Von Hardenberg Research Articles

Between the Grand Tour and the sublime sea: Thomas Coke and William Kent at Holkham

Holkham is one of the best-known eighteenth-century English estates. Acknowledging Coke's and Kent's travels on the Grand Tour, previous studies have underestimated the significance of the estate's...

Night in Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel

THE ABSOLUTE NIGHT INVOKED BY THE GERMAN ROMANTIC FRIEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, might well have been more influential at turn of nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This image saturating his dithyrambic cycle Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to Night], published in 1800, continues to be read by some in terms of obscure private experiences despite twentieth-century work of Kate Hamburger, Martin Dyck, and others that show scientific connections. (1) This construal is especially popular in Enghsh-speaking world and has followed long tradition of interpreting Novalis that began with reviews of essayist Thomas Carlyle. In late 1820s, Carlyle had tied this poet not just to medieval German mystic Jakob Bohme but also to what he regarded as tenebrific constellation of Immanuel Kant and Kantists. (2) Common readers today tend to merge Novalis's night more with state of spiritual loneliness Christian mystic St. John of Cross had called the dark night of soul [la noche oscura del alma]. This inclination is not merely result of religious metaphor's familiarity; it derives its understanding from an incident linked to poem's inspiration, an epiphany Novalis experienced at grave of his first fiancre, Sophie von Kuhn, on 13 May 1797. (3) The subsequent view that Novahs's spiritual insight was inextricable from his vulnerability has led several critics to identify wide range of literary influences. Suggestions include August Wilhelm Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797, Johann Gottfried Herder's mythic poems, religious writings of Karl von Eckartshausen and Johann Patti Friedrich Richter, or Jean Paul, and Edward Young's Night Thoughts of 1742-45. (4) Young's poem, which had numerous European translations by end of eighteenth century, is often cited in view of its thematic resemblance to Novahs's poem and its reputation among German writers such as Herder, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (5) Novalis might have turned to this reflection on mortality weeks before his graveside experience, but it seems rather excessive to proclaim Young's direct and deep impact. The British surrealist David Gascoyne expresses same doubt in his introduction to an English edition of Hymnen an die Nacht translated by American poet Jeremy Reed and published in 1989: Gascoyne notes that Young's poem exudes disgruntlement--its other tide being, after all, The Complaint--while Novalis's achieves a serene transcendence of bereavement and mourning through resolution of into rapture rather than resignation. (6) This distinction between two otherwise comparable nights demands that we not only make better sense of Novalis's design but also check our own assumptions about lyrical intensity. Well-meaning critics who rehash point of his anguish inadvertently perpetuate tiresome picture of sentimental artist so devastated by loss that he could barely order his thoughts, let alone argue for them. Even esteemed Friedrich Hiebel seems to have contributed to this impression when he found Hymnen an die Nacht deeply rooted in those months of grief and its emotional depth reached only after three years of recuperation. (7) Such views present an obvious interpretive problem: what ultimately saw print in Schlegel brothers' journal Athenaeum is taken to manifest both profound mystical self-transformation and contrary rehance on overcoming of trauma. Novahs's poem becomes both product of strong mind able to integrate and transcend thoughts and mark of irresolution and maladjustment to life, product of weak mind. The inconsistency here is wholly illusory; in what follows I will show that Novalis's main ideas reflect distinct intellectual currents of his time. His image of night is no casual aesthetic plaything and in fact provided heretofore uncharted series of reactions from both philosophers Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. …

From Romantic Tools to Technics: Heideggerian Questions in Novalis's Anthropology

As much as primitive tools extended the reach, capacity, and power of the human body, in the course of their development they have also threatened it with extinction. Heidegger realized that what was at stake in the technics of the modern world was the capacity for a loss that would extend beyond the body to include the very being of mankind. The potential tragedy underlying these reflections is mitigated, however, by an inherent ambivalence: just as the usefulness of the earliest tools cannot be denied, the same goes for their sophisticated modern counterparts. For all his criticisms about the dangers involved, Heidegger does not conclusively answer the question concerning the effect of industrialization on the human condition. The essay shows how concerns that are usually considered products of the twentieth-century discourse on technics are already raised by the Romantic anthropology of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and argues that the affinity between Novalis and Heidegger is greater than has been acknowledged. Prior scholarship has described a common interest in problems relating to being and language in aesthetic and philosophical contexts. The essay puts these topics in a new light by shifting the focus to their writing on technics and technology.

The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism Arnd Bohm (bio) Nicholas Saul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx+336pp. US$80 (hb). ISBN 978-0-521-84891-6. Different eras feature different publishing fashions. Right now, the simultaneous collapse of monograph publishing and the shift of scholarly journals to theme issues has been matched by the rise of series such as the one represented by the Cambridge University Press Companion to volumes. Focused on famous writers or on selected topics, the books have a respected editor and a collection of individual contributions, which together provide an overview, primarily for those seeking quick yet reliable information. Somewhere between reference works and special journal numbers, the volumes have the advantage of being timely and authoritative. Individual experts can find time for an article when they are often too busy to undertake a book-length study of a subject they know quite well. These advantages are displayed by this Companion. Nicholas Saul is an established scholar and an experienced editor, so one immediately has confidence in the project. All sixteen contributors have published on various aspects of German literature and bring an impressive background of learning to bear, more than one person could easily claim and certainly not express so succinctly. Libraries and readers will from the outset be virtually guaranteed good value for their money and time. The range of the contributions complicates matters for a reviewer. Thus, of the sixteen articles, less than half will be of much direct interest to Eighteenth-Century Fiction readers, which does not mean that they are therefore slight. However, only Anthony Phelan’s “Prose Fiction of the German Romantics” (41–65) is clearly worth recommending here. Phelan has faced a difficult challenge with masterful aplomb. As everyone who has attempted to bring order into the view of German Romantic prose knows, it can be quite a tangle. Phelan’s headings — Goethe, the early Romantics, later Romantics, and shorter forms (Novelle, Erzählung, Märchen) — may seem idiosyncratic, but they accurately reflect the state of things. Phelan concentrates on canonical texts such as Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin, and Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and his Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter, and Joseph von Eichendorff ’s Ahnung und Gegenwart. Perhaps with the exception of E.T.A. Hoffmann, these writers are little more than names to the Anglo-American literary world. This is regrettable, especially when the qualities associated with what Phelan calls “radical experimentation” remain cut off from the discourse on English prose texts. The article concludes with notes and with a brief list of further readings, one that does justice to American and British scholarly contributions. [End Page 231] Several other contributions emphasize the prose of the German Romantics. John McCarthy offers a keen look at “Forms and Objectives of Romantic Criticism” (101–18), reminding how important criticism was in the work of German theorists at the time. Useful overviews are Jane K. Brown, “Romanticism and Classicism” (119–31); Gesa Dane, “Women Writers and Romanticism” (133–46); Nicholas Saul, “Love, Death, and Liebestod in German Romanticism” (163–74); Andrew Bowie, “Romantic Philosophy and Religion” (175–90); Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Romantic Politics and Society” (191–207); and Jürgen Barkhoff, “Romantic Science and Psychology” (209–25). Richard Littlejohns on painters and Andrew Bowie on music can barely scratch the surfaces of their respective large areas. Ricarda Schmidt deals with “early to late Romanticism,” Charlie Louth with lyric, and Roger Paulin with drama, each with good success. Two contributions were disappointing despite the claims of their announced titles. Azade Seyhan’s “What Is Romanticism and Where Did It Come from?” opens the volume with a review of familiar arguments that do not find bridges to current work on histories of epistemology. Similarly, Carl Niekerk’s “The Romantics and Other Cultures” operates with a rather mundane concept of culture. In contrast, the closing review of Romantic scholarship and the Romantic presence by Margarete Kohlenbach, “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000” (257–80), is stimulating as well as...

Mind's world: imagination and subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Rhetoric: Contexts of ImaginationAristotle, Phantasia, and the Problem of Epistemology Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Vagaries of the Sublunar WorldPhantasia and Ecstatic Knowledge More Skillful Artist than Imitation 2. Dreams, Doubts, and Evil Demons: Descartes and ImaginationMeditatio Prima: Certainty, the Cogito, and ImaginationImagination in the RulesMeditatio Secunda: The World of the CogitoDescartes, Montaigne, and Pascal Analogies and EnthusiasmExcogitations: Fabulating the Cogito 3. The Reasonable Imagination: Immanuel Kant's Critical PhilosophyImagination in the Limits of Pure Reason Dreamers and Madmen: Imagination in AnthropologyNatural Art and Sublime Madness: Imagination in the Critique of Judgment 4. The Highest Point of Philosophy: Fichte's Reimagining of the Kantian System The Logics of Positing: Intellectual Intuition and the Absolute Subject Ecstasy, Inspired Communication, and Philosophical Genius Light, Dusk, and Darkness: The Reconciliation of OppositesThe Metaphysics of Oscillation and the Truth of Imagination Reason's Fixations: Arresting Imagination 5. A System without Foundations: Poetic Subjectivity in Friedrich von Hardenberg's Ordo InversusA System without Foundations Fantasy and the Body 6. Divine Law and Abject Subjectivity: Coleridge and the Double Knowledge of Imagination Divine Imagination The Abyss of the Empirical Self Coda: Imagining Ideology Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index

<em>Guter Hoffnung?</em> Pregnancy and Narrative in Two German Romantic Märchen

In this essay I examine the function of pregnancy and narrative in two Romantic tales’ engagement with a Fichtean notion of subjectivity. I begin by tracing how Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) responded to the Fichtean model, arguing that even while embracing the agency and expansiveness gained by the subject in Fichte’s reworking of Kant, he recognized its simultaneously solipsistic and hyperoppositional tendencies and worked to mitigate them in his own philosophical and poetic attempts. Following an interpretation of Novalis’s “Atlantis-Saga” (1801) in this context, I broaden my perspective to examine the way in which pregnancy functions in the discourse about gender around the turn of the nineteenth century, including changes in the medical treatment of pregnancy and childbirth. Finally, I turn to Bettina Brentano’s “The Queen’s Son” (1808), which throws into question the autonomous, self-referential Fichtean subject, even in its Novalian revision. This occurs not least in its narration of pregnancy as an experience in its own right.

Romanticism and the Ethics of Style

Alexander Nehamas and others have recently attempted to revive a conception of ethics that is centered on self-formation and the values of aesthetic coherence. This conception faces several difficulties, including the lack of fit between models of aesthetic coherence in literary works and individual lives and an absence of determinate content. The argument of this paper is that both of these defects are absent from the work of one of the earliest and most vocal exponents of this conception of ethics, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), better known by his pseudonym “Novalis”. The paper begins by reviewing the growing consensus among scholars that Novalis makes a serious contribution to philosophy, and by pointing out the lack of attention paid to his moral philosophy. His conception of moral life as an infinite process of approximation the archetypal unity of the divine is then explicated in detail. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which his model of moral life and conception of aesthetic coherence avoids some of the difficulties faced by more recent theorists.

Evolutionary genetics of ageing in the wild: empirical patterns and future perspectives

Summary 1 Classical evolutionary theory states that senescence should arise as a consequence of the declining force of selection late in life. Although the quantitative genetic predictions of hypotheses derived from this theory have been extensively tested in laboratory studies of invertebrate systems, relatively little is known about the genetics of ageing in the wild. 2 Data from long-term ecological studies is increasingly allowing quantitative genetic approaches to be used in studies of senescence in free-living populations of vertebrates. We review work to date and argue that the patterns are broadly consistent with theoretical predictions, although there is also a clear need for more empirical work. 3 We argue that further advances in this field of research might be facilitated by increased use of reaction norm models, and a decreased emphasis on attempting to discriminate between mutation accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy models of senescence. We also suggest a framework for the better integration of environmental and genetic effects on ageing. 4 Finally, we discuss some of the difficulties in applying quantitative genetic models to studies of senescence outside the laboratory. In particular we highlight the problems that viability selection can cause for an accurate estimation of parameters used in the prediction of age-trajectory evolution.

Women and writing in the works of Novalis: transformation beyond measure?

The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death. Yet 20th-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge and its disciplines exist as fictional structures, as represented possibility rather than fixed truth. As such, all being and knowledge could and should be subjected to the ironic play of Romantic poetry, which sought to renew the individual and the world it inhabited.Hardenberg's work has come in for particular criticism for idealizing women, thus denying the living, expressive female subject; the conservative social roles it ascribes to women are also cited. Although more recent critics have discerned an empowered female subject in Novalis, this is the first balanced, book-length study of gender in Novalis in English. It concludes that Hardenberg's Romantic writing began to be successful in reinventing the fiction of female identity, and goes further to reveal his extensive interaction with women as intellectual equals

Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s “Christianity or Europe”

German Romanticism is commonly associated with nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism. Against this standard picture, I argue that the early German romantic author, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) holds a decidedly cosmopolitan view. Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe” has been the subject of much dispute and puzzlement ever since he presented it to the Jena romantic circle in the fall of 1799. On the basis of an account of the philosophical background of Novalis’s romanticism, I show that the image of the Middle Ages sketched in “Christianity or Europe” plays a symbolic role and should not be taken as a literal description of the historical past or as a blueprint for the future. Rather, the romantic picture of medieval Europe serves to evoke poetically the ideal of a cosmopolitan re-unification of humanity.

Products of the Imagination: Mining, Luxury, and the Romantic Artist in Heinrich von Ofterdingen

ABSTRACTScholars have long been interested in the relationship between capitalism and early romantic aesthetics. The following investigation offers a fresh perspective on this topic through a reconsideration of the figure of the miner and the representation of mining in Friedrich von Hardenberg's Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Rather than elucidating this representation on the basis of general concepts like alienation and instrumental rationality, as has often been the case, the essay situates mining within the context of the wide‐ranging late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century debates about luxury. When contextualised along these lines, it becomes clear that Hardenberg's representation of mining is best understood as part of an effort to defend the legitimacy of literature, especially the still fragile legitimacy of the novel. Re‐framing the representation of mining in the work in this way also necessitates a re‐evaluation of other key aspects of the novel, most significantly, its negotiation with processes of economic modernisation and especially its stance toward an incipient consumer culture in which reading and literature play a paradigmatic role.

Prediction of ungulates abundance through local linear algorithms

We use a local learning algorithm to predict the abundance of the Alpine ibex population living in the Gran Paradiso National Park, Northern Italy. Population abundance, recorded for a period of 40 years, have been recently analyzed by [Jacobson, A., Provenzale, A., Von Hardenberg, A., Bassano, B., Festa-Bianchet, M., 2004. Climate forcing and density dependence in a mountain ungulate population. Ecology 85, 1598–1610], who showed that the rate of increase of the population depends both on its density and snow depth. In the same paper, a threshold linear model is proposed for predicting the population abundance. In this paper, we identify a similar linear model in a local way, using a lazy learning algorithm. The advantages of the local model over the traditional global model are: improved forecast accuracy, easier understanding of the role and behaviour of the parameters, effortless way to keep the model up-to-date. Both data and software used in this work are of public domain; therefore, experiments can be easily replicated and further discussions are welcome.

The Poet as Artisan: Novalis' Werkzeug and the Making of Romanticism

MENSCHENLEHRE. Der Mensch soll ein vollkommnes und Totales Selbstwerckzeug seyn. Das allgemeine Brouillon (III.297.321)1 The manuscripts of Romantic literature may have been drafted with pen and paper, but Friedrich von Hardenberg makes use of a wider arsenal of instruments with which to hammer and file everything from poetic inscriptions to battleships. A persistent interest in "das Werkzeug"—a polysemous German word which at the end of the eighteenth century could encompass everything from tool and instrument to organ and organon—runs throughout Hardenberg's fragment collections and his two novels. The young Heinrich von Ofterdingen, for example, learns the skills and pleasures of manual craftsmanship before those of poetry. Even Hardenberg's nom de plume, Novalis, which was ostensibly chosen from a repertoire of ancestral names, deserves to be included within the discourse on tools circulating throughout his oeuvre: Novale refers to newly plowed land (Neubruch) a terrain of unknown fertility over which poets and plowmen must sow their seeds, which is precisely what the epigraph to Novalis' best known fragment collection, Pollen, encourages us to do. [End Page 617] It is tempting to interchange the Werkzeug freely with other semantically related words, such as Instrument, Organ and Organon, and this has indeed been the general tendency of the critical scholarship.2 Yet one runs the risk of overlooking a clear semantic hierarchy which prioritizes the Werkzeug. Its semantic elasticity allows for a free movement between the mechanical and the organic realms which the Organ is denied. In Novalis' day, bodily organs could be referred to as Werkzeuge, but it would not have been possible to refer to a chisel or hammer as an Organ—the Werkzeug rests at the top of a hierarchical tree which branches off into different metaphorical registers. Novalis' fragments and novels exploit the Werkzeug's potential for ambiguity and reveal affinities between its seemingly unconnected discourses. The Werkzeug in Novalis' idiolect is an amalgam of tradition and philosophical innovation. It reflects the meanings in currency during the eighteenth century such as one might find in Zedler's Lexikon (1732 ff.),3 and receives an additional impulse from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement from 1790. The Werkzeug in its capacity as "organ" is a Naturzweck ("natural purpose"), and Kant characterizes it as follows: each part is there both through and for every other part and the whole; a Naturzweck is both organized and self-organizing: each part mutually produces every other part, each part is both Zweck and Mittel; finally, a Naturzweck appears to have a purpose, but this purpose cannot be discerned by human faculties.4 Novalis' reception of the Kantian Werkzeug amounts to a conceptual gain in complexity. The simple instrumentality of cause and effect relationships which characterizes the Werkzeug prior to Kant develops into a richer model of production built on reciprocal relationships. Novalis develops the new, organically influenced model of the Werkzeug to include other types of productivity—such as the relation between artist, instrument, and artwork—as well as autoproduction, in keeping with his mandate that man should be a Selbstwerkzeug. At the same time, Novalis takes advantage of the [End Page 618] Werkzeug's fundamental ambivalence to explore new territory through the creative use of analogies. As a result, the scope of the Werkzeug in Novalis' novels and aphoristic writing is vast. It ranges from the most mundane household tools and means of communication, such as the telegraph, to embrace literary forms (the fairy tale), and abstractions: these include analogy itself, the faculty of judgement, and mathematics as the epitome of the scientific organon. Clearly, Novalis' Werkzeug is not an idle tool, but just how the Werkzeug mediates between subject and object, man and world, remains to be addressed. It is helpful to frame these questions within the broader context of Novalis' anthropology. In the 1996 essay titled "'Macroanthropos'—Friedrich von Hardenberg's Literary Anthropology," Bianca Theisen describes the...

The structure of convective rain cells at mid-latitudes

Abstract. Rain cells are structures which represent an important component of convective precipitation and a study of their properties represents a necessary step both towards improved stochastic models of small-scale precipitation and for the verification of deterministic high resolution local-area models. The case of intense convective precipitation in the tropics has been analysed in a recent study (von Hardenberg et al., 2003). Here we extend the analysis to mid-latitudes and we present results on the structure of convective rain cells observed by radar measurements in Italy. In particular we consider the average shape of precipitation cells and its dependence on radar resolution and the distributions of ellipticities.

All You Can't Eat: Derrida'S Course, "Rhétorique Du Cannibalisme" (1990–1991)

AbstractIn 1990–1991 Jacques Derrida taught a seminar in Paris involving the scientific-philosophical notebooks of the German Romantic writer and thinker Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801). The present article offers an account of that seminar, which was entitled, "The Rhetoric of Cannibalism."

The Lacanian Gaze and the Role of the Eye in Early German Romanticism

This essay traces the philosophical precursors of Lacan’s theory of the gaze back to the semiotic theory of representation developed by the German philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and his questions about the contours of the self or what happens to the self when it begins to seek consciousness of itself.

Comment on “Multiple equilibrium states and the abrupt transitions in a dynamical system of soil water interacting with vegetation” by X. Zeng et al.

[1] Zeng et al. [2004] modeled two stable equilibrium states (bistability) and the abrupt boundaries of vegetation in semi-arid grassland ecosystems. The bistability in their model is due to a positive feedback between increased plant biomass and reduced evaporation. Therefore, they claim that vegetation boundaries are abrupt even when the water availability decreases smoothly along a gradient. In this comment we stress that well-known spatial processes lead to spatial pattern formation and changing parameter regions. Furthermore we argue that the model results of Zeng et al. [2004] cannot be interpreted as abrupt vegetation boundaries. [3] Horizontal homogeneous models, like the single vertical column of Zeng et al. [2004], are helpful to understand bistability in homogeneous or well-mixed ecosystems [Scheffer et al., 2001]. However, semi-arid ecosystems are spatially extensive and heterogeneous. It has been shown that positive feedbacks between plant biomass and water infiltration rate, reduced evaporation, and increased transpiration due to extended root systems trigger spatial processes such as run-off and lateral soil water movement [Klausmeier, 1999; von Hardenberg et al., 2001; Rietkerk et al., 2002]. Therefore, these ecosystems typically require an understanding of the relation between soil-vegetation feedback and spatial scale. In a review of Rietkerk et al. [2004] it has been demonstrated that increased water scarcity in arid ecosystems leads to emerging self-organized vegetation patchiness. Vegetation states include homogeneous cover, gaps, labyrinths or stripes and spots depending on different strength of the feedbacks caused by water availability. This implies that vegetation boundaries are not necessarily abrupt when water availability is decreased smoothly along a gradient, but may go through a diversity of vegetation patterns instead [von Hardenberg et al., 2001; Rietkerk et al., 2002, 2004] (Figure 1). Additionally, and following from this, we stress that the outcome of the model of Zeng et al. [2004] cannot be interpreted as abrupt vegetation boundaries, as it starts from the a-priori assumption of horizontal homogeneity. [4] Furthermore, the parameter region of bistability found by Zeng et al. [2004] will change if spatial processes were included. For example, vegetation may still persist in self-organized patches for precipitation regimes where Zeng et al. [2004] already predict bare soil [cf. Lejeune et al., 2002, 2004; Rietkerk et al., 2004] (Figure 2). These self-organized patches coincide with higher soil moistures as compared to bare soil. Therefore, this will have an impact on precipitation [cf. Koster et al., 2004; Zeng et al., 1999], although the extent of the effect on soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions remains a challenge for further research. For example, the new proposed model of Zeng et al. [2004] could be extended by incorporating spatial processes and embedded in the state of the art literature. Further key questions concern how the outcome of such model is affected by seasonality in rainfall and local geological and soil differences. Another aspect that could be further analyzed is the possible asymmetry of collapsing and recovery time scales. [5] We thank Patrick Bogaart for useful discussion and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments. The research of MR is supported by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research, Earth and Life Sciences (NWO-ALW).

The Revival of Frühromantik in the Anglophone World

In Critical Fragment Nr. 115, Friedrich Schlegel remarks: whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.1 Written in the swell of revolutionary fervor, both of the political kind-the French Revolution-and of the philosophical kind-Kant's Copernican Revolution, Schlegel's push to unite such disparate realms of human inquiry was revolutionary in its own right. More than 200 years have passed since Schlegel's call to unite poetry and philosophy, and to reconsider art's relation to science, and thinkers are still struggling to understand the ramifications of such a call. Indeed, the movement of which Schlegel was a part, Fruhromantik (or early German Romanticism, which peaked between the cities of Berlin and Jena and the years of 1794 and 1801), defies easy classification and partly for that reason, it has been since its inception at best misunderstood, and at worst simply ignored, especially in the Anglophone world. The neglect of the philosophical dimensions of Fruhromantik in the Anglophone world is due to two main reasons. First, a language barrier: many of the primary works by the leading figures of the movement, e.g., Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher were not translated into English until quite recently.2 Moreover, critical German language editions of their work were not even available until the 1960s, hampering scholarship even on the continent. second, a generally dismissive view of the broader movement known as German Idealism, to which Fruhromantik is typically seen as a mere appendage. Foundational figures in the beginning of the analytic tradition in philosophy, such as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, turned with a vengeance against the philosophy that they had endorsed in their youth, helping to propagate a virulently biased view of German Idealism.3 Their influence certainly eroded interest in German Idealism sparked by the writings of thinkers such as F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and J. M. E. McTaggart, in England, and Josiah Royce in the United States. By and large, analytic philosophers after Russell and Moore have tried to keep non-analytic European continental thought on the European continent, and to free the analytic tradition from moves toward spooky concepts like Kant's Ding an sich, Hegel's Geist, and other such allegedly anti-realist leanings that might land us in the realm of the nonsensical.4 It should come as no surprise that the period of thought from Kant to Hegel, 5 which has been compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens, was not forever to be quieted by such biased, myopic, anti-idealist hysteria. Lately the period has been given muchneeded, renewed attention. Particularly heartening is the serious interest given to the most disdained figures of the period, the early German Romantics, who typically were not even seen as threatening to the future of philosophy by anti-idealist Anglophone philosophers, insofar as they were not even considered to be philosophers at all. The early romantics traditionally fared, then, even worse than the idealists, for the idealists were at least seen as philosophers. The renewed interest in Fruhromantik is shown by the several excellent translations of both primary and secondary works, and by the several original studies which shed light on just the sorts of relations articulated by Schlegel, namely, philosophy's relation to poetry, art's relation to science, and the nature of philosophy itself. While the recent profusion of new work on the early German Romantics is most welcome, its pace is so fast and its manifoldness is so varied, that the task of discussing these new contributions with the detail that they deserve is virtually impossible. Thus I cannot provide exhaustive treatment of each contribution I discuss (and I will not even discuss every new contribution); instead, I will highlight some of the main controversies and debates generated by the new literature, while providing a general overview of the exciting new growth in the field. …

Unbestimmte Rhetorik: Friedrich Schlegel und die Redekunst um 1800 by Peter D. Krause (review)

1044 Reviews good grace others' only more-or-less well-informed co-authorial manipulation of his texts during his lifetime). As a result, the history of the reception and influence of Hardenberg-Novalis's works is to an unusual degree coextensive with the chequered history of editions which merely purported to be (but were not) adequate renditions of Novalis: Schriften. Not for the first time, then, we are treated here to opulent documentation and analysis of the myth- and legend-making industry of Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, and Eduard von Biilow (and their collaborators Maassen, Minor, and Kammnitzer). Nor is it the firsttime that the extraordinary achievements ofthe irreplaceable Hans-Joachim Mahl (who died on 13 March 2001) and Gerhard Schulz in restoringthe Fichte-Studien, Das allgemeine Brouillon, and many other texts to their pre-manipulated state have been recognized, even if scholarship outside the narrow compass of specialist Romantic studies sometimes has yet to register the hermeneutic effectof this textual earthquake on its rusty cognitive seismograph. More significant, however, are Rommel's and Ira Kasperowski's justifications of previously maligned editors such as Sophie von Hardenberg and Ernst Heilborn. Both of these are shown to have acted on something resembling today's editorial principles, and it is they, rather than the bigger names just mentioned, who are commemorated as the true grandparents of today's epoch-making historical-critical edition. This revisionary achievement is nicely complemented by other material. Rommel edits many minor primary documents forthe firsttime, including a draftlyric by Hardenberg's younger brother Anton and letters to him by Sidonie von Dieskau. Jorg Briickner definitively identifies Ferdinand von der Lippe, instead of Hardenberg, as the author of the rather dry Harzreise journal (15-19 April 1793) still included in the modern edition (what a pity he never saw a Biicherrad after all). And, in the only literary essay in the volume, Ludwig Stockinger shows what it means now that 'Kenne dich selbst', thanks to a manuscript discovery of 1990, must henceforth be read as 'Kenne dich Selbst'. But this volume, rightly,is to be seen as a celebration of editorial achievement, and it is well rounded out by reproductions of manuscripts, in particular the Astralis manuscript found by Sophie Vietor not long since in the British Library. Recently, Helmut Krausser wrote an alas only partially successful postmodernist novel Thanatos: Das schwarze Buch (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1996), which is set in a fictional Berlin Institut furDeutsche Romantik, centrally features the sensational (and successful) forgeryofthe lost manuscript ofHeinrich von Ofterdingen Part 11by a drug-crazed archivist, and (yet again) perpetuates the myth of Romanti? cism as a school of death-obsessed wan young Erotomanen. Had he dug a little deeper into the editorial history of Novalis: Schriften, we would have been spared that, and it is earnestly to be wished that Rommel's catalogue finds readers everywhere. University of Liverpool Nicholas Saul UnbestimmteRhetorik: Friedrich Schlegel und die Redekunst um 1800. By Peter D. Krause. (Rhetorik-Forschungen, 14) Tubingen: Niemeyer. 2001. vi + 4i8pp. ?78. ISBN 3-484-68014-8 (pbk). By foregrounding 'indeterminacy' in his suitably paradoxical title, Peter Krause fo? cuses attention on an aim Friedrich Schlegel failed to achieve: liberating rhetoric from the determinacy of persuasive intent. Rhetoric was resistant and consequently never gained more than marginal importance for Schlegel's Romantic project. The extensive first part of this revised dissertation from the University of Oldenburg deals mainly with the concept of rhetoric in Schlegel's early writings, which reveal the process ofhis reading the classical authors largely as an autodidact. Krause's detailed discussion of Schlegel's eclectic reception ofthe classics and scattered and un- MLR, 98.4, 2003 1045 systematic comments on rhetoric negotiates shifting terminology and complex inter? play between a wide variety of sources and Schlegel'sexperimental ideas. His finding that Schlegel's concept of rhetoric remained ambiguous and in essence 'unrhetorical' is convincing, and Schlegel's work thus appears to support the generally accepted view that 1800 marks the death of rhetoric proper not only in German literature. The second part is curiously disconnected from the first,since Schlegel, while implicitly acting as the sole representative of Romanticism, now recedes from view. Al? though Krause...

A Higher Language: Novalis on Communion with Animals

Around 1800 Philipp Otto Runge fashioned with scissors and paper a dog gazing up at a full moon. Significantly, the dog holds his mouth closed, as if, were he to howl, we might think him a wolf in the wild. Instead he is a domesticated dog, to the point that he even communicates human value: like a true Romantic, he raises his eyes silently to the sky, his chest filled with a longing for transcendence. Art critic Robert Rosenblum has written that the silhouette portrays a strangely haunting opposition between terrestrial desire and skyborne inaccessibility (37). A decade before C. D. Friedrich's nocturnal back figures, Runge creates a dog transfixed by lunar light. This substitution of a dog for this archetypal Romantic pose is fascinating. How is it that the dog can be emblematic for human longing? Does it mean that animals share in mankind's intimations of a higher being or immortality? Or is the anthropomorphism more mundane, announcing the sentimentalization of the pet seen later in Victorian England? Here, the animal undoubtedly represents neither the human trait that Enlightenment thinkers conventionally denied it (i.e., reason), nor does the dog represent the feature that the nineteenth century frequently claimed humans and animals shared (i.e., a baser instinct). The dog is not an animal in a fairy tale waiting to be retransfigured into a human being and thereby saved from a beast's existence. Nor is he a talking animal who has stepped out of a fable to depict human frailties. Instead the dog possesses a kind of spirituality, a sense of awe. His transfixed gaze suggests a bond with a transcendent world; perhaps his chest breathes in oneness with nature. Even in the sparseness of the silhouette (or perhaps because of the evocative sublimity of its shorthand), Runge points to the mysterious interconnectedness of nature. all of nature is sacred and alive, a unity in which the dog participates. I should like to argue that this particular substitution of animal for human occurs not insignificantly in Romanticism, and that Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) was a major thinker in realigning the relationship between the two worlds. Of course, much scholarship has been devoted to nature, galvanism, and mineralogy in Novalis's writings.1 To be sure, there are fewer and less salient references to animals than to plants and stones in his work. But what passages exist are extraordinary for their contradiction of the Enlightenment delineation of the boundaries between man and animal. If much Enlightenment thought set out to define the essence of man, then his uniqueness was often purported at the expense of nonhuman creatures. Even in writers such as Condillac and Reimarus who elaborated on the similarities between beast and man, man always crowned the continuity and development from one species to the next. Novalis, by contrast, conceives of an almost instantaneous, imaginative transformation of man into an animal, plant, or stone. At one stroke, he casts aside the hierarchy that governed the eighteenth-century belief in the Great Chain of Being. The metamorphosis itself signifies a state of higher consciousness that transcends the human. Even more audaciously, Hardenberg asks whether God, since he could become man, could not also become a stone, plant, animal, or element, thereby instating eine fortwahrende Erlosung in der Natur (2:826). In short, instead of the animal being the abject Other of Enlightenment thought, it becomes the of Novalis's radical pre-Rimbaudian statement: Ich bin Du (2:332). The question then arises as to what permits this shift in intellectual history, one that involves philosophy, theology, and science. Could one perhaps search for an answer in central Romantic tenets, even if they appear at first glance to be far removed from the question of what distinguishes man from beast? In other words, do the Romantic theories on the fragment, organicity, chaos, pre-reflexive being, and poesis pertain or even contribute to this striking shift? …