Romantic Acosmism – On Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of an Unfinished World

Abstract

This article examines the often neglected ‘reversal side’ of early Romanticism, for which Friedrich Schlegel’s critical philosophy of the infinite, developed in his Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy of 1800/1801, is exemplary. Therein Schlegel aims to synthesize Spinoza’s philosophy of substance with Fichte’s subjective foundationalism. This synthesis finds its particular challenge in the consequences that follow from the cosmological antinomies of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Since the antinomies no longer allow adherence to the constitutive totality of the world, Schlegel is forced to take a radical step. His conception, however, does not aim at a uniform and harmonious universe, as is usually assumed. Because the modern, reflexive I must reject every positive order of being as inconsistent, Schlegel concludes, that the world itself has to be regarded as unfinished, or indeterminate which results in the idea of an unfinished deity. Contrary to common understandings, this article argues that Schlegel’s concept of “world” is based on an acosmism that also has a formative influence on his theoretical foundations of poetry and art. Romantic universal poetry it could be said, therefore, is not only a benign manifesto of poetics, but also a resolute response to the impossible union of the subject with the cosmos. The rejection of a positive order of being motivates Romanticism to its own acosmic poetics, which evokes a fundamentally new conception of poetry by reflecting this insight.