ABSTRACT
Goethe once defined the symbol as that which 'by fully representing itself refers to everything else'. The question arises both because of the volume's subject matter and because of its general methodological orientation. With regard to the former, Stephan Meier-Oeser's erudite essay observes that analysing specific concepts under the names of symbol and intuition is unavoidably complicated by the 'variety of conceptual implications that accrued to them from the long history of their use in philosophical language'. A tension between the claims of unity and multiplicity is discernible already in the editors' Introduction, which postulates a 'newly charged' post-Kantian concept of the self-referential symbol while questioning the legitimacy of speaking of 'the Romantic symbol'. To an extent, this tension reflects a methodological difficulty inherent in the discipline of Begriffsgeschichte, with its characteristic focus on individual concepts and keywords: a difficulty in distinguishing pragmatically between the historicity of discourse and that of philosophical understanding.
