The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala Thomas L. Cooksey, emeritus Asko Nivala. The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History. New York: Routledge, 2017. viii + 273 pp. Friedrich Schlegel is commonly identified as a writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. Though much of his work focused on Greek and Latin classics, Schlegel thought of himself as a historian, engaged in what he characterized as Kulturgeschichte (though admittedly not in the modern sense of the term). Inspired by Hesiod and the book of Genesis, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of history followed a triadic pattern, positing a problematic present as a fallen or undesirable age, between an idyllic primitive Golden Age in the past, and the possibility of a utopian Golden Age in the future. Asko Nivala challenges the commonly held reading that Schlegel and the Romantics believed that a Golden Age had any basis in history. He further proposes to complicate the view that Romanticism be understood in terms of a nostalgic yearning for such a lost Golden Age. Rather it is a fluid trope that allowed Schlegel to critique the cultural present. Schlegel's "Romanticism" here refers to the historical period in German cultural history at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with the final stages of the Enlightenment. Its early proponents include the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel. This book focuses on Schlegel's early writings, literary fragments, and letters until his conservative turn and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Nivala, a cultural historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, teases out and drills down into Schlegel's complex and shifting treatment of the conception of a Golden Age, proposing to reconstruct his philosophy [End Page 333] of history. For Schlegel, the Golden Age is often deployed ironically. He rejected claims that it represented an age of greater authenticity, a position Nivala compares to Adorno's critique of fetishizing the genuine. Noting the complexity of Schlegel's conception of the Golden Age, Nivala suggests that he is ripe for various contemporary readings, including the postmodernist, the transhumanist, and the ecocriticial. Deploying a broadly chronological and biographical organization, Nivala first examines Schlegel's writings on classical poetry, arguing that he distinguishes between the myth of the Golden Age and primitivist myth, too often conflated in the critical literature. Primitivism is understood as the idea of a past epoch based on a rural way of life, closer to the rhythms of nature, a way of life more authentic than the modern, an "original" related to concepts resonating with Schiller's naive or Rousseau's "noble savage." In contrast, Schlegel sees the Golden Age in Hesiod or Genesis as an ancient trope or narrative pattern that challenged the notion of primitivism. He turns to the antiprimitivist myths of Prometheus and Orpheus, to explore a harmony between nature and technology. Schlegel also treats the myth of Atlantis as the embodiment of an anti–Golden Age. Rejecting the notion of a Golden Age as period of authentic harmony with nature, Schlegel instead posits an age of "blossoming" (Blütezeit), shifting from the mathematical metaphors of the Enlightenment to biological and chemical ones, to suggest a creative and organic relationship between the polis and the rural environment. For Schlegel, the culture of Athens—especially that expressed in Attic theater—exemplified an age of blossoming, while that of Alexandria, a culture of decline. The notion of a blossoming culture challenges the idea that humans represent something fixed and autonomous, opening the possibility of the transhuman. Nivala next explores Schlegel's studies of various cultural attempts to recreate a "national Golden Age," especially those of Augustus's Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Louis XIV's France. This in turn informs Schlegel's political thinking about the cultural prospects for the still fragmented German-speaking regions of Europe, and his sympathies for the Athenian model. Underlying this is what Nivala terms a Chiliastic reading of history, a millenarian and messianic vision of the Golden Age as the Kingdom of God. Responding to dramatic historical changes, especially in...