Emphasising the Positive: The Critical Role of Schlegel's Aesthetics

Abstract

In its relationship with that which might be considered to exist beyond the perceived limits of philosophical discourse—for the sake of brevity let us call it the Absolute—Early German Romanticism tends to be presented either as mystically positivistic and therefore wholly unphilosophical, or as philosophically informed and committed to a sort of critical antifoundationalism that offers, at best, a negative non-relation to the Absolute. Naturally enough, these two opposing positions give rise to opposing reconstructions of Romantic aesthetics. Whilst broadly in agreement with the latter interpretation, this article argues, in relation to Friedrich Schlegel, that in the rush to establish the philosophical credentials of Frühromantik, some of its complexity has been jettisoned and along with it a more accurate understanding of the guiding spirit of Romantic aesthetics. Drawing on Fichte and Walter Benjamin, it will be argued that Schlegel's notion of the Wechselerweis is intended to bridge the ideal and the real in a positive experience of negation and that his much-vaunted aesthetics amounts to an attempt to develop a philosophico-literary form that would be able to express or, rather, perform precisely this.

Notes

Notes

1. See, in particular, Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

2. “If ontological realism can be expressed by the thesis that reality exists independently of our consciousness (even if we suppose thought to play a role in structuring reality) and if epistemological realism consists in the thesis that we do not possess adequate knowledge of reality, then early German Romanticism can be called a version of ontological and epistemological realism.” Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán Zaibert (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 28.

3. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 74.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 59.

6. Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 68.

7. Elizabeth Millán Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 39. Beiser clearly ignores the fact that Kant himself remained torn between a constructivist theory of truth and correspondence or representationalist theories of truth. Kant's constructivism, as well as his lingering, conflicting commitment to representationalism, is illuminatingly discussed by Tom Rockmore in Kant and Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). From this perspective, it might be argued that Frank's interpretation of Romanticism grows out of the implicit belief that the Romantics simply play out this tension, convinced of being trapped within their own projections and yet unable to give up the desire for transparent access to whatever it is that those projections obscure.

8. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 161. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text.

9. See, in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 2000), 384–90.

10. Schlegel writes: “In the Wissenschaftslehre, the method must also be critical; but that is what Fichte is not.” Quoted in Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 180.

11. “Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle.” J. G. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit and Co., 1845–1846), 1.91.

12. Quoted in Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 180.

13. Fichte, sämmtliche Werke, 1.225.

14. Ibid., 1.208.

15. Ibid., 1.216–17.

16. For Fichte's most clear statements in this regard, see sämmtliche Werke, 1.215–17.

17. We know from a letter that Hölderlin wrote to Hegel that Fichte's notion of reciprocal determination (Wechselbestimmung) caused quite a stir (see Friedrich Hölderlin, “Letter to Hegel, 26 January 1795,” trans. Stefan Bird-Pollan, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 190). It is likely that Schlegel was similarly influenced.

18. Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 189.

19. Frank writes: “One could think of another, much closer source of Schlegel's talk of Wechselerweis: Fichte's use of Wechselbestimmung (alternating or reciprocal determination) at the beginning of the theoretical part of his Wissenschaftslehre … but it is clear, that the recollection of the definite use of the concept in Novalis or Fichte's thought, does not fully explain Schlegel's fundamental use of the term ‘Wechselerweis’” (Ibid., 193).

20. Frank writes: “That the highest principle of philosophy can only be a Wechselerweis should simply mean here, that a concept or a proposition can never alone per se, that is to say from Cartesian evidence, be established; rather, it is established first through a further and second (provisional) concept or proposition (for which the same holds, so that through a coherence formation of truth we come ever closer to the truth without ever grasping it in one single thought)” (Ibid., 203).

21. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 2. See also 4 and 192, note 8.

22. Schlegel's most illuminating statements about “romantic poetry” can be found in Athenaeum Fragment 116 (175–76). For a discussion of the words “romantic” and “romanticism,” see Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 24–33.

23. Schlegel reiterates this imperative numerous times. For instance, in Fragment 115 of Critical Fragments he writes: “poetry and philosophy should be made one,” and in Fragment 48 of Ideas, he writes: “Where philosophy ends, poetry must begin” (translation modified) (157, 245).

24. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 74.

25. Ibid., 75. For the supposed real-life identities of all the characters of the Dialogue on Poetry, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 89.

26. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, and Ian Balfour, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 175–77.

27. Ibid., 143.

28. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 83.

29. Ibid., 84.

30. Andrew Bowie emphasises the importance of the relationship between creation and destruction for philosophy of this period and, following Frank, partly attributes it to a contemporary interest in the figure of Dionysus. See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 66–67.

31. Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 151.

32. Ibid., 152.

33. Ibid., 153.

34. Rodolphe Gasché, “The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics,” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2002), 60.

35. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 92.

36. For a discussion of the centrality of the fragment to Jena Romanticism, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, and Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 125–31.

37. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 53. One could read Ideas Fragment 26 as supporting this view: “Wit is the appearance, the outward lightning bolt of the imagination” (243). Similarly, in “Letter About the Novel” in Dialogue on Poetry, the suggestion is made that “of that which originally was imagination there remains in the world of appearances only what we call wit” (100). This view is also endorsed by Frank who refers to this aspect of Schlegelian wit as “clearly a Kantian reminiscence” (The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 209).

38. Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 209.

39. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 90.

40. Schlegel, quoted by Andrew Bowie in From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 68.

41. For an insightful discussion of allegory and symbol in relation to early German Romanticism, see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (London: Routledge, 1989).

42. The word “allegory” derives from the Greek allēgoriā: allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak).

43. Frank, for instance, suggests that “irony is the searched for structure of the whole whose abstract parts are wit and allegory…. Irony is the synthesis of wit and allegory” (The Philosophical Foundation of Early German Romanticism, 216).

44. Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82.

45. Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, 146. Behler goes on to remark: “Friedrich Schlegel was, of course, aware of the rhetorical tradition in which irony was transmitted and had found its habitual place in Europe. But this rhetorical irony, bound to individual instances, to particular figures, appeared to him minor and insignificant compared to the philosophical homeland of irony where it could manifest itself ‘throughout’” (147).

46. Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, 82. Hammermeister is emphatic: “Philosophy can describe irony, but it is art that must practise it” (84).

47. Ibid., 83. Bowie makes a similar point contrasting Romantic irony with rhetorical irony: “The Romantics’ wariness of determinate propositions is also what leads them to their particular conception of irony. Normally irony is the determinate negation of what is asserted in a proposition: ‘That was good’, said ironically, means it wasn’t. Romantic irony, on the other hand, requires the negation of the assertion, but not in favour of a determinate contrary assertion” (From Romanticism to Critical Theory, 69).

48. Charles Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156.

49. Similarly, in Athenaeum Fragment 121, Schlegel writes: “An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts” (176).

50. With regard to Romantic irony's connection to other forms of irony, Schlegel's essay “On Incomprehensibility” is of particular importance. Here Schlegel masterfully combines rhetorical irony, quasi-Socratic irony and an attempt at Romantic irony in a dizzying piece of work which both constatively and performatively explores irony (in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, 297–307).

51. Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” 164.

52. Ibid., 165.

53. Ibid., 163.

54. Ibid., 164–65. There are undeniable parallels here with Beiser's rather less nuanced account of Romanticism's debt to Platonism, the exact nature of which are beyond the scope of this essay. See Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 59–70.

55. Ibid., 165. At approximately the same time as Benjamin, Georg Lukács was also explicitly making a connection between irony and objectivity. He suggests that “irony is the objectivity of the novel” and, famously, writes: “Irony, the self-surmounting of a subjectivity that has gone as far as it was possible to go, is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God.” Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 90, 93.

56. “In order to become comprehensible, that which is pure must limit itself; any border contradicts the essential infinity of that which is pure, however; therefore it must always overstep the limits which it sets to itself, and then limit itself again, and then overstep these limits, and so on and on” (Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, 215–16).

57. Millán Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy, 19.

58. Lukács said of Jena Romanticism: “It was a dance on a glowing volcano, it was a radiantly improbable dream.” Georg Lukács, “On the Romantic Philosophy of Life,” in Soul and Form (London: Merlin Press, 1974), 42.

59. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 42.

60. Maurice Blanchot, “Athenaeum,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 359.

61. Ibid., 359.

62. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 64–69.