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.