Shifting the ground

If recent literary theory has irritated those primarily concerned with literary history and literary interpretation because of its insistence on raising philosophical issues, it has equally irritated many philosophers because of its introduction of questions derived from the study of literature into philosophy. The roots of this dual irritation lie, as I shall demonstrate in this and Chapter 3, in the insights of early German Romanticism. ¹ The effects of the interference between philosophy and literature, which began in its modern form with early Romanticism, have again become central to important developments in contemporary philosophy. ² In the Athenäum Fragments of 1798 Schlegel declares that: ‘Many of the complex disputed questions of modern philosophy are like the tales and the Gods of ancient literature. They return in every system, but always transformed’ (Schlegel 1988 (2) p. 145). Recent debates between ‘philosophers’ and ‘literary theorists’ —the terms cannot, of course, be easily separated—such as the debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida over conceptions of meaning, can be interpreted as re-articulations, and thus as transformations, of issues that first emerged with Romanticism. Understanding why this recurrence of Romantic concerns has taken place, and how our contemporary questioning differs from that of the Romantics, will be vital to the future development of both philosophy and literary theory.