The Romantic Poetry of Nature: an Antidote to German Idealism’S Eclipsing of Natural Beauty

chapter 4 The Romantic Poetry of Nature: an Antidote to German Idealism’s Eclipsing of Natural Beauty

Elizabeth Millán Brusslan1

In 1927 Arthur O. Lovejoy pointed to a problem that lingers, namely that we are in need of more precision for the term ‘nature’ a “verbal jack-of-all trades” that is “at once the most sacred and most protean” of terms.2 If we attempt to navigate the territory of late 18th and early 19th century German thought, without a map of the meanings of “nature” in this period we are doomed, in the words of Lovejoy, “to move about in the midst of ambigui- ties unrealized.”3 In what follows I hope to create a map to help us navigate a particular area within the terrain of early German Romantic thought, the terrain of nature, through a specific focus on nature’s beauty. As we shall see, it is just the sort of map summoned by Walter Benjamin in words from an essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, where he writes: “at the exact moment when Kant’s work was completed and a map through the bare woods of reality was sketched, the Goethean quest for the seeds of eternal growth began.4 A concern with life, with change, and with nature’s organic processes, also became central to the work of the early German Romantics—in their quest for the seeds of eternal growth, a conception of nature took shape that devel- ops organically from the romantic approach to reality. In the period of early German Romantic thought, a concern with nature coupled with an embrace of aesthetic experience, gave way to a call for a poetry of nature. Establishing

1 With thanks to Rachel Zuckert and Kevin Thompson, who invited me to present a paper at the Chicago Areas Consortium in German Philosophy on March 20, 2015, which enabled me to develop my account of the romantic poetry of nature, and to Naomi Fisher, whose comments on that paper were of great value to me. I also presented a draft of the current paper at a Workshop on early German Romanticism that was held at DePaul University on March 25, 2016, and I thank the participants at that workshop, especially, Andrew Cutrofello, for their comments and for providing a wonderful atmosphere of Symphilosophie. 2 A. O, Lovejoy, “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948): 69–77, at 69. 3 Ibid., 69. 4 …. genau um die Zeit, da Kants Werk vollendet und die Wegekarte durch den kahlen Wald des Wirklichen entworfen war, begann das Goethesche Suchen nach den Samen ewigen Wachstums. Walter Benajamin, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Leipzig: Insel, 1972), 256.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388239_006 98 Millán Brusslan just what the status of the romantic poetry of nature is and what role it plays in a period of Naturphilosophie—a protean term all its own—and a period rife with abundant references to a veil of nature, is not an easy task.5 I shall argue that the romantic conception of nature is best approached via their poetry of nature, which amounts to a specific sort of presentation of nature, one that is neither a breed of Naturphilosophie nor even a standard philosophy of nature, but rather the upshot of their attempt to bring science, poetry, and philosophy into closer company, and just the sort of presentation of nature that allows nature to appear as a process of eternal growth.

1 The Romantic Dialogue with Nature

Schlegel called for a radical new way of conceiving philosophy, a way that dethroned the lofty place promised by philosophers who claimed that philosophy was the “queen of all sciences.” For Schlegel, philosophy does not stand above the other disciplines, but rather is just one discipline along a horizon of other disciplines. Indeed, for Schlegel as philosophy opens its boundar- ies to converse with the other disciplines, it will become more progressive. Philosophy for Schlegel is not a finished product, but rather ever in a process of becoming. Schlegel reminds us time and again in his writing that one can never be a philosopher, but only ever be in the process of becoming one, for

5 During the “Age of Goethe and Schiller” philosophy was dominated by Kant’s philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. Certainly, there are several promising lines of investigation that could use Kant’s thought as a guidepost through this period. For example, in his article, “Kant and Naturphilosophie,” Frederick Beiser presents a detailed portrait of “the dialecti- cal struggle between Kant and Naturphilosophers,” focusing upon the work of Schelling, Schlegel, Novalis, Hegel, and even including some discussion of Blumenbach, Kielmeyer, and Humboldt. See Frederick Beiser, “Kant and Naturphilosophie,” in Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, eds., The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth Century Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7–26, at 22. Michela Massimi gives an impressively detailed account of Schelling’s contributions to Naturphilosophie, in “Philosophy and the Chemical Revolution after Kant,” in Karl Ameriks, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182–204. Rachel Zuckert also discusses the relation between Kant and the development of Naturphilosophie, with a focus on organ- isms, in her, “Organism and System in German Idealism” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, second edition, ed., Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 271–291. An innovative and meticulously detailed account of the natural sciences and Romanticism is Leif Weatherby’s, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ. German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). One of the best sources on the views of nature and life of the period is Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).