DOCSLIB.ORG

NOVALIS and the AUTONOMY of ART by CARLOS GASPERI

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
NOVALIS and the AUTONOMY of ART by CARLOS GASPERI NOVALIS AND THE AUTONOMY OF ART by CARLOS GASPERI LABBEE A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in German Written under the direction of Martha B. Helfer And approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2019 i ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Novalis and the Autonomy of Art By CARLOS GASPERI LABBEE Dissertation Director: Martha B. Helfer The dissertation that follows argues that the early works of Novalis together represent a philosophical critique of Romantic reflexivity as a concept of artistic autonomy. Chapter One addresses Novalis's “Bemerkungen zu Fichte,” demonstrating that the Jena Romantic concept of artistic autonomy operates at the most elementary level of Novalis's aesthetic program, namely, the linguistic sign. In nuce, Novalis's semiotics represent an ongoing process of self-regeneration in visual form; stated otherwise, the sign engenders itself as a literary creation of its own imaginative powers of language. Chapter Two considers “Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs” to be a literary narrative about the “language of nature.” Interpreting the text in the context of Novalis's semiotic discourse on the laws of language and scientific discourse on the laws of nature, the poetic autonomy of the sign comes to represent a microcosm of the poetic autonomy of nature herself. For Novalis, the “nature” of language and the “language” of nature convey one and the same intuition. Chapter Three understands “Monolog” to be the culmination of Novalis's philosophy of language as that of a living, animating force in the universe that maintains and regulates the manifold unity of our mundane reality. ii Acknowledgments I suspect having been born and raised in an unusual family setting played a decisive role in my life choices. It was my parents who first taught me the value of mutual understanding among cultures. As an American expatriate residing in Venezuela, my mother insisted that English be spoken in our family household, whereas my Venezuelan father insisted that Spanish be spoken in equal measure. Moving to the United States at eighteen years of age, I initially intended to pursue an undergraduate education in the fields of business and economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The course of my academic trajectory changed in its entirety, however, after listening to Professor C.D.C. Reeve's eloquent lectures on Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift of 1887. Professor Reeve's fine exposition of Nietzsche's consummate understanding of the historical origins of our social mores engrossed my mind completely. Nietzsche's ingenious style of philosophical writing by dint of literary tropes instigated my desire to engage questions of philosophy from the vantage point of a literary critic ever since. Having been exposed to the value of learning foreign languages from an early age, I sought to learn how to read Nietzsche in his native language. My apprenticeship of the German language under the tutelage of many dedicated and talented teachers of German over the years has accorded me a more nuanced philosophical appreciation of Nietzsche's poetic language, as well as that of his predecessors. It is with great enthusiasm, indeed, that I find myself at the culmination of my formal studies immersed in the philosophical ruminations of one of his greatest nineteenth century literary precursors – Novalis. In iii truth, I am most fortunate that by the grace of many fortuitous circumstances, life has afforded me the opportunity to amply pursue my passion for the study of countless great works of German Literature. The joyful endeavor of the past decade brought tremendous felicity to my spirit. Since joining the academic community that forms Rutgers University's Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures, I feel honored to have been conferred the privilege of a graduate education under the auspices of such a fine group of mentors. I am foremost obliged, however, to my dissertation adviser, Martha B. Helfer. Her supervision with a most caring view to my professional development, as well as unflagging support in times of personal setbacks, were instrumental to the completion of the project at-hand. But more importantly, her work in the field of German literary studies continues to serve as the exemplar of what my own scholarship strives to be. The incontrovertible probity of character that distinguishes the intellectual honesty and incisive judgment of her research reflects the true vocation of the person I know as someone devoted to a lifetime of study of German Romanticism. I finally wish to express my earnest gratitude to the staffs of Freies Deutsches Hochstift and Schloss Oberwiederstedt. Their elated enthusiasm for all things related to Novalis went hand-in-hand with their outstanding hospitality. I particularly wish to thank Dr. Konrad Heumann and Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rommel for sharing their erudition, as well as granting me full-access to their vast collections of investigative resources on Novalis. iv Dedication I wish to dedicate the following dissertation to my family, Carlos Astolfo Gasperi Grillo, Carlos Daniel Gasperi, and Terri Lynn Labbée de Gasperi. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgment iii-iv Dedication v Introduction “Novalis and the Autonomy of Art” 1-50 Chapter I “The Original Schema” A Study of “Bemerkungen zu Fichte” 51-104 Chapter II “Of Law and Nature” A Study of “Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs” 105-156 Chapter III “Anima Mundi” A Study of “Monolog” 157-184 Concluding Remarks 185-186 Appendix A 187-188 Bibliography 189 vi 1 Introduction “Novalis and the Autonomy of Art” In recent discussions about art, the notion of the “autonomy of art” proves to be a panchreston. It offers an explanation concerning the nature of art which can be made to fit all cases, but is used in such a variety of ways as to become virtually meaningless. Göran Hermerén's 1983 Aspects of Aesthetics alone extrapolates thirteen definitions of the autonomy of art from contemporary art critics and philosophers; Owen Hulatt's 2013 anthology Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy compiles ten wide-ranging essays on topics that further differentiate, according to Hulatt, between “aesthetic” and “artistic” autonomy. For those of us invested in such discussions, the meaning of the autonomy of art is rendered no less obscure by its commonplace association to the phrase “art for art's sake.” The latter is first recorded in an 1804 journal entry by Benjamin Constant, who reports a dinner conversation with Henry C. Robinson on the subject of Kant's inventive turn of phrase Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck.i The equivalent in French l'art pour l'art is otherwise contrived by the mid-nineteenth century parnasse movement, where Théophile Gautier is the first to adopt the slogan in the preface of his 1835 epistolary novel Mademoiselle de Maupin.ii Broadly speaking, the phrase “art for art's sake” is understood to mean that art lacks any didactic, moral, or utilitarian function beyond its sphere of influence on human activities. To state the following clearly from the outset, this is not the concept of the autonomy of art that the present study intends to discuss. Philosophically considered, several iterations of the concept of “autonomy” [Autonomie, Selbständigkeit, Selbstgezetzlichkeit, Selbsttätigkeit, Souveränität] are nevertheless worth here reviewing against the backdrop of early modern aesthetics to the present. Of course, while by no means exhaustive, the overview that follows frames 2 several preliminary definitions of the autonomy of art that deal with fundamental aspects of Jena Romantic aesthetics in the final decade of the eighteenth century. More expressly, I wish to make use of these preliminary definitions in an effort to illuminate the philosophical stakes of three early works by Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, otherwise better known by his celebrated nom de plume “Novalis.”iii Over the course of three studies, I interpret Novalis's “Bemerkungen zu Fichte” of late 1795 to mid-1796, “Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs” of 1798, and “Monolog” of early 1799. I will argue that these works each in their own respect critically reflect on the concept of Romantic reflexivity as a form of artistic autonomy. With the findings of the present investigation, I hope to make a contribution of lasting value to the most current scholarship on Novalis, as well as offer a unique perspective on the autonomy of art which others may find of use in the pursuit of their own intellectual and scholarly interests. I The German literary and philosophical traditions are unique in their tendency to view the autonomy of the work of art separately from the autonomy of art as such.iv During the Age of Enlightenment, Lessing's 1766 treatise on aesthetics Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie distinguishes the ideals of the plastic arts in general and poetry on the basis of their representational limits. On the premise that “signs must stand in a convenient relation to the thing signified,” the signs of paintings and sculptures, forms and colors in-space, in contradistinction to the signs of poems, articulate sounds in-time, themselves signify two distinct artistic ends. Because the plastic arts are bound to observe spatial proximity, the painter or sculptor must therefore select and render the seminal, most expressive “pregnant” moment in a chain of events; 3 poets, in contrast, have the task of depicting events according to the temporal sequence of transitory actions (101-102).v The plastic arts and poetry are “autonomous” media of artistic representation in the sense that they designate independent semiotic systems on the basis of mutually exclusive structures of signification. Only two decades later, Karl Philipp Moritz lays the theoretical groundwork for the distinct concept of autonomy that permeates Jena Romantic aesthetics.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholarship@Western Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-23-2015 12:00 AM Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought Ben Woodard The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Tilottama Rajan The University of Western Ontario Joint Supervisor Joan Steigerwald The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Ben Woodard 2015 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Woodard, Ben, "Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3314. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3314 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (Thesis Format: Monograph) by Benjamin Graham Woodard A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in Theory and Criticism The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Ben Woodard 2015 Abstract: This dissertation examines F.W.J. von Schelling's Philosophy of Nature (or Naturphilosophie) as a form of early, and transcendentally expansive, naturalism that is, simultaneously, a naturalized transcendentalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Rediscovering Frédéric Chopin's "Trois Nouvelles Études" Qiao-Shuang Xian Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 Rediscovering Frédéric Chopin's "Trois Nouvelles Études" Qiao-Shuang Xian Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Music Commons Recommended Citation Xian, Qiao-Shuang, "Rediscovering Frédéric Chopin's "Trois Nouvelles Études"" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2432. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2432 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. REDISCOVERING FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN’S TROIS NOUVELLES ÉTUDES A Monograph Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in The School of Music by Qiao-Shuang Xian B.M., Columbus State University, 1996 M.M., Louisiana State University, 1998 December 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF EXAMPLES ………………………………………………………………………. iii LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………………………… v ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………… vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….. 1 The Rise of Piano Methods …………………………………………………………….. 1 The Méthode des Méthodes de piano of 1840
    [Show full text]
  • On Not Interpreting the Roar
    University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor Electronic Theses and Dissertations Theses, Dissertations, and Major Papers 10-5-2017 On Not Interpreting the Roar Simina Banu University of Windsor Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd Recommended Citation Banu, Simina, "On Not Interpreting the Roar" (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 7236. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/7236 This online database contains the full-text of PhD dissertations and Masters’ theses of University of Windsor students from 1954 forward. These documents are made available for personal study and research purposes only, in accordance with the Canadian Copyright Act and the Creative Commons license—CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works). Under this license, works must always be attributed to the copyright holder (original author), cannot be used for any commercial purposes, and may not be altered. Any other use would require the permission of the copyright holder. Students may inquire about withdrawing their dissertation and/or thesis from this database. For additional inquiries, please contact the repository administrator via email ([email protected]) or by telephone at 519-253-3000ext. 3208. ON NOT INTERPRETING THE ROAR by Simina Banu A Creative Writing Project Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies through the Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts at the University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario, Canada © 2017 Simina Banu On Not Interpreting the Roar by Simina Banu APPROVED BY __________________________________________________ J. Mboudjeke Languages, Literatures and Cultures __________________________________________________ L. Cabri English Language, Literature and Creative Writing __________________________________________________ S.
    [Show full text]
  • Skepticism and Pluralism Ways of Living a Life Of
    SKEPTICISM AND PLURALISM WAYS OF LIVING A LIFE OF AWARENESS AS RECOMMENDED BY THE ZHUANGZI #±r A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY AUGUST 2004 By John Trowbridge Dissertation Committee: Roger T. Ames, Chairperson Tamara Albertini Chung-ying Cheng James E. Tiles David R. McCraw © Copyright 2004 by John Trowbridge iii Dedicated to my wife, Jill iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In completing this research, I would like to express my appreciation first and foremost to my wife, Jill, and our three children, James, Holly, and Henry for their support during this process. I would also like to express my gratitude to my entire dissertation committee for their insight and understanding ofthe topics at hand. Studying under Roger Ames has been a transformative experience. In particular, his commitment to taking the Chinese tradition on its own terms and avoiding the tendency among Western interpreters to overwrite traditional Chinese thought with the preoccupations ofWestern philosophy has enabled me to broaden my conception ofphilosophy itself. Roger's seminars on Confucianism and Daoism, and especially a seminar on writing a philosophical translation ofthe Zhongyong r:pJm (Achieving Equilibrium in the Everyday), have greatly influenced my own initial attempts to translate and interpret the seminal philosophical texts ofancient China. Tamara Albertini's expertise in ancient Greek philosophy was indispensable to this project, and a seminar I audited with her, comparing early Greek and ancient Chinese philosophy, was part ofthe inspiration for my choice ofresearch topic. I particularly valued the opportunity to study Daoism and the Yijing ~*~ with Chung-ying Cheng g\Gr:p~ and benefited greatly from his theory ofonto-cosmology as a means of understanding classical Chinese philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Thoughts About Natural Law
    Some Thoughts About Natural Law Phflip E. Johnsont My first task is to define the subject. When I use the term "natural" law, I am distinguishing the category from other kinds of law such as positive law, divine law, or scientific law. When we discuss positive law, we look to materials like legislation, judicial opinions, and scholarly anal- ysis of these materials. If we speak of divine law, we ask if there are any knowable commands from God. If we look for scientific law, we conduct experiments, or make observations and calculations, in order to come to objectively verifiable knowledge about the material world. Natural law-as I will be using the term in this essay-refers to a method that we employ to judge what the principles of individual moral- ity or positive law ought to be. The natural law philosopher aspires to make these judgments on the basis of reason and human nature without invoking divine revelation or prophetic inspiration. Natural law so defined is a category much broader than any particular theory of natural law. One can believe in the existence of natural law without agreeing with the particular systems of natural law advocates like Aristotle or Aquinas. I am describing a way of thinking, not a particular theory. In the broad sense in which I am using the term, therefore, anyone who attempts to found concepts of justice upon reason and human nature engages in natural law philosophy. Contemporary philosophical systems based on feminism, wealth maximization, neutral conversation, liberal equality, or libertarianism are natural law philosophies.
    [Show full text]
  • A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century Damnatio of Euripides Ernst Behler
    BEHLER, ERNST, A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century "Damnatio" of Euripides , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 27:4 (1986:Winter) p.335 A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century Damnatio of Euripides Ernst Behler N HIS 1802-04 Berlin lectures on aesthetics, August Wilhelm Schle­ I gel claimed that his younger brother Friedrich (in his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry U795]), had been the first in the modern age to discern the "immeasurable gulf" separating Euripides from Aeschylus and Sophocles, thereby reviving an attitude the Greeks themselves had assumed towards the poet. The elder Schlegel noted that certain contemporaries of Euripides felt the "deep decline" both in his tragic art and in the music of the time: Aristophanes, with his unrelenting satire, had been assigned by God as Euripides' "eternal scourge"; 1 Plato, in reproaching the poets for fostering the passionate state of mind through excessive emotionalism, actually pointed to Euripides (SK I 40). Schlegel believed that his younger brother's observation of the profound difference between Euripides and the two other Greek tragedians was an important intuition that required detailed critical and comparative analysis for sufficient development (SK II 359). By appropriating this task as his own, August Wilhelm Schlegel inaugurated a phenomenon that we may describe as the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides. The condemnation of Euripides by these early German romantics was no extravagant and isolated moment in their critical activity: it constituted a central event in the progressive formation of a new literary theory. Their pronouncements must be seen in the context of a larger movement, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that transformed the critical scene in Europe: the fall of the classicist doctrine and the rise of the new literary theory of romanticism.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Shelley: Teaching and Learning Through Frankenstein Theresa M
    Forum on Public Policy Mary Shelley: Teaching and Learning through Frankenstein Theresa M. Girard, Adjunct Professor, Central Michigan University Abstract In the writing of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was able to change the course of women’s learning, forever. Her life started from an elite standpoint as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. As such, she was destined to grow to be a major influence in the world. Mary Shelley’s formative years were spent with her father and his many learned friends. Her adult years were spent with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their literary friends. It was on the occasion of the Shelleys’ visit to Lord Byron at his summer home that Mary Shelley was to begin her novel which changed the course of women’s ideas about safety and the home. No longer were women to view staying in the home as a means to staying safe and secure. While women always knew that men could be unreliable, Mary Shelley openly acknowledged that fact and provided a forum from which it could be discussed. Furthermore, women learned that they were vulnerable and that, in order to insure their own safety, they could not entirely depend upon men to rescue them; in fact, in some cases, women needed to save themselves from the men in their lives, often with no one to turn to except themselves and other women. There are many instances where this is shown throughout Frankenstein, such as: Justine’s prosecution and execution and Elizabeth’s murder. Mary Shelley educated women in the most fundamental of ways and continues to do so through every reading of Frankenstein.
    [Show full text]
  • Scientific Explanation
    Scientific Explanation Michael Strevens For the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and expla- nation; but the greatest of these is explanation. Also the most inscrutable: prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as we have some independent grasp of these notions, we can evaluate science’s strate- gies of prediction and control from the outside. Explanation, by contrast, aims at scientific understanding, a good intrinsic to science and therefore something that it seems we can only look to science itself to explicate. Philosophers have wondered whether science might be better off aban- doning the pursuit of explanation. Duhem (1954), among others, argued that explanatory knowledge would have to be a kind of knowledge so ex- alted as to be forever beyond the reach of ordinary scientific inquiry: it would have to be knowledge of the essential natures of things, something that neo-Kantians, empiricists, and practical men of science could all agree was neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. Everything changed when Hempel formulated his dn account of ex- planation. In accordance with the observation above, that our only clue to the nature of explanatory knowledge is science’s own explanatory prac- tice, Hempel proposed simply to describe what kind of things scientists ten- dered when they claimed to have an explanation, without asking whether such things were capable of providing “true understanding”. Since Hempel, the philosophy of scientific explanation has proceeded in this humble vein, 1 seeming more like a sociology of scientific practice than an inquiry into a set of transcendent norms.
    [Show full text]
  • Two Concepts of Law of Nature
    Prolegomena 12 (2) 2013: 413–442 Two Concepts of Law of Nature BRENDAN SHEA Winona State University, 528 Maceman St. #312, Winona, MN, 59987, USA [email protected] ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE / RECEIVED: 04–12–12 ACCEPTED: 23–06–13 ABSTRACT: I argue that there are at least two concepts of law of nature worthy of philosophical interest: strong law and weak law . Strong laws are the laws in- vestigated by fundamental physics, while weak laws feature prominently in the “special sciences” and in a variety of non-scientific contexts. In the first section, I clarify my methodology, which has to do with arguing about concepts. In the next section, I offer a detailed description of strong laws, which I claim satisfy four criteria: (1) If it is a strong law that L then it also true that L; (2) strong laws would continue to be true, were the world to be different in some physically possible way; (3) strong laws do not depend on context or human interest; (4) strong laws feature in scientific explanations but cannot be scientifically explained. I then spell out some philosophical consequences: (1) is incompatible with Cartwright’s contention that “laws lie” (2) with Lewis’s “best-system” account of laws, and (3) with contextualism about laws. In the final section, I argue that weak laws are distinguished by (approximately) meeting some but not all of these criteria. I provide a preliminary account of the scientific value of weak laws, and argue that they cannot plausibly be understood as ceteris paribus laws. KEY WORDS: Contextualism, counterfactuals, David Lewis, laws of nature, Nancy Cartwright, physical necessity.
    [Show full text]
  • Novalis's Magical Idealism
    Symphilosophie International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism Novalis’s Magical Idealism A Threefold Philosophy of the Imagination, Love and Medicine Laure Cahen-Maurel* ABSTRACT This article argues that Novalis’s philosophy of magical idealism essentially consists of three central elements: a theory of the creative or productive imagination, a conception of love, and a doctrine of transcendental medicine. In this regard, it synthesizes two adjacent, but divergent contemporary philosophical sources – J. G. Fichte’s idealism and Friedrich Schiller’s classicism – into a new and original philosophy. It demonstrates that Novalis’s views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now. Keywords: magical idealism, productive imagination, love, medicine, Novalis, J. G. Fichte, Schiller RÉSUMÉ Cet article défend l’idée selon laquelle trois éléments centraux composent ce que Novalis nomme « idéalisme magique » pour désigner sa philosophie propre : la conception d’une imagination créatrice ou productrice, une doctrine de l’amour et une théorie de la médecine transcendantale. L’idéalisme magique est en cela la synthèse en une philosophie nouvelle et originale de deux sources philosophiques contemporaines, à la fois adjacentes et divergentes : l’idéalisme de J. G. Fichte et le classicisme de Friedrich Schiller. L’article montre que les vues de Novalis tant sur la magie que sur l’idéalisme sont non seulement réellement rationnelles et compréhensibles, mais philosophiquement plus cohérentes et novatrices qu’on ne l’a admis jusqu’à présent. Mots-clés : idéalisme magique, imagination productrice, amour, médecine, Novalis, J. G.
    [Show full text]
  • Bringing Nature to Light: Schellingâ•Žs Naturphilosophie in the Early
    Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications Philosophy, Department of 1-1-2013 Bringing Nature to Light: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the Early System of Identity Michael Vater Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. Analecta Hermeneutica, Vol. 5 (2013). Permalink. © 2013 International Institute for Hermeneutics. Used with permission. ISSN 1918-7351 Volume 5 (2013) Bringing Nature to Light: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the Early System of Identity Michael Vater Light is already a completely ideal activity that deconstructs and reconstructs objects just as the light of idealism always does— and so Naturphilosophie provides a physical explanation of idealism, which proves that at the boundaries of nature there must break forth the intelligence we see break forth in the guise of humanity [Person des Menschen]. Schelling, General Deduction of Dynamic Process, § 631 In November of 1800 the issue of the reality of nature and its meaning for a transcendental philosophy interrupts, or rather heats up, the exchange of letters between Fichte in Berlin and Schelling in Jena. Fichte has faint praise for the latter‟s System of Transcendental Idealism and marks as problematic the way it sets nature alongside of consciousness as the subject of a genetic deduction. For transcendental philosophy, he insists, nature can only be something found, finished, perfect because lawful, but whose lawfulness is not its own, but that of the intelligence which beholds and explains.2 Schelling responds with a long recital of his philosophical development and poses several alternative ways that philosophy of nature might coincide with Wissenschaftslehre, the most radical of which suggests that philosophy of consciousness must be based on natural philosophy, not the reverse.
    [Show full text]
  • 2. Very Little Almost Nothing Simon Critchley
    Unworking romanticism America, to which I shall return in my discussion of Cavell. It is rather the offer of a new way of inhabiting this place, at this time, a place that Stevens names, in his last poem and piece of prose, ‘the spare region of Connecticut’ , a place inhabited after the time when mythology was possible.51 As Stevens puts it: A mythology reflects its region. Here In Connecticut, we never lived in a time When mythology was possible. Without mythology we are offered the inhabitation of this autumnal or wintry sparseness, this Connecticut, what Stevens calls ‘a dwindled sphere’: The proud and the strong Have departed. Those that are left are the unaccomplished, The finally human, Natives of a dwindled sphere. (CP 504) ‘A dwindled sphere’…this is very little, almost nothing. Yet, it is here that we become ‘finally human natives’. (c) Romantic ambiguity The limping of philosophy is its virtue. True irony is not an alibi; it is a task; and the very detachment of the philosopher assigns to him a certain kind of action among men.52 Romanticism fails. We have already seen how the project of Jena Romanticism is riddled with ambiguity. On the one hand, romanticism is an aesthetic absolutism, where the aesthetic is the medium in which the antinomies of the Kantian system— and the Enlightenment itself—are absolved and overcome. For Schlegel, the aesthetic or literary absolute would have the poetic form of the great novel of the modern world, the Bible of secularized modernity. However, on the other hand, the audacity of romantic naïveté goes together with the experience of failure and incompletion: the great romantic novel of the modern world is never written, and the romantic project can be said to fail by internal and external criteria.
    [Show full text]