Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature by William S. Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature by William S. Davis Christopher R. Clason William S. Davis. Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 156 pp. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European philosophical trajectories were dramatically shifted by the epistemologies of Kant and Fichte. Furthermore, these epistemologies placed the very objects that human subjects experience in a gravely problematic relationship, where it seemed that the essential object could not be known directly, or it would have to be subsumed into a subjectivism that many found difficult to swallow—especially (and most tragically) Kleist, but others as well. Davis's book offers an engagingly readable account of how several of the main figures of literature and philosophy confronted the problem head-on, beginning with the early friendship of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel, progressing through Goethe to the British Romantics Shelley and Byron, and then returning to Hölderlin, all with an eye on how the contemporary world of letters and philosophy valued the ancient Greeks, and how their reception of classical thought aided them in coming to terms with the contemporary abstract view of the aesthetic object in the physical world. In the "Introduction," Davis presents a basic problem endemic to Romantic philosophy, especially the "Ich-Philosophie" of Fichte and his followers. Quoting Frederick Beiser regarding a key issue concerning subjectivity, he illustrates how among the early Romantics there arose a fear that a perceiving subject has no knowledge "beyond its own circle of consciousness." As one possible way through the subjectivity conundrum, several early Romantic philosophers (e.g., Hölderlin, Goethe, Percy Shelley, and Schelling) attempt to find a discursive strategy, by employing literary metaphors of "a restorative unity that lies beyond the subject." Davis suggests that for these writers the solution does not rest in a philosophical-epistemological paradigm, but rather in an artistic one, in an act of the aesthetic imagination, informed by the philosophy of nature and Romantic Hellenism, both of which are inextricably connected. He seizes on an aspect of philosophy according to Schelling, that natural objects are not merely dead things, but are "living potentialities," and "vibrant objects." In the first chapter, Davis presents a scene in which Hyperion, the hero of Hölderlin's eponymous novel, stands atop the Acrocorinth and ponders how division constitutes human self-consciousness, while he contemplates (in a distracted state of mind, which Hyperion describes as being "lost in the wide blue") how one might achieve a merging of the self with the all. Davis then explores what Hölderlin meant by "intellectual intuition" in reclaiming the original unity (the elusive "one with all") that he and a host of other Romantics sought; instrumental in forming this idea was his participation in a secret philosophical club formed by the three fellow students at the Tübinger Stift (with Schelling and Hegel), whose Greek motto "Hen Kai Pan" (one and everything) gave direction to their early thought. Next, Davis guides us through aspects of Schelling's Naturphilosophie and its connections with Goethe's own neoclassical aesthetics, set against the background of the personal and intellectual relationship between the two. Most importantly, Davis highlights the catalytic function each served for the other's thinking regarding the Weltseele (world-soul), which, they believed, inhabits and animates the entire cosmos. In the fourth chapter, which focuses on aesthetic and erotic intuition, Davis shifts to more material concerns. Here he elaborates the literary response to Schelling's realization that the return to wholeness and oneness cannot merely be an intellectual exercise, but must be concretized in order to be truly [End Page 358] successful. The aesthetic object must become substantial and physical, which can only be accomplished through art imbued with elements of the erotic, amounting to a return to the Hellenistic ideal of the lost classical age. As a summary of this process, Davis compares Hölderlin's Hyperion with a scene from Percy Shelley's Epipsychidion, against the backdrop of the space delimited in the two works: Greek islands on which one experiences a conjoining of "poetry, nature philosophy, aesthetics, and sex," a conversion of intellectual intuition into aesthetic-erotic intuition. He maintains that...