ABSTRACT
Fichte's philosophy in the end is a radical breaking out of the circles of self-reflection presupposed by previous philosophy in the modern mode leading up to Kant. Frank turns thinking back self-reflexively to the subject, which was supposedly liquidated by the post-structuralist turn, and he finds crucial models for an alternative to secular scientific epistemology in Romantic thinkers such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, who were among Fichte's most zealous converts. It consists essentially in the inability of self-reflection to grasp its own inalienable source and structure, which consists in a vocation or a calling. Fichte's thought was taken up with enthusiasm and turned in a poetic direction by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Fichte's critique of religious revelation or "Offenbarung" leads Novalis to a theory of poetic revelation. Lyrical language envisages whole truth or the Absolute, thereby overcoming the modern forgetting of language, in which it is reduced to a functional sign.
