Early German Romanticism Research Articles

The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765–1885 (review)

Robert Cowan, The Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 225 pp. Robert Cowan's book is welcome addition to the growing secondary literature on the influence of Indian thought and culture on Germany. Building on the works of such scholars as Dorothy Figueira, The Identification joins other recent works such as Nicholas A. Germana's The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity (2009) in reassessing this cultural influence. Although certain sections of Cowan's book are not entirely convincing, there is, overall, much to recommend. Cowan begins by offering an overview of India in the European imagination, from the ancient Greeks through the mid eighteenth century. This is useful summary for those new to the topic, showing how views of India often oscillated between two contrasting images: as site of ancient wisdom, and as land of incomprehensibility. In the next two chapters, Cowan sketches the beginnings of European Indology, showing how increased European interest in Sanskrit made possible the Indian influence on German thought that Cowan traces in his later chapters. This influence would not be possible without the pioneering work of both French and English scholars, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and William Jones among them. Cowan then turns to the case of Johann Gottfried Herder, whom he calls our first true Indo-German (51). Herder's belief that the human race originated in the Himalayas, view shared by Kant, would remain influential in thought for over century (53). After Herder, a true Indo-mania would develop in early German romanticism (57). Novalis is one of these Fruhromantiker influenced by Indian thought. Cowan reads the Hymnen an die Nacht as containing many parallels to the fifth-century drama of Shakuntala, building on work by Romila Thapar and A. Leslie Willson. Cowan cites Walter Leifer in stating that Sophie von Kuhn, Novalis's fiancee, was known as 'Shakuntala' in the Hardenberg household (81-82). Cowan then analyzes the philosophy of F. W J. Schelling, arguing that the latter's reading of the Gitagovinda influenced his earlier work. There is, however, only single reference to the Gitagovinda in Schelling's oeuvre, which Cowan quotes (102-3). Cowan sees the equanimity of the Sanskrit poem as influencing Schelling's Indifferenzpunk f (91). At the end of the discussion on Schelling, Cowan notes how Schelling's beliefs later moved toward Lutheran orthodoxy (103). …

Reason and receptivity in critical theory

Nikolas Kompridis' Critique and Disclosure is a sustained argument for the proposition that critical social theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School is best carried forward by rejecting central aspects of Habermas' neo-Kantian version of it. The most promising future direction for critical theory according to Kompridis involves a reconsideration of the resources of hermeneutic phenomenology, especially renewed attention to the Heideggerian concept ‘disclosure’. To this end, Kompridis develops a distinctive dialectical version of this concept. I agree that Kantian versions of critical theory are philosophically suspect, and that critical theory is most conceptually vital and politically trenchant when turned away from ‘discourse ethics' and the like. I am a bit less sanguine than is Kompridis with a turn to Heidegger, however, and raise several issues having to do with that aspect of Kompridis' account. This caution is not rooted simply in the historical fact that critical theory from its inception has attempted to immunize itself against phenomenology; it is rather a conceptual matter. In my judgment, Kompridis does not need to develop, as he does, an intricate account of overlap between what he holds best about critical theory and Heidegger’s ontology. If one were looking for historical antecedents that do not come freighted with what Horkheimer derided as ‘irrationalism’, one would do better to investigate early German Romanticism, in which there is an explicitly interpretive yet dialectical methodology on offer. Moreover, the central doctrines of Jena Romanticism exhibit more positive points of contact with the earlier, more skeptical forms of critical theory that Kompridis might favor, e.g. Adorno’s.

The Romantic Absolute

In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of it that motivates our striving. I then examine two different Romantic accounts of this feeling. The first, given by Novalis, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to the absolute which logically precedes any conceptualisation. I argue that this account is problematic and that a second account, offered by Friedrich Schlegel, is preferable. On this account, we feel the absolute in that we intuit it aesthetically in certain natural phenomena. This form of intuition is partly cognitive and partly non-cognitive, and therefore it motivates us to strive to convert our intuition into full knowledge.

Emphasising the Positive: The Critical Role of Schlegel's Aesthetics

In its relationship with that which might be considered to exist beyond the perceived limits of philosophical discourse—for the sake of brevity let us call it the Absolute—Early German Romanticism tends to be presented either as mystically positivistic and therefore wholly unphilosophical, or as philosophically informed and committed to a sort of critical antifoundationalism that offers, at best, a negative non-relation to the Absolute. Naturally enough, these two opposing positions give rise to opposing reconstructions of Romantic aesthetics. Whilst broadly in agreement with the latter interpretation, this article argues, in relation to Friedrich Schlegel, that in the rush to establish the philosophical credentials of Frühromantik, some of its complexity has been jettisoned and along with it a more accurate understanding of the guiding spirit of Romantic aesthetics. Drawing on Fichte and Walter Benjamin, it will be argued that Schlegel's notion of the Wechselerweis is intended to bridge the ideal and the real in a positive experience of negation and that his much-vaunted aesthetics amounts to an attempt to develop a philosophico-literary form that would be able to express or, rather, perform precisely this.

Searching for Modern Culture's Beautiful Harmony: Schlegel and Hegel on Irony

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller stand together immortalised in Ernst Rietschel's statue at the centre of Weimar. In their lifetime, Goethe and Schiller shaped the culture of German-speaking lands, not only through their poetry, plays, and novels, but also in their role as editors of journals that helped to set the intellectual tone of the period. Schiller's journal Die Horen (1795-1797) and Goethe's Propyläen (1798-1800), although short-lived, were important literary vehicles of the period and provided a forum that brought scientists, historians, philosophers, and poets into conversation with one another. The late 1700s and early 1800s were years of intense intellectual development in Germanspeaking lands; the arts flourished and aesthetics developed as a serious branch of philosophy.During the ‘Age of Goethe and Schiller’, philosophy was dominated by Kant's philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. A problem with traditional philosophical histories of this period is the overwhelmingly Hegelian reading of it, a reading that subsumes all of the so-called minor figures under the shadows of the great system builder, Hegel. Richard Kroner's influential Von Kant bis Hegel of 1921 set the tone for this reading. Silenced by such narratives are the voices of the early German Romantics, a group of thinkers whose impudence created problems for them, and whose work posed hermeneutical challenges that continue to plague a proper understanding of the movement and the worth of its contributions. As we shall see, Hegel himself began to prepare the ground for a history of philosophy that would dismiss the contributions of the early German Romantics, a dismissal that is unfair and unfortunate: unfair because it is based on false characterisations of the movement, and unfortunate because such misreadings lead us to overlook the wealth of insights offered by the early German Romantics.

Review of The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, by Manfred Frank, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert

Review of The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, by Manfred Frank, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert

Kant and the Power of Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Kant and the Power of Imagination Daniel Guevara Jane Kneller. Kant and the Power of Imagination. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 172. Cloth, $91.00. Kant and the Power of the Imagination discusses some neglected literature from the early German Romantic period—one major text that Kneller discusses was not published (except partially in 1901) until the manuscript, lost for decades, resurfaced at an auction in New York in the 1960s. Kneller argues that this unduly neglected literature makes a productive and illuminating contribution to Kant’s program in the three Critiques. More particularly, she argues that it contributes to our understanding of the true philosophical potential of the role of the imagination in Kant’s theory, especially as he works the theory out in the third Critique. She makes her case in a slim volume, so she is necessarily selective. Her argument that Kant is closer to the early German Romantics (especially the extraordinary poet/philosopher Novalis) than is generally thought leans heavily, for example, on certain passages from the third Critique. On her interpretation, the first and second Critiques tend to give the imagination a second-class role (or worse) as a mental power. But there are crucial passages in the third Critique that seem to elevate the role of the imagination, by, for example, giving it the special power of exhibiting concretely certain ideals of pure reason. Thus one of the main results of Kneller’s reading, for Kant’s critical program, is that the imagination can provide a kind of intuitive content for the otherwise empty and problematic ideals of pure reason, such as that of the highest good in Kant’s practical philosophy. The content that the imagination can provide here is a feeling that the highest good is possible. The imagination contributes this felt content through judgments of beauty and sublimity: both types of judgment involve a feeling that indicates a kind of transcendence and purpose in otherwise purposeless and immanent nature, and thus a basis for our meaningfully striving to bring about the highest good in this world. This, the author argues, is an improvement on Kant’s official view that a kind of faith in God and immortality is needed in order for us to be motivated to strive for the highest good by the otherwise empty postulates of pure practical reason. It also bridges the chasm between feeling and reason commonly thought to exist in Kant’s philosophy of cognition, and serves likewise as a bridge to the Romantic emphasis on feeling in cognition. The literature selected for discussion from the early German Romantics is very interesting and suggestive, and made this reader want to see more. And Kneller’s book itself, in its interpretation of certain key passages from the third Critique, and of the selections from the Romantics, is interesting and suggestive, too. But the book tries to cover too much: among other things, it tries to cover (i) the view of the imagination in the three Critiques, (ii) the texts from the early Romantics struggling with and responding to the implications (as they saw them) of Kant’s Critiques, (iii) the relationship of these early responses to Fichte, and (iv) a wide range of other issues, including poetry’s relationship to philosophy. Kneller’s writing is clear and elegant and makes one wish, therefore, that she had concentrated her abilities on just one of the many topics she addresses. This would have allowed opportunity for greater attention to more or less purely philosophical issues, and for a more sympathetic treatment of the work of, e.g., Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard. She opposes their view that theoretical reason is somehow subordinate to practical reason: [End Page 629] dependent upon the moral law as a law of autonomy. Kneller must oppose this view because she takes the third Critique to imply that there is no account of the unity of theoretical and practical reason. There is only, instead, a mediated connection in the exercise of the power of judgment, through its free play of the imagination and associated feelings. O’Neill and Korsgaard have produced “powerful and influential” theories, as Kneller herself...

"Theismus des Gefühls": Heydenreich, Fichte, and the Transcendental Philosophy of Religion

Belief in God is a living and animating principle within human beings, and it springs from life itself, not from dead concepts.(Concluding Remark by the Editor, 1/6, 411; IW, 179).1The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, which erupted publicly in 1785, impacted the development of German philosophy in the subsequent decades in almost incalculable respects. To name just two of these, the rise of German Idealism and of early German Romanticism are both inconceivable apart from the flowering of Spinozism occasioned by the earlier controversy. As Frederick C. Beiser has convincingly shown, nothing less than the authority of reason itself was at stake in the so-called Pantheismusstreit.2 Still, it is important to keep in mind that the heart of the issue was the authority of reawn vie-I-vie religioue belief. The debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, on which virtually every major figure of the penod had something to say, was fundamentally a debate about religion. It brought to a head a long-standing tension in eighteenth-century thought, particularly in Germany, between the partisans of rationalist metaphysics and those (most famously in Germany, J.G. Hamann) who took religion to be fundamentally a matter of pre- or sub-rational sentiment [Emp findung]. This tension is articulated most clearly in K. L. Reinhold's intervention into the dispute, the Briefe uber die Kantische Philosophie.~ Reinhold's work presents the issue in terms of the relationship between rational reflection, on the one hand, and common sense natural faith, on the other. In this epochal work, Reinhold attempted to bring Kant's new critical perspective to bear on the larger issue of the relationship between philosophical reflection and religious belief.Reinhold's work in turn stimulated others to take up the torch of Kantianism and to address the religious questions of the era from that point of view. In particular, the little known Leipzig philosopher K. H. Heydenreich (1764-1801) and the better known pioneer of idealism, J. G. Fichte (17641814), each attempted to develop a new philosophical synthesis that responded to the Pantheismusstreit in the spirit of Kant's phiosophy.~ Heydenreich, though virtually ignored by contemporary scholars, played a key role in shaping the larger intellectual context in which post-Kantian philosophers, including Fichte, worked out their views. The present essay has three interlocking goals: (1) to rehabilitate Heydenreich as an important figure in his own right and as an important player in the development of the philosophy of religion in Germany in the 1790s; (2) to explore the hitherto overlooked role that Heydenreich played as a stimulus to Fichte's intellectual development during the crucial Jena phase (1794-1800) of his career; and (3) to utilize Heydenreich's views to bring out some of the distinctive aspects of Fichte's position during this period.Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801) was an important figure in the tumultuous German philosophical scene in the 1790s, and yet he has been all but forgotten.5 His System der Asthetik (1790) was the first serious philosophical response to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In two works from the 1780s, Uber Mendelssohns Darstellung des Spinozismus (1787) and Natur und Gott nach Spinoza (1789), he addressed directly the intellectual watershed of his age, the so-called Pantheismusstreit described above. His attempt at a fair-minded presentation of Spinoza's philosophy was widely noted, and it earned him an appointment in philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Heydenreich's work exercised a profound influence on the reception of Spinoza by the young Romantic generation, with Schleiermacher (ca. 1793-94) and Holderlin (ca. 1795) being particular beneficiaries.6As it did for Fichte, the publication of Reinhold's Briefe and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason led to a profound shift in Heydenreich's position.7 His ardent partisanship for Spinoza cooled somewhat, and he took up the project of developing a thoroughly Kantian philosophy of religion. …

Friedrich Schlegel and the Character of Romantic Ethics

Recent years have witnessed a rehabilitation of early German Romanticism in philosophy, including a renewed interest in Romantic ethics. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) is acknowledged as a key figure in this movement. While significant work has been done on some aspects of his thought, his views on ethics have been surprisingly overlooked. This essay aims to redress this shortcoming in the literature by examining the core themes of Schlegel’s ethics during the early phase of his career (1793–1801). I argue that Schlegel’s position stands out against both the dominant Kantianism of his era, as well as against some of fellow Romantics. I show how Schlegel anticipates contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell in both his criticisms of traditional moral theory and in his attempts to develop a positive position.

What is Wrong with National Literature Departments?

This article asks what is wrong with national literature departments. Traditional literature departments, even with various politically conscious additions – women writers, authors of colour, postcolonial conditions, linguistic minorities, queer theory – assume by their very structure a romantic notion of the nation state, of borders and of linguistics as a major aspect of national identity and canonicity. The article considers the early German Romantics to see how they understood the twinning of nation and culture, and how this is baggage that Western universities still carry, even as they try to open themselves to other cultures. ‘Frühromantiker’ such as Friedrich Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, Novalis and Fichte (along with Chateaubriand) idealize the Middle Ages as a time of great unity in Europe, and understand nationhood to have a divine aspect. Recently, the idea of the university and of national literature departments is being fundamentally rethought. Said, Bernheimer, Moebius, Reading, Foucault, Spivak, Bauman – to name just a few – have all worried about the place of literature in the light of globalisation, the dominance of Europe in literature departments, and the place of minority discourses. The article suggests that Comparative Literature may be the hope for the future in literary studies, because it is a field that by definition combines linguistic, cultural and political perspectives in its approach to texts. At the same time, however, comparative literature has traditionally been dominated by Eurocentrism, which has been the source of much criticism. Should the dominant languages of Europe be set aside to make room for the less known, less powerful ones? The article sees the European project of community as a source of hope, analogous to comparative literature, in facing both the challenge and cultural wealth of diversity.

The Unity of Physics and Poetry: H. C. Ørsted and the Aesthetics of Force

This article briefly outlines Ørsted's early aesthetic thought by placing it in the context of his affiliations with early German romanticism, and by examining the poetics and philosophy of language contained in a prize-winning essay on aesthetics that he wrote in 1796. Further, this article presents an example of how aesthetic and linguistic strategies in his writing helped shape the meaning of the theoretical terms utilized in his early scientific work. Toward this end, the focus of the article will be limited to a central passage from the first installment of his Kemiske Breve (Chemical Letters), which he published in 1798 at the age of twenty-one.

‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism

This article argues in favor of the idea that works of art in Early German Romanticism, as conceived of by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, were conceptually considered as an integrated whole, consisting of very different and diverging elements that determine each other in a dynamic process. In this respect, the aesthetic views of this literary movement can be related to some basic postulations about dynamic systems, chaos, order, and emergence. The assumptions of system theory as well as of chaos theory can lead to their application to postmodern works of art that can be described by the categories of nonlinearity, self-reflectivity, irreversibility, and self-organization. Moreover, it can be supposed that these categories apply also to Romantic works of art. The article demonstrates it through the analysis of some late narrative texts of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who could be considered a very modern or an avant la lettre postmodern author.

The Beautiful Soul, the Sociopath, and Fichte’s Ethics

The figure of the beautiful soul (die schone Seele) is a theme that runs through the Uterature and the philosophy of the period both before and after Fichte's System der Sittlichkeit. It also feeds into and feeds out of that work. The notion of the beautiful soul has its roots in German pietism.1 In the young Hegel, it is found in the Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. There the beautiful soul is Jesus, who unites duty and inclination in love. In Schilier, it is not merely characterized by ethical feeUng but is a matter of the whole person, the mature fruit of true humanity in a joining of natural and ethical existence. For him it becomes moral action as second nature. In Goethe, on the other hand, the beautiful soul is more contemplation than action. Among the early German Romantics it runs the gamut between a certain innocent naivete (Fr. Schlegel) and a longing nostalgia that verges upon madness (NovaUs). In the later Hegel of the Phenomenology, with its vigorous criticism of Romanticism, the beautiful soul has an essentially moral sense, along with certain reUgious and aesthetic overtones. Although Hegel disapproves of the notion, it remains an integral part of the dialectic. Hegel sees the beautiful soul as a consequence of Kant's (and Fichte's) moral rigorism, and as following upon the categorical imperative.2 His basic criticism of the beautiful soul is that it cannot face reality; it does not want to get its moral hands dirty. With the beautiful soul aesthetics and moraUty one, and so (contrary to Kant) duty and inclination, nature, and freedom. One merely follows the inspiration of one's heart and the delicacy of one's feelings. As Hegel says, the difference between an abstract God and self-consciousness, previously hidden, disappears, and the self experiences the immediacy of God's presence in its mind and heart, in itself.3 However, it lacks the power to externalize itself, fearing to besmirch the splendor of its inner being by action, fleeing contact with the actual world, persisting in a state of self-willed impotence (eigensinnigen Kraftslosigkeit).* The beautiful soul ends up with a contradiction between its pure self and the necessity to act, and, unable to resolve the conflict, becomes disordered to the point of madness, wastes away in yearning, and pines away in consumption5 - a thoroughly nasty allusion to the Romantic poet NovaUs. There two places in Fichte's System of Ethics where the theme of the beautiful soul makes an appearance. One is the context of his sermonette on the publican and the Pharisee. Fichte speaks of the way in which some manage to raise themselves by their freedom above die laws of nature. They have a genius for virtue, which is a combination of sensitivity and autonomy.6 Such persons can have a good will and want to be magnanimous and considerate but wiU hear nothing of duty, obUgation, and law or justice, nor they respectful of other's rights. Their conduct is not reflected upon in accordance with a rule. There may be genuine renunciations involved, but also a growth of self-esteem - how good and noble we are (178). Such persons act in accordance with a blind drive without reflecting upon their actions beforehand. While not acting with freedom and self-awareness, once the action has occurred they find the rule according to which they might have acted: a given innate good. A certain joy is the result, since they find themselves considerably better than they were strictly obUged to be, performing acts above and beyond the call of duty (opera supererogativa, 179). This results in a certain self-conceit based upon the sacrifices the person has made, and evokes the admiration of others. One is a hero. Of course, for Fichte all this is worthless, since it does not proceed from morality (181). One may, indeed, fault Fichte's reading of the parable. He insists that the works performed by the Pharisee do not proceed from morality; though they most certainly in accord witii the law, even, as he admits, over and above the law. …

»Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch«

Umulige fiktioner i den romantiske roman »Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch«. Impossible Fictions in the Romantic NovelIn the Romantic period, the novel is regarded as a literary form that, by poetological necessity, makes experiments by means of literary representation possible. Seen in an European perspective this is almost solely a matter of early German Romanticism, Frühromantik, where Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis by formulating the novel as a specific, modern genre, try to state a new, revolutionary aesthetics. The article thus points at three characteristic features of the novel’s poetics within this context: 1) the novel contains a double poetics of formal heterogeneity and spiritual homogeneity; 2) the novel gets its value through its inherent epistemology of world views; 3) the novel of early German Romanticism understands itself in a productive split of an utopian vision that never can be fulfilled and an auto-reflexivity exactly because of the knowledge of permanent unfulfillment. Further,the article argues, an aesthetics of impossible fictions evolves as the potential and heritage of this kind of poetics. In the last part of the article, a novel of the Swedish (post-)Romantic author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866), Drottningens juvelsmycke (The Queen’s Tiara, 1834), is read as way of representing, through the constitution of the main character, Tintomara, a principle of the absolute that displays the borders of novelistic representation.

Book Review: The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism

Book Review: The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism

Wall's Tableau Mort

For how many contemporary artists besides Jeff Wall would a conference of papers dedicated to the analysis of individual works be so appropriate, perhaps even required? For who else would this approach fit, and so snugly, as the basis for a special issue of an art journal, let alone an academic one? Wall's practice is in many respects distinguished – one might well say isolated – by the production of a certain individuation or integration of the artwork, which encourages, often spectacularly, the kind of sustained if not altogether academic attention of this approach. Wall's art is an art of the single image, the picture or tableau. This is as much an anachronism as it is an achievement of his modernism. Wall's work is strikingly distinct from contemporary art-photography's preoccupation with the series, whether in the narrative forms practised by Allan Sekula derived from the photo-essay or book, or the non-narrative and more aggregative or archival forms of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students, such as Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. Andreas Gursky is an interesting exception among the latter, but the unity of his images is derived from the overallness of its subject matter, usually itself serial in nature, which is strictly subordinated to its decorative properties in generating a surface unity. This subordination of subject matter to its decorative coherence tends to make Gursky's pictures more stylised and comparable than, say, Wall's. The serial forms of contemporary art-photography register certain conditions of photographic modernism, despite frequent suggestions that this work is simply a technologically enhanced recovery of pictorialism. Photography's mass reproducibility is less determining here – especially insofar as this is repressed in art-photography's limited editions – than the fragmented kind of picture it produces as a result of its mechanized composition: its quality of being a snapshot rather than a tableau, which then requires montage as both the supplementation and the emphasis of its fragmentariness. The intensively composed, encompassingly scaled, images of much contemporary art-photography resist this, but its serial forms reveals a residual circumscription by this transformation of the idea of the picture. Once the picture is treated as a fragment, unity is sought in some ensemble of picture-units, and the task of composition essentially exceeds the individual image. Seriality is a peculiarly photographic form of unity in its endlessness or incompleteablity. It registers the extent to which a whole cannot be assembled out of fragments. An alternative form of the fragment would be the early German Romantic's apparently paradoxical idea of it as the finite presentation of unity, wholeness, indeed, absoluteness. This is a plural form – Friedrich Schlegel wrote ‘fragments’ – but it is not serial.1 These tensions of fragmentation, unity and seriality might well be considered decisive to the forms of contemporary art-photography.

Beauty as an Encounter between Freedom and Nature

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant's Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductions to the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant's aesthetic investigation,which understand Kant's judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature.

Foucault’s Alleged Irrationalism

Commentators often construe Foucault as an anti-Enlightenment thinker; much of this criticism assumes that Foucault inherits early German Romanticism in some sense. This essay examines these claims by assessing the role the German Romantics play in Foucault's work, both early and late. After a brief consideration of the meaning of the term Romanticism, the essay examines the role that language and literature plays in Foucault early texts before examining the place of self-formation or Bildung in his later work. I conclude that examining the relationship between Foucault and the German Romantics can help us better understand Foucault's texts and thereby avoid what Foucault terms the blackmail of the Enlightenment, the idea that one must be either for or against Enlightenment ideals rather than critically interrogating them.

Comprehending Romantic Incomprehensibility. A Systems- Theoretical Perspective on Early German Romanticism

Comprehending Romantic Incomprehensibility. A Systems- Theoretical Perspective on Early German Romanticism

The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism

The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism