Revitalizing Romanticism: Novalis' Fichte Studien and the Philosophy of Organic Nonclosure The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Jones, Kristin Alise. 2013. Revitalizing Romanticism: Novalis' Fichte Studien and the Philosophy of Organic Nonclosure. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11124853 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Revitalizing Romanticism: Novalis' Fichte Studien and the Philosophy of Organic Nonclosure A dissertation presented by Kristin Alise Jones to The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Germanic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 © - Kristin Alise Jones All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Peter Burgard Kristin Alise Jones Revitalizing Romanticism: Novalis' Fichte Studien and the Philosophy of Organic Nonclosure Abstract This dissertation offers a re-interpretation of Novalis' Fichte Studien. I argue that several recent scholarly readings of this text unnecessarily exclude "organicism," or a panentheistic notion of the Absolute, in favor of "nonclosure," or the endless, because impossibly completed search for knowledge of the Absolute. My reading instead shows that, in his earliest philosophical text, Novalis makes the case for a Kantian discursive consciousness that can know itself, on Jacobian grounds, to be the byproduct (or accident) of a self-conditioning being or organism, and even more specifically a byproduct of God's panentheistic organism, at the same time that Novalis does not allow the possibility of discursive immediacy with that absolute standpoint; the epistemic consequence is that, while empirical science can proceed in the good faith that it makes valid reference to being, nonetheless it can never know its description of being to be final or complete. I call this position "organic nonclosure," and argue that Novalis holds it consistently throughout his very brief philosophical career. The keys to understanding Novalis' reconciliation of organicism and nonclosure are contextual and textual. Contextually, Novalis appreciates the inadvertent organicism in Jacobi's metacritique of Kant and also applies Jacobi's organicist metacritique to Fichte as well, with the result that Novalis' position in the Fichte Studien bears much resemblance to Herder's panentheistic ontology and modest epistemology. Textually, Novalis engages in a polysemy in the fragments of his Fichte Studien that performs the dependence of the sphere of empirical consciousness on a higher, intellectually intuitive being (a being that ! """! could only be a divinely creative intellection), and, simultaneously, the impossibility of presenting that identity in discursive terms. In other words, for Novalis, human knowledge of the existence of the organicist Absolute is enabled by, but also limited to, the merely contingent, empirical, and private experience of the dependence of the human subjective standpoint on an objectivity simply given to it. ! "#! Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 I. Organicism as the Closure of Kant's Transcendental Idealism 9 II. The Novalis Debate: Nonclosure versus Organicism? 28 III. Novalis' "Organic Nonclosure" 36 Chapter One From Organicism to Post-Structuralist Nonclosure in Readings of Novalis: A History of an Interpretive Tradeoff Page 43 I. Walter Benjamin 44 II. Theodor Haering 50 III. Géza von Molnár 57 IV. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 66 V. Manfred Frank 69 VI. Clare Kennedy 79 VII. Frederick Beiser 84 Chapter Two The Historical Precendence of Novalis' "Organic Nonclosure": Jacobi and Herder Page 92 I. Jacobi's Metacritique of Kant 96 II. Jacobi's Organic Theory of Consciousness 102 III. Dasein and Glaube 108 IV. Jacobi's Inadvertent Spinozism and the Road from Kant back to Being 112 V. The Nonclosure of Herder's Organicism 118 Chapter Three Organic Nonclosure in Novalis' Fichte Studien Page 136 I. "Bewußtseyn ist ein Seyn außer dem Seyn im Seyn": Novalis' Organicism 138 II. Novalis' Metacritique of Fichte 152 III. Novalis' Alternative Deduction: The Ex Negativo Approach to Panentheistic Absolute 161 IV. The Nonclosure of Novalis' Organicism in the Fichte Studien 178 Bibliography Page 189 ! ! "! Introduction „Mein Lieblingstudium heißt im Grunde, wie meine Braut. Sofie heißt sie – Filosofie ist die Seele meines Lebens und der Schlüssel zu meinem eigensten Selbst.“ Novalis an Friedrich Schlegel, Juli 1796 Novalis’ eminent standing at the heart of literary German Romanticism has gone essentially unchallenged for more than 200 years, but his status as a reputable philosopher is much younger. The first recognition of his uniquely early-Romantic contribution to the philosophy of his day arrived only at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany with Walter Benjamin, and in France only in 1978 with L’Absolu Litteraire by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy; then, in the English language, the first blossoming of scholarly notice began as late as the 1990s. Yet even a brief glance at Novalis’ works and letters reveals copious professions of love for philosophy and the insistence on its centrality to his creative project, so this tardy acknowledgment can only come as a surprise. Philosophy was clearly an intellectual priority for Novalis, and also a beloved pursuit. While working as an Akzessist for the saltworks in Weißenfels in 1795, Novalis said he had “ohngefähr 3 Stunden des Tages frey, wo ich für mich zu arbeiten wollen kann,” which he filled with “dringende Einleitungsstudien auf mein ganzes künftiges Leben, wesentliche Lücken meiner Erkenntniß und notwhendige Uebungen meiner Denkkräfte”1 – all exercises that eventually grew into the 500 handwritten pages of the Fichte Studien, his first major philosophical work. On several occasions, he describes the joy of philosophy as like an embrace, or a first kiss: “Im eigentlichsten Sinn ist philosophiren – ein Liebkosen – eine Bezeugung der innigsten Liebe zum Nachdenken, der absoluten Lust an der Weisheit,” and he writes that he wishes readers could see “daß !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe/Novalis Bd 1 (München, Wien: Hanser, 2005) 574. ! "! der Anfang der Philosophie ein erster Kuß ist, in einem Augenblick... wo sie Mozarts Composition ‘Wenn die Liebe in Deinen blauen Augen’ recht seelenvoll vortragen hörten – wenn sie nicht gar in der Ahndungsvollen Nähe eines ersten Kusses seyn sollten.”2 For all the historical tendency to see Novalis solely as a poet, or as a dreamy mystic at best, in fact his discussion of the very relationship between poetry and philosophy was steeped in the epistemological and aesthetic concerns of his day. Novalis was quite aware of the strength and originality of his philosophical insights, too. In his diary, he wrote without modesty: “Philosophie: Schiller, Herder, Lessing, Ich selbst, Kant.”3 Why, then, did scholarly recognition of his philosophical import arrive so late? There are several possible reasons for scholars’ neglect of Novalis as a philosopher. The first is more a function of historical accident than any deficiency of merit: his philosophical work was not reliably compiled until very late. In 1929, Paul Kluckhohn attempted to order the utter disarray of Novalis’ philosophical notes; but only in 1960, after Hans-Joachim Mähl put these materials into chronological order according to a painstaking handwriting analysis, did a more reliably clear train of thought emerge from Novalis’ jottings. Their publication in English did not begin until 1996. Prior to 1960, from those German-language fragments that were available to the public, Walter Benjamin wrote his 1919 dissertation on the philosophical foundations of early Romantic Kunstkritik; in a fairly scathing review of it, Winfried Menninghaus said it made “a forced usage of textual sources” which “set the course for significant limitations to and falsifications within his exposition,” though he granted that certain insights were !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe/Novalis Bd 2 (München, Wien: Hanser 2005) 331. 3 Novalis (Bd 1) 434 ! #! surprisingly accurate given Benjamin’s lack of access to correctly ordered fragments.4 In general, before handwriting analyses brought Novalis’ notes any kind of coherence, scholars’ decontextualized quotation of them made Novalis’ philosophy sound like "something akin to anarchy and magic,"5 and moreover, an artist’s retouching of his dewy-eyed portrait only fanned flames of the myth of his irrational and "effeminate" mind. So the second reason is that what knowledge scholars did have of Novalis’ philosophy did not inspire great interest in it. Third, even once his philosophical notes were properly collected, the influence of certain individual scholars drew attention away from their explicitly philosophical content and towards an almost exclusively literary interpretation. Ernst Behler is a crucial example; as Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert writes: "Behler was a leading authority… and a case in point regarding the exaggerated literary interpretation of early German Romanticism…To