The Question of a Science: Encyclopedistic Romanticism

Abstract

allows itself to be represented by another science (Novalis 3:246, #49). (1) With this remark from the collection of fragmentary notes that were to form the basis of an encyclopedic project, Novalis indicates that the knowledge of a particular cannot be represented by that same science. Instead, it can only be truly given expression by yet another science. Thus, any definition of what a is, never mind itself, is always displaced from its proper domain. According to what Novalis says, then, a such as chemistry would have the ability to represent biology but would not be able to represent itself. This example could, however, be misleading. Since chemistry and biology are both hard sciences, what Novalis means can easily be reduced to saying that one conveys the scientific character of the other. But such an understanding does not represent another science; rather, it represents any that can be described as hard. Novalis's understanding of is not so restricted. In fact, Novalis develops his thinking on the nature of in such a way that the place of Romanticism in relation to the Enlightenment may well have to be rethought--not as rejection of the Enlightenment but as its radicalization. (2) To the extent that every is understood as a form of knowledge, what a is for Novalis cannot be restricted to what modernity has codified--according to Enlightenment principles--as the sciences. This inclusiveness becomes clear in another fragment to which Novalis gives the heading Encyclopedistic. In this fragment, Novalis refers to the doctrine of knowledge that every requires in order to establish itself as a in the following terms: is a philosophical, critical, mathematical, poetical, chemical, historical, doctrine of knowledge [Wissenschaftslehre] (Novalis, 3:321; #429). Here, under the rubric of encyclopedic thought, Novalis indicates the kind of understanding that permits one (and poetry is as much a here as chemistry) to represent another. When Novalis writes that the doctrine of knowledge is philosophical, critical, mathematical, etc., two things are stated. First, each or discipline (these terms are interchangeable here since they both describe a particular means of knowing) possesses a doctrine of knowledge that is specific to each. Second, knowledge is thought in terms of a central principle in which philosophy, criticism, math, poetry, chemistry, and history are all equally present. The two understandings of discipline and knowledge represented in this fragment are of course contradictory. A knowledge specifically philosophical or specifically chemical emphasizes its difference from another or discipline. The question Novalis's fragment poses concerns how this difference is related to an understanding that emphasizes just the opposite: that there is a doctrine of knowledge that is equally mathematical, poetical, etc., in other words, a doctrine equally present in each of the individual sciences. What then is such a doctrine? Clearly, it cannot be a doctrine in the traditional sense, a doctrine that governs each of the individual disciplines as if it were some kind of meta-knowledge. Yet, if it does not possess this sense, Novalis's use of this word still insists on some kind of identifiable content, on something that is recognizable as knowledge. Defining this content, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, proved to be the greatest difficulty faced by the Jena Romantics. This difficulty. Benjamin notes, can be discerned in the different and conflicting answers it received: the absolute, the idea, religion (Benjamin 1:138-141 and 156). In the context of Novalis's remarks on encyclopedism, overcoming this difficulty would seem to require the production of an encyclopedia if such an answer were not already understood by Novalis as hopelessly inadequate--at least in the form bequeathed to Romanticism by the Enlightenment (the Encyclopedia of D'Alembert and Diderot). …