swerved, touching the trigger with his left. The
bullet went through Wilde’s body, then deflecting on the bone of the
right arm, traversed the forearm, came out of the palm, and dropped
into his gauntlet where it was found.
Wilde rolled slowly from the saddle while Black Prince went on
and Charcoal also, but then the outlaw turned, galloped back and
fired straight downward into the dying man. Black Prince had
stopped at a little distance snorting, and when the Indian came
grabbing at his loose rein, he struck with his forefeet in rage at his
master’s murderer. Charcoal had fired to disable Wilde as the only
way left him of escaping “slavery”; now he had to conquer the dead
man’s horse to make his escape from the trackers.
Some three weeks ago, Charcoal’s brothers, Left Hand and Bear
Paw, had been released from jail, with the offer of forty pounds from
the government and ten pounds from the officer commanding, if they
could capture the outlaw. The tribes had decided that Charcoal’s
body belonged of right to the police, and after Wilde’s death he could
expect no mercy on earth, no help or succor from any living man.
From the slaying, like a wounded beast to his lair, he rode direct for
home, came to the little cabin, tied Black Prince to a bush and
staggered toward the door. Out of the house came Left Hand, who
ran toward him, while the outlaw, moved by some brute instinct, fled
for the horse. But Left Hand, overtaking his brother, threw his arms
about him, kissing him upon both cheeks, and Bear Paw, following,
cast his rope over the helpless man, throwing him down, a prisoner.
The brothers carried Charcoal into the cabin, pitched him down in a
corner, then Left Hand rode for the police while Bear Paw stayed on
guard.
It was Sergeant Macleod who came first to the cabin where Bear
Paw squatted waiting, and Charcoal lay to all appearance dead in a
great pool of blood upon the earthen floor. He had found a cobbler’s
awl used in mending skin shoes, and opened the arteries of his arm,
that he might take refuge from treachery in death. From ankle to
groin his legs were skinned with incessant riding, and never again
was he able to stand upon his feet.
For four months Charcoal had been hunted as an enemy by D
Troop, now for a like time he was nursed in the guard-room at Fort
Macleod, and, though he lay chained to the floor in mortal pain, his
brothers of the guard did their best. As he had been terrible in the
field, so this poor hero was brave in suffering—humble, and of so
sweet a disposition that he won all men’s hearts. Once he choked
himself with a blanket; once poisoned himself with a month’s
collection of cigarette stubs; each time nearly achieving his purpose,
but he never flinched, never gave utterance even to a sigh, except
for the moaning in his sleep.
At the trial his counsel called no witnesses, but read the man’s
own defense, a document so sad, so wonderfully beautiful in
expression, that the court appealed to the crown for mercy, where
mercy had become impossible.
When he was taken out to die, the troop was on guard
surrounding the barracks, the whole of the tribes being assembled
outside the fence. The prisoner sat in a wagon face to face with the
executioner, who wore a mask of black silk, and beside him was the
priest. Charcoal began to sing his death song.
“Stay,” said the priest, “make no cry. You’re far too brave a man
for that.” The song ceased, and Charcoal died as he had lived.
XXVI
A. D. 1898
A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE
WHEN a boy has the sea in his blood, when he prays in church for
plague, pestilence and famine, for battle and murder and sudden
death, his parents will do well to thrash him tame. For then if he can
be tamed he may turn out well as a respectable clerk; but if he has
the force of character to get what he wants he will prove himself and
be, perhaps, like John Boyes, of Hull, a king at twenty-five.
Boyes ran away to sea, and out of the tame humdrum life of the
modern merchant service made for himself a world of high
adventure. As a seaman he landed at Durban, then earned his way
up-country in all sorts of trades until he enlisted in the Matabeleland
Mounted Police, then fought his way through the second Matabele
war. Afterward he was a trader, then an actor, next at sea again, and
at Zanzibar joined an Arab trading dhow. When the dhow was
wrecked, and the crew appealed to Allah, Boyes took command, so
coming to Mombasa. From here the crown colony was building a
railway to Uganda, a difficult job because the lions ate all the
laborers they could catch, and had even the cheek to gobble up
white officials. Up-country, the black troops were enjoying a mutiny,
the native tribes were prickly, the roads were impossible and there
was no food to be had. Boyes was very soon at the head of a big
transport company, working with donkey carts and native carriers to
carry food for the authorities.
Northward of the railway was Mount Kenia, a lofty snow-clad
volcano; and round his foothills covering a tract the size of Yorkshire
or of Massachusetts lived the Kikuyu, a negro people numbering half
a million, who always made a point of besieging British camps,
treating our caravans to volleys of poisoned darts, and murdering
every visitor who came within their borders. Boyes went into that
country to buy food to supply to the railway workers (1898).
He went with an old Martini-Henry rifle, and seven carriers, over
a twelve thousand foot pass of the hills, and down through bamboo
forest into a populous country, where at sight of him the war cry went
from hill to hill, and five hundred warriors assembled for their first
look at a white man. Through his interpreter he explained that he
came to trade for food. Presently he showed what his old rifle could
do, and when the bullet bored a hole through a tree he told them that
it had gone through the mountain beyond and out at the other side. A
man with such a gun was worthy of respect, especially when his
drugs worked miracles among the sick. Next day the neighbors
attacked this tribe which had received a white man instead of killing
him, but Boyes with his rifle turned defeat to victory, and with
iodoform treated the wounded. The stuff smelt so strong that there
could be no doubt of its magic.
The white man made a friend of the Chief Karuri, and through
the adventures which followed they were loyal allies. Little by little he
taught the tribesmen to hold themselves in check, to act together. He
began to drill them in military formation, a front rank of spearmen
with shields touching, a rear rank of bowmen with poisoned arrows.
So when they were next attacked they captured the enemy’s chief,
and here again the white man’s magic was very powerful—“Don’t
waste him,” said Boyes. The captive leader was put to ransom,
released, and made an ally, a goat being clubbed to death in token
that the tribes were friends. Then a night raid obtained thirty rifles
and plenty of ammunition, and a squad of picked men with modern
arms soon formed the nucleus of the white man’s growing army.
When the Masai came up against him Boyes caught them in
ambush, cut their line of retreat, killed fifty, took hundreds of
prisoners and proved that raiding his district was an error. He was a
great man now, and crowds would assemble when he refreshed
himself with a dose of fruit salts that looked like boiling water. His
district was at peace, and soon made prosperous with a carrier trade
supplying food to the white men.
Many attempts were made by the witch doctors against his life,
but he seemed to thrive on all the native poisons. It was part of his
clever policy to take his people by rail drawn by a railway engine,
which they supposed to be alive, in a fever, and most frightfully
thirsty. He took them down to the sea at Mombasa, even on board a
ship, and on his return from all these wonders he rode a mule into
the Kikuyu country—“Some sort of lion,” the natives thought. It
impressed the whole nation when they heard of the white man riding
a lion. He had a kettle too, with a cup and saucer to brew tea for the
chiefs, and a Union Jack at the head of his marching column, and his
riflemen in khaki uniform. All that was good stage management, but
Boyes had other tricks beyond mere bluff. A native chief defied him
and had five hundred warriors in line of battle; but Boyes, with ten
followers only, marched up, clubbed him over the head, and ordered
the warriors to lay down their arms on pain of massacre. The five
hundred supposed themselves to be ambushed, and obeyed. It was
really a great joke.
So far the adventurer had met only with little chiefs, but now at
the head of a fairly strong caravan he set forth on a tour of the whole
country, sending presents to the great Chiefs Karkerrie and
Wagomba, and word that he wanted to trade for ivory. Karkerrie
came to call and was much excited over a little clock that played
tunes to order, especially when a few drops of rain seemed to follow
the music. “Does it make rain?” asked Karkerrie.
“Certainly, it makes rain all right,” answered Boyes.
But it so happened that rain was very badly needed, and when
Boyes failed to produce a proper downpour the folk got tired of
hearing his excuses. They blamed him for the drought, refused to
trade and conspired with one of his men to murder him. Boyes’ camp
became a fort, surrounded by several thousands of hostile savages.
One pitch-dark evening the war cry of the tribe ran from village to
village and there was wailing among the women and children. The
hyenas, knowing the signs of a coming feast, howled, and all through
the neighborhood of the camp the warriors were shouting, “Kill the
white man!”
As hour by hour went by the sounds and the silences got on the
white man’s nerves. It was always very difficult to keep Kikuyu
sentries awake, and as he kept on his rounds, waiting the inevitable
storming of his camp at dawn, Boyes felt the suspense become
intolerable. At last, hearing from one of his spies that Karkerrie was
close at hand disposing his men for the assault, Boyes stole out with
a couple of men, and by a miracle of luck kidnaped the hostile chief,
whom he brought back into the fort a prisoner. Great was the
amazement of the natives when at the gray of dawn, the very
moment fixed for their attack, they heard Karkerrie shouting from the
midst of the fort orders to retreat, and to disperse. A revolver
screwed into his ear hole had converted the Chief Karkerrie. Within a
few days more came the copious rains brought by the white chief’s
clock, and he became more popular than ever.
Boyes made his next journey to visit Wakamba, biggest of all the
chiefs, whose seat was on the foothills of the great snow mountain.
This chief was quite friendly, and delightfully frank, describing the
foolishness of Arabs, Swahili and that class of travelers who
neglected to take proper precautions and deserved their fate. He
was making quite a nice collection of their rifles. With his camp
constantly surrounded and infested by thousands of savages, Boyes
complained to Wakamba about the cold weather, said he would like
to put up a warm house, and got plenty of help in building a fort. The
chief thought this two-storied tower with its outlying breastworks was
quite a good idea. “What a good thing,” said he, “to keep a rush of
savages out.”
After long negotiations, Boyes managed to bring the whole of the
leading chiefs of the nation together in friendly conference. The fact
that they all hated one another like poison may explain some slight
delay, for the white man’s purpose was nothing less than a solemn
treaty of blood-brotherhood with them all.
The ceremony began with the cutting into small pieces of a
sheep’s heart and liver, these being toasted upon a skewer, making
a mutton Kabob. Olomondo, chief of the Wanderobo, a nation of
hunters, then took a sharp arrow with which he cut into the flesh of
each Blood-Brother just above the heart. The Kabob was then
passed round, and each chief, taking a piece of meat, rubbed it in his
own blood and gave it to his neighbor to be eaten. When Boyes had
eaten blood of all the chiefs, and all had eaten his, the peace was
sealed which made him in practise king of the Kikuyu. He was able
at last to take a holiday, and spent some months out hunting among
the Wanderobo.
While the Kikuyu nation as a whole fed out of the white chief’s
hand, he still had the witch doctors for his enemies, and one very
powerful sorcerer caused the Chinga tribes to murder three Goa
Portuguese. These Eurasian traders, wearing European dress, were
mistaken for white men, and their death showed the natives that it
would be quite possible to kill Boyes, who was now returning toward
civilization with an immense load of ivory. Boyes came along in a
hurry, riding ahead of his slow caravan with only four attendants and
these he presently distanced, galloping along a path between two
hedges among the fields of a friendly tribe—straight into a deadly
native ambush. Then the mule shied out of the path, bolted across
the fields and saved his life. Of the four attendants behind, two were
speared. Moreover the whole country was wild with excitement, and
five thousand fighting men were marching against Boyes. He
camped, fenced his position and stood to arms all night, short of
ammunition, put to the last, the greatest of many tests. Once more
his nerves were overstrung, the delay terrified him, the silence
appalled him waiting for dawn, and death. And as usual he treated
the natives to a new kind of surprise, taking his tiny force against the
enemy’s camp: “They had not thought it necessary to put any
sentries out.”
“Here,” says Boyes, “we found the warriors still drinking and
feasting, sitting round their fires, so engrossed in their plans for my
downfall that they entirely failed to notice our approach; so, stealthily
creeping up till we were close behind them, we prepared to complete
our surprise.... Not a sound had betrayed our advance, and they
were still quite ignorant of our presence almost in the midst of them.
The echoing crack of my rifle, which was to be the signal for the
general attack, was immediately drowned in the roar of the other
guns as my men poured in a volley that could not fail to be effective
at that short range, while accompanying the leaden missiles was a
cloud of arrows sent by that part of my force which was not armed
with rifles. The effect of this unexpected onslaught was electrical, the
savages starting up with yells of terror in a state of utter panic. Being
taken so completely by surprise, they could not at first realize what
had happened, and the place was for a few minutes a pandemonium
of howling niggers, who rushed about in the faint light of the camp-
fires, jostling each other and stumbling over the bodies of those who
had fallen at the first volley, but quite unable to see who had
attacked them; while, before they had recovered from the first shock
of surprise, my men had reloaded, and again a shower of bullets and
arrows carried death into the seething, disorganized mass. This
volley completed the rout, and without waiting a moment longer the
whole crowd rushed pell-mell into the bush, not a savage who could
get away, remaining in the clearing, and the victory was complete.”
It had taken Boyes a year to fight his way to that kingdom which
had no throne, and for another eighteen months of a thankless reign
he dealt with famine, smallpox and other worries until one day there
came two Englishmen, official tenderfeet, into that big wild land
which Boyes had tamed. They came to take possession, but instead
of bringing Boyes an appointment as commissioner for King Edward
they made him prisoner in presence of his retinue of a thousand
followers, and sent him to escort himself down-country charged with
“dacoity,” murder, flying the Union Jack, cheeking officials, and being
a commercial bounder. At Mombasa there was a comedy of
imprisonment, a farce of trial, an apology from the judge, but never a
word of thanks to the boyish adventurer who had tamed half a million
savages until they were prepared to enter the British Peace.
XXVII
A. D. 1898
JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN
FROM the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart S. Grogan in the

year 1900:—
“I must say I envy you, for you have done that which has been for
centuries the ambition of every explorer, namely, to walk through Africa
from South to North. The amusement of the whole thing is that a youth
from Cambridge during his vacation should have succeeded in doing
that which the ponderous explorers of the world have failed to
accomplish. There is a distinct humor in the whole thing. It makes me
the more certain that we shall complete the telegraph and railway, for
surely I am not going to be beaten by the legs of a Cambridge
undergraduate.”
It took death himself to beat Rhodes. Two years after that letter
was written news went out through the army in South Africa that he
was dead. We were stunned; we felt too sick to fight. For a moment
the guns were hushed, and silence fell on the veldt after years of war.
That silence was the herald of lasting peace for British Africa, united by
stronger bonds than rail or telegraph.
* * * * *
Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge, but also of
the bigger schools called War and Adventure, for he had traveled in the
South Seas, climbed in the Alps, and fought in the Matabele
campaigns, before he made his holiday walking tour from the Cape to
Cairo. He was not the usual penniless adventurer, but, reckoned by
frontier standards, a man of means, with the good manners that ease
the way for any traveler. From the Cape to the Zambesi he had no
need to tread old trails again, and far into the heart of Africa there were
already colonies with steamers to speed the journey up to Lake
Tanganyika, where his troubles really began. Through two-thirds of the
journey Grogan had a partner, Mr. A. H. Sharp, but they were seldom
in company, for one would explore ahead while the other handled their
caravan of one hundred fifty negro carriers, or one or both went
hunting, or lay at the verge of death with a dose of fever.
Their route lay along the floor of a gash in the continent, a deep
abyss called the Great Rift, in which lies a chain of lakes: Nyassa,
Tanganyika, Kevu, Albert Edward, and Albert, whence the Nile flows
down into distant Egypt. This rift is walled and sometimes blocked by
live volcanoes, fouled with swamps, gigantic forests and new lava
floods, reeking with fever, and at the time of the journey was beset by
tribes of hostile cannibals. This pleasant path led to Khartoum, held in
those days by the Khalifa with his dervish army. The odds were about
a thousand to one that these two British adventurers were marching
straight to death or slavery. Their attempt was madness—that divine
madness that inspires all pioneers.
Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:
“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty A. M. crept up
within sixty yards.... I saw in the middle of a circle of some two hundred
vultures a grand old lion, leisurely gnawing the ribs, and behind, four
little jackals sitting in a row.... Behind stretched the limitless plain,
streaked with mists shimmering in the growing light of the rising sun,
clumps of graceful palms fenced in a sandy arena where the zebra had
fallen and round his attenuated remains, and just out of reach of the
swish of the monarch’s tail, the solid circle of waiting vultures, craning
their bald necks, chattering and hustling one another, and the more
daring quartette within the magic circle like four little images of
patience, while the lion in all his might and matchless grandeur of form,
leisurely chewed and scrunched the titbits, magnificently regardless of
the watchful eyes of the encircling canaille.... I watched the scene for
fully ten minutes, then as he showed signs of moving I took the chance
afforded of a broadside shot and bowled him over with the .500
magnum. In inserting another cartridge the gun jammed, and he rose,
but after looking round for the cause of the interruption, without
success, started off at a gallop. With a desperate effort I closed the
gun and knocked him over again. He was a fine black-maned lion and
as he lay in a straight line from tip to top ten feet, four inches, a very
unusual length.”
Among the volcanoes near Lake Kivo, Grogan discovered a big
one that had been thrown up within the last two years, and there were
vast new floods of lava, hard to cross. One day, while searching out a
route for the expedition, he had just camped at a height of nine
thousand feet in the forest when he found the fresh tracks of a bull
elephant, and the spoor was much larger than he had ever seen.
When he overtook this giant the jungle was so dense that only the
ridge of his back was visible, and for some time he watched the animal
picking the leaves off a tree. When fodder ran short he tore down a
tree whose trunk was two feet thick, and fearing he might move on,
Grogan fired. The elephant fell, but recovered and clashed away, so
that there were some hours of tracking before the hunter could catch
up again. And now on a flaw of wind the giant scented him.
“The noise was terrific, and it suddenly dawned upon me that so
far from moving off he was coming on. I was powerless to move—a fall
would have been fatal—so I waited; but the forest was so dense that I
never saw him till his head was literally above me, when I fired both
barrels of the .500 magnum in his face. The whole forest seemed to
crumple up, and a second later I found myself ten feet above the
ground, well home in a thorn bush, while my gun was lying ten yards
away in the opposite direction; and I heard a roar as of thunder
disappearing into the distance. A few seconds later the most daring of
my boys, Zowanji, came hurrying along with that sickly green hue that
a nigger’s face assumes in moments of fear, and with his assistance I
descended from my spiky perch. I was drenched with blood, which
fortunately proved to be not mine, but that of the elephant; my gun,
which I recovered, was also covered with blood, even to the inside of
the barrels. The only damage I sustained was a slightly twisted knee. I
can not say whether the elephant actually struck me, or whether I was
carried there by the rush of the country.”
Following up, Grogan found enormous pools of blood, and half a
mile farther on heard grunts that showed that the elephant had scented
him. The animal rushed about with terrifying shrieks, devastated half
an acre of forest, and then moved on again. Several times the hunter
caught up, but the elephant moved on at an increasing pace, until
sunset put an end to Grogan’s hopes.
This part of the Rift has belts of forest, and close beside them are
patches of rich populous country where black nations live in fat
contentment. But for five years there had been trouble to the westward
where the Congo army had chased out the Belgian officials and run
the country to suit themselves. Still worse, there were certain cannibal
tribes moving like a swarm of locusts through Central Africa, eating the
settled nations. Lately the swarm had broken into the Rift, and as
Grogan explored northward he found the forest full of corpses. Here
and there lurked starving fugitives, but despite their frantic warnings he
moved on until he came to a wide province of desolated farms and
ruined villages. Seeing that he had but a dozen followers a mob of
cannibals attacked at night; but as they rushed, six fell to the white
man’s rifle, and when the rest fled he picked them off at the range of a
mile, as long as he could find victims. Then he entered a house where
they had been feasting. “A cloud of vultures hovering over, the spot
gave me an inkling of what I was about to see; but the realization
defies description; it haunts me in my dreams, at dinner it sits on my
leg-of-mutton, it bubbles in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun
bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the same country.”
Grogan fled, and starved, for the mountain streams were choked
with corpses, the woods were a nightmare horror, to eat and sleep
were alike impossible. He warned his partner and the expedition
marched by another route.
Two very queer kinds of folk he met in the forests: the pygmies and
the ape-men. The pygmies are little hunters and not more than three
feet tall, but sturdy and compact, immensely strong, able to travel
through the pig-runs of the jungle, and brave enough to kill elephants
with their tiny poisoned arrows. He found them kindly, clever little folk,
though all the other explorers have disliked them.
The ape-men were tall, with hanging paunch and short legs, a
small skull and huge jaws, face, body and legs covered with wiry hair.
The hang of the long powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and
the hunted vacant expression of the face were marked. The twenty or
thirty of them Grogan met were frightened at first but afterward
became very friendly, proud to show him their skill in making fire with
their fire sticks.
Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size.
The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white
man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro
women.
At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out
toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British
Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black
troops, raids from the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left
the expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent
back home as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful
attendants, pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with
a weed called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear
away, and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible
marshlands. He had in all only fourteen men when he came to the
Dinka country, and met that queer race of swamp folk. They are very
tall, some even gigantic, beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking
with feet picked up high and thrust far forward—the gait of a pelican. At
rest they stand on one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with
its foot on the straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe
made an attack on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads,
screaming that they were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed
to the heart, while two others went down with cracked skulls.
“I took the chief,” says Grogan, “and his right-hand man with the
double barrel, then, turning round, found that my boy had bolted with
my revolver. At the same moment a Dinka hurled his spear at me; I
dodged it, but he rushed in and dealt me a swinging blow with his club,
which I fortunately warded with my arm, receiving no more damage
than a wholesome bruise. I poked my empty gun at his stomach, and
he turned, receiving a second afterwards a dum-dum in the small of his
back. Then they broke and ran, my army with eight guns having
succeeded in firing two shots. I climbed up an ant hill that was close
by, and could see them watching at about three hundred yards for our
next move, which was an unexpected one, for I planted a dum-dum
apparently in the stomach of one of the most obtrusive ruffians, whom I
recognized by his great height. They then hurried off and bunched at
about seven hundred yards, and another shot, whether fatal or not I
could not see, sent them off in all directions.”
The battle was finished, and Grogan toiled on with his wounded
men, famished, desperate, almost hopeless. One day in desert country
he came to the camp of Captain Dunn, a British officer.
“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’
“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any sport?’
“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing here. Have a drink?’
“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war, (South Africa), and
eventually Dunn asked where the devil I had come from.”
The battle of Omdurman had destroyed the dervish power, and
opened the Nile so that Grogan went on in ease and comfort by
steamer to Khartoum, to Cairo, and home. Still he heard in his sleep
the night melody of the lions—“The usual cry is a sort of vast sigh,
taken up by the chorus with a deep sob, sob, sob, or a curious
rumbling noise. But the pukka roar is indescribable ... it seems to
permeate the whole universe, thundering, rumbling, majestic: there is
no music in the world so sweet.”
It is hard to part with this Irish gentleman, whose fourteen months’
traverse of the Dark Continent is the finest deed in the history of
African exploration.
XXVIII
A. D. 1900
THE COWBOY PRESIDENT
LET others appraise the merits of this great American gentleman as

governor of New York, secretary of the United States Navy, colonel
of the Rough Riders, historian of his pet hero, Oliver Cromwell, and,
finally, president of the republic. He had spent half his life as an
adventurer on the wild frontier breaking horses, punching cows,
fighting grizzly bears, before he ever tackled the politicians, and he
had much more fun by the camp-fire than he got in his marble
palace. Here is his memory of a prairie fire:—“As I galloped by I saw
that the fire had struck the trees a quarter of a mile below me, in the
dried timber it instantly sprang aloft like a giant, and roared in a
thunderous monotone as it swept up the coulée. I galloped to the hill
ridge ahead, saw that the fire line had already reached the divide,
and turned my horse sharp on his haunches. As I again passed
under the trees the fire, running like a race horse in the bush, had
reached the road; its breath was hot in my face; tongues of quivering
flame leaped over my head, and kindled the grass on the hillside fifty
yards away.”
Thus having prospected the ground he discovered means of
saving himself, his companions, and his camp from the rushing
flames. It is an old artifice of the frontier to start a fresh fire, burn a
few acres, and take refuge on the charred ground while the storm of
flame sweeps by on either hand. But this was not enough. The fire
was burning the good pasture of his cattle and, unless stayed, might
sweep away not only leagues of grass, but ricks and houses. “Before
dark,” he continues, “we drove to camp and shot a stray steer, and
then split its carcass in two length ways with an ax. After sundown
the wind lulled—two of us on horseback dragging a half carcass
bloody side down, by means of ropes leading from our saddle-horns
to the fore and hind legs, the other two following on foot with slickers
and wet blankets. There was a reddish glow in the night air, and the
waving bending lines of flame showed in great bright curves against
the hillside ahead of us. The flames stood upright two or three feet
high. Lengthening the ropes, one of us spurred his horse across the
fire line, and then wheeling, we dragged the carcass along it, one
horseman being on the burnt ground, the other on the unburnt grass,
while the body of the steer lay lengthwise across the line. The weight
and the blood smothered the fire as we twitched the carcass over the
burning grass, and the two men following behind with their blankets
and slickers (oilskins) readily beat out any isolated tufts of flame.
Sometimes there would be a slight puff of wind, and then the man on
the grass side of the line ran the risk of a scorching.
“We were blackened with smoke, and the taut ropes hurt our
thighs, while at times the plunging horses tried to break or bolt. It
was worse when we came to some deep gully or ravine—we could
see nothing, and simply spurred our horses into it anywhere, taking
our chances. Down we would go, stumbling, sliding and pitching,
over cut banks and into holes and bushes, while the carcass
bounded behind, now catching on a stump, and now fetching loose
with a ‘pluck’ that brought it full on the horses’ haunches, driving
them nearly crazy with fright. By midnight the half carcass was worn
through, but we had stifled the fire in the comparatively level country
to the eastwards. Back we went to camp, drank huge drafts of
muddy water, devoured roast ox-ribs, and dragged out the other half
carcass to fight the fire in the west. There was some little risk to us
who were on horseback, dragging the carcass; we had to feel our
way along knife-like ridges in the dark, one ahead and the other
behind while the steer dangled over the precipice on one side, and in
going down the buttes and into the cañons only by extreme care
could we avoid getting tangled in the ropes and rolling down in a
heap.” So at last the gallant fight was abandoned, and looking back
upon the fire which they had failed to conquer: “In the darkness it
looked like the rush of a mighty army.”

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Romanticism, Philosophy, and

Literature 1st ed. 2020 Edition Michael

ISBN 978-3-030-40873-2 ISBN 978-3-030-40874-9 (eBook)

This volume is loosely based on a conference that we organized at Bonn

2 Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational” Approach 19

3 Dialectic and Imagination in Friedrich Schlegel105

4 Hegel as an Attendee of Schlegel’s Lectures on

5 Schleiermacher and the “Consideration for the Foreign”:

Part II Philosophy and Literature 171

7 Mythology and Modernity173

8 Schlegel’s Incomprehensibility and Life: From Literature

9 The Fragment: The Fragmentary Exigency217

10 Hölderlin and Romanticism229

11 Romantic Self-Transformation in Kierkegaard245

12 Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy265

13 Shandeanism, the Imagination, and Mysticism:

14 The Experience of Everything: Romantic Writing and

15 Dostoevsky as a Romantic Novelist335

Andreas Arndt is Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology of

Historically it focuses mainly on ancient philosophy and especially German

he is also a visiting lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the

FREIHEIT ZU RECHT MACHT—Manuale des Politischen (De Gruyter

James Vigus is Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at the School of English

TWA Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Theorie-Werkausgabe. Auf der

The following abbreviations refer to the English translations:

Michael N. Forster and Lina Steiner

M. N. Forster (*) • L. Steiner (*)

© The Author(s) 2020 1

from about 1796 on developed criticisms of Fichte’s subjective idealism,

in his revolutionary book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians

Ofterdingen, and Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie. However, the

communication—not only literary texts but also non-literary ones, not

overview will be a bit more ample in discussing three contributors whom

have begun his critique of Schlegel considerably earlier. Accordingly,

that Coleridge draws on this new conception of the imagination in order

attributed to their shared roots in German Romanticism. Steiner also

Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational”

1 The “Jena Constellation”

© The Author(s) 2020 19

Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794), before being expanded and “objec-

2 Reinhold’s Core Idea and the Critique

In a letter (characteristically) written to Erhard from June 18, 1792,

As mentioned, Reinhold believed himself to have discovered such a

one’s own spontaneity, neither of which lie in consciousness in general,”

all, Johann Benjamin Erhard. This necessitates a more detailed discussion

And Reinhold spoke of this no longer analysable concept, which, naturally,

the expression “intellectual intuition” (Erhard 1796, 90). Erhard con-

While Novalis by no means draws this moral philosophical conclusion,

He calls this method in letters to Reinhold and Niethammer (from

theory of sorts to which Novalis also subscribes, as is shown when he des-

3 Novalis in the Jena Constellation. The Origins

In his constellation research, Henrich focused primarily on the ways in

DAWN was breaking of a summer’s day in 1896, when Green-

FROM the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart S. Grogan in the

LET others appraise the merits of this great American gentleman as

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2 Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational” Approach 19

3 Dialectic and Imagination in Friedrich Schlegel105

4 Hegel as an Attendee of Schlegel’s Lectures on

5 Schleiermacher and the “Consideration for the Foreign”:

Part II Philosophy and Literature 171

7 Mythology and Modernity173

8 Schlegel’s Incomprehensibility and Life: From Literature

9 The Fragment: The Fragmentary Exigency217

10 Hölderlin and Romanticism229

11 Romantic Self-Transformation in Kierkegaard245

12 Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy265

13 Shandeanism, the Imagination, and Mysticism:

14 The Experience of Everything: Romantic Writing and

15 Dostoevsky as a Romantic Novelist335

M. N. Forster () • L. Steiner ()