A Higher Language: Novalis on Communion with Animals

Abstract

Around 1800 Philipp Otto Runge fashioned with scissors and paper a dog gazing up at a full moon. Significantly, the dog holds his mouth closed, as if, were he to howl, we might think him a wolf in the wild. Instead he is a domesticated dog, to the point that he even communicates human value: like a true Romantic, he raises his eyes silently to the sky, his chest filled with a longing for transcendence. Art critic Robert Rosenblum has written that the silhouette portrays a strangely haunting opposition between terrestrial desire and skyborne inaccessibility (37). A decade before C. D. Friedrich's nocturnal back figures, Runge creates a dog transfixed by lunar light. This substitution of a dog for this archetypal Romantic pose is fascinating. How is it that the dog can be emblematic for human longing? Does it mean that animals share in mankind's intimations of a higher being or immortality? Or is the anthropomorphism more mundane, announcing the sentimentalization of the pet seen later in Victorian England? Here, the animal undoubtedly represents neither the human trait that Enlightenment thinkers conventionally denied it (i.e., reason), nor does the dog represent the feature that the nineteenth century frequently claimed humans and animals shared (i.e., a baser instinct). The dog is not an animal in a fairy tale waiting to be retransfigured into a human being and thereby saved from a beast's existence. Nor is he a talking animal who has stepped out of a fable to depict human frailties. Instead the dog possesses a kind of spirituality, a sense of awe. His transfixed gaze suggests a bond with a transcendent world; perhaps his chest breathes in oneness with nature. Even in the sparseness of the silhouette (or perhaps because of the evocative sublimity of its shorthand), Runge points to the mysterious interconnectedness of nature. all of nature is sacred and alive, a unity in which the dog participates. I should like to argue that this particular substitution of animal for human occurs not insignificantly in Romanticism, and that Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) was a major thinker in realigning the relationship between the two worlds. Of course, much scholarship has been devoted to nature, galvanism, and mineralogy in Novalis's writings.1 To be sure, there are fewer and less salient references to animals than to plants and stones in his work. But what passages exist are extraordinary for their contradiction of the Enlightenment delineation of the boundaries between man and animal. If much Enlightenment thought set out to define the essence of man, then his uniqueness was often purported at the expense of nonhuman creatures. Even in writers such as Condillac and Reimarus who elaborated on the similarities between beast and man, man always crowned the continuity and development from one species to the next. Novalis, by contrast, conceives of an almost instantaneous, imaginative transformation of man into an animal, plant, or stone. At one stroke, he casts aside the hierarchy that governed the eighteenth-century belief in the Great Chain of Being. The metamorphosis itself signifies a state of higher consciousness that transcends the human. Even more audaciously, Hardenberg asks whether God, since he could become man, could not also become a stone, plant, animal, or element, thereby instating eine fortwahrende Erlosung in der Natur (2:826). In short, instead of the animal being the abject Other of Enlightenment thought, it becomes the of Novalis's radical pre-Rimbaudian statement: Ich bin Du (2:332). The question then arises as to what permits this shift in intellectual history, one that involves philosophy, theology, and science. Could one perhaps search for an answer in central Romantic tenets, even if they appear at first glance to be far removed from the question of what distinguishes man from beast? In other words, do the Romantic theories on the fragment, organicity, chaos, pre-reflexive being, and poesis pertain or even contribute to this striking shift? …