ABSTRACT
The German ‘early Romantic’ thinkers—Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich von Hardenberg (‘Novalis’), and Friedrich Schlegel—rejected the Cartesian legacy, which persisted through Kant and Fichte, of regarding reflective self-consciousness as the first principle of philosophy. Encountering Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre in the late 1790s, all three objected to his argument that the thinking subject posits itself in an empirically inaccessible act of ‘intellectual intuition’. The shared characteristics of their rethinking of thought included (1) anti-foundationalism, (2) an objection to subject–object dualism, (3) an assertion of the unknowability of the absolute, (4) an emphasis on unconsciousness, feeling, and aesthetic experience as integral components of thought, and (5) an insistence that philosophy requires poetry (broadly defined) as its complement. Hölderlin postulated the grounding of self-consciousness in an unconditioned state of Being which, being inaccessible to discursive reason, intimates itself to consciousness aesthetically—in beauty—and through self-negating metaphorical substitution. Novalis interpreted being as a constant oscillation between opposites and truth as an illusion projected by thought as its goal. For him, art, as self-consciously illusory, represents the illusoriness inherent in thought and thus achieves the self-transparency and wholeness that eludes reflective consciousness. Schlegel sought to incorporate groundlessness into philosophy itself with a ‘reciprocal proof’ (Wechselerweis), or constant alternation between opposing principles. The dynamic nature of thought and relational nature of truth requires historical self-awareness, which reveals philosophy’s perpetual incompleteness. Schlegel advocated a self-reflexivity he called ‘irony’, which manifests itself formally in prose fragments and poetic allegory, the latter representing the elusiveness of the absolute.
