The Genial Education of Genius in German Idealism and Early Romanticism
Steven Sych, Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montréal
April 2015
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree
of PhD, Philosophy
© Steven Sych 2015
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................................................1
RÉSUMÉ.................................................................................................................................................3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................................5
1. HEGEL AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE ROMANTIC GENIUS.....................................................27
1.1 Introduction.............................................................................................................................27
1.2 Hegel’s Critique of Romantic Irony......................................................................................30
1.2.1 A Finite Fichte: The Romantic Self.................................................................................30
1.2.2 Provisional Definition of ‘Romantic Irony’...................................................................34
1.2.3 Bad Art: Aesthetic and Ethical Criteria..........................................................................35
1.2.4 Finite and Infinite Ironies..............................................................................................44
1.2.5 Irony, Romantic Egoism and Genius............................................................................50
1.3 Kant’s Theory of Genius..........................................................................................................52
1.3.1 Beauty and the Third Critique........................................................................................53
1.3.2 Kant’s Genius...................................................................................................................57
1.3.2.1 Excursus on Aesthetic Ideas............................................................................61
1.4 Hegel’s Criticisms of the Romantic Genius..........................................................................63
1.4.1 Hegel’s Three Criticisms.................................................................................................64
1.4.1.1 The Charge of Egoism......................................................................................64
1.4.1.2 The Charge of Elitism......................................................................................66
1.4.1.3 Authoritarianism of the Particular.................................................................67
1.4.2 Hegel’s Artist....................................................................................................................68
1.4.3 Hegel and the Unsociability of Genius..........................................................................72
1.4.3.1 Against Egoism.................................................................................................72
1.4.3.2 Against Elitism.................................................................................................72
1.4.3.3 Particularity and Originality...........................................................................73
1.4.4 Summary of Hegel’s Criticisms of the Romantic Genius............................................74
1.5 Morality and the Ethical: The Systemic Significance of Irony............................................75
1.5.1 Socrates and the Greek Ethos.........................................................................................76
1.5.2 Hegel’s Account of Ethical Life......................................................................................82
1.5.3 Sublated Artistic Particularity........................................................................................84
1.5.4 Hegel’s ‘Social’ Critique...................................................................................................86
1.6 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................87
2. EGOISM AND DISCURSIVE RECIPROCITY: SCHLEIERMACHER CONTRA KANT..............90
2.1 Introduction............................................................................................................................90
2.2 Kant and the Problem of Cognitive Autonomy....................................................................94
2.2.1 Unsociable Sociability and Enlightenment..................................................................94
2.2.2 Public Enlightenment..................................................................................................102
2.2.3 Epistemic Prudence, or the Very Possibility of Cognition? ......................................108
2.3 Absolute Reciprocity: Schleiermacher..................................................................................111
2.3.1 Enlightenment and Sociability.....................................................................................112
2.3.2 Between the Professional and Domestic.....................................................................115
2.3.3 Purposiveness Without Purpose and Absolute Reciprocity.......................................117
2.3.4 Self-limitation in Kant and Schleiermacher...............................................................124
2.4 Egoism and Ethical Life........................................................................................................130
2.4.1 Against Hegel’s Accusation of Egoism.........................................................................131
2.4.2 Criticisms of Hegel’s Conservatism.............................................................................133
2.5 Conclusion..............................................................................................................................139
3. ELITISM AND PARABATIC POPULISM: SCHLEGEL CONTRA FICHTE..................................141
3.1 Introduction............................................................................................................................141
3.2 On Hovering: Schlegelian and Fichtean Epistemological Methods.................................145
3.2.1 Fichte’s Constructive Method.......................................................................................145
3.2.2 Fichte’s Non-discursive Absolute.................................................................................151
3.2.3 Schlegel’s Method: Irony as Permanent Parabasis.....................................................155
3.3 Schlegel’s Motives and Mythology........................................................................................161
3.3.1 Irony and Truth...............................................................................................................161
3.3.2 Mythology.......................................................................................................................170
3.4 Schlegel’s Discourse...............................................................................................................175
3.4.1 Negativity: Self-criticism and Fichte’s Pistol...............................................................175
3.4.2 Positivity: Schlegel’s Mytho-poetic Symphilosophy...................................................179
3.4.3 Hegel’s Narrow Reading of Romanticism...................................................................184
3.5 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................188
4. COMMUNITY AND GENIAL AUTHORITY: ON IDEALIZING AN AUDIENCE........................191
4.1 Introduction...........................................................................................................................191
4.1.1 The Empirical and Ideal Audiences..............................................................................193
4.1.2 Idealizing One’s Audience and the Authoritarianism of the Particular...................197
4.2 Ideality of Audience: Three Forays into Idealization.........................................................201
4.2.1 Fichte’s Idealization: Being Understood.....................................................................201
4.2.2 Jean Paul’s Idealization: Being Alone With Others...................................................204
4.2.3 O’Neill’s Idealization: Logical Egoism Through Communication...........................208
4.2.3.1 Normativity and Audience in O’Neill...........................................................208
4.2.3.2 Reason’s Authority.........................................................................................212
4.2.3.3 The Categorical Imperative and Communication as Praxis......................217
4.2.3.4 The Ideal Public and the Sensus Communis: O’Neill’s Logical Egoism...222
4.2.4 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................226
4.3 Towards a More Sociable Rhetoric: Summoning an Ideal Audience and Romantic
Humility......................................................................................................................................229
4.3.1 The Two Audiences, the Two Schlegels.......................................................................230
4.3.2 The Fragment and Romantic Hermeneutics..............................................................234
4.3.3 Fragments, Aesthetic Ideas, and Autonomy...............................................................242
4.3.4 The Sociable Effects of Irony on the Fragment..........................................................247
4.3.5 Authority, Hubris and the Romantic Ideal of Audience............................................253
4.4 Genius and Authority in Kant and Romantic Discourses.................................................256
4.4.1 Genial Authority in Kant...............................................................................................258
4.4.1.1 A Real Public? .................................................................................................258
4.4.1.2 The Horizon as the Interaction Between the Ideal and the Real: Notes for a
Defence of O’Neill.......................................................................................................................261
4.4.1.3 The Dialectic of Taste.....................................................................................263
4.4.1.4 The Authority of Taste in Kant.....................................................................270
4.4.1.5 Horizon and Finitude.....................................................................................271
4.4.2 Genius of the Age..........................................................................................................275
4.4.2.1 Invocation.......................................................................................................276
4.4.2.2 Daimon and Genius......................................................................................278
4.4.2.3 The Romantic Daimon: The Genius of the Age...........................................282
4.5 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................289
5. CONCLUSION: THE PARTICULARITY OF ROMANTIC COMMUNITY...................................291
5.1 Hegel’s Social Critique..........................................................................................................291
5.2 The Genius of Community...................................................................................................294
5.2.1 Fichte’s Audience of Insight.........................................................................................296
5.2.3 Fichtean Conversion.....................................................................................................299
5.2.3.1 Social Metaphors and Romantic Contingency............................................303
5.2.4 Conclusion: Socratic Contingency and the Infinite Conversation...........................311
WORKS CITED...................................................................................................................................318
OTHER WORKS CONSULTED FOR THIS THESIS........................................................................334
1
ABSTRACT
Historically, Early German Romanticism has been viewed as a reaction against the
science-oriented and rationalistic Enlightenment philosophies that preceded it; exemplary of
such readings is that of G. W. F. Hegel, who accuses the Romantics of irrationalism and a
retreat from community. The purpose of the following thesis is to refute Hegel’s criticism and
argue that Romantic philosophy presents us with a truth-oriented discourse. Although others
have defended the Romantics against Hegel, the reading presented here is unique insofar as it
foregrounds the importance of human sociability, discursive practices (symphilosophy), and
Immanuel Kant’s conception of genius for Romantic philosophy. On my reading, Hegel's
criticism can be divided into three parts: the accusation of the egoism of the Romantic genius,
the charge of the elitism of the Romantic circle, and the claim that the Romantics give all
authority to the individual. The first chapter explicates Hegel’s criticisms of the Romantics,
showing how they both parallel and expand on his understanding of the artistic (Kantian)
genius. The second chapter takes up Hegel's charge of Romantic egoism, arguing with the help
of Schleiermacher and Kant that the Romantic self comes to be communally constituted
through its interactions with others. The third chapter explores Hegel’s charge of elitism,
analyzing Friedrich Schlegel’s ironic discourse, along with the lectures of the later Fichte, to
argue that the Romantics’ epistemological fallibilism necessitates a populist expansion of
2
philosophical truth-seeking. The fourth chapter concerns itself with the issue of the authority of
the exceptional individual, arguing that the Romantic discourse conceives of its audience as
ideal (how an audience should be) rather than actual (how an audience is), but that this
idealization is a humble solicitation rather than an arrogant demand; that is, this chapter
shows that the Romantics follow the Kantian account of genius in claiming that a social
warrant is necessary for sorting sense from nonsense. The conclusion points out that this
Romantic picture of the community as both responsive to individuals and capable of
substantial change—a community of genius—acts as a corrective for a conservative tendency in
Hegel’s own account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Accordingly, this thesis both refutes Hegel's
historically important reading of the Early Romantics and develops a novel account of
Romantic sociability that informs the Romantics’ theories of the self, the community, and their
discursive interplay.
3
RÉSUMÉ
Historiquement, on a considéré les débuts du romantisme allemand comme une
réaction au caractère scientifique et rationaliste des philosophies des Lumières. Telle était, par
exemple, l’interprétation de G. W. F. Hegel, qui accusait les romantiques d’irrationalisme et
d’abandon de la communauté. La présente thèse a pour objectif de réfuter cette critique de
Hegel et d’avancer que la philosophie romantique nous présente en fait un discours qui
concerne la vérité. Bien que d’autres aient défendu les romantiques contre Hegel, la présente
interprétation est unique parce qu’elle souligne l’importance, pour la philosophie romantique,
de la sociabilité humaine, des pratiques discursives (symphilosophie), et de la conception du
génie selon Immanuel Kant. D’après mon interprétation, la critique de Hegel peut se diviser en
trois parties: l’accusation d’égoïsme à l’égard du génie romantique, l’accusation d’élitisme à
l’égard du cercle romantique, et l’affirmation que les romantiques délèguent toute l’autorité à
l’individu. Le premier chapitre développe les critiques de Hegel à l’égard des romantiques en
montrant comment elles révèlent et approfondissent son interprétation du génie artistique
(kantien). Le deuxième chapitre répond à l’accusation d’égoïsme romantique en arguant, à
l’aide de Schleimacher et Kant, que le soi romantique se constitue en commun à travers ses
interactions avec les autres. Le troisième chapitre se penche sur l’accusation d’élitisme à l’aide
de la notion de discours ironique selon Friedrich Schlegel ainsi que des plus récentes leçons de
4
Fichte, et affirme que le faillibilisme épistémologique romantique nécessite une expansion
populiste de la recherche philosophique de la vérité. Le quatrième chapitre traite du thème de
l’autorité de l’individu exceptionnel en affirmant que le discours romantique conçoit son
auditoire comme étant idéal (ce qu’un auditoire devrait être) plutôt que réel (ce que l’auditoire
est), mais que cette idéalisation est une humble sollicitation plutôt qu’une exigence arrogante;
en d’autres termes, ce chapitre montre que les romantiques suivent le récit kantien du génie en
affirmant qu’un mandat social est nécessaire pour distinguer le sens du non-sens. La
conclusion souligne que l’image romantique de la communauté présentée comme à la fois
réactive aux individus et capable de changement considérable—une communauté de génie—
agit en tant que correctif à la tendance conservative dans le récit hégélien de la vie éthique
(Sittlichkeit). Par conséquent, cette thèse, d’une part, réfute l’interprétation hégélienne des
premiers romantiques, une interprétation d’importance historique, et, d’autre part, développe
un nouveau récit de la sociabilité romantique qui informe les théories du soi, de la communauté,
et de leurs interactions discursives.
5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express enormous gratitude first to my supervisors, Professors George di
Giovanni and Hasana Sharp, both for their comments and criticisms of my many drafts and
scribbles, as well as their moral support over my time at McGill. A tall thank you to Mylissa
Falkner and Angela Fotopoulos as well, without whom everything here would tumble like a
tower.
I am also grateful to Anna Ezekiel and Keven Poulin for their help copy editing, fixing
citations and for their comments on earlier drafts. Thanks as well to my students from my
PHIL445 seminar in Winter 2015 who prodded me in the right directions and forced me from
the shadows into the sphere of free sociality. Thanks finally to Hugues Tremblay Manigouche
and Patrick de Gruyter for their perpetual checking of my translations.
I offer my thanks also to: my parents Barbara and Randall for their unending support,
and to Jennifer Sych, Alonso Gamarra, Ashley Duong, Chris Schafenacker, Eric Schafenacker,
Eryn Tempest, Eryn Fitzgerald, Fern Thompsett, Halley Barnett, James Goddard, Jeff Noh,
Jordan Elias, Kristyn Emmerzael, Lauren MacLean, Maddie Reddon, Maiya Jordan, Mazi
Javidiani, Ryan Galloway, Sarah Burgoyne, Scott Paradis, Philippe and Lacey and everyone at
Shakti, as well as everyone else I am lucky enough to know, for their companionship and
kindness over the past six years.
6
INTRODUCTION
Jena at the end of the eighteenth century. An episode in the lives of a few human beings,
of no more than episodic significance for the world at large. Everywhere the earth
resounds with battles, whole worlds are collapsing, but here, in a small German town, a
few young people come together for the purpose of creating a new, harmonious, all
embracing culture out of the chaos. They rush at it with that inconceivable, reckless
naivety that is given only to those people whose degree of consciousness is morbidly
high, and to those only for a single cause in their lives and then again only for a few
moments. It was a dance on a glowing volcano, it was a radiantly improbable dream;
after many years the memory of it still lives on in the observer’s soul as something
bewilderingly paradoxical.1
Georg Lukács provides a beguiling description of the Early German Romantic
movement.2 Lukács’ imagery unfolds before the reader in striking terms. These were the youth
1
György Lukács, Anna Bostock, John T. Sanders, Katie Terezakis and Judith Butler, Soul and
Form (New York: Columbia UP, 2010) 42.
2
Exactly who should be included under this label is a matter of some contention. Frederick C.
Beiser states, “‘Romanticism’ in those years means the period known as the Frühromantik, and it refers
to the circle of poets and philosophers in Jena and Berlin, which includes the Schlegel brothers, Schelling,
Novalis, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, and Tieck” (Beiser, “Romanticism and Idealism,” The Relevance of
Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014] 31).
7
whose friendships and love affairs became the meeting point for a generation’s dreams and
paradoxes, whose joyous volcano-dance came to be seen as a funeral rite to the Enlightenment,
and whose own eruption onto the scene of literature and philosophy outweighed any of the
eventual apostasies of their adult lives.
Despite the beautiful character of Lukács’ prose, both the content and its apocalyptic
tone are typical of various readings of Romanticism: youth, dreams, paradoxes—feeling—all
posed as the corrective for (or a reactionary and regressive gesture against) the scienceoriented and rationalistic Enlightenment generation. The term ‘rationality’ is a crucial one. For
on readings that operate on a similar rhetorical and thematic register to that of Lukács, it is
nothing less than the rationality of the Early Romantics that is at stake. Such readings claim
that the Romantics reasserted the rightful importance of affect as opposed to discourse, the
opaque unconscious as opposed to the legibly conscious, the essentially inexhaustible nature of
meaning and truth in the face of reason’s penetrating gaze, the lightning bolt of genius and
inspiration, the play of irony in opposition to any attempt at self-transparency, and so forth.
Such readings see the Early Romantics as a backlash to the dour rationalism of their
immediate predecessors; indeed, such readings abound, beginning even during their own
Our focus in this thesis is Friedrich von Schlegel (chapter 3) and Schleiermacher (chapter 2). We also
draw on Novalis and Jean Paul in support of Schlegelian/Schleiermacherian themes.
8
time.3 A manifest and influential example of such a reading of the Early German Romantics is
none other than that of G. W. F. Hegel.4 Hegel, who seemed to hold a special reserve of vitriol
ear-marked for Friedrich von Schlegel and his circle, argued that the Romantic discursive
practices, in particular irony, had the effect of not only wilfully exiling the Romantic individual
from its prevailing historical community, but also revealing that individual’s engagement in a
revelrous mockery of rationality itself; these two things are not, for Hegel, two separate
movements, but rather two results of the same flight towards subjectivity.
In more recent decades, a wave of compelling counter-readings to those that associate
Romanticism with subjectivism/irrationalism has come to surge. Nuanced interpretations of
the Frühromantik provided by the likes of Dieter Henrich, Ernst Behler, Manfred Frank and
Frederick Beiser,5 as well as the ongoing publication of both the complete critical works and
3
It is at least arguable that these interpretations lay the groundwork for twentieth and twentyfirst century understandings of the Early German Romantics as the predecessors to what is broadly (if
clumsily) dubbed ‘postmodernism.’
4
Jeffrey Reid writes, “the Hegelian interpretation of Romanticism is very strong—so strong in
fact that it determined the fate of romantic thought until its reevaluation in the twentieth century” (Reid,
The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism [London: Bloomsbury, 2014] 2).
5
Manfred Frank and Beiser are perhaps the two most important scholars within the world of
Anglophone scholarship. While Beiser heralds Schelling as the systematic apotheosis of Romantic
thought and argues for the movement’s parallelism with absolute idealism, Frank argues for
Romanticism’s status as a clearly distinct, and skeptically corrective, counterpoint to absolute idealism.
For this debate, see Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) and his German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–
1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002, 2006), as well as Frank’s “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die
Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), sections of which
have been translated into English as The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism
(Albany: SUNY, 2004). For an overview of the debate between Beiser and Frank, see Dalia Nassar’s
introduction to The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy,
9
English translations of the work of key thinkers such as Schlegel, has illuminated this area of
the scholarly world in a way that has been here-to-fore unprecedented, if not impossible, even
for the likes of Hegel himself.6 In broad terms, such readings attempt to redeem Jena
Romanticism by arguing that, despite the irrational or ‘poetic’ appearance, the Romantics were
both in dialogue with their philosophical contemporaries and forebears and had substantive
points of their own to bring to these discussions.
This thesis likewise presents a counter-reading to the traditional association of Early
German Romanticism with irrationalism. Yet, while maintaining a persistent dialogue with
contemporary readings, it does not aim at an exhaustive historical reading of the
Frühromantik; nor does it work aim at an exhaustive historical reading of particular thinkers
within the constellation of Jena and Berlin. Rather, this work’s focus is conceptual7 and
(broadly) thematic: we will set into relief what might be the most peculiar aspect of the lives and
works of the Romantic circle, a peculiarity that comes to be all the more striking in light of the
association of Romanticism with irrational egoism. The peculiarity that this text takes as its
1795–1804 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014) 8–19, as well as Frank and Beiser’s own playful rejoinders to
one another in Nassar’s Relevance of Romanticism: Beiser, “Romanticism and Idealism” 30–47 and
Frank, “What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?” The Relevance of Romanticism 15–30.
6
This point is made in depth by Frank. Even Hegel didn’t have access to the complete critical
works (Frank, “What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?” 15).
7
Conceptual in the sense that we look at shared concepts rather than focusing on the strictly
historical relations between individuals and texts; it is highly unlikely, for instance, that Schlegel heard
or read about Fichte’s 1804 lectures, given that they were not published and only presented to a small
circle. Likewise, some of the specific relationships that emerged between members of the Romantic
circle (such as Schlegel and Novalis, or erstwhile roommates Schlegel and Schleiermacher) are only of
passing concern.
10
theme is the Romantic fascination with, as well as the Romantic performance of, a particular
notion of human sociability. Through communal creation, collective philosophizing
(symphilosophy, literally a philosophizing-with), the deployment of textual forms belying
traditional ideas concerning authorship, and the participation in the salons and burgeoning
seminar rooms of their day, the practices of the Romantics opened up entirely new styles of
collective activity. Yet they did not merely unreflectively act in sociable ways. Indeed, the
Romantics provide us with a sophisticated theory of the human being as essentially communal,
and with it a remarkably original picture of culture and cultural production.
In short, the Romantics’ theory and practices desired to elucidate the implications of
humanity’s social being as well as the possibilities to be found in various kinds of collective
activity. It is the unfolding of this theme, which we may broadly call Romantic sociability, that
this text takes as its mandate. In what follows we will see that textual meaning, the self, criteria
of normativity, and even what constitutes rationality as such come to be construed by the
Romantic circle as the result of a particular kind of social interplay that is alternatingly referred
to as symphilosophy, Romantic poetry, and genius. Accordingly, this thesis focuses on the
period of 1795–1801, and in particular on the Athenaeum journal as an incarnation of something
resembling symphilosophy.8 What surfaces is a vision of a particular communal discourse as
undergirding the sense-making activities of human creatures. By focusing on the discursive
8
‘Something resembling’ because, as we will see, it is a less than perfect historical incarnation of
its own ideals.
11
practices of the Early Romantics, the reading proposed here will differ radically from the
historical pictures of Romanticism. That is, on traditional readings such as that of Hegel,
Romanticism was associated with a naïve and self-absorbed daydreaming as opposed to a
proper philosophy that gives due importance to practice; this is why Hegel accuses the
Romantics of pernicious egoism, elitism, and standing outside their community by granting all
authority to the individual. These three aspects of Hegel’s critique will act as a framing
narrative for the thesis: against Hegel, we will argue that Early Romanticism provides an
account of discursive practices and the emergence of human meaning therefrom. In short, this
thesis elucidates the Romantic argument(s) for the essentially practical and social grounds of
human cognition.9
The theme of Romantic sociability is under-explored territory, especially within the
English-speaking scholarly world. There has been no full-length exploration of the concept and
implications of Romantic sociability,10 nor has there been such a study on the concomitant
vision of discursive practices. Instead, the aforementioned attempts to ‘redeem’ or revivify the
Frühromantik by Frank, Beiser, et al. have tended to argue for the successorship of the
9
An alternative way of reading this thesis is to view it as a translation of Romantic theory and
practices into the language of modern discourse ethics. For the Romantics, as we will see, translation
was the model of hermeneutics and criticism, for it allowed them to conceptualize both faithfulness to
an original meaning and a necessary shift concordant with a new linguistic context.
10
Some attention has been paid to this issue. Jane Kneller argues that it is precisely this emphasis
on collective activity that differentiates the Early German Romantics from other Romanticisms (Kneller,
“Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What We Can Learn from Early German Romanticism,”
Relevance of Romanticism 110–111). While her essay is excellent, it is also perfunctory.
12
Romantics to the Enlightenment (Immanuel Kant in particular), their dialogue with and
corrective status vis-à-vis their more mainstream philosophical contemporaries (Fichte in
particular), or their discovery, almost centuries in advance, of the insights of the twentieth
century (Heidegger and his successors in particular). Once more, it is undeniable that all of
these attempts to contextualize the Romantics—that is, to place them in dialogue with their
peers, predecessors, and successors—have opened fruitful pathways of scholarship. Our goal is
not to abandon these pathways so much as to reconnoitre a new one.
Accordingly, we will aim to bring the Romantics’ particular vision of discursive practices
itself into a broader and longer-standing debate concerning the relationship between discourse
and rationality. Our dialogue partners will, like the above readings, consist of predecessors and
contemporaries of the Romantics, as well as contemporary reinterpretations thereof: in taking
up Kant’s enlightenment discourse alongside F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s theory of sociability, we
examine the social constitution of the self and how the education of cognitively active and
autonomous individuals is possible (chapter 2); in taking up Fichte’s 1804 Wissenschaftslehre
lectures alongside Schlegel’s theory of irony, we examine how the thoroughgoing skepticism of
irony can nevertheless represent a truth-oriented, properly philosophical method (chapter 3); in
taking up Onora O’Neill’s modern rereading of Kant’s discourse, we examine how normativity
arises from discursive practices, and how holding an ideal picture of one’s audience does not
13
necessarily imply a self-exile from community (chapter 4). This thesis is structured as a
discussion of each of these thinkers respectively.
Descriptions of Individual Chapters
Chapter 1
Our starting point is the locus of so many critiques of Romanticism: the Romantic
picture of the individual genius. For this purpose, Hegel will prove for us our first fruitful
dialogue partner. Hegel was Schlegel’s most well known, and perhaps his most vociferous,
contemporary critic; thus it is only by going through the Hegelian critique that one can begin to
comprehend Schlegel’s reception in his own lifetime. Our goal will be to extrapolate the various
aspects of Hegel’s critique from within the context of his system. This requires of us a two-fold
approach: aesthetic and ethical.
First, we situate these criticisms by Hegel in the context of his aesthetics by means of a
comparison with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Specifically, we show how Kant’s
concept of genius implies an egoistic and elitist stance towards aesthetic production similar to
the ontological production of Hegel’s Romantic genius: the origin of beautiful art is, and can
only be, the exceptional ego. Both of these aspects (the accusations of egoism and elitism)
emerge in his aesthetics and come to heavily inform Hegel’s broader critique of the Romantic
individual.
14
Noting that Hegel’s criticism of the Romantics is not merely aesthetic, we will not stop
here. Instead, and this is our second point, we situate these criticisms within the wider
philosophical history provided by the Hegelian system, that is, his account of the arrival of
‘morality’ and the increasing authority granted to the subject. For Hegel, the Romantics fall
within this long lineage, beginning with Socrates and including the likes of Fichte, which
reinterpreted truth itself as requiring critical reflection and confirmation by a subject; indeed,
Hegel reads this Romantic circle as being the apex of this historical progression, radicalizing
the quite proper and timely demands of the likes of Socrates—the demand of the subjective
confirmation of truth—and, in the end, providing a kind of absolute authority to the particular
ego. The Jena circle thereby comes to reveal the radical danger that was inherent in morality all
along: the destruction of all universality as such, and with it the plunging of the self into
contingency, arbitrariness, and evil. This playful skepticism of the subject who flits away from
all truth and universality is what Hegel understands to be Romantic irony.
For clarity’s sake, we come to divide Hegel’s critique into three distinct parts: first, as
per his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel accuses the Romantics of illicitly finitizing the Fichtean
ego, thereby claiming the ground of all truth and meaning to be the individual subject (we call
this Romantic egoism); second, also from the aesthetic writings, Hegel claims that the picture
of the Romantic ego is not available to all, but implies a stratification of humanity along lines of
activity and passivity (we call this Romantic elitism); third, from Hegel’s broader philosophical
15
history, Hegel accuses the Romantics of granting absolute authority to the individual, a
position shown to be deeply pernicious by the former’s picture of community as ethical life (we
call this the authoritarianism of the particular). These three aspects taken together we will dub
Hegel’s social critique of the Romantics.
The remainder of this thesis will argue against the main aspects of this criticism’s
applicability to the Early German Romantics, in particular Schlegel. Despite this, Hegel’s
criticism of the Romantics is broad, scathing, and historically important, if for no other reason
than his gargantuan stature in the subsequent decades and centuries. Accordingly, we will not
only explore Hegel’s criticisms; we will use his claims to frame the entire thesis. Extracting
three aspects of Hegel’s critique of the Romantics as a framing mechanism, we proceed to give
an account of the Romantic subject as dependent on its community (chapter 2), the Romantic
vision of cultural production as thoroughly non-elitist (chapters 3), and what truly qualifies as
having authority, for the Romantics (the self-creating historical community) (chapter 4).11 The
examination of all three of these issues together will, in turn, build up to a fulsome picture of
the sense-making discursive practices of the Romantics.
11
While this threefold division is helpful, we must note that it is also somewhat artificial: none of
the three aspects of Hegel's critique are truly separable. While egoism is primarily dealt with in chapter 2
on Schleiermacher, this chapter also touches upon the issue of populism vs. elitism in discursive
practices; and while elitism is primarily covered in chapter 3 on Schlegel, this will also clearly depend on
a non-egoistic ontology and epistemology. Such issues cannot be absolutely separated. Still, this division
of Hegel’s critique gives us a schematic of approach to our issues.
16
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 begins our push back against Hegel’s social critique by exploring the first
aspect, namely the purported egoism of the Romantics. Examining the most explicit
theorization of Romantic sociability, that of Schleiermacher, we show the Romantic self to be
constituted communally through the circulation of intersubjective activity; accordingly, we
examine not only the Romantic concept of sociability but likewise extrapolate the Romantics’
own discursive practices that are implied by this concept. With an eye to the latter, we begin
with an examination of Kant’s Enlightenment discourse.
For Kant, the issue of enlightenment concerns the ability of individuals to think for
themselves, that is, to be cognitively autonomous rather than heteronomous. Yet, for Kant,
autonomy does not imply that an individual requires no community or is somehow absolved
from other minds; indeed, Kant claims quite the opposite, stating that while to enlighten
oneself is all but impossible, its achievement is almost inevitable when we increase our scope
and examine a community (a public).
Kant provides a fruitful point of comparison with Schleiermacher for several reasons.
First, Kant himself is quite aware of the egoism described by Hegel—Kant calls it logical
egoism—, and much of his account of enlightenment aims to argue for its futility. Second, Kant
bears striking similarities to Schleiermacher with respect to how the problem of logical egoism
is to be dealt with, claiming the community to be the condition for thought itself, properly
17
understood; both Kant and Schleiermacher, in other words, argue for the fundamental sociality
of cognition and that the subject comes to be constituted within a social milieu. In dialogue
with both Hegel and the Romantics, Kant is thus provides a horizon on which a charitable
defence of the Romantics can be coupled with a recognition for the importance of Hegel’s
concerns. Furthermore, and this is the third point, Kant’s short works on these themes reveal an
enormous number of tensions, for it is not at all clear how he can ward off egoism while holding
on to a strict picture of enlightenment as self activity; such issues, we argue, are more
adequately dealt with by Schleiermacher’s position.
This is to say that Schleiermacher does much more to provide an explicit
conceptualization of the interdependence of self and community, giving the name ‘absolute
reciprocity’ to this relationship of mutual mediation. Absolute reciprocity allows
Schleiermacher to provide a theory of humanity’s social nature and intersubjective activities
that foreground neither the ego nor the community exclusively. Accordingly, and against Hegel,
we will argue that the Romantic ego is no sort of absolute origin, but rather the result of that
ego’s situatedness within an intersubjective community; we will show that the Romantics hold
this position without submerging the former in the latter, as it is arguable that Hegel himself is
guilty of doing.
18
Chapter 3
Though chapter 2 furnishes us with a first glimpse of Romantic discursive practices and
allows us to extract the Romantic position regarding the mutuality of ego and community, this
point is by itself insufficient to nullify Hegel’s social critique. There are two reasons for this.
First, Schleiermacher focuses on a narrow band of discursive practices, drawing his inspiration
from the salons at the time; this leaves him open to Hegel’s second charge, that of the elitism
inherent in the Romantic conception of the ego-cum-genius. In other words, even if the
individual ego is no longer seen to be a pure origin, Schleiermacher’s account may simply shift
the ‘subject’ that bears authority to a narrow group of exceptional individuals. Furthermore,
although Hegel directs his critique at the broadside of the Romantic galleon, it was Schlegel and
his conception of irony that seemed particularly to attract his ire.
Chapter 3 tackles the issue of irony head-on. It argues that Schlegel’s irony can be seen
not merely as a kind of infinitizing skepticism that does away with universality and truth, but
rather as a method of deploying skepticism, of utilizing skepticism as a moment in our striving
(infinitely, fallibly) towards truth. By means of a comparison with the later Fichte’s so-called
‘constructive’ method, as found in the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre lectures, we will show that
Schlegel’s epistemic position does not coincide with the maladroit subjectivism of which he is
accused by Hegel.
19
Although truth, for Fichte, ultimately cannot fall within discourse, the performance of
discourse’s limitation and inevitable self-destruction can nevertheless lead to truth’s bestowal
in the form of a non-discursive insight; accordingly, Fichte associates his method, which he
calls ‘construction,’ with both the weaving and unraveling of concepts, or better, the
performance of the oscillation between construction and deconstruction. ‘Oscillation’ will be a
term that repeats in our discussion of Schlegelian irony. We will argue that, while Hegel was
quite right to point to the veiling and unveiling performances of irony, he was wrong about its
ends; Schlegel aims not to liquidate truth and universality, but rather to recognize, like Fichte,
our own finite position before truth as absolute. This leads him to develop a performative
method that accepts both the necessity of truth-claims and the necessarily contradictory nature
of finite claims to truth; yet Schlegel’s position also claims, now in contradiction to Fichte and
with a remarkable proximity to Hegel, that human finitude allows no escape from discourse.
Thus the later Fichte provides a useful foil to Schlegel for several reasons. First, as there
exist startling similarities between irony and construction as performative methods,
articulating them side-by-side brings to light in what manner irony can be understood as a
truth-oriented and properly philosophical way of approaching truth; indeed, irony simply
draws out the implications of both the regulative theory of truth held by the Romantics and
their recognition of the inescapability of discourse. This picture of irony stands in stark
contradiction to the picture of playful nihilism painted by Hegel.
20
Second, this properly philosophical method demands of the Romantics not only an
infinite approach towards truth, but furthermore an infinity of approaches towards truth. For
Schlegel, it is only by gathering together as many truth claims as possible that we can hope for
the progress of our endeavours. Accordingly, we will push back on Hegel’s accusation of elitism
with respect to the Romantics, arguing instead that what Schlegel intends by ‘Romantic poetry’
is an infinitely populist and cosmopolitan discourse. Here too Fichte will provide a useful
counter-image, for he maintains a kind of papal authority within the narrow community of
insight he solicits.
In addition to this rebuttal of the charge of elitism, the third reason Fichte proves useful
is that Schlegel’s disagreement with Fichte on the status of the truth as graspable here and now
directs us towards the proximity of Hegel and Schlegel with respect to their distrust of ‘pistolborne’ absolutes;12 that is to say that both Hegel and Schlegel see it as an unjustifiable and
ultimately mystical assumption that absolute truth can enter one’s discourse (even if the
modality of that entering requires discourse to fall aside).
Chapter 4
The fourth chapter takes up another issue at the core of Hegel’s criticisms, what we have
called the authoritarianism of the particular. The trajectory of this chapter may appear at first
12
To borrow a phrase from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Arnold J. Miller [Oxford;
Clarendon, 1977] 10).
21
oblique: we tackle the notion of the audience of the Romantics, the indirect object or the ‘to
whom’ of the Romantics’ discursive address. We will see that all of the Romantic commentary
on their audience seems to imply that they hold an ideal picture thereof. Despite appearances, it
will become clear that this issue is at the heart of the Hegel’s critique, for it allows us ask, within
the vocabulary of discourse and discursive practices, whether or not the Romantics are simply
content to speak only to themselves.
In other words, this chapter asks whether or not, despite the non-egoistic and nonelitist aspects of Romanticism explored in the prior chapters, the Romantics simply idealize
their interlocutors away. Hegel’s stance will come to be reframed: in chapter 1, the third aspect
of Hegel’s critique claimed that the Romantics grant absolute authority to the particular ego;
for us, chapters 2 and 3 will have rendered this claim implausible, and yet it is still necessary to
ask whether the accusation of the authoritarianism of the particular may persist in a more
surreptitious form. Despite Romantic rhetoric to the contrary, Hegel’s accusation will now
claim that even if the Romantics engage in a kind of discursive practice as opposed to mere
individualistic or aristocratic daydreaming, the Romantic conception of those with whom they
are to engage may be so narrow and unrealistic that it avoids actual others altogether. Whether
through wilful self-exile or mere self-deception, according to Hegel the Romantics find
themselves alone.
22
To develop the theme of audience, we turn once more to Kant’s enlightenment discourse.
This time we focus on the recent interpretation provided by O’Neill. Beginning with Kant’s texts
and his claims regarding the essential sociality of cognition, O’Neill creatively builds on Kant to
extrapolate various norms and strictures which must be in place for a discursive act to qualify
as ‘public reasoning.’ She comes to view a public or audience as determined by the authorities
presupposed by its members and, in turn, Kantian public reasoning to imply the attempt to
reach the widest possible audience. On O’Neill’s reading, therefore, Kantian public reasoning
amounts to nothing less than the pragmatic construction of reason itself as the widest possible
horizon of authority. In order to make this association between the widest reach and reason,
O’Neill makes a further claim regarding the ideal status of reason’s audience: her claim is that
the public with whom a reasoner must primarily transact is not the factual/empirical public,
but rather the ideal public.
Thus O’Neill’s reading not only claims the public to be idealized, it in fact deploys this
ideal public as the pivot around which claims to rationality and normativity must be staked.
Although defending herself against Hegel’s social critique is not her concern, she thereby
appears to leave herself open to it or similar charges. Nevertheless, we provide a reading of her
work that allows her to avoid this. We focus on her claim that an ideal public is always posited
by a particular finite individual staking a claim to reason, authority, and community; this
implies both that the ideal in question is not a pure Platonic ideal, but rather the result of an
23
attempt at self-transcendence by a historically situated individual, and that such reasoners
leave themselves humbly open to rebuke rather than arrogantly soap-boxing. O’Neill’s reasoners
act to solicit others to community and come to be vindicated only by the very success of that act.
In fact, this model of performative solicitation, and the necessity of a social warrant that
undergirds it, finds a predecessor in Kant’s own work; indeed, its model appears to closely
parallel Kant’s dialectic of genius and taste, the latter both clipping the nonsensical forays of
would-be geniuses and authenticating true genial works.13 This genial connection to O’Neill is
especially important insofar as the concept of genius is of great importance both to Hegel and
the Romantics themselves (see chapter 1).
O’Neill’s text therefore provides, at least in principle, the tools with which to develop a
defence of the Romantics’ discourse: an idealized audience is not to be seen in absolute and
arrogant opposition to empirical audiences; rather, an ideal audience is always projected from a
particular situated position; furthermore, just as with Kant’s genius, an act of idealization is
always also performed with an eye to changing the prevailing milieu. In what follows, we go on
to show just how the Romantics’ discourse amounts to such a grand performance, arguing that
it is designed to deploy textual means (i.e., irony and fragmentation) to solicit others and draw
their respective activities into the discursive fold. Thus the Romantics do idealize their
13
The etymology of these terms, ‘genius’ and ‘genial,’ is ultimately the same (from the Latin gen-),
however different their colloquial uses are in contemporary English. Paul W. Bruno describes the
etymology as follows: “the root of the word ‘genius’ comes from the Latin gen (to be born; to beget; to
come into being)” (Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third ‘Critique’
[London: Continuum, 2010] 9).
24
audience; yet in doing so they aim not to escape reality so much as alter it, that is, to take the
position of social prophets in closing the gap between the ideal and the real.
Still, pace Hegel’s social critique and the claims of the authoritarianism of the particular,
the Romantics avoid a stance of bare arrogance towards their audience, for they recognize the
importance of a social warrant. A community is required by the Romantics in order to vindicate
their claims. Yet, in contradiction to both Kant and Hegel, we argue that the Romantic
discourse does not associate this audience of genius with a merely passive taste, that
transcendental attunement that acts as the ultimate empirical buttress against the vainglorious
tyranny of novel nonsense, nor does it grant ultimate authority to the individual genius. Rather,
the social warrant envisioned by the Romantics comes to be itself understood in genial terms:
the Jena Circle saw their limiting social horizon as the genius of the age. The genius of the age is
factual in the sense that it indicates a shared sensibility of the prevailing historical milieu:
claims to community that are opposed to it will find no social traction—they will fail to
generate community or be origin-al. Yet there is within its name-sake of the genius of the age
an implicit idealization, for to call an audience ‘genius’ already indicates that it has the creative
power to transform itself.
Thus it is only Kant’s theory of genius, coupled with O’Neill’s account of public
reasoning, that offers the conceptual resources for addressing the final aspect of Hegel’s social
critique. The Romantics transform both and develop a picture of community as capable of its
25
own spontaneous change—a community that is active and reactive to the individuals within its
ken. There is a traditional picture of Romanticism as claiming that the sense-making nexus of
human beings is to be located in the hearts of exceptional individuals or geniuses.14 This text as
a whole attempts to elucidate the shifting concept of genius as it is deployed in Kant’s third
Critique, in Hegel’s criticisms of the Romantics, and in the Romantics’ texts themselves; by the
end of the thesis, we will have found that the Romantics hold a sociable picture of genius, where
the latter implies: first, that the individual genius requires a communal nexus in order to attain
to activity; second, that a social warrant is required in order to vouchsafe cultural productions
from becoming nonsensical (à la Kant’s genius); third, that the community itself is genial in the
sense that it, taken as a co-active whole, is capable of engaging in its own creative selftransformations. Thus the following work could also be described as an examination of the
Romantic genius—what we will ultimately dub the discourse of genius or genius as geniality.
Conclusion
Finally, with our conclusion it will have become clear that the Romantics’ discursive
practices represent a response to a particular problem within Hegel’s own account of freedom
in modernity. That is, we point out that a particular danger that arises with the Hegelian
picture is that communal freedom comes to be associated with a prevailing cultural ethos itself,
14
Hegel makes this connection quite explicitly, a point our first chapter examines.
26
and hence the ossified and monolithic content of cultural practices rather than the continued
dialogues and struggles that bring those norms about. To this extent, it is not clear that Hegel’s
account of ‘the ethical’ has the ability to take seriously either subcultures or shifts, let alone sea
changes, in the prevailing cultural ethos. In contrast, the Romantic position represents a
critical amendment to Hegel’s own position in the following respects: first, by arguing for a
necessary mutually reciprocal mediation between the individual and community, and by taking
seriously the potential for creative spontaneity from all individuals, the Romantics reveal that
the individual is always in dialogue with its cultural norms; yet, and second, the Romantics are
not content to simply claim this in principle, for they design discursive practices which act to
foster and develop that creative spontaneity. For both reasons, we conclude with the claim that
Romantics can be seen as the inheritors of the progenitor of irony: Socrates.
27
1. HEGEL AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE ROMANTIC GENIUS
Genius, we all know, was once all the rage in poetry, as it now is in philosophy; but when
its productions made sense at all, such genius begat only trite prose instead of poetry, or,
getting beyond that, only crazy rhetoric. So, nowadays, philosophizing by the light of
nature, which regards itself as too good for the Notion [Begriff], and as being an
intuitive and poetic thinking in virtue of this deficiency, brings to market the arbitrary
combinations of an imagination that has only been disorganized by its thoughts, an
imagery that is neither fish nor flesh, neither poetry nor philosophy.15
He is so much alone. He wishes there was a voice beside him; what sort of voice? A hand;
well, and? A body? But what for?16
1.1 Introduction
The following section will concern itself primarily with the exposition of Hegel’s account
and critique of Romantic unsociability. In broad terms, Hegel argues that the Early Romantics
engage in a wilful self-exile from their community, opting instead to plunge themselves into a
playful and self-absorbed nihilism. For Hegel, this latter stance is associated with his
15
16
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 42.
Robert Walser, “Kleist in Thun,” Selected Stories 18 (1982): 17–25.
28
understanding of the Romantic self, which he associates with irony.17 We will first present
Hegel’s argument against Romantic irony; we will see that he accuses the ironist18 of taking a
subjective stance towards the world that reduces all actuality to vacuousness and despair.
Subsequently, we will arrive at a tentative definition of irony as the reflexive and critical stance
of the genius-cum-ego who, by presenting and veiling its object at will, engages in a type of
auto-poetization.
After presenting Hegel’s criticisms, we note a certain ambiguity: his arguments seem to
be directed both at the ironic works and the actual authors themselves, with no clear
differentiation between the two. Accordingly, we take up the question of what art is for Hegel;
after showing that it is the sensuous manifestation of the Idea (the Ideal), which is to say the
language of a community about itself, we will attempt to show, through Hegel’s critique of
ironic characters, that Romanticism does not present the communal Ideal and, as such,
constitutes bad (untruthful) art within Hegel’s aesthetic framework.
In order to show more concretely what this means, we will compare the Hegelian
criticisms of irony with Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Kierkegaard proves a useful touchpoint
for us, since he both presents ironic characters and, in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony,
seems to agree entirely with Hegel’s reading of the Romantic self. It will be shown that, much
17
Thus Ernst Behler states that “irony is [the] most famous part of early Romantic theory and
became so closely associated with it that the two are often regarded as identical” (Behler, German
Romantic Literary Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993] 141).
18
For the purposes of this chapter, we follow Hegel’s use of ‘Romantic’ and ‘ironist’ as
interchangeable terms.
29
like what Hegel says of the irony of Socrates, irony in Kierkegaard’s text is a controlled
element—a means to a higher end rather than an end in itself. Thus we will find that Hegel’s
critique is properly directed not at ‘irony’ as such, but rather at a specific type of irony which, in
positing the ironizing subject as absolute, stands outside communal ‘language.’
Taking full stock of this anti-communal dimension will require us to connect Hegel’s
critique of the Romantics with similar anti-social tendencies he identifies more broadly with
the concept of genius. Using Kant’s third Critique as our paradigm for the concept of the genius,
we will show that Hegel’s arguments regarding the genius and the Romantic ego dovetail in
striking ways. According to Hegel, the conceptual and systemic reverberations of positing an
individual genius include egoism (the genius-ego is taken in a Fichtean sense as the selfgrounding origin of sense), elitism (the genius concept has the effect of dividing the mass of
humanity into strata: the creative and the receptive), and the authoritarianism of the particular
(the notion of genius involves granting absolute authority to the particular individual over the
universal and communal).19 These three aspects taken as a whole will constitute what we call
Hegel’s social critique of the Romantic genius, and will be used to frame the remainder of the
thesis.
19
The comparison is between Kant’s idea of genius and Romantic individualism according to
Hegel. In other words, we will draw on the Kantian conception of the genius to define how Hegel
understood the Romantic self. Carried beyond the confines of the aesthetic, this is a concept of the
subject that Kant himself would surely take issue with.
30
After having shown that Hegel’s critique of the Romantics parallels his criticisms of the
concept of genius in his aesthetics, we will argue that both critiques are underpinned and
rendered fully comprehensible by Hegel’s account of freedom in modernity, that is, his account
of the rise, as well as the overcoming, of morality (Moralität). Beginning with Socrates—the
origin figure of both irony and subjective freedom in modernity, and it is not incidental that he
is both—Hegel provides a philosophical history of the rise of the modern concept of
subjectivity; his claim is that what qualifies as truth itself undergoes a historical shift to include
the demands for reflexive substantiation by a subject. In this sense, Socrates was the first
modern subject. While Hegel sees truth in this historical lineage, he nevertheless claims that
this concept of subjectivity remains abstract: it must, much like the ideal of absolute
particularity he finds in Romantic art, undergo its necessary overcoming in the nexus of
communal life (the ethical, or Sittlichkeit).
1.2 Hegel's Critique of Romantic Irony
1.2.1 A Finite Fichte: The Romantic Self
Hegel’s polemic against aesthetic irony punctuates his lectures on aesthetics. At each
point, however, the logic of this criticism remains the same: he accuses the Romantic circle of
enacting an aesthetic individualization of the Fichtean ego. Schlegel, he writes, “started from
Fichte's standpoint,” meaning that both thinkers set “up the ego as the absolute principle of all
31
knowing.”20 Yet this ego is not, as it is for the early Fichte, the absolute transcendental principle;
rather, Hegel claims that Schlegel illicitly empiricizes Fichte’s ego, conflating it with the
individual artist-genius that poetizes itself as well as its object. For the early Fichte, the ego is
not to be taken as an individual, but rather an “abstract and formal”21 presupposition; it is not
individual genius, but rather the “atemporal epistemological presupposition”22 of all knowing.
Kierkegaard’s dissertation follows Hegel’s argument against the Early Romantics.23
Hegel’s point regarding the Fichtean ego is succinctly summarized by Kierkegaard as follows:
“the empirical and finite I was confused with the eternal I.”24 There are two consequences to
this. Firstly, the ego, taken as a limitless and pure creativity, comes to be seen as “disengaged
and free from everything.”25 Since the ego only recognizes itself as “absolute and independently
real,”26 everything other than itself “assumes a shape which is wholly in [the ego’s] power,”27 as
only being valid or meaningful for it. This means that the ego “knows it has the power to start
20
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon,
1975) vol. I, 64.
21
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 64.
22
Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989)
172.
23
I cite Kierkegaard here, who follows Hegel’s critique almost to the letter in the second part of
his dissertation. Cf. Stewart, Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered 171.
24
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992) 275).
25
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
26
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
27
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
32
all over again if it so pleases... anything that happened before is not binding[,]”28 since the ego
can just as easily reach back and negate this reality; in other words, the absolved ego “has no
past.”29
This kind of carefree situation may not seem as though it is a bad thing, especially in the
realm of aesthetics; after all, for the infinitely creative artist-genius, there seem few things
more desirable than to poetize without strictures, without external standards, and without the
hindrance of tradition or historicity. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard argue, however, that this
situation proves to be untenable, leading inevitably to a kind of egoistic despair. Since the
ironic stance reduces all objectivity to a “self-made and destructible show,”30 since all actuality
has been submerged in the ego’s subjectivity, it follows that “no actuality is adequate.”31 The ego
begins to realize that this kind of ‘actuality,’ which is constantly and merely at the ego’s disposal,
the kind of ‘actuality’ to be posed and disposed of at will, is no proper actuality at all.
As a result of this lack of substance, it is not only the object that is reduced to nullity, but
the ego itself. Since it has no criterion for choosing this or that beyond its own arbitrariness,32
28
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 293.
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 277. As Bob Dylan puts it: “she’s an artist, she don’t look back”
(“She Belongs to Me,” from the album Bringing It All Back Home).
30
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
31
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 283.
32
According to Schlegel, “…to transport oneself arbitrarily now into this, now into that sphere, as
if into another world, not merely with one's reason and imagination, but with one's whole soul; to freely
relinquish first one and then another part of one's being, and confine oneself entirely to a third; to seek
and find now in this, now in that individual the be-all and end-all of existence, and intentionally forget
29
33
the ego’s existence has forfeited “all continuity”33—all continuity, that is, aside from the
agitated and inconstant tremors of boredom and caprice. But to claim that this qualifies as
‘continuity’ is only to reiterate that the ego has itself been rendered non-actual, and this is
precisely what Kierkegaard means when he tells us that the ego, having “looked over a
multitude of destinies, usually in the form of possibility, has familiarized himself with them
poetically before he ends with nothing.”34
The ironic and absolute ego then, is itself nothing: it is sheer vacuousness, infinity
without finitude,35 subject without substance.36 The result, Hegel claims, is that the ironic
genius begins to recognize this emptiness, and to crave “for the solid and the substantial, for
specific and essential interests.”37 Subsequently, the absolved ego begins to wish itself to
become un-absolved, longing “for objectivity”38 and eventually engaging in a narcissistic
apostasy, i.e., coming to renounce itself as absolute. That is, in an effort to flee itself but lacking
everyone else” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. P. Firchow [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1991] Athenaeum Fragments #121).
33
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 284.
34
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 282.
35
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony 283.
36
This we can compare with the claim made by Hegel: “not only as Substance, but equally as
Subject” (Phenomenology of Spirit 10).
37
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
38
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
34
“the strength to escape from this vanity and fill himself with a content of substance,”39 the ego
submits its will to a higher authority.40
1.2.2 Provisional Definition of 'Romantic Irony'
Before either endorsing or renouncing the Hegelian critique of Schlegel, let us explicitly
define irony according to Hegel’s understanding. Irony, as it appears in Hegel’s account of
Schlegel, amounts to the egoistic stance of the subject who faces a world it knows to be of its
own making. From the perspective of the Romantic ‘genius,’41 this self-awareness leads to a
kind of disconnected playfulness, a critical detachment, wherein the artist hovers (schwebt)42
between the imaginative creation43 of its object and the rapturous flight that reveals that
object’s nullity. This movement allows, according to Hegel and Kierkegaard, no rest; instead, it
results in only a wild oscillation between creativity and negativity, between freedom and
freedom’s renunciation. Finally, this whole stance leads the ironist to a kind of a-moral
position: for an ego that recognizes only its own creative force as substantial, other subjects
39
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 67.
Kierkegaard points this out in relation to Schlegel’s old-age conversion to Catholicism (Concept
of Irony 290).
41
As we will soon see, Hegel articulates many of his criticisms in terms of the notion of the genius.
For example: “Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative
genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature” (Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I,
66).
42
This notion of hovering will again occupy us when we take up irony on Schlegel’s terms in
chapter 3.
43
“[A]uthor means creator” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #68).
40
35
come to be deprived not only of respect in a Kantian sense, but indeed all freedom in the selfmade show.
Bearing in mind this final point, let us step back for a moment and pose the following
question: just what does the Hegelian critique of irony amount to? Is this an aesthetic critique,
one directed towards the relative merit (or lack thereof) of the Ironist’s work? Or is this simply a
moral critique, a kind of personal or ethical polemic? Indeed, at times it seems difficult to deny
that Hegel’s stance towards Schlegel becomes bogged down in vitriol.44 Nevertheless, even if we
are to grant him rhetorical leeway, it may appear strange to some readers that a critique against
(what is prima facie) a literary and artistic movement concentrates so thoroughly on ethical
issues. As much as is possible, we must work to disentangle these issues.
1.2.3 Bad Art: Aesthetic and Ethical Criteria
It appears as though Hegel’s critique is operating on several registers at once.
Consequently we must ask: does Hegel’s critique amount to a charge of ethical subjectivism? If
so, what is the relation between the moral and aesthetic components of his argument? At this
point it may prove helpful to more clearly delimit three different registers of the Hegelian
criticism of irony, dealing with each in turn; there is,
44
For instance: “Schlegel's poems at the time when he imagined himself a poet” (Hegel, Aesthetics,
vol. I, 296). This vitriol was taken up by Hegel’s successors: Karl Ameriks speaks of “the influential
tendency of strands of Hegelianism that continue Hegel’s own vigorous campaign against romantic
writings, as if they must be tantamount to the espousal of social chaos and evil itself” (Ameriks, “History,
Succession, and German Romanticism,” Relevance of Romanticism 55).
36
1. A critique of the Ironists as individual authors, as being themselves anti-ethical agents;
2. A critique of the Ironists’ works as being filled with characters who are anti-ethical
agents (and hence as constituting bad art);
3. A critique of the Ironists as anti-ethical agents, a stance which necessarily leads to works
which are themselves filled with anti-ethical characters (and hence which constitute bad
art).
If Hegel were to be taken as arguing for the first position alone, it would surely strike
one as odd. If he takes issue only with the personal moral stance of a specific cabal of authors,
why would he end up devoting such a lengthy section of his lectures on aesthetics to such a
topic, beyond the incidental fact of these authors being aestheticians? Indeed, though this
argument is perhaps interesting in itself, in context it would amount to little more than
polemic or ad hominem, suited more to a character-defaming pamphlet than a lecture course.
For this reason the second position seems as though it should be more pertinent, and
indeed Hegel does directly criticize the characters found in the Romantic works. Employing
many of the same claims that we have explored regarding the absolutization and non-actuality
of the subject, Hegel points sardonically to the variety of character traits “which [do] not come
together into a unity, so that every character destroys itself as character.”45 He claims finally
45
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 243.
37
that, as a result, the works and the characters within these works are “worthless and without
bearing”;46 they are, in short, the building blocks of bad art.
Nevertheless, Hegel’s critique cannot solely be construed as an aesthetic critique, since
it is quite clear at points that he is speaking of the authors of the works and not merely the
works themselves. He speaks, for instance, of those whose goal is “living as an artist and
forming one’s life artistically.”47 Thus Hegel’s position must be the third possibility pointed out
above, namely a wholesale critique of irony as such, as being both an existential/moral and
artistic standpoint.
An important question to be posed at this point is whether the two sides flow inevitably
from or into one another; that is, is Hegel claiming that the existential ironist, fancying
him/herself an artist, is doomed to create bad art?48 Further, in gesturing towards this coimplication of art and artist, a worry arises regarding Hegel’s critique. Given what we have said
above, can it be concluded that Hegel views art as being subordinated to ethical instruction? Is
it only because of their non-moral stance that ironic characters constitute bad art, art that is not
46
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
48
Corroborating evidence for such an interpretation is found at several points in his Lectures on
Aesthetics: for instance, we are told that, for the artist, “his works are the best part and the truth [of
him]… what he is [in his works], that he is… but what remains buried in his heart, that he is not” (Hegel,
Aesthetics, vol. I, 291). Thus it seems that Hegel does indeed ascribe to the view that irony’s stance
necessarily unfolds in both the realms of life and art; indeed, the artist-subject cannot be viewed
otherwise than through what it produces: the subject is found in and through the work.
47
38
schön or beautiful?49 More broadly, just what is the connection between the two aspects (the
moral and the aesthetic) of Hegel’s criticism of irony?
The connection between the moral and the aesthetic—and the necessary hangingtogether thereof in this context—can, as we will see momentarily, be made clear only by
exploring Hegel’s notion of fine art. In the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel states that this “beauty
is only a specific way of expressing and representing the true”;50 nevertheless, if art is a
presentation of truth, we must still ask just what is intended here by the word ‘truth.’ Earlier in
his introduction, Hegel tells us that it is the absolute “Idea as such [that is] the absolute truth,”51
meaning that art’s role is to bring “home to consciousness their object [viz.] the Absolute.”52 The
Absolute here is absolved Spirit; it is its own “absolute activity”53 of self-differentiation, a
differentiation that posits its own other and overcomes this breach. Thus it can be seen as the
movement or process of infinite Spirit overcoming finite oppositions: between “freedom and
necessity, between spirit and nature, between knowledge and its object, between law and
impulse.”54
49
The adjective schön must be understood to have a wider range than its English counterpart,
encompassing ‘fine’ and ‘good.’
50
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 91. We see Hegel react to the alienation of art from truth by his
predecessors (especially Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement). Kant argued for the autonomy of
the aesthetic sphere precisely by way because of its alienation from truth.
51
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 73.
52
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 101.
53
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 92.
54
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 100.
39
It follows that art’s role is to mend the antinomies and tensions of the finite world.
Nevertheless, Hegel’s claim is that the Idea in art cannot be “the Idea as such,”55 or the absolute
Idea proper; indeed, the absolute Idea can only be “grasped in thought,”56 whereas the artistic
sphere is always to be limited by its sensuousness. This is why Hegel draws a distinction
between the Idea and beauty: he writes, “when truth in this its external existence is present to
consciousness immediately, when the Concept remains immediately in unity with its external
appearance, the Idea is not only true but beautiful.”57 Thus art is the “free reconciled totality” of
Idea and sensuousness;58 it is spiritualized59 sensuousness and sensuous Idea, or the “pure
appearance [Schein]60 of the Idea to sense.”61 This means that, rather than the absolute Idea
proper, we can state instead that art is the ideal.
Given art’s relation to truth, we should not be surprised that Hegel includes it in “the
same province” as religious and philosophical activities.62 This is what he calls “the realm of fine
art is absolute spirit”63—those activities of Spirit that present the Absolute,64 that is, present
55
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 73.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 111.
57
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 111.
58
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 70.
59
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 39.
60
We note here in passing the ambiguity in the German word Schein: much like in English, the
word ‘appearance’ can bear the sense of ‘deception’ (mere appearance) or ‘that which appears from itself’
(as the manifestation of truth). It is the latter sense that Hegel appears to have in mind.
61
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 111.
62
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 94.
63
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 94.
64
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 101.
56
40
Spirit to Spirit. Art is the first and most immediate form thereof: in art, Spirit begins to wrest
itself from the immediacy of nature (desire, impulse) by means of “sensuous knowing… in
which the absolute is presented to contemplation and feeling.”65 Like religion and philosophy,
art is the ‘language’ of the community about itself; this language, broadly understood, allows
Spirit an auto-presentation of its “deepest interests [and] most comprehensive truths.”66 In
other words, art is a presentation of “who and how we are, and of how 'things' are for us[,]”67
proffered by the community to itself for the purposes of its self-recognition.68 Thus the
community is brought before itself, finding “itself again in the objet d’art,”69 and thereby
domesticating the ruptures of finitude and otherness.70
65
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 101.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 7.
67
J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno
(Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 73. Cf. M. J. Inwood's claim that art “progressively reveals the nature of world,
of man and the relationship between them (the absolute)” (Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary [Oxford:
Blackwell Reference, 1992] 42).
68
Cf. “man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is.... man as
spirit duplicates himself... [he is] for himself; he sees himself, represents himself to himself” (Hegel,
Aesthetics, vol. I, 31).
69
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 246.
70
Here Hegel both manifests and acknowledges his debt to Schiller’s aesthetics. Schiller argues in
the Kallias Letters that beauty is freedom in appearance (“Kallias, or Concerning Beauty: Letters to
Gottfried Körner,” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein [Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1993] 145–185). His claim is that reason, in encountering objects that appear to be entirely selfdetermining—these objects obey the laws arising from their own natures—finds therewith an analogue
to its own practical autonomy. While there are clearly connections to be made here, Beiser points out
that Hegel does more than merely acknowledge this debt; rather, his reading is an attempt to subsume
Schiller’s position and take it as a mere historical antecedent to his own. For Beiser, by contrast, it is
crucial to keep in mind Schiller’s Kantianism: for Schiller beauty is freedom merely in appearance; Hegel
has the other sense of appearance in mind, i.e., freedom as manifestation. Thus Beiser states that this
reading of Schiller, “has been especially propagated by Hegel and Marx scholars. Supposedly, Schiller’s
66
41
We have come to an understanding of what Hegel sees art to be: it is the Ideal, the
‘language’ a community speaks to itself in the ongoing process of sense-making, of placing
itself bei sich. In short, the truth that is art’s concern is communal truth. With this in mind we
ask once more: does Hegel subordinate art to ethical concerns? The answer, it seems, is a
categorical no. Though Hegel admits that art can be employed in the service of ethical
instruction,71 he tells us that it should not and cannot be “restricted to this usefulness”;72 indeed,
Hegel will go on to call such wholesale subordination a “perverse idea”73 since art, in order to be
art (i.e., present the Ideal), must be “free alike in its end and its means.”74 He sums up his
position in the following terms:
We maintain that art's vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic
configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition, and so to have its end and aim in
itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling... other ends, like instruction, purification,
famous definition of beauty as freedom in appearance anticipates Schelling’s and Hegel’s doctrine that
beauty is the sensible appearance of the idea. This reading completely ignores, however, Schiller’s
insistence that the idea of freedom has to be read into appearances, and that beauty is a strictly
normative or regulative principle” (Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Reexamination [Oxford: Clarendon,
2005] 11).
71
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 48–50.
72
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 51.
73
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 55.
74
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 7. This is Hegel’s take on the notion of aesthetic autonomy, the idea that
art is its own domain with its own rules, i.e., that it is not subservient to moral or epistemological
standards.
42
bettering, financial gain, struggling for fame and honour, have nothing to do with the
work of art as such, and do not determine its nature.75
This passage is as clear an answer as can possibly be given. Hegel follows Kant in
avoiding the subjugation of art to anything outside itself, avoids removing from art its own
domain of standards, its own raison d’être. From this point, we can draw out the conclusion
that Hegel’s critique of irony, if he is to be consistent, cannot be solely ethical: it cannot be that
ironic art is ‘bad’ simply because it does not present ethical characters. In order to critique
ironic works (qua works of art), Hegel must attempt to show that they do not live up to what art
is supposed to be, namely the presentation of the Ideal; he must show that ironic works are not
an instance of a community’s self-reflexive discourse, its presentation of itself to itself.
Let us bear this point in mind and return to Hegel’s more explicit critique of ironic
artworks. We saw above how Hegel critiques the characters found in such works: his claim is
that, whereas true character requires both “essentially worthy aims” and a “a firm grip of such
aims,” the ironic ‘genius’ presents ironic characters that wallow in their own “insincerity [and]
hypocrisy.”76 Later in the lectures, Hegel contrasts these “wishy-washy”77 exemplars of
mediocrity78 with the characters from Shakespearean tragedy; the latter, though they are often
75
76
77
78
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 55.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
He associates this with Schlegel’s Lucinde.
43
unabashedly outside of communal ethical standards, are nevertheless “self-consistent… they
remain true to themselves and their passion, and in what they are and in what confronts them
they beat about according only to their own fixed determinacy of character.”79
If we contrast the above with what Hegel tells us about irony’s “nullity and indecision,
and trash of this sort,”80 then we begin to understand his claim that the latter work “can awaken
no genuine interest.”81 It seems that it is not merely that the characters of irony are evil, since it
appears that even evilness could reveal a community’s highest truths to itself, by contrast or
otherwise. Hegel’s issue with the ironist is, to the contrary, that his/her characters are more
precisely un-characters: they are the vacuous manifestations of the whims of a particular
author who has created them as the means to ratify his own absolution. From this we can infer
that ironic works of art do not present a communal ideal, do not accord to the concept of art;
put differently, we could say that the ironist, in him/herself and positing him/herself as a
spurious absolute, is not speaking the ‘language’ of the community at all. Instead, he/she has
become idiosyncratic in the etymological sense. This is why, Hegel claims, “on the part of irony
there are steady complaints about the public's deficiency in profound sensibility, artistic insight,
and genius, because it does not understand this loftiness of irony.”82
79
80
81
82
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 579.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 244.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
44
From this point, we may conclude that Hegel’s critique of irony is not merely a
moral/ethical critique, and that it is not solely directed at the Ironists themselves. Instead, it
seems that Hegel’s critique employs his definition of art (as presenting truth, the Ideal, to a
community) in order to show that ironic art is not only non-ethical, but that it is also bad art,
art that does not present the spiritual-communal Ideal. With this in mind, the question we wish
to pose is simply whether or not it is possible, in Hegel’s framework, for irony to be related to
truth—that is, whether an ironic portrayal could aspire to the Ideal and become good art. In
order to explore this in a more concrete manner, we will turn to the works of Kierkegaard.
1.2.4 Finite and Infinite Ironies
Kierkegaard, in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, presents a lengthy account of
irony from Socrates to the post-Fichtean Romantics. Yet, as Jon Stewart points out,
“Kierkegaard's criticisms of these Romantics is largely borrowed from Hegel.”83 Soon after The
Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard deploys much of this thinking again, this time in a concretized
and literary form: the first half of Either/Or presents the collected papers of the existential
ironist (aesthete) that we know only under the name ‘A’; the text is fragmentary, disjointed,
unsystematic and unrelenting in its sardonic humour. More importantly for our purposes, it
appears quite similar to Kierkegaard’s (and Hegel’s) description of ironic works.
83
Stewart, Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered 171.
45
Indeed, certain characters in Kierkegaard’s text seem to precisely fit the Hegelian
account of the ironic subject. The Seducer’s Diary, for instance, presents an ego that approaches
the world as though it were his own making, or in the words of the aesthete himself, with an
“artistically consummate, calculated carelessness[.]”84 The seducer relates to reality with the
self-reflexive calculation and artifice that allows him to ensnare a young girl named Cordelia.
He seduces her, but this ‘seduction’ does not involve the banal physical realm of biological lusts;
rather, the seducer wishes to poetize the woman—that is, sculpt and compose her—and in the
same stroke poetize himself as her poet.85 The seducer succinctly describes his work in the
following terms: “The highest form of enjoyment conceivable is to be loved, loved more than
everything in the world... to poeticize oneself into a girl is an art, to poeticize oneself out of her
a masterpiece.”86 We see then, that this is no mere lust: it is a “spiritual concupiscence,”87
reflexively aimed at the power of the seducer himself: “I am intoxicated with the thought,” he
tells us, “that she is in my power.”88
Despite this intoxication (or perhaps because of it), the seducer’s power is employed in
the most arbitrary and absurd ways. At times, for instance, he seeks for and revels in a mere
“greeting,”89 a glance, or a “picture of her”90 in memory as she passes him on the street.
84
85
86
87
88
89
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992) 247.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 269.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 306.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 338.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 314.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 250.
46
Eventually the preservation of this ideal is best served by the engagement’s ending; late in the
text, he tells us that he must now “prepare everything for the breaking-off of the engagement,
so as to ensure a more beautiful and more significant relationship with Cordelia”;91 the object of
his ‘affection,’ it seems, can only be preserved in and as a memory.
It is not difficult to see the similarities between the Diary and Hegel’s account of the
ironist: the self-reflexivity and detachment of the genius-cum-seducer with respect to Cordelia,
the negativity of ‘A’ with respect to all determinations, the self-poetization of the genius
through the ‘work’ (both textual and erotic), etc. Even the despair and flight for solidity
predicted by Hegel is evident in other sections of Either/Or: A himself (who is the likely seducer,
Kierkegaard’s ‘editor’ Victor Eremita tells us) is doomed to “constantly [seek] an exit and forever
[find] an entrance through which he returns into himself”;92 he is trapped in his own vacuous
ego, and while the seduction is “terrible for her,” A claims that “it will be more terrible for
him.”93
At this point, it will be sufficient to point to Kierkegaard’s dissertation in order to
unearth a certain perplexity. As mentioned before, The Concept of Irony echoes many of the
same criticisms that Hegel had already rallied against the ironist. Kierkegaard writes of
90
91
92
93
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 273.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 313.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 252.
Kierkegaard, Either/Or 253.
47
Schlegel’s characters and their “superior indolence that cares for nothing at all,”94 and in
general an attitude of artistic genius that seeks to “cancel all actuality and substitute for it an
actuality that is no actuality.”95 But if this is indeed the case, what is going on in Either/Or? Did
Kierkegaard simply change his mind shortly after submitting his dissertation? And if not, how
is it that Kierkegaard can coherently criticize Schlegel and so soon afterwards produce a work
that presents, as he claims of Lucinde, a brazenness “so charming and interesting that by
comparison morality, modesty, and decency… appear to be very insignificant characters”?96
Indeed, Kierkegaard’s words here parallel those of his erstwhile mentor J. L. Heiberg in his
review of Either/Or. Heiberg writes of the Diary that: “one is disgusted, one is nauseated, one is
revolted, and one asks oneself not whether it is possible for a person to be like this seducer but
whether it is possible that an author can be so constituted that he finds pleasure in setting
himself into a character of this kind and in working out this character in his quiet thoughts.”97
What is going on? Perhaps Either/Or is not ironic in exactly the same manner as, for
instance, Hegel claims of Schlegel’s Lucinde. In his dissertation, Kierkegaard posits a
distinction between finite irony and infinite irony, or irony as “infinite absolute negativity.”98
After polemicizing against Schlegelian irony, Kierkegaard begins a new chapter entitled “Irony
94
95
96
97
98
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 291.
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 290.
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 290.
Heiberg, quoted in Stewart, Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered 234.
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 261.
48
as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony.”99 His tone here differs markedly from the prior
chapter, and he tells us that, despite the critiques he and Hegel have levelled, irony should not
(and indeed cannot) be disregarded by human subjects. This is why we find that, with certain
authors and in certain instances (Shakespeare and Goethe are the great artists explicitly
named), irony is a vital element in the work. This is so, according to Kierkegaard, if and only if
irony “is in turn ironically controlled,”100 itself put at an (artistically exploited) distance; that is,
irony is now a certain trope or dialectical moment, a “controlled element”101 that serves a
purpose beyond the vainglorious revelry of the poet’s subjectivity. The result is that the poet is
not merely negatively free in the sense that he is not determined by outside limits; the poet is,
rather, “integrated in the age in which he lives, is positively free in the actuality to which he
belongs.”102 In short, this finite “irony simultaneously makes the poem and poet free,”103 but
only with the qualification that “the poet himself must be a master over the irony.”104
99
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 324.
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 324.
101
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 325.
102
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 326. Again, this should ring clearly with a Hegelian note.
103
This picture of self autonomy through aesthetic autonomy should remind the reader of Kant
and Schiller (see subsequent sections). Compare the following remarks by Hegel: “he leaves it free as an
object to exist on its own account; he relates himself to it without desire, as to an object which is for the
contemplative side of spirit alone” (Aesthetics, vol. I, 38).
104
Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 324.
100
49
What arises is a kind of taxonomy of irony. A similar point is made by Hegel in his
Lectures on the History of Philosophy,105 as well as his Philosophy of Right, this time in the
context of Socratic irony. Hegel here tells us that Socrates employed irony in order “to defend
the Idea of truth and justice against the complacency of the uneducated consciousness and that
of the Sophists; but it was only this consciousness which he treated ironically, not the idea
itself.”106 Again, irony is here a means and not an end; this is a point succinctly summarized by
Robert R. Williams when he states that Socratic irony is not a “final or absolute position, but
rather a transition from immersion in finitudes towards something higher that both limits and
disposes the self”;107 thus, in contrast to the Hegelian reading of the Romantics, “Socrates still
pursues substantial interests, albeit in a different way.”108
Thus it seems that both Kierkegaard and Hegel see qualitative differences within the
wider category of ironic practice. Within Hegel’s framework, we can map these types on to
Kierkegaardian and Schlegelian irony, the latter representing a will to infinity, the will to
ironize for its own sake, and it seems to be this stance and this stance specifically with which
both Kierkegaard and Hegel take issue. Thus, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or must be seen as an
105
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. I, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans. Robert F.
Brown, J. M. Stewart with H. S. Harris (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 135–136.
106
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge UP, 2006) 180.
107
Robert R. Williams, “Hegel on Socrates and Irony,” Hegel's History of Philosophy: New
Interpretations, ed. D. A. Duquette (Albany: SUNY, 2003) 78.
108
Williams, “Hegel on Socrates and Irony” 78.
50
attempt to employ irony for a higher end or purpose. Kierkegaard contextualizes irony, and in
doing so puts it to work.
We are now in a position to ask the following question: if art’s role is to make manifest a
communal truth, that is, if art is the language that tells us “who and how we are, and of how
'things' are for us[,]”109 why is irony to be absolutely excluded? Kierkegaard’s account of the
seducer is surely a poignant psychological portrait and, granting this, there seems no
immediate reason why it should be excluded, as an ironic work, from the sphere of good art
tout court. Why is it impossible for a community to recognize itself in Kierkegaard’s aesthete if,
after all, there are individuals in the community who act in this way? Is Kierkegaard not, by
aesthetically presenting this behaviour, revealing a particular stance vis-à-vis the universal that
is possible in modernity?
1.2.5 Irony, Romantic Egoism and Genius
The above discussion implies that we could take Hegel’s critique of romanticism as
hyperspecific, i.e., as directed not against irony in general (which can be employed finitely as a
moment in a wider reaching dialectic), but rather against the lives and works of a specific cabal
of ironic artists, Schlegel in particular. Yet if Hegel is engaged in a direct and hyperspecific
polemic, it seems important to pose the question as to why Hegel devotes the time and vitriol to
109
Bernstein, Fate of Art 73.
51
Schlegel that he does.110 As we will soon see, what is in contention goes beyond the specificity of
a particular and personal polemic.111 For Schlegel is singled out for infinitizing the ego’s activity
and, as it were, speaking a private and self-glorifying, rather than communal, ‘language.’ What
is at stake here, in other words, is not the individual or individuals targeted (Schlegel and
company), but rather the very understanding of particularity and its concomitant relation to
universality—the same understanding that Kierkegaard ironically portrays and that Hegel and
Kierkegaard believe the Early Romantics exemplify.
This understanding of particularity and universality we have already begun to explore
by pointing to the status of the Romantic ego as a finitization of the Fichtean ego, that is, as an
absolute and spontaneous origin. In broad terms, it is apt to begin calling this the concept of
the Romantic ‘genius’: it is the word ‘genius,’ as Hegel himself insinuates, that articulates the
Romantic social philosophy, that is, the Jena circle’s understanding of how the individual ego
(the particular) relates to the community (the universal). Yet in the nineteenth century genius
was first and foremost an aesthetic conception. Accordingly, with an eye to better
understanding the broader social philosophy that undergirds the genius figure, it will now be
110
Paul de Man seems amused by the vitriolic reactions that Schlegel seems to elicit: “…whoever
wrote about [Lucinde] later—and some very big names wrote about it—got extraordinarily irritated
whenever this novel came up… this is the case most notoriously with Hegel, who refers to Schlegel and
Lucinde and loses his cool, which doesn’t happen easily to Hegel” (de Man and Andrzej Warminski, “The
Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996] 168).
111
Though we must make no mistake: Hegel’s attacks are personal as well. For a recounting of his
various personal swipes at Schlegel, see Reid, The Anti-Romantic 11–49.
52
fruitful for our purposes to explore Hegel’s conception of the artist in comparison to that of
Kant’s highly influential account of genius from his third Critique.
1.3 Kant's Theory of Genius
This section connects Hegel’s criticisms of Romantic irony with his broader critique of
the concept of the individual genius; for a theory of genius that is both paradigmatic and highly
influential, we turn to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement.112 We will find that, while
Kant avails himself of the infinitely active, spontaneous, and naturalized genius-ego for
systemic reasons, Hegel shies away from the concept. Instead, Hegel argues that we can only
understand the artist as a socio-historically constituted; that is to say that his conception of the
artist, much like his conception of art, is communal and historical in a thoroughgoing sense.
From there we will explicitly explore Hegel’s concerns regarding the bare egoism, elitism, and
authoritarianism of particularity involved with the genius concept, and thereby render clear
that Hegel’s criticisms of the Romantics take place in and around the conceptual nexus of the
genius.
Yet, while admitting that many of these criticisms appear to apply to the Romantics, the
argument of this work will be that all of these points—elitism, egoism, and absolution of
particularity—are not what the Romantic notion of genius implies; indeed, the argument that
112
Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013) 337–338.
53
will be developed in subsequent chapters will show that it is precisely the opposite: the
Romantic genius is in the strictest sense a social conception of genius, one that bears with it a
very different notion of sociability, authority, and availability of creative power than those
implied by Hegel. Let us now turn to these issues, beginning with the aesthetic genius and the
implied social philosophy therein.
1.3.1 Beauty and the Third Critique
Kant’s third Critique is not a philosophy of art, nor even a philosophy of beauty.
Attempting to find a middle way between the idealist aesthetics (which argued for the
perfection-grounded ‘objectivity’ of beauty and claimed that beauty has scientific rules) and
empiricist aesthetics (which argued for the feeling-grounded subjectivity and non-cognitive
status of judgements of taste), Kant turns to the power of judgement itself,113 and hence can be
understood as providing an account of the transcendental faculty of judgement. Specifically,
Kant’s notion of judgement posits a distinction between judgements of two sorts:
determinative and reflective judgements.114
Let us explore this distinction. In the Critique of Pure Reason, in developing his general
theory of mind and epistemology, Kant presents a theory of how our cognitive faculties interact
113
Christian Helmut Wenzel writes, “compared with previous aesthetic theories, Kant’s approach
is marked by a certain shift in focus, a shift from the object to the judging about the object” (Wenzel, An
Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005] 2).
114
A distinction already posited, though not greatly elaborated, in the first Critique.
54
to give rise to the finite empirical world. A representation115 for Kant is a general term, denoting
a perception, sensation, intuition, or a concept.116 Concepts are applied to sensible intuitions by
the understanding,117 in order to form determinate cognitions. The faculty of imagination is
tasked with mediating between the faculty of intuitions (sensibility) and the faculty of concepts
(understanding); the imagination performs this mediation by presenting a synthesized
manifold of intuitions to the understanding for the sake of their conceptual determination.118
According to Kant, the imagination gathers together and presents a sensual manifold, leading
to judgement, under the rule-governing guidance of the understanding, to determine an
experience (as experience) by way of applying a concept.
In normal cognition, then, both the imagination and judgement come under the
authority of the understanding. In general terms, we can say that concepts are applied to
sensible intuitions by judgement in order to form determinate cognitions, i.e. experience as
such. In the third Critique, by contrast, Kant argues that this ordinary cognition is not the only
way in which these faculties operate. In the context of aesthetic judgement, he claims, the
imagination presents an empirical manifold, but this time it does not fall to the decisiveness of
the understanding to determine the experience; instead, the imagination presents the manifold
115
Representation (Vorstellung) contrasts with Darstellung (presentation), which implies “making
something sensible” and intuitable (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans.
Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000] 351).
116
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) A320/B377.
117
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A50/B75.
118
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A124.
55
again and again with differing aspects and, at the same time, the understanding applies various
concepts again and again, but none in a ‘final’ or conclusive way.
Thus, whereas determinative judgement passes from the (already available) universal to
the particular,119 determining120 it by means of a rule-cum-concept, reflective judgement passes
from the particular to the (not yet available) universal.121 This reflection thus takes the aspect of
a search, and furthermore a ceaseless one:122 instead of predicating something of an object
(circularity, colour, etc.) and determining the experience, beauty remains fundamentally in
search of a universal: beauty, rather than giving rise to a conclusion, spurs instead a ceaseless
reciprocal interplay between one’s cognitive powers.
Famously, Kant calls this reciprocity ‘free play.’ Crucial in understanding free play is that
rules (concepts) are still in play here, but rather than contemplating (or taking pleasure in) any
singular possibility, I take pleasure in the very process of passing over this whole range of
119
Kant describes determinative judgements in the Critique of Pure Reason as “the faculty of
subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a
given rule” (A132/B171), and further as a “peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be
taught” (A133/B172).
120
Does Kant mean that a concept is determined by being provided an appropriate intuition, or
that an intuition is determined by providing it with a concept? In the end we must say that it is an
experience that is determined, since both intuitions and concepts are blind without the other (cf. Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason B75).
121
Reflective judgements: “the power of judgement in general is the faculty for thinking of the
particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given,
then the power of judgement, which subsumes the particular under it […] is determining. If, however,
only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the power of judgement is
merely reflecting” (Kant, Power of Judgment 67)
122
That is, they are not just reflective, since all judgements likely have a ‘moment’ of reflection
during which time a universal is sought, but merely reflective.
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possibilities.123 If we compare aesthetic experiences with everyday (determinate) cognition, we
could say that both involve rules, but that aesthetic contemplation differs insofar as it does not
necessitate a particular rule as a final resting place.
The aforementioned interplay is described by Kant as being a kind of cognitive harmony
that is not strictly bound by the rules of the understanding; this harmony, for Kant,
demonstrates not only that the object is amenable to our cognition (that certain objects allow us
to engage in free contemplation), but also that our faculties are amenable to one another (that
the activities of the faculties fit together in a non-conflictual manner, thereby allowing for play).
Nevertheless, no determinative judgement is possible regarding the grounds for this
appearance. In other words, Kant claims that the ceaseless interaction of the imagination and
understanding implies that the beautiful object is ‘as if’ made for a purpose, but with no
particular end being posited (for this would require something like a will or an intention).
Instead of a teleological relation of beauty to an end, the appearance of the beautiful object is
simply the amenability of appearances to our cognition; that is to say that the beautiful object is
‘as if’ made for our faculties. The a priori principle of judgement is what Kant calls subjective
purposiveness: beauty exhibits, in Kant’s words, “purposiveness without purpose.”
123
As Wenzel writes, “In aesthetic contemplation the object provides an open range of possibilities
of what we could say and how I could look at it. My satisfaction in the beautiful is a pleasure in the act of
reflecting about, and by means of, this open range of possibilities” (Wenzel, Introduction to Kant’s
Aesthetics 41).
57
1.3.2 Kant’s Genius
It is at this point that we may return to the theme that spurred this discussion of Kant’s
third Critique, namely the figure of the genius. To understand not only what the genius is, but
also why Kant turns to this figure, we must first ask after the problem his aesthetics was posed
to tackle. Recall that, for Kant, the beautiful exhibits a kind of purposiveness without purpose:
the object appears to us as if designed for a purpose, but without any determinate purpose
being positable in the form of a concept; this is why we stated that the beautiful representation
could be understood as an excess of sense. With the claim that pure judgements of beauty are
beyond determinative rules, Kant goes on to claim his paradigm of beauty to be nature as
opposed to art.124
In order to maintain the notion of purposiveness without purpose as the principle of
aesthetic judgement, Kant’s chosen paradigm of beauty must be something that does not
immediately require conceptualization, either for its creation or its reception. If this were not
so, it seems we would no longer be dealing with a merely ‘as if’ purposiveness: with a concept
comes a determinate experience and a non-subjective end; we would not, in short, be dealing
with merely subjective purposiveness, but rather objective purposiveness (perfection), which
does not for Kant allow free play to arise. This is why art cannot for Kant be paradigmatic:
whereas art prima facie involves conceptualization at all moments, either as the subject matter
124
Ultimately, as Henry E. Allison points out, “Kant’s fundamental concern is with the nature of
aesthetic judgement, not artistic production” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique
of the Power of Judgment [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001] 271).
58
of a work or in the prior deployment of deliberation and technical skills that allowed the artist
to create, nature is freely given to us without ends.125
The paradigmatic status of natural beauties in the third Critique thus arises directly
from the principle of purposiveness. Nevertheless, despite Kant’s preference for natural
beauties as opposed to the beautiful in art, his position must strive to give an account of the
latter; in doing so, either he must admit that all artistic beauty depends on concepts,126 or he
must provide a way of accounting for artistic beauties that attempts to comprehend them as
being, as it were, nature-like127—as fitting within his broader account of the principle of
reflective judgement, i.e., subjective purposiveness. Kant opts for the latter, availing himself of
the naturalized genius figure to mediate this systemic gulf. He claims that the beautiful in art is
the product of genius; genius, for Kant, is the natural (innate) disposition of an individual to act
as nature’s cipher: “the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature
gives the rule to art.”128
Nevertheless, it is not immediately obvious how the genius allows for an account of art
that is not bound to concepts. After all, the genius is human and, like all human beings, it seems
125
Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic status of nature allows Kant to claim something else equally
important for his project in the third Critique, namely the idea that beauty is morally edifying: our free
contemplation of nature shows us that, rather than being radically opposed to us, phenomenal nature is
amenable to our subjectivity and our projects (moral and otherwise) (see paragraph 42 of Kant, Power of
Judgment). It becomes obvious, therefore, that Kant’s favouring of natural over artistic beauties is not
incidental, nor a matter of mere personal aesthetic preference.
126
I.e., that there is in principle no pure judgement of taste about objects of art.
127
Cf. Wenzel, Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics 94–101; Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste 271–300.
128
Kant, Power of Judgment 307, emphasis added.
59
that the genius must also create by means of reasoning, deliberation, and ultimately the
technical application of concepts. To this, Kant replies that in fact the genius is a very particular
type of human being and, furthermore, has a unique mode of creation: the genius creates only
in a quasi conscious or intentional manner. Kant states that “the author of a product that he
owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not
have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan, and to communicate to
others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products[.]”129
The passing point between nature and consciousness, Kant’s genius itself takes on the
status of being ‘natural.’ Even if the genius uses rules (he/she deliberates, deploys technical
skills, refers explicitly or implicitly to the history of art, etc.), and even if the audience of the
work will always be aware of it as a work,130 both the activity and the result must go beyond any
of those rules as being determining. Whatever determinations enter the work, they give rise to
their own overcoming within the work itself; what is presented through the rule-governed
activity of genius must give rise, in other words, to something beyond rules. To summarize, for
Kant the genius’s very activity is in excess of the concepts (rules/skills) that may have gone into
it, in excess of intentions or ends, in excess of the artist’s particularity, and (accordingly) even
in excess of the artist’s own understanding of the work. The tension between Kant’s choice of
129
Kant, Power of Judgment 186–187.
With a concomitant awareness of the artist’s deliberation, techniques, historical affiliations,
etc.: “beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art” (Kant, Power
of Judgment 185–186).
130
60
paradigmatic beauty as nature and the necessity of theorizing artistic beauty is thereby
resolved by reimagining the creator as being ‘natural,’ that is, as involving an activity beyond
mere conscious concept application.
Beyond resolving the tension between Kant’s theory of purposiveness and artistic
beauties, the non-conceptual nature of the activity of genius alters how we must conceive of
genius socio-historically; that is to say that, concomitant to the genius’s non-conceptual activity,
Kant claims that the genius cannot rely on what came before him/her in the history of artistic
creation. Doing so, it seems, would imply that the genius is not in excess of concepts after all,
instead picking and choosing from available artistic models; it follows that the genius (as the
origin of art) is necessarily original: genius is “a talent for producing that for which no
determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in
accordance with some rule, consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic.”131
Although this is a theme that will not occupy us at the present time, it will be a crucial point in
the fourth chapter, which deals with a similar dialectic of performance/correction in the
Romantic notion of genius as geniality.
131
Kant, Power of Judgment 186.
61
1.3.2.1 Excursus on Aesthetic Ideas
If we think of determinate concept application (that is, the imagination/understanding
structure from the Critique of Pure Reason) as constituting experience—as constituting the
concept of objectivity as such—then it is no exaggeration to claim that for Kant the beautiful is
not, strictly speaking, cognized as an object. Much as the genius is in excess of him/herself, we
can think of the beautiful object as a kind of rupture of sense in the empirical world, a cognitive
excess within experience. Indeed, this is exactly what Kant implies by his notion of the aesthetic
idea.
Ideas in Kantian terminology are concepts of reason that cannot be demonstrated, that
is, rational concepts that cannot attain to sensuous presentation; they are not, therefore, a part
of experience, but are rather regulative principles involved in reason’s striving. In contrast to
these rational ideas, Kant writes that an aesthetic idea is a “representation of the imagination
that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e.,
concept, to be adequate to it.”132 In other words, what is unique about the presentation of this
particular sensible manifold is that it is where concepts falter. The understanding fails to
constrain the aesthetic idea by the provision of rules, i.e., judgement acts in a purely reflective
manner. The upshot of this failure of the understanding is that the aesthetic idea ‘occasions’
more thought than can be determinatively conceptualized, i.e., concepts are in play in a kind of
132
Kant, Power of Judgment 192.
62
process rather than providing a resting point.133 This processual nature is partly why we are
justified in calling a sensible manifold itself an ‘idea.’ We do so: (1) “because [aesthetic ideas] at
least strive towards something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to
approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which give them the
appearance of an objective reality”; and (2) “because no concept can be fully adequate to
them[.]”134
Aesthetic ideas are thus the obverse of rational ideas: an aesthetic idea is an inexponible
representation of the imagination that strives to, but cannot, approximate something beyond
determinate cognition; rational ideas are indemonstrable concepts of reason which strive to,
but cannot, attain intuitive presentation. Each has what the other lacks: intuitions and concepts,
respectively. This means that, despite the fact that we will never be able to conceptually
constrain the imaginative play, we nevertheless seek out a concept; accordingly, in this
reflective action we can describe the aesthetic idea as something around which the free activity
of our faculties can coalesce; that is, we can describe the aesthetic idea as a space for free play,
and the genius as the individual who opens this space.
Aesthetic ideas are thus for Kant the counterparts of rational ideas, and their structural
similarity (of striving and reciprocity of what is lacking) justifies his use of the term ‘idea’ for
133
In Paul Guyer’s words, “Kant’s characterization of aesthetic ideas makes it plain that our
response to works of art manifesting such ideas is always linked to concepts but never determined or
exhausted by those concepts” (Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997]
359).
134
Kant, Power of Judgment 192.
63
both.135 Aesthetic ideas will not preoccupy us further at the present juncture. In chapter 4 we
will argue that the Romantic striving towards truth depends on a similar gathering together
and presentation of sensuous excess; however, unlike Kant, the Romantics socialize the
aesthetic idea, arguing that its very excess depends not on an individual presenter (genius) but
a community of discursive participants.
1.4 Hegel’s Criticisms of the Romantic Genius
Since Hegel’s critique of the Early Romantics is concerned centrally with the Romantic
genius-cum-ego, that “divine irony of genius,”136 exploring Hegel’s conception of the artist
alongside the Kantian genius will now prove useful. Our goal is not to claim that Hegel’s
criticisms of the Romantics apply directly to Kant, for there are respects in which Kant would
surely agree with the Hegelian position.137 In addition, it must be emphasized that Kant’s
genius is limited to the merely aesthetic, and it is clear that the Romantics, including on Hegel’s
reading, do not share this stricture. Nevertheless, our goal is to widen our perspective on
Hegel’s critique, expanding from the narrow issue of irony and passing through the genius
figure so as to fully elucidate the Romantic social philosophy as per Hegel’s understanding.
There are three points of comparison between Kant and Hegel we wish to emphasize, namely
135
Cf. “ideas in the most general meaning are representations related to an object in accordance
with certain (subjective or objective) principle, insofar as they can nevertheless never become a
cognition of that object” (Kant, Power of Judgment 217–218).
136
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 66.
137
See later chapters (s.2.2) for Kant’s notion of logical egoism.
64
the egoism of genius (which we have already touched upon in our discussion of irony), the
elitism of genius, and the authority that the notion of genius grants to particularity. We will
now examine these issues, connecting each to Hegel’s broader critique of Romanticism.
1.4.1 Hegel’s Three Criticisms
1.4.1.1 The Charge of Egoism
Let us begin with the egoism of genius. It is obvious that both Kant and the Romantics
(on Hegel’s reading) seem to heavily emphasize the genius as an individual subject;138 the
genius is the ego whose (all but uncontrollable) creativity acts as the spontaneous origin of
sense. This is why, as we have seen, the ‘work’ of the Kantian genius is necessarily novel: just as
the individual Romantic ego can, and indeed must, begin again at every moment, the Kantian
genius cannot rely on the rules that came beforehand, cannot draw from the prevailing
historical community as the nexus of his/her creation. Indeed, Kant claims that the nondiscursive activity of the genius opens up a space of play—one which is in principle opposed to
the prevailing standards of the historico-artistic community (as the necessity for originality
implies), and over which the genius holds sway; the genius therefore implies original
spontaneity of the individual ego as origin.
138
Still, it must be noted that Kant’s genius—insofar as it acts as the cipher of nature, where the
latter term implies the internal nature of the subject and hence reference to cognition in general—
already implies a level of generality that Hegel accuses the Romantics of lacking. In other words, Kant’s
genius is at least arguably something like a ‘universal ego,’ even if the genius as a concrete individual is
also always particular.
65
This position seems to imply, therefore, an inherent individualist unsociability built into
the genius figure. The genius is the power of origin, the opening of a new field of meaning
before others can follow suit; even if the space opened is ‘social’ in the sense that others can
subsequently judge or create once the exemplarity of a work has been instituted, the space itself
is founded by the heroic and ultimately individual act of a lone subject, who, on many accounts,
is willing to suffer the aspersions of their age.139 Whereas for Kant this solo performance is
limited to the aesthetic domain, Hegel claims that the Romantic individual is the spontaneous
origin in a far stronger (Fichtean) sense: the Romantic ego is the absolute principle ethically,
epistemically, and even ontologically speaking.
Still, it seems clear that Kant’s aesthetic genius and Schlegel’s genius ego both bear a
kind of Fichtean flair: egoism implies both a privacy of the ego’s productive activity (its activity
is spontaneous, absolute, a-social, and a-historical) and a privacy of the ego’s products (the
product is novel, staking a claim to exemplary status beyond social or communal warrant and
subsequently demanding of others to play along). Kant’s genius is therefore egoistic in a similar
sense to the Romantic ego.
139
On this, see Schiller: “how does the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time,
which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion” (Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education
of Man [Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004] 52).
66
1.4.1.2 The Charge of Elitism
This brings us to the second point we wish to raise on behalf of Hegel, namely that the
very notion of the genius bears with it an emphasis not only on the individual, but also on the
exceptional individual, and hence an attendant elitism. To explain: in both the Romantics and
Kant the exceptionality of genius implies a stratified and hierarchical picture of humanity;
there is the spontaneously origin-al individual opposed to those who can merely (as it were)
play along—or fail to do so. Not everyone, in other words, has the capacity for true and
spontaneous creativity; in Kant it is inborn and innate, just as for Schlegel one either gets irony
or does not, the latter implying not only reception but also the performance thereof.140 This is
an issue that becomes all the more pointed when we consider that Kant’s naturalization of
genius, as much as it may solve a problem within his own system, also has the effect of
obscuring the ways in which the genius could be viewed as being, at least in part, historically
and communally constituted.141
Crucially for our purposes, this kind of hierarchicalism or elitism seems able to persist
even if we challenge Hegel’s claim that Romanticism amounts to a mere egoism, as we will go
on to do. For even if the Romantics posit a definite social philosophy, indeed one that
140
Thus Schlegel states of irony that for “a person who hasn't got it, it will remain a riddle even
after it is openly confessed” (Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #108). In other words, one
either is or is not ironic in some more or less essentialized sense.
141
For an examination of the naturalization of genius and its repercussions on the gendered
understanding of artistic production, see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist
Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989).
67
emphasizes sociability and collective writing, they themselves admit that one does not wish to
philosophize with or for just anyone.142 Romantic sociability—if there is such a thing—appears
sociable not absolutely but only within a bounded range of prospective others, namely those
other exceptional individuals (‘geniuses’) with whom one feels a creative affinity. To put
matters differently: Romantic sociability (if there is such a thing) could well remain an
unpopular sociability.
1.4.1.3 Authoritarianism of the Particular
With these two notions alone (the egoism and elitism of genius) we may already have
enough to indict the purportedly social philosophy of genius. Yet, there is one last point of
interest that arises through bringing the Romantics, on Hegel’s reading, into dialogue with
Kant. For the very core of Hegel’s critique was not only an overemphasis on the absolute power
of the ego, nor even a false understanding of this power’s popular availability. Rather, Hegel’s
critique targeted the relation between the ego and its community: Hegel directs his attack, in
other words, at the very authority granted to particularity over and against universality. In
order to explore this point, reference to Hegel’s own conception of the artist—in contrast to
that of Kant as well as his reading of the Romantics—will prove fruitful. From there we will
142
Cf. “You shouldn't try to symphilosophize [i.e., engage in collective philosophizing] with
everyone, but only with those who are à la hauteur” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum
Fragments #264).
68
bring into play Hegel’s conception of modern freedom, concretized in the transition from
morality to ethical life. Let us turn to this purported authoritarianism of the particular.
1.4.2 Hegel’s Artist
Perspicuously, ‘artist’ for Hegel does not (as it did for Kant) overlap with ‘genius.’ Hegel
engages with the notion of genius (it was indeed a concept with much currency in his day), but
seems constantly to bear a critical hesitation towards the idea and its conceptual reverberations.
As we have seen above, beauty is for Hegel a matter of bringing home the truths of a historical
freedom to that freedom itself; it is a matter of freedom’s self-reflection in otherness and as a
matter of overcoming that otherness, i.e., the development and circulation of a communal
language. This implies, first of all, that artistic beauties rather than natural beauties take
paradigmatic status for Hegelian aesthetics due to the more immediate connection to human
freedom and self-consciousness. The second implication of this paradigm shift is that Hegel
avoids the problem afore-posed to Kant; specifically, in arguing against the paradigmatic status
of nature, Hegel avoids the necessity of interpreting art and artistic practice in a naturalized
fashion. All of this implies that Hegel frees himself from an account of art and artistic creation
as being somehow non-conceptual and ‘nature-like’ in the sense that Kant claimed with his
notion of purposiveness without purpose.
69
Hegel therefore has no need to avail himself of a genius figure—if by that we mean what
Kant did, i.e., that non-reflective spontaneously creative individual born with the capacity to act
as nature’s cipher. While Hegel’s artist can indeed be said to be ‘natural’ in some sense, it is not
the way that Kant had in mind. For Hegel, the artist is only natural in the following two senses.
First, the artist is natural insofar as he/she has a necessary sensuous aspect, not only
with respect to the product of his her work but also to the activity of creation. This is to say that
the artist’s creation and expression both take place sensuously: it is not the case that the artist
divines everything in a realm of pure subjectivity and ideas before simply applying these to the
material (the artist is no philosopher) but rather that the artist works out and develops for the
first time in the very materiality of his/her body (feeling), as well as through the materiality of
the medium itself: “the artist must fashion his work not in the exclusively spiritual form of
thought but within the sphere of intuition and feeling and, more precisely, in connection with
sensuous material and in a sensuous medium.”143
Nevertheless, art does not remain on an opaque sensuous level. Indeed, as we have seen,
Hegel fits this particular human activity into his broader theory of consciousness as the activity
of reflecting itself in otherness. As we have seen on the level of reception, the community finds
itself reflected in the alienated (sensuous) freedom that is the work of art; cognition and
143
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 284.
70
aesthetic judgement are not separate domains, but differ quantitatively through degrees of
conceptual clarity.
In narrower terms, what follows is the second sense in which Hegel’s artist is
naturalized: just as thought and artistic reception are no longer seen to be worlds apart,
thought and artistic creation are also no longer separated by an impassable gulf. That is, Hegel
agrees with Kant that the artist must indeed have an innate capacity for the auto-production of
ideas, and hence we can say that the artist is, in colloquial terms, ‘a natural’; nevertheless, this
bare capacity must be developed by study and reflection, both of which take place in a historical
milieu, relying as they do on the historical availability of studying and reflecting, as well as the
concepts, practices, techniques and so on of the day. Although Kant gestures to the fact that the
artist (genius) requires an academically trained ‘talent’ as well as an innate creative force,144 it is
not at all clear that this does not violate the strictures placed on him by his own broader theory
of purposiveness without purpose.
In contrast, Hegel claims that an artist who attempts to forgo reflection “does not bring
home to his mind what is in him, and so we notice in every great work of art that its material in
all its aspects has been long and deeply weighed and thought over…[from] the facile readiness
of fancy [Phantasie] no solid work proceeds.”145 This is ultimately why the genius tends not to
144
“Genius can only provide rich material for products of art; its elaboration and form require a
talent that has been academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to the power of
judgment” (Kant, Power of Judgment 189).
145
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 282.
71
“burst forth”146 in youth, but requires a lifetime of experience—with training,147 exposure to
many aspects of the world, as well as disappointment and experience, and so on. The
availability of this ‘bursting forth’ of genius in youth does, Hegel admits, depend on the
medium. Regardless of the medium or content, however, Hegel’s message is the same: “without
circumspection, discrimination, and criticism the artist cannot master any subject-matter
which he is to configurate, and it is silly to believe that the genuine artist does not know what
he is doing[.]”148 Indeed, Hegel goes so far as to glibly compare this kind of non-reflection to a
state of drunkenness.
Ultimately, therefore, Hegel reminds us that we cannot forget that the artist is a selfconscious subject rather than a force of nature: “genius is the general ability for the true
production of a work of art, as well as the energy to elaborate and complete it, [but] this
capacity and energy exists only as subjective, since spiritual production is possible only for a
self-conscious subject who makes such creation his aim.”149 Hegel’s artist is a reflective human
being and must be judged accordingly.
146
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 283.
Thus Reid points out that, for Hegel, the genius figure is recalcitrant to habitual discipline, see
by the latter as “a necessary element in the education of the artistic genius” (The Anti-Romantic 35).
148
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 283. Of course, nowhere does Kant say that the artist must forget what
they’re doing; still, it is not difficult to see how this criticism might be directed at Kant.
149
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 283.
147
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1.4.3 Hegel and the Unsociability of Genius
1.4.3.1 Against Egoism
Hegel therefore has a direct responses to the issues raised in section 1.4.1 (the three
charges against genius). First, with respect to the origin-ary egoism of the genius, Hegel claims
that the ego is no spontaneous and absolute origin, but rather communally constituted both as
an artist (through the shared communal ‘language’ of symbols, myths, images and so on—but
also through criticism) and beforehand as an individual in the world (through disappointment,
experience, and reflection, i.e., the fullness of life within a historical milieu). In other words, the
genius may indeed be an individual ego, according to Hegel, but he/she is also the product of
history and community; as such, the genius speaks the communal ‘language,’150 implying that
even the availability of novelty depends on the particularity of a self that is itself sociohistorically constituted. The genius ego is, in short, no absolute or Fichtean origin.
1.4.3.2 Against Elitism
Second, to the aforementioned elitism of genius, Hegel seems to admit this much: the
artist is exceptional in the sense of having the innate capacity to generate ideas, a capacity to
which not every person is lucky enough to lay claim. Nevertheless, this innate capacity
represents only an inchoate ability to create: as we have seen, Hegel goes on to argue that the
150
Even if it is in part an idiolect.
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bare capacity to generate ideas amounts to nothing without the training (mentors, schools,
techniques, history) and reflection (deploying concepts) afforded by the genius’s historicocommunal context. The inchoate exceptionality of the genius can only develop in the verdant
greenery of history and community; if the genius nevertheless remains ‘elite’ in some sense
(he/she is ‘a natural’), Hegel tempers the manner in which we are to take this, historicizing and
communalizing what Kant (and implicitly the Romantics) had naturalized.
1.4.3.3 Particularity and Originality
The nineteenth century genius, taken to be paradigmatically Kantian, dovetails with the
Romantic understanding of genius-ego. In contrast, we see that Hegel’s more communal and
historical understanding of art and artistic creation leads him away from the genius figure and
simultaneously towards his critique of Romanticism. Artistically speaking Hegel is led to argue
not for the absolute importance of the particular (creative genius) but rather a necessary
sublation of this particularity into the universal. He writes that, while the artist must
appropriate entirely the subject matter of a work (the artist must make the subject matter
his/her own) he/she must nevertheless practice a kind of self-forgetfulness: the artist must be
able to “forget his own personality and its accidental particular characteristics and immerse
himself […] entirely in his material,” for an inspiration “in which the subject gives himself airs
and emphasizes himself as subject, instead of being the instrument and the living activation of
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the theme itself, is a poor inspiration.”151 Particularity is far from enough. The genius of
inspiration, according to Hegel, must be wedded to the true objectivity of the subject matter in
the work as such; this means that, rather than emphasizing the mere ‘mannerism’152 that is
his/her own, the artist sacrifices the purely particular for the communal and universal subjectmatter at stake.
1.4.4 Summary of Hegel’s Criticisms of the Romantic Genius
It is this kind of self-forgetfulness that tempers both the egoism and elitism of genius.
The genius, in short, only comes to be vindicated insofar as it is historically and communally
situated. Indeed, it is quite telling that it is at this point in his discussion of the artist—which
seems in so many ways to respond directly to Kant—that Hegel again finds it appropriate to
attack Schlegel. Here in his discussion of genius he claims that Romantic poetry “brings
together in its representations a mass of external details, the inmost meaning of which the poet
keeps to himself [in its] collocations and external details there lie concealed the 'poetry of
poetry’” that cannot be communally expressed; he continues “in F. von Schlegel's poems at the
time […] what is unsaid is given out as the best thing of all [, yet] this `poetry of poetry' proved
151
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 288.
I.e. a manner that is merely idiosyncratic: “‘manner’ is a conception appropriate only to this
personality and the accidental idiosyncrasy of his accomplishment, and this may go so far as to be in
direct contradiction with the true nature of the Ideal” (Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 291).
152
75
itself to be precisely the flattest prose.”153 Repeating the criticism explored earlier, Hegel claims
that what remains concealed from the community (the audience) is deployed in the form of a
promise, a promise that, by virtue of its paucity of content, allows the individual genius to
retreat into idiolectical self-aggrandizement.154
1.5 Morality and the Ethical: The Systemic Significance of Irony
In order to continue our examination, it is at this point crucial to broaden our
perspective on what this retreat implies. For while it is the genius figure around which Hegel’s
critique of Romanticism coalesces, his argument regarding its ‘deficient’ notion of subjectivity
extends beyond the merely aesthetic, as we have already glimpsed in the opening section of this
chapter. Indeed, in the aesthetics and elsewhere Hegel argues that the figure of the genius
implies not only a faulty understanding of artistic practices, but also a broader and equally
faulty relation between the individual and the community; that is, the genius figure posits not
only egoism and elitism, but also an authoritarianism of particularity. In broad strokes,
therefore, we begin to glimpse that what undergirds this gulf between Kant/the Romantics on
the one side and Hegel on the other is not only an argument over aesthetics, but a different
understanding of the relation of particularity to universality and the ways in which the tension
between these terms come to be mediated.
153
154
291).
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 296.
Schlegel speaks of arbitrariness; Hegel of a mass of unrelated ideas (Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I,
76
We will show that it is for this reason that the Romantics hold a particular position
within Hegel’s system. The source of Hegel’s enmity, in short, as well as the reasoning for the
historico-systemic position in which he places Romanticism within the broader development of
the human community, is the egoism, elitism, and authoritarianism of the particular implied
by the Romantic genius. That is to say that Hegel’s criticism of the Jena circle is a social critique,
a wholesale condemnation of the Romantic philosophers’ stance towards their community. It
follows that we must ask after the broader historical picture, according to Hegel, within which
the Romantics can be placed; this picture is the development of morality (Moralität) and ethical
life (Sittlichkeit) described in the Philosophy of Right, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy,
and elsewhere. It is to this broader picture that we now turn.
1.5.1 Socrates and the Greek Ethos
Hegel’s story begins with the Greeks. Hegel, like many of his contemporaries,
understands Greek life to have been characterized by its harmonic relations between the
individual and the prevailing socio-cultural ethos. The individual found itself intelligibly
situated within his/her community as well as nature. Yet Hegel also agreed with many of his
contemporaries that such a state of harmony became the victim of inevitable historical forces.155
155
For instance, see Schiller, Aesthetic Letters.
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Greek harmony, according to Hegel, becomes troubled with the arrival of Socrates on
the scene,156 and it is here that we begin to glimpse the systemic/historic importance of the
ironic genius for Hegel, beyond aesthetics and epistemic concerns. For Hegel, Socrates
concretizes a burgeoning tension within the prevailing Greek order: whereas the community’s
truth was once naturalized and alienated from subjectivity, Socratic reflexivity represents the
first historical demand of the ego (Hegel calls this Moralität).157 Hegel states that Socrates,
“evaporated the existing world and retreated into himself in search of the right and the good.”158
With Socrates, in other words, all being/truth is now to be seen as qualifying as being or
truth to the extent that it can be routed through the reflexive activity of a thinking subject.159 In
short, the self-certainty of a subject becomes the absolute criterion of anything qualifying as
truth: truth and subjectivity undergo a historical reconfiguration in which the two terms come
to be seen as co-implicative.
156
“Socrates made his appearance at the time when Athenian democracy had fallen into ruin”
(Hegel, Philosophy of Right 167).
157
“‘[M]orality’ means that the subject is free, and that it has to posit the definition of the good and
the true out of itself” (Hegel, History of Philosophy 126).
158
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 167.
159
As Hegel puts it, “now there has come on the scene the consciousness that what is true is
mediated by thinking” (History of Philosophy 125). That is: it comes to be made explicit that all being is
mediated by thought, and that this being requiring the certain reflection of a self in order to qualify as
truth (cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right 166–167; Juliane Rebentisch, “The Morality of Irony: Hegel and
Modernity,” Symposium 17.1 [2013] 102). In broader terms, we can direct the reader to Phenomenology of
Spirit, where Hegel speaks of the historical emergence of the absolute: “not only as Substance, but
equally as Subject” (Phenomenology of Spirit 10).
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It is in this context that the genius of Socrates becomes a crucial transitional moment.
Socratic irony, according to Hegel, was deployed as the ultimate expression160 of reflexive
subjectivity—the expression of the claim that what is true must be tested by and for subjective
freedom in order to qualify as ‘really real.’ In Plato’s texts,161 this irony is deployed dialogically
against the complacency of various interlocutors (who take the prevailing ethos as all too
obvious) as a negative force that lets the non-conscious contradictions within sophistic
obviousness unfurl themselves into conflicts. The figure of Socrates thus manifests the
realization on the part of Greek society that a naïveté towards the prevailing socio-cultural
order is not enough; the societal ethos must now be examined, reflected upon, and accepted (or
rejected) by a subject162 as a demand for the latter’s self-certainty, and only insofar as this
reflection occurs does the ethos win its legitimacy. In short, Hegel claims that a historical shift
has occurred in truth, and with it a shift of criteria.
160
“[T]he supreme form in which this subjectivity is completely comprehended and expressed is
that to which the term 'irony’… has been applied” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right 180–181).
161
“Plato used it of a method which Socrates employed in personal dialogue to defend the Idea of
truth and justice against the complacency of the uneducated consciousness and that of the Sophists”
(Hegel, Philosophy of Right 180).
162
The reflexive demands of subjectivity are perhaps most clear in the moral sphere. According to
Allen Wood, “modern moral agents… demand of themselves not only that they do what is objectively
good but also that they do it with insight into the reasons why it is good; the value and dignity of the
moral will consists in an insight and an intention that accord with the good” (Allen W. Wood, “Hegel's
Ethics,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993] 223).
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Hegel thus presents a version of Socrates as a deeply ambivalent figure.163 On the one
hand, he is the vanguard of a burgeoning (and incontrovertible) truth, namely the newfound
necessity of self-reflection and appropriation by the subject as a condition for truth. Seen from
this angle, Socrates represents a specific turning point in Greek (and world) history, wherein
the necessity of recognizing subjective certainty is first brought to bear against the naturalistic
beliefs of the Greek cultural and philosophical milieu.164
The above resembles Hegel’s critique of the Romantics: the self recognizes as ‘really real’
only what it recognizes as its own. Yet the difference is manifest: whereas the Romantics (for
Hegel) absolutize this subjective tendency, leading to an evacuation of all truth and meaning
which the self has not directly created,165 Socrates takes a different approach. Read Platonically,
we can say that, although the self demands reflection, Socratic negativity avoids turning the
Good into something purely or merely subjective. While realizing that the Good is not to be
163
“Everyone dies, for that is the right that nature exercises over us. In the genuinely ‘tragic’
situation there must be a justified and ethical power on each side that come into collision. That is how
the fate of Socrates is genuinely tragic” (Hegel, History of Philosophy 126).
164
“Socrates was the one who finally grasped the independence of thought. Being-in-and-for-itself
came to be recognized as the universal, and thinking as the final end, as what is valid, in that human
beings are able to discover and recognize from themselves—not from their own preferences but from
themselves as universal and thinking beings—what is right and good, and that everything that is to be
valued has to justify itself before this inner tribunal of thought” (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of
World History, vol. I, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011]
417).
165
“‘You in fact honestly accept a law as existing in and for itself,’” irony says to others, “‘I do so too,
but I go further than you, for I am also beyond this law and can do this or that as I please… it is not the
thing which is excellent, it is I who am excellent and am master of both law and thing; I merely play with
them as with my own caprice, and in this ironic consciousness in which I let the highest of things perish,
I merely enjoy myself” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right 182).
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found in the prevailing socio-cultural order, it is nevertheless presupposed in its transcendence
by the Socratic subject.
This ambivalence is neatly read by Hegel into the image of the Socratic daimon.166
Between subjective conscience and transcendence, between the pure reflection of the
individual as the measure of all things and an entirely transcendent or naturalized ethical order,
the daimon presents us with a microcosmic image of the burgeoning tension of Athenian
political life.
The difference between Socrates and the Romantics on Hegel’s interpretation amounts
to the following: whereas Socrates demands subjective insight into the real, the Romantics
make the ground of the real subjectivity as such; whereas Socrates calls for self-reflection on the
true, the Romantics arrogate the territory of truth. While Hegel is far more sympathetic
towards Socrates, it is also clear that he does not see him as a purely heroic figure, a martyr who
stood for justice and was struck down before his time. Socrates is for Hegel truly ambivalent.
While he incarnates the emerging truth of modernity, he nevertheless falls into, or at least
paves the way for, a more absolutizing negativity.
The path paved by Socrates is as follows: with the emphasis on particularity (both
subjectivity in general as well as the use of examples to trouble generalities), Socrates emphasis
on particularity calls into question the pretensions of universalism held by the prevailing Greek
166
Hegel, Philosophy of World History, vol. I, 402–403. Nevertheless, as Ken Frieden points out, the
figure of the daimon predates Socrates: “daimon occurs often in Homer and reveals a plenitude of
meanings” (Frieden, Genius and Monologue [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985] 33).
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order. The problem, according to Hegel, is that this furnishes nothing of substance with which
to replace such beliefs. Rather than providing a positive philosophical position (with a
substantial content in the form of concrete universality—with a philosophical system) Socratic
philosophy, equating, as it does, truth both with a transcendent good and with the absolute selfcertainty of a reflexive subject, remains (at best) merely propaedeutic to truth in the form of
insight.167 In this way, regardless of his intentions, Socrates opens the door to a kind of
relativism.
First, we may understand this as the claim that Socratic irony is a negative form or
method, orientable towards (and against) anything—that is, towards the glorification of
subjectivity and private interests as much as towards a transcendent order of truth and justice.
Socrates, on Hegel’s reading, cannot vouchsafe against the former orientation. Yet we can also
read Hegel in a stronger sense. For it is more than incidental that the negativity of irony can be
turned to any end whatsoever. Due to the failure of Socratic philosophy to comprehend the
notion of a concrete universal, even the choice of irony’s directedness is itself a matter of
particularity—of one’s inclination in this or that moment, determined by the vagaries of
context, by “desire, drive, inclination… contingency.”168 As a result, irony cannot even be said to
be properly propaedeutic to truth in the form of insight; to put the issue in a somewhat
167
In this sense, we might take Fichte as the inheritor of Hegel’s Socrates (see chapter 3 and
conclusion to this thesis).
168
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 167.
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paradoxical form, we can say that Socratic irony is necessarily contingent, a state of affairs that
renders it dangerous in principle, rather than just in fact.
1.5.2 Hegel’s Account of Ethical Life
This is all to say that, according to Hegel, Socrates does not provide a substantial
positive philosophy. We can see this by briefly taking up Hegel’s own notion of ethical life. On
this account, the above tension between the inwardness of subjectivity and the substantiality of
the universal is only reconciled in the modern state. For Hegel, the content of our duties is
drawn not from the abstract self-consistency of a reflecting subject, but from our “concrete
relationships to individuals and institutions within an ethical order”;169 indeed, it is precisely
this ethical life170 (Sittlichkeit) that differentiates his (positive) notion of freedom from the
ironic (negative) freedom that—whether immediately or potentially—falls to the level of
arbitrariness.171 In other words, whereas Socrates (and according to Hegel, the Romantics) see
subjective freedom as manifested in the demands of subjectivity to reflect upon the real, Hegel
169
Wood “Hegel’s Ethics” 223.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 166–168. Cf. “Ethical life is the customary ways of a community, or
(in premodern societies) the ancestral ways of one’s family, city, country, or homeland [covering] pre
political and political forms of the customary, and it is characterized by following tradition without
feeling the need for the conscious articulation and justification of principles” 581 (Richard L. Velkley,
“On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates' Daimon, and the Modern State,” The Review of
Metaphysics (2006): 581).
171
Hegel is clear to distinguish the arbitrariness of ‘doing as one pleases’ from proper freedom
(Philosophy of Right 48).
170
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argues that freedom is actualized and made “concrete”172 only in the prevailing norms of the
modern state itself. Whereas irony (in both its Socratic and Romantic forms) posits the subject
as the bearer of the predicate ‘free,’ Hegel argues that freedom is only made substantial—given
determinacy and a content—in the norms and customs of a historical community.173
This immediate certainty (that is, a certainty lacking the thematic justification of every
customary action) in the modern state is the sublated truth of the Greeks. Sublated because,
unlike the Greeks, the modern state lacks the naïveté involved in naturalism (as well as the
concomitant submersion of particularity into the universal). Instead of naïveté, we have the
recognition of recognition: the autonomy of the subject demands freedom from arbitrariness,
something the state can provide to citizens through the provision of sittlich norms. This is
because, for Hegel, the civil society of modern states transforms particularity (the individual’s
idiosyncratic and selfish desires and inclinations),174 structuring it into a lawlikeness that is
beneficial not only to the individual but also to the body politic. This is precisely what separates
the modern from the ancient states: the latter cannot incorporate individual freedom into the
body of the state, whereas the former can. Thus Hegel describes the “states of classical antiquity”
172
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 185.
The state transforms what is a ‘pure’ duty in the abstract into “a specific duty” (Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit 386). This is why “ethical life [is] the concept of freedom which has become the
existing world,” as well as the “nature of self-consciousness” itself (Hegel, Philosophy of Right 189).
174
Cf. Rebentisch, “Morality of Irony” 124.
173
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as ones where “universality was indeed already present, but particularity had not yet been
released and set at liberty and brought back to universality.”175
Thus for Hegel, although the unreflexivity of the Greeks is neither possible nor desirable
for modernity, the overcoming of the gap between freedom and universality is possible—but
only through a proper understanding of what the modern ethos implies and demands. The
prevailing ethos can be, in other words, reflexively justified by the subject as a reflection of its
own freedom, just as for Kant to obey the moral law (to strive for absolute self-consistency) does
not amount to a kind of heteronomy insofar as it is to obey one’s own autonomous will, for
Hegel the subject’s freedom is a matter of recognition in difference of a ‘limit’176—no longer do
the fundamental structures of a society (law, religion, the family, etc.) reflect the will of God,
but the (reflexive) will of the individual his/herself.177
1.5.3 Sublated Artistic Particularity
There is a direct point of comparison here between the political and the aesthetic: just as
the particularity of the individual is not destroyed by its entering into the modern state but
rather concretized and released for the first time through civil society, so too is the particularity
of the artist attained for the first time in and as the Ideal. Hegel’s conception of the artist
175
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 282–283.
This is a historicization of Kant’s Rousseauian background, leading him to claim that in obeying
the moral law, we are obeying our own will (Wood, “Hegel’s Ethics” 212).
177
Thus “they are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, the subject bears spiritual
witness to them as to its essence” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right 191).
176
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claims that true novelty involves not the destruction, but rather the sublation, of the artist’s
particularity into the communal ideal. In his own words: “the originality of art does indeed
consume that accidental idiosyncrasy of the artist, but it absorbs it only so that the artist can
wholly follow the pull and impetus of his inspired genius, filled as it is with his subject alone,
and can display his own self, instead of fantasy and empty caprice, in the work he has
completed in accordance with its truth[.]”178
The truth spoken of by Hegel, it should be clear, is understood to be historical and
communal. Within Hegel’s theory of the artist, just as within theory of self-consciousness more
generally, the self is brought about only by its own alienation and reflection in otherness. This
means that, just as the subject only attains true ‘releasement’ via the universalizing norms and
abiding structures of ethical life, so too does the artist sacrifice his/her particularity for the
communal ideal—only to thereby regain it in a properly determinate form. In art, just as
elsewhere, spirit is spirit only in and as this activity of self-estrangement and reflection: “works
are the best part and the truth of the artist; what he is [in his works], that he is [but] what
remains buried in his heart”—and we might add, in his idiolect—“that is he not.”179
178
179
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 298.
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 291.
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1.5.4 Hegel’s ‘Social’ Critique
What comes into view at this point is the complete articulation of Hegel’s criticism of
the Romantics. Rather than resting on the level of a mere personal polemic, or even an aesthetic
criticism, Hegel’s critique runs much deeper. That is, we can begin to glimpse a much broader
argument concerning the egoistic and elitist genius as a deficient, and indeed pernicious,
manner of mediating the tensions that arise between the subject and the subject’s community.
This is, it seems, Hegel’s criticism in broad strokes: the Romantics’ concept of genius allows
only for a false mediation between the particular (genius/ego/conscience) and the universal
(community/ethos/duty); this mediation is false because, as we have seen, in positing the
absolute authority of the exceptional self’s activity, it fails to attain substantiality and falls to its
opposite: passivity and unfreedom (ethically speaking), unhinged skepticism (epistemically
speaking), and arbitrariness (aesthetically speaking).
What we have called Hegel’s ‘social critique’ poses the abstract negativity of morality vis-
à-vis the positive social freedom of ethical life, wherein subjective freedom has been
communally ‘released.’ Taking place as an impostor form of this releasement, according to
Hegel, Romanticism holds the systemic importance of both revealing the truth and the eminent
danger of freedom in modernity. It is with the Romantics that the tension within morality
becomes manifest: the subject’s arrogation of authority, the conscience or reflexivity of the self
as the ground of truth, knowledge, and freedom cannot be posited absolutely without a
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dialectical overturning. It follows that, rather than the genius-ego being an unreasonable and
merely personal bugbear for Hegel, we have hit upon the broader philosophical reasoning that
brought him to devote to it not only a great deal of space across his oeuvre, but also a seemingly
unparalleled degree of vitriol.
1.6 Conclusion
Nevertheless, one must also admit that, framed in this manner, such a critique of early
German Romanticism may indeed appear odd to those familiar with the works of the
Romantics themselves. These are, after all, the writers whose social circle was formed around
the urbane culture of salons in Berlin,180 whose philosophical thematics took up issues of
sociability, collective writing, and the constitutively-othering effects of love. Indeed, it does not
take much digging into Romantic philosophy for the issue to become pointed, for even on a
bare surface level it is quite telling that the preferred form of writing for the early Romantics
was that of the collectively-written fragment.181 In the Athenaeum journal,182 that is, we are
presented with a shifting army of fragments, “jointly authored by the two Schlegel brothers,
180
Cf. Harro Zimmermann, Friedrich Schlegel, Oder, Die Sehnsucht Nach Deutschland
(Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2009) 103–105.
181
Though this was by no means the only style of writing to be found: the Athenaeum included
letters, reviews, dialogues, and letters as well. Still, as the most distinctive mark of Romanticism’s
originality and modern character, “the fragment is the romantic genre par excellence” (Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute [Albany: SUNY, 1988] 40).
182
Despite the exigencies of citations which push us to name Schlegel, we take it that the
Athenaeum fragments were a collective product.
88
their wives, Novalis, and Schleiermacher.”183 This collective practice of writing and
philosophizing is referred to in the journal as “symphilosophy” or “sympoetry”184—literally a
composition ‘with.’ To write in this way—anonymously, collectively, and fragmentarily—has
the effect of placing the text a step removed from an author; as a result, we can no longer
ascribe the fragments to this individual ego, with this particular disposition or dramatic
personal history.185 Instead, the fragments approach us from the outset as a multiplicity of
anonymous and heterogeneous voices, speaking on a variety of topics, often standing in
tension or outright contradiction with the others. Yet while Hegel devotes many pages to
criticisms of the purportedly antisocial and individualist irony, it may appear as though his
social critique entirely ignores these explicitly sociable aspects of Romantic philosophy and
praxis, as well as the very centrality of these issues to the Romantic project.186
There is, it seems, a definite social philosophy articulated by Romanticism that is not
captured by Hegel’s social critique. This social philosophy will occupy us a great deal in the
183
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute 14.
Schlegel et al., Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #125. Kneller argues that it is
precisely this emphasis on collective activity that differentiates the Early German Romantics from other
Romanticisms (“Conduct of Philosophy” 110–111). This is a theme that will occupy us a great deal in the
coming chapters.
185
Martin Bäuerle points out that readers of the nineteenth century rarely knew a great deal about
the authors whose work they read (Bäuerle, Kommunikation Mit Texten: Studien Zu Friedrich Schlegels
Philologie [Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008] 172). Nevertheless, taking away the author
designation has the effect of even removing the author as even a possible hermeneutic touchpoint.
186
To be fair to Hegel, some of the central texts with which this treatise deals only became available
and contextualizable with twenty-first century scholarship. Notably, Schleiermacher’s “Theory of
Sociable Conduct,” which is central to our next chapter, was published anonymously and its authorship
was not determined until well after Hegel’s time (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 117–118).
184
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chapters to come. At this point our investigation must pose the question broadly: just what is
the social philosophy posited by the early Romantics? Does Hegel engage with these social
aspects at all, even obliquely? Or does he simply ignore them, imposing instead the framework
of his own historical picture of philosophical modernity (i.e., the transition through morality to
ethical life)? As we will now argue, the sociality of Romantic genius implies neither an
individualism (community is essential, as we will see in chapter 2) nor an elitism (genius is
popularly available and in fact called for in and by Romantic discursive practices, as we will see
in chapter 3); furthermore, even the authority of the particular in the Romantics will be
challenged (something like ‘taste’ will clip the wings of Romantic genius as much as the Kantian
genius, as we will find in chapter 4).187 It is to these broader issues that this text will now turn.
187
Let us note at this point that the three aspects of Hegel’s critique (egoism, elitism, and
authoritarianism) cannot be absolutely separated. This is especially true in the next two chapters, which
both look at differing aspects of egoism and elitism in Schleiermacher and Schlegel respectively. For
instance, we will see that the arguments presented on behalf of Schleiermacher in chapter 2 against
egoism will already imply at least a minimally non-elitist stance towards others; likewise, the arguments
presented on behalf of Schlegel in chapter 3 against elitism will argue for a picture of the Romantic
discursive practices that are non-elitist, and yet at the same time this will clearly necessitate a nonegoistic stance towards truth seeking. The three aspects of Hegel’s critique must therefore be taken as
having heuristic value in the elucidation of the Romantics’ broad and holistic standpoint as opposed to
presenting three entirely separate points.
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2. EGOISM AND DISCURSIVE RECIPROCITY: SCHLEIERMACHER CONTRA
KANT
Is there such a thing as enlightenment? We should only be entitled to use this term if we
could arbitrarily and without interference set going, if not artificially create, a principle
in the mind of man that would play the same role in it that light plays in the universe.188
2.1 Introduction
In the previous chapter, we described Hegel’s social critique of the Early German
Romantics. Hegel claims that the latter hold an egoistic and elitist position that arrogates all
authority to the individual ego. This chapter takes up the first of these issues, namely the
purported egoism of the Romantic genius.
Hegel’s understanding of this egoism was twofold, concerning both the products of the
Romantic genius and the activity of genius itself. First, Hegel claimed with respect to its
production that, while the genius opens a space of meaning that may be social (others may
partake either as judgers or as those artists who repeat the original creative act), the space itself
is not socially or historically constituted. Rather, the genius is an exceptional individual whose
activity opens a space of play, and others can only ‘play along’—or fail to do so. Non-genius
188
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #12.
91
individuals,189 in other words, have no role to play in the singular opening of an aesthetic idea,
which is why novelty for Kant became a criterion for the work of art.
Second, Hegel also states that the genius tends towards egoism insofar as it implies that
the individual as such is insulated from its community and history: the activity of genius is
interpreted as pure spontaneity, a reading that grants it the status of origin; that is, the genius
figure is a rupture into history that is not itself historical. Hegel views this understanding of the
ego and its productions as naïve. Not only does he claim that the production of genius depends
on the historical community for its status as abiding objectivity, he also claims that the genius
requires others for its very activity—for it is only in the context of the prevailing community
that arbitrariness (and hence passivity) gives way to abiding substantiality and substantive
freedom.
Still, we have also stated that Hegel appears to focus exclusively on irony, all but
ignoring the Romantic’s own social philosophy. As we have already had occasion to point out,
Romantic philosophizing is centrally concerned with human sociability and collective practices
of creation. We will argue that the Romantics, though they may remain centrally concerned
with the theme of genius, deprioritize the subjective genius (the finite Fichtean ego) for the
sake of a collective genial practice.
189
As well as history, and structural issues such as class and gender.
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This chapter begins both our elucidation of this Romantic position and, with it, our
push back against Hegel’s social critique. Our central theme is the first aspect of Hegel’s
critique, that is, the purported egoism of the Romantic self. Taking up the work of
Schleiermacher, who provides the most explicit Romantic theorization of human sociability, we
show how self-activity is theorized as only being possible within a communal milieu, that is, in
dialogue with others; accordingly, we argue that Schleiermacher’s position represents a
counterargument to the Hegelian charge of egoism. Before taking on Hegel directly, our
chapter will compare Schleiermacher and Kant. While Kant agrees explicitly with Hegel about
the dangers of egoism, his manner of dealing with these issues (the development of discursive
practices) places him in closer proximity to Schleiermacher.
Our chapter commences with a description of Kant’s account of enlightenment and his
notion of humanity’s unsociable sociability. Kant understands enlightenment as humanity's
emergence from cognitive heteronomy into the capacity for autonomous thought. While this is
very difficult for an individual to accomplish, Kant claims it to be all but inevitable in the
context of the mutual interaction of a group, which he associates with a public. Thus for Kant
the ego attains and maintains self-activity only in a communal milieu. Nevertheless, Kant is in a
difficult position insofar as he must avoid positing an egoism while remaining within the
understanding of enlightenment as self-activity. In short, Kant must avoid egoism as well as the
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ego’s passive subjection to its community—a feat which will prove quite difficult from within
the framework of his writings alone.
As we will see, it is not within Kant’s account of enlightenment that the Scylla and
Charybdis of bare egoism and communal heteronomy are clarified and avoided; rather, it is
with the Romantics that self-activity is theorized without falling victim to either Odyssean
danger. This chapter will concern Schleiermacher’s notion of free sociability. Schleiermacher
provides an account of a specific type of discourse, one that aims to allow participants to
transcend the limits set by their professional and domestic situations. In order to describe this
discursive practice, Schleiermacher borrows concepts from Kant’s own aesthetics and detranscendentalizes190 them: discourse must be free in a sense similar to Kantian free play, he
claims—thoroughly non-hierarchical and aimed at no purpose beyond its own circulating
activity. Insofar as Schleiermacher claims this discourse to result in the development of free
and autonomous individuals—that discourse itself produces the self—we argue that
Schleiermacher provides a response to the Hegelian charges of egoism.
Yet Schleiermacher’s position is more than merely a defence against Hegel. Indeed, it is
important to emphasize that, within Schleiermacher’s discourse, it is not the case that
190
I borrow this formulation from Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s project arises in the shadow of
the post-Kantian project to ground rationality while avoiding Kant’s appeal to the “‘otherworldly’
dimension rooted in the realm of the intelligible” (Habermas and Barbara Fultner, Truth and
Justification [Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003] 17). This is what Habermas calls ‘detranscendentalization’: the
attempt to render immanent (to both history and the culture) what was for Kant the function of a
supersensible and a-historical rational subject.
94
discourse constitutes the self in a unidirectional manner. Instead of presenting a theory of the
spontaneous and self-grounding ego (as per Hegel’s critique), or even an account of the
necessary ontological and ethical priority of the communal milieu over the ego (as per Hegel’s
Sittlichkeit), the Early Romantics attempt to develop a collective discursive practice that
emphasizes neither pole at the expensive of the other. In Schleiermacher’s theory of free
sociality, we begin to glimpse a theory of sociable interaction that foregrounds neither the ego
nor the community exclusively, but rather the play of reciprocity and mutual mediation
between them. Schleiermacher calls this dialectic an absolute reciprocity between the ego and
its community; thus Schleiermacher views both the individual and the community as reciprocal,
and reciprocally mediated, poles, and claims neither to be comprehensible or even possible
without the other.
2.2 Kant and the Problem of Cognitive Autonomy
2.2.1 Unsociable Sociability and Enlightenment
Sociability was a familiar theme in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; indeed, the
topic was present in the philosophical atmosphere of Europe long before and after the
Romantics.191 Sociability circumscribed an entire region of questions that extended from the
anthropological (what is the human being? is the human being destined for community?), to
191
Cf. J. B. Schneewind “Kantian Sociability: Good out of Evil,” Essays on the History of Moral
Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010) 320–347.
95
the moral (what is the primordial disposition of the individual towards others?), to the political
(how is it that unsocial human beings can form a functioning political order?). These themes
formed a constellation of overlapping concerns regarding the nature of the human individual
and its relation to others.
Among the many thinkers who spoke to these issues was Kant, who put forth his notion
of humanity’s unsociable sociability.192 He claims that the human being bears an irreconcilable
duality within itself. On the one hand, human creatures are naturally social: we are drawn to
community not only by the exigencies of physical need or the risks that nature piles before us,
but also by the desire for the company of others. On the other hand, the human being exhibits
an incorrigible unsociable disposition: we are egoistic and selfish and, since we are by nature
desirous of power, wealth, and status, we wind up competing constantly with one another;
recognizing this disposition in others as much as performing it ourselves, we are then pushed
away from community just as much as we are drawn to it.
Humanity, on Kant’s account, is riven with this dual inclination; nevertheless, Kant
claims that this unsocial sociability, rather than denoting an inexplicably contradictory human
nature, has a positive upshot. Unsociable sociability is, in short, nature’s means of progress.
Since we are driven to go after what we desire in a competitive context, we by necessity come to
develop our inchoate skills and capacities. Indeed, Kant makes enormous claims regarding the
192
See Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” Anthropology, History, and
Education (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 107–120 and “Towards Perpetual Peace,” Kant’s Practical
Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 311–352.
96
generative capacities of unsociable sociability: it is, he claims, the only means of driving
humanity towards all of its ends: enlightenment, taste, culture, science, and artisanal practices.
Even morality itself is claimed as the beneficiary of this productive tension, as the brute
impulses of humanity come to be tempered by the need for constant contact with others.
In his writings on unsociable sociability, community for Kant comes to be seen the
conflictual milieu in which autonomous subjects attain towards the fullness of all their
capacities. For our purposes here we will focus on one particular capacity, namely the ability to
use reason autonomously, which Kant associates with enlightenment. The reasons for this
focus on the sociability of enlightenment will become clear momentarily, but suffice to say for
the moment that both Kant’s picture of the emergence of enlightenment and the Romantic
practices of discussion can both be appropriately described as discourses193 aimed at the
developing of the activity of free subjects.
Let us therefore explore Kant’s enlightenment discourse. In his What is Enlightenment?
Kant begins by immediately providing us with a negative characterization of the eponymous
term: it is human being’s emergence from minority (unmündigkeit), the latter term being
understood as the “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the direction of
193
In what follows, I am indebted to the readings of Kant by Allison (in “Kant’s Conception of
Aufklärung,” Essays on Kant [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012] 229–235), Onora O’Neil (whose work will be dealt
with extensively in our fourth chapter), and Katerina Deligiorgi.
97
another.”194 Enlightenment, on Kant’s account, is a matter of cognitive self-activity or, in short,
cognitive autonomy.195
To the picture of enlightenment as cognitive autonomy, Kant quickly appends that we
can understand a situation of minority as being self-incurred when its source lies not in a lack
of capacity, but rather a lack of “resolution and courage.”196 Yet the coupling of these two
thoughts—enlightenment and courage—may be prima facie troubling. Are the implications of
this that the emergence from minority will take the shape of an ex nihilo act of individual will?
Or that the ‘unenlightened,’ those who do not at present employ their understanding without
the direction of another, are to be held responsible for this state of affairs? That, regardless of
political persecution, lack of opportunities for education, and so on, the unenlightened are (in
some sense) blameworthy?
A strictly voluntarist interpretation seems belied by Kant’s own use of juridical
vocabulary. In his extended discussion of the term in the Anthropology, Kant describes
unmündigkeit as “the (natural or legal) incapacity of an otherwise sound human being to use
his own understanding in civil affairs”;197 the term is associated with mental ‘deficiencies,’
194
Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Kant’s Practical Philosophy 17.
Ameriks argues succinctly for the ties that bind Kant’s shorter works with that of the broader
critical project: “his Critical essays stress the enlightened preconditions for the step-by-step historical
realization of our complete autonomy,” the latter being sketched out fully in the first and second
Critiques (Kant’s Elliptical Path 324).
196
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17.
197
Kant, “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” Anthropology, History, and Education
315.
195
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children and women, all of whom, as a matter of course, repose upon another’s agency in
matters concerning civil society.198 Yet in such cases it seems clear that there is no moral
register to the ascription of minority: the child is not to be held accountable for his or her
condition.
Indeed there is evidence to be found that, beyond not blaming children for their
‘minority’ status, Kant also may not see minority generally as being self-incurred. Again in his
discussion on the topic in the Anthropology, Kant directs us towards a very different
activity/passivity dynamic between those with civil or ecclesiastical positions and the public
they serve, thereby problematizing the charge of voluntarism (and its concomitant moral
judgement). While he first claims that heads of state can opportunistically act on the public’s
already-present docility (and, we may add, complicity for the sake of comfort), his claims about
the ecclesiastical authorities are different: the clergyman, he tells us, holds the layperson
“strictly and constantly in his immaturity”199 with respect to religious matters. This is not only a
matter of a lack of reciprocity, in other words, but the activity of one party suppressing the
activity of others. While Kant does not elaborate as to how precisely this occurs, we can say the
following: taking him on his word here, it cannot be the case that Kant holds a strict picture of
the culpability of the unenlightened for their state.
198
199
Cf. Allison, “Kant’s Conception of Aufklärung” 231.
Kant, “Anthropology” 315.
99
The voluntarist interpretation is, it seems, further problematized by Kant’s claims
regarding the ability of any “single individual” to free him- or herself from a situation of
minority that has become “almost nature” to him/her.200 While we could initially take Kant to be
arguing for the mere difficulty of bringing will to bear against sedimented habit, he puts the
case more strongly: the single individual “is really unable for the time being” to make use of
his/her own understanding, not only because they are caught up in “precepts and formulas,”
but also because they were “never allowed to make the attempt.”201 Moreover, in the rare cases
where an individual has succeeded in breaking free from minority,202 Kant makes no mention
of a heroic and individualist act of will as its source; rather than a decision, this freedom is
achieved by the broader cultivation of the individual’s spirit in a social milieu.203
It is clear that Kant and Hegel are in agreement about one thing: the individual ego is
not to be taken, for either thinker, as the absolute origin of its own sense and activity. We will
now argue that, despite the potential to overemphasize the danger of this egoistic voluntarism,
it is nevertheless the case that this proximity of enlightenment with the language of
voluntarism is not, strictly speaking, accidental. While Kant’s position on this point seems far
200
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17.
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17, emphasis added.
202
And there are some, if only “a few who have succeeded, by their own cultivation of their spirit,
in extricating themselves from minority” (Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17).
203
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17. Michel Foucault describes the tension, claiming that
Kantian enlightenment is to be seen “both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an
act of courage to be accomplished personally” (Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” The Postmodernism
Reader: Foundational Texts, ed. Michael Drolet [London: Routledge, 2004] 43).
201
100
from systematic, it is the very coupling of enlightenment with both individual autonomy and
community that places him in a difficult position—a position within which voluntarism (as a
kind of auto-affection) appears as one possible pathway of response.
We can pose Kant’s dilemma as follows: if we desire to give an account of the emergence
of humankind from minority, self-incurred or otherwise, and if we have at the same time
defined minority as cognitive heteronomy (as the inability of an ego to attain to or maintain its
own activity), we can no longer naïvely avail ourselves of what seems to be an obvious response,
namely a developmentalist account based on the educative hierarchy of the
enlightened/unenlightened. In other words, it seems that we cannot claim that enlightenment
will occur when those who are presently enlightened (through natural capacities or the
serendipities of birth and education, and presumably there are some) simply direct themselves
towards those who are presently not enlightened in the mode of pure activity. It is clear that the
result of this unilateral picture will simply be the self-defeating institution of, at most, a
different order of cognitive heteronomy.
A one-sided activity, in short, cannot bring about a reciprocal activity and indeed may
have the opposite effect, namely the effect of preventing the unenlightened from the
“attempt”204 to step away from passivity. Even if the already-enlightened can bring this
particular horse to water (as it were) in some way or other, what is required is a more fulsome
204
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17.
101
picture of just how this is to occur; this is to say that we must extrapolate a theory of the
emergence of enlightenment that does not follow a hierarchical model.
Despite the deeply problematic implications of equating the emergence of
enlightenment with a voluntaristic process, it has at least this advantage: in focusing purely on
the auto-affection of a subject through its own will (i.e., in manifesting courage), we avoid
having to posit a hierarchical relation between, say, a teacher and a student, or a genius and his
or her ‘audience,’205 or more broadly between a public and the intelligentsia. Indeed, if we take a
voluntaristic interpretation, it is clear that, strictly speaking, we cannot even speak of an
‘emergence’ in the sense of a development of a capacity; with respect to those whose
unenlightened state is self-inflicted, it is not a matter of developing what is inchoate, but rather
the spontaneous decision to put into play what has been there all along.206
Yet it should be clear from the above discussion of unmündigkeit in the Anthropology
and elsewhere that this equation of enlightenment with courage is not what Kant wishes to do.
What is necessary, then, is another kind of developmentalist account of enlightenment as selfactivity—one that explains the true emergence of enlightenment while avoiding the pernicious
moralizing implications of the voluntarist account. But just what sort of development is to be
205
A theme which will again occupy us in the fourth chapter of this text.
Compare the statement of Novalis: “how can a person have the sense for something which he
does not have the germ in himself? What I should understand I should develop organically in myself;
and what I appear to learn is only nourishment, incitement of the organism” (Novalis, “Pollen,” The
Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser [Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1996] #18).
206
102
understood here, when what emerges is cognitive autonomy, i.e., activity as such? How is it that
emergence can emerge if we limit ourselves strictly to the domain of auto-affection when, as we
have already pointed out, Kant stresses the inability of the “single individual”207 to free him- or
herself from his condition by his or her own means? Thus we could say that within the opening
lines of Kant’s essay, replete as it is with inexplicit tensions, a whole problematic emerges. To
retain his understanding of enlightenment as the emergence of cognitive autonomy, Kant
appears pushed towards the realm of the auto-affective; yet this very limitation seems to
problematize the most obvious grounds for a developmentalist account.
2.2.2 Public Enlightenment
Many of the above thematics we have already hit upon with Hegel’s social critique. In
the previous chapter, we came to understand egoism to imply that the individual subject acts as
the spontaneous origin of sense, truth, and right; furthermore, this notion of egoism implied
that the subject is a-historical and a-communal as a result. Kant’s solution reposes implicitly
upon his theory of unsociable sociability, as he directs us towards the communal nexus as the
ground of the emergence of enlightenment; that is, Kant claims priority for a sphere of
unfettered (and in a specific sense conflictual)208 interaction between individuals.
207
208
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17.
For instance: positing claims, being rebuked, etc.
103
Kant’s position is that, although a single individual’s ability to reach enlightenment is
severely limited, there is the possibility—indeed, he claims it to be almost inevitable—that a
public should enlighten itself if its freedom is left to it. By ‘freedom’ here Kant has in mind the
freedom to engage in public uses of reason, that least harmful, he claims, of “anything that
could even be called freedom,” and which “alone can bring about enlightenment among human
beings.”209 Kant thereby displaces the problematic. Instead of the development of the cognitive
autonomy of the individual being directly at stake, with the concomitant dangers of either a
voluntaristic or hierarchical account of how this development takes place, Kant shifts his
concern to the wider public. The result of this shift to a sociable account of enlightenment is
that, rather than the problematic understanding of a vertical transference of autonomy from
teacher to student (however wide we take these definitions to be), Kant posits a horizontal
process involving the circulation of activity within an entire group.
Yet to fully understand what Kant has in mind here, it is important first to come to
terms with his understanding of the public/private divide. This is a distinction that may on first
glance strike the reader as odd, insofar as it belies the more colloquial and contemporary uses
of the term. Kant sees officers, the clergy, and other manifestly public officials as exemplary
private reasoners. Presumably, he has in mind an etymological sense210 of the word rather than
209
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 17.
That is, the sense of privation: in O’Neill’s words, private “uses of reason are not ‘private’
because confined to private life, but because premised in part upon the acceptance of some ‘alien
210
104
the everyday distinction between the public (professional) sphere and private (domestic) life.
Yet beyond the arguably unintuitive vocabulary, the distinction Kant hopes to make is clear: the
private reasoner presupposes some authority—that of a government, the church, or a particular
societal institution (such as the legal system), etc.—and restrains his or her reach accordingly.
The reasons for this self-limitation are, Kant claims, prudential: the officer, for instance,
could not function qua officer by engaging in subtle questioning about the fundamental
grounds of every handed-down order; in such situations the citizen must take on the role of a
‘cog’ (Glied) in a functional machine, lest he or she spoil the artful unanimity that is harnessed
towards public ends.211 In contrast, the individual employing reason publicly212 presupposes no
such authorities, that is, no prudential limitations. Instead, he or she is free to reason, free to
make claims and respond critically, and free to examine all claims made by all purported
authorities. Kant goes so far as to frame this activity not only as a right but as a kind of duty,
stating that the public reasoner is “called upon to communicate” to the public all of the thoughts
that arise therewith.213
We can thus summarize this distinction along two axes: on the one hand, the
private/public uses of reason can be distinguished in terms of the authorities presupposed; on
authority’” and hence privative (O’Neill, “Enlightenment as Autonomy: Kant’s Vindication of Reason,”
The Enlightenment and Its Shadows [London and New York: Routledge, 1990] 196).
211
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 18.
212
We must note here that this may be the same officer from the previous example: Kant makes it
clear that the two capacities are not mutually exclusive beyond the confines of particular contexts (cf.
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 18–19).
213
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 19.
105
the other hand, the two uses can be distinguished in terms of the audience to whom such
reasoning is directed.214 That is, while a private thinker may reason with those who presuppose
the same horizon of authority (lawyers argue with one another on the basis of preexisting laws
and precedents, and indeed on the basis of the entire justice system, but throw neither the
system nor its instantiations into question), the public reasoner dons the scholar’s robes: “by
the public use of one’s own reason,” Kant states, “I understand that use which someone makes
of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers.”215 The public reasoner-cumscholar makes claims and dutifully “places these before his public for appraisal.”216
Important to note here is that Kant does not seem to equate the ‘scholar’ with the
professional academic or member of the prevailing intelligentsia, nor does he seem to think
that the performance of one sort of reasoning (either private or public) precludes the
performance of the other. Both of these points are evident from Kant’s examples of ‘private’
users, especially in the case of the clergyman: though the clergyman must deploy reason only
privately before a congregation, this does not preclude his enjoyment of “an unrestricted
freedom to make use of his own reason and to speak in his own person”217 in other contexts,
namely in the aforementioned capacity of a scholar before the world of readers. We can take it
214
“[T]hought, speech, and writing all presuppose possible audiences” (O’Neill, “Kant’s Conception
of Public Reason,” Kant and the Concept of Community [Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2011] 144). This
is a theme that chapter 4 will take up at length.
215
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 18.
216
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 19.
217
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 19.
106
then, that, although prima facie elitist, Kant’s claims regarding the scholar before a public imply
something rather humble, and perhaps even straightforwardly inclusive.218
With a clearer view of Kant’s position, the question that must be posed is just how this
widened view of the self-activity of a public as opposed to that of an individual avoids the
reinstitution of a kind of cognitive heteronomy, this time in the form of an
enlightened/unenlightened dynamic. Worse yet, it seems as though we may simply be
presupposing the very thing our account is designed to explain, as Kant’s understanding of
public reasoning as a reasoning that does not presuppose authoritative limits seems to veer
dangerously close to simply rephrasing his notion of cognitive autonomy, which undergirds his
entire discussion. If this is indeed the case, then Kant’s entire picture of the discourse of
enlightenment falls victim to a vicious circle.
It is difficult to overemphasize how puzzling Kant’s move here appears to be. Even
assuming we do not simply presuppose the fully-formed219 cognitive autonomy of all the
individuals making up a public, public reasoning seems a very poor solution to our problem. For
if we cannot already reason autonomously, the bringing of a whole public to bear may in fact
218
According to Deligiorgi, “Kant's references to learning can in fact be interpreted as meaning
that no other qualifications are necessary for participating in a public argument” (Deligiorgi, Kant and
the Culture of Enlightenment [Albany: SUNY, 2005] 72). Kevin R. Davis maintains that “we can then
argue that the freedom of participation represents a commitment to overcoming the traditional barriers
of birth, wealth, standing, or professional specialization” (Davis, “Kant’s Different ‘Publics’ and the
Justice of Publicity,” Kant-Studien 83.2 [1992]: 172).
219
Or we might say: fully armed. (Cf. Schiller: “It is not without significance that the old myth
makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is
warlike” (Aesthetic Letters 49).
107
bring us towards a more complete subjection to the cognition of others, insofar as one’s
autonomy now comes to depend (in some undisclosed way) on an addressed audience. Indeed,
in this sense, the ‘solution’ of the public may even be dangerous: the avoidance of the verticality
of a student/teacher relation pushes us instead towards the individual’s subjection to the
horizontal volatility of a whole public. Would not this result be even more troublesome than our
subjugation to those who Kant calls ‘guardians’ (individuals with intellectual or spiritual
authority), insofar as the public is also the realm of unrestrained opinion?
It is clear that Kant sees another possibility in the sphere of public reasoning. In order to
understand why he sees the public use of reason neither as heteronomy nor a subjugation of
thought to opinion, we need to come to an understanding of what the ‘autonomy’ in ‘cognitive
autonomy’ implies. We can take an obvious starting point simply by stating what autonomy
cannot imply, given what we know of Kant’s account so far, specifically that it cannot imply a
notion of autonomy as a kind of cognitive absolution from all others. Beyond the narrower
context of enlightenment, this is clearly stated by Kant in his Anthropology.220 In this text Kant
provides a description of what he calls the logical egoist, that is, the individual who deems the
testing of his/her judgement by the judgements of others superfluous. Similar to the Romantic
ego (at least according to Hegel), who claims for itself absolution from its community, the
logical egoist arrogates authority and retreats into self-congratulatory idiosyncrasy.
220
Kant, “Anthropology” 240–242.
108
For Kant as much as Hegel, this flight from community is a grave mistake: the testing of
our judgements against those of others, according to Kant, is an external criterion of truth,221
something with which we cannot dispense. Kant’s reasoning may prima facie be empirical
prudence. If, for instance, freedom of the press is restricted, we become deprived of one of the
means of testing the correctness of our own judgements through the resistance of other
reasoners; accordingly, we are far more likely to be led into scientific and philosophical danger.
2.2.3 Epistemic Prudence, or the Very Possibility of Cognition?
Is it therefore mere prudence, placed in opposition to epistemic hubris, that brings Kant
to give a central position to the specifically public side of enlightenment? That is, is it only the
increased chance of avoiding errors and happening upon truths that leads Kant to his position?
On this picture, the public would appear as a sort of self-righting, if shambolic, machine on the
march towards truth. Yet such an interpretation of these texts misses, it seems, a far more
radical sentiment to be found in Kant’s texts. For, as we have seen all along, Kant’s conception
of enlightenment bears little concern—or rather should bear little concern—for the content of
thought, and thus should not primarily be concerned with truth or falsity;222 instead, Kant’s
account is concerned broadly with the aspect under which thought takes place, drawing a
221
Cf. Katerina Deligiorgi, “Universalisability, Publicity, and Communication: Kant’s Conception
of Reason,” European Journal of Philosophy 10.2 (2002): 150.
222
Nevertheless, Kant is at times in tension with himself on this issue, and clearly concerned with
both the content and aspect of thought.
109
dividing line between heteronomous and autonomous thinking, between activity and passivity.
Even if we can infer it as a likely result of a societal shift towards mass enlightenment, at no
point in his work does Kant provide us with an argument for this cognitive autonomy that is
explicitly framed in terms of its epistemic utility.
Indeed, the need for publicness in Kant’s account seems to extend far beyond such
prudence. In a famously and all-too-pithy comment from What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself
in Thinking?223 Kant goes so far as to claim that a complete restriction of the freedom to
communicate with others is not only imprudent, but in fact inhibits the bare ability to think.
For, he asks us, “how much and how correctly would we think if we did not think as it were in
community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts, and who communicate theirs
with us!”224 Communication thereby comes to be seen as a condition not only of epistemic
prudence (à la Kant’s remarks regarding the logical egoist), but rather of cognition as such:
sociality is here the condition for the self-activity of thought.
We see Kant going to great lengths to avoid the naïve individualism or egoism so
thoroughly criticized by Hegel. Indeed, there is a startling similarity in their claims: for Hegel
the Romantic genius requires community not only for the substantiality and truth of its content,
but for its very activity—the unchecked idiosyncratic activity of the ego soon falls, as we have
223
A text also concerned with enlightenment: “thinking for oneself means seeking the supreme
touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e. in one’s own reason); and the maxim of thinking for oneself is
enlightenment” (Kant, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Religion and Rational
Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996] 18).
224
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 16.
110
seen, into passivity and despair; likewise, for Kant the individual requires a community not
only for the maintenance of truth, but indeed for the individual’s own activity of cognition. It is
thereby clear, both in his discussion of logical egoism as well as his broad orientation towards a
kind of public enlightenment, that Kant seeks desperately to avoid such an egoism; the
individual is no absolute Fichtean origin or wellspring of its own activity, for Kant as much as
for Hegel, and he/she must turn to the community in order to achieve cognitive autonomy.
Nevertheless, Kant’s quick words regarding the dependence of thought on
communication are quite opaque; that is, it is not clear just why the activity of individuals
should depend on the activity of others. Why does Kant implore the reader to think
autonomously, yet at the same time cautions strongly against the trap of logical egoism? Why
does Kant begin his essay on enlightenment with a forceful admonition of those who lack the
courage to reason autonomously, before immediately going on to argue that it is only in the
context of community (and public uses of reason, i.e., reasoning with or before others) that
autonomous reasoning can emerge?225
On the one hand, the importance placed on autonomy seems to imply that we cannot
think simply of an enlightened individual acting upon a passive one (or a group thereof); this
225
Beiser notes a similar vicious circle at play in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, implying that such
issues may be bound up with enlightenment notions of autonomy more broadly: “At the beginning of
this work Schiller noted a vicious circle facing any attempt to educate the citizen: a republic exists only if
it consists of citizens having the virtue and wisdom to make laws; but citizens can be educated only if
there is already a republic” (Beiser, “Romanticism,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, ed.
Randall Curren [Blackwell Reference Online, 2005]).
111
may furthermore require of him an account of the auto-affective emergence of enlightenment,
i.e., of how the individual can bring him or herself out of unmündigkeit from within his or her
sphere of cognitive propriety. Yet it is also clear that we cannot simply conceive of this
autonomy as implying that the individual is cognitively absolved from others. For, beyond the
arrogance and loss of the ‘external touchstone’ involved in logical egoism, it seems that staking
a claim to cognitive absolution leaves us with few means to render enlightenment’s
emergence—or even thought as such—comprehensible; few means, that is, beyond the positing
of a voluntaristic (and egoistic) act of will.
2.3 Absolute Reciprocity: Schleiermacher
Egoism on the one hand, a communal heteronomy on the other: Kant’s thinking here
risks shearing apart in such a tug of war. What is missing to clarify this Kantian account of
Bildung226 is a more explicit account of the dialectic between the individual and the communal
(the particular and the universal, the active and the passive). While the Romantics enter into
the same thematic territory as Kant, seeking to understand the formation of the self-activity of
226
Beiser provides a clear description of the valences of this word and its relation to the English
term ‘education’: “Education might be Unterricht, which usually means instruction; it might be
Erziehung, which implies teaching; or it might be Ausbildung, which suggests training or
apprenticeship. In some contexts the term Bildung simply means education; but it usually also has much
richer connotations. It literally means ‘formation,’ suggesting an organic process whereby something
potential, implicit, and inchoate becomes actual, explicit, and determinate. But in some contexts
Bildung also means culture. These connotations sometimes coalesce in the idea of the process or
product of acculturation. Sometimes they suggest the ethical idea of self-realization, the process by
which someone becomes what they are” (Beiser, “Romanticism”).
112
free subjects in the nexus of a communal dialogue, they differ from Kant to the extent that they
provide a more fulsome and explicit account of this dialectic.
Schleiermacher, realizing the strictures placed on an account of the development of
autonomous beings, states clearly that we cannot understand ‘active’ individuals as causing the
‘passive’ individuals to initiate autonomous activity in a causal sense; at most we can
understand the activity of others to present an object around which the self-activity may
coalesce.227 This means that the circulation of activity within a community must be
multidirectional in a thoroughgoing sense; that is, the Romantics conceptualize a kind of
communal interaction necessitating the parting out of activity and passivity between all
involved individuals, and hence a co-mediation of individual and community. Schleiermacher
calls this the form of absolute reciprocity. We will now explicate this concept, arguing that it
implies that the Romantic ego is no sort of absolute origin and, accordingly, that Hegel’s
charges of egoism are misguided.
2.3.1 Enlightenment and Sociability
We began this chapter by exploring Kant’s unsociable picture of human sociability,
framing his theory of enlightenment as an instance thereof. It is important to note, however,
that this not the sum total of Kant’s writing on the subject of sociability. In his third Critique,
227
On this point we can compare Novalis: “the objects of social conversation are nothing more
means of stimulation. This determines the choice, change, and treatment of them” (“Pollen” #44).
113
Kant provides a sketch of a startlingly different picture of humanity’s social tendencies. At the
end of the first part of the text, that is, in his very concluding comments, Kant gestures towards
a two-pronged theory of proper human sociability, necessitating a “universal feeling of
participation” coupled with “the capacity for being able to communicate one’s inmost selfuniversally[.]”228 This burgeoning human social intercourse Kant connects to a vision of human
society: he speaks of an “art of reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part
[of society] with the cruder, the coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with
the natural simplicity and originality of the latter[.]”229
Preserving the truth of both castes of society, this art of reciprocal communication
would act as the sublation of the opposition between nature and culture. Although this Kantian
picture remains only a sketch, it is arguable that the Romantics picked up this particular torch,
lit but carried only briefly by Kant himself.230 It is in the works of Schleiermacher that the sociocommunal aspects of social philosophizing attain to their highest degree of thematic clarity.231
228
Kant, Power of Judgment 229.
Kant, Power of Judgment 229.
230
Kneller argues for this position, claiming that the “German romantics took up the project of
deliberately constructing this sort of social sociability [from the Critique of the Power of Judgment] by
experimenting with and theorizing new forms of social discourse that balanced expressions of high
culture on the one hand, and the unpretentious originality of ordinary human nature on the other”
(Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 110).
231
It is ironic that the most explicit and in-depth theorization of sociability in early Romanticism
took shape in the conventional works of an individual as opposed to the more obviously
experimental/symphilosophical forms of writing. Yet although the text was penned by Schleiermacher
alone, it’s clear that he believed its genesis to have been social. Indeed, Schleiermacher abandoned the
goal of writing on the issue when he found himself isolated in Potsdam, writing to Henriette Herz, “I
229
114
In his tract “Towards a Theory of Sociable Conduct,”232 Schleiermacher follows Kant in arguing
that the community is the nexus in which individuals attain to their own proper activities.233
Schleiermacherian sociability is descriptive of a particular inclination in the human
being towards interaction with others;234 yet unlike Kant’s picture of enlightenment,
Schleiermacher posits not an argumentative antagonism,235 but a desire for the company and
love of others culminating in a communal practice that he calls ‘free sociable intercourse’ or
‘free sociality.’ Schleiermacher claims that, in order to properly manifest this inclination to
sociability (rather than egoism, utility, etc.), there must be an interaction of a particular sort,
that is, a particular kind of dialogue—a discourse. Schleiermacher’s notion of free sociability is
have read a dialogue of Plato and done some work on religion, I have written letters, in short, I have
tried everything except the piece on good manners—and how should I do anything on this without
companionship?” (Schleiermacher, quoted in Jeffrey Hoover, “Introduction: ‘Toward a Theory of
Sociable Conduct,’” Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct” and Essays on its
Intellectual-Cultural Context, ed. R. D. Richardson [Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, 1995] 10).
232
First published 1799. The text was published anonymously (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 117).
233
Cf. “The community of people with other people, as choosing, acting beings, is called sociality
[Geselligkeit]” (Schleiermacher, On Freedom, ed. and trans. Albert L. Blackwell [Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen,
1992] 140). This is a motif which occupied Schleiermacher throughout his life: “in Schleiermacher’s
writings of the last years of the eighteenth century, he repeatedly dwelled on the role of other people in
his life and deliberated on the nature of an ethical stance toward other human beings, always conscious
of our inherent connectedness to others” (Katherine M. Faull, “Beyond Confrontation?” Schleiermacher’s
Theory of Sociable Conduct 51). Kristin Gjesdal writes that even within Schleiermacher’s writings on
hermeneutics, the self “realizes itself in free interaction with other selves”; she points out further that it
is within his essay on sociable conduct that the basic tenets of this position are most clearly set forth
(Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher’s Idea of Bildung in the
Landscape of Hegelian Thought,” Relevance of Romanticism 103).
234
For example, “free sociality will be treated [as] an unavoidable natural tendency”
(Schleiermacher, “Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct,” Schleiermacher’s “Theory of Sociable Conduct”
23).
235
Schleiermacherian sociability is, as it were, a sociable sociability in opposition to the unsociable
sociability of Kant’s enlightenment discourse.
115
thus in part descriptive (gesturing as it does towards broader issues of a human nature) and in
part prescriptive, arguing for a sphere of dialogical interaction with particular traits in order to
best manifest and develop this sociable aspect of the human being.
2.3.2 Between the Professional and Domestic
In part Schleiermacher’s model of free sociable dialogue is determined negatively on the
basis of what it is not.236 That is to say that Schleiermacher sharply differentiates his sphere of
free sociability from those of the domestic and professional realms of social intercourse. Both
of these spheres of interaction, he claims, posit strict limits that prevent them from ever
attaining to the status of ‘free’ and hence to being properly social. First, on a professional level,
Schleiermacher claims that one’s relations come to be externally determined by one’s
occupation, as well as more immediately by the task at hand. One shares both a common task
and common vocation with ‘coworkers,’ and to one another you are only that: ‘coworkers.’237 In
concrete terms this implies that the range of topics of conversation tends to dilate towards
topics bound to these purposes; indeed, the sharing of a task may be the only thing that brings
236
He writes, “it all depends on whether one is able to expel for a time all limitations of domestic
and public [bürgerliche] relationships as far as one wants” (Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct”
21).
237
Compare Schiller’s remarks regarding the limiting and dehumanizing effects of the division of
labour: “We know indeed that vigorous genius does not make the boundaries of its concern the
boundaries of its activity; but mediocre talent consumes the whole meagre sum of its strength in the
concern that falls to its lot” (Schiller, Aesthetic Letters 41).
116
one into a common sphere, and only in an incidental and rigid way; additionally, the range of
possible conversation partners is narrowed to those who share the same range of tasks.238
Second, Schleiermacher takes up the domestic sphere. The domestic sphere, it turns out,
overcomes some of the problems to be found in the professional realm. The range of possible
dialogue topics, for instance, can stretch well beyond those connected to the professional
domain (the skills, goals, and situations to be found in any particular profession); likewise, the
people with whom one interacts is not determined by an incidental professional connection (a
shared task or vocation). Yet here Schleiermacher points out that, for entirely different reasons
having to do with the family structure, we tend nevertheless to interact with a only a narrow
range of persons: our family members, our spouses, close friends, and so on.239 We again
encounter a problem of range: one usually only interacts with a handful of people domestically,
and they are usually the same ‘sort’ (race and class) as one incidentally is. Furthermore, while it
may seem as though one is not domestically defined by one’s task or role, this is not strictly the
case: one is still a husband, a wife, a daughter, and so on, and each of these titles articulates a
particular relation vis-à-vis one’s domestic contacts. While this may not be quite as limiting as
the above professional limits, it is still, for Schleiermacher, insufficient.
238
Just as the Kantian public reasoner must do away with his/her ‘private’ commitments,
Schleiermacher claims that professional interactions are all-too limited. We will return to this point of
comparison later.
239
“[D]omestic life places us in contact with only a few individuals and always with the same ones”
(Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 20).
117
2.3.3 Purposiveness Without Purpose and Absolute Reciprocity
In both domestic and professional spheres of interaction, an individual’s interactions
and associations are externally overdetermined. Likewise, both the domestic and the
professional realms can be expansive, sapping the energy and time of the potential socializers.
In contrast, Schleiermacher wants to conceive of a realm of interpersonal association that goes
beyond institutional control and domestic limitations. Accordingly, he claims that, within free
sociality, there can be no mention of a determinate purpose: there must be no specific goals or
tasks, no institution must form around it, no rules can be posited for how it must be performed,
and, he continues in quite thorough terms: “no particular action executed communally, no
product brought about jointly, nor any judgement methodically acquired.”240 These are the
negative determinations of ‘freedom.’
There is a clear similarity between the concept at the core of Kant’s aesthetics241 (and
teleology, for that matter) and Schleiermacher’s claims regarding the purposelessness of free
sociality. As we have seen for Kant,242 the beautiful object appears to us as having been made for
an end, but with no particular end being posited. Beauty exhibits, in Kant’s words,
purposiveness without purpose. The beautiful object is available to our free contemplation and
yet it is so with no purpose (concept) being positable beyond itself that would betray both the
free play of our faculties and aesthetic autonomy as such. Schleiermacher, on his part, clearly
240
241
242
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 25.
Kneller makes a similar point in her “Conduct of Philosophy” 121.
See s.1.3 of this thesis.
118
envisions free sociality along the lines of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement. Free sociality
does not bear with it an external standard or goal; although it seems that people gather and
discuss in a purposive way—it is not chaotic or lawless, even if it is horizontally anarchic—we
can posit no determinate purpose beyond the dialogue itself.243 Instead, free sociality exhibits a
kind of lawlikeness that stems from the amenability of certain minds with one another244—
much like the beautiful seems to simply ‘fit’ with our cognition. Free sociality is thus, like beauty
for Kant, purposive without determinate purposes being posited.
Yet there appears to be a tension here. For if free sociality is supposed to be beyond
purposes, is the cultivation of individual activity not a purpose? In a certain sense this must be
admitted, even if we clarify that there is no purpose beyond the general stimulation of the
individual to (individual) activity. Yet such a response is unsatisfying. The tension here is the
same to be found in Kant’s third Critique as well as in the work of his erstwhile disciple
Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, and even for Hegel. For all three thinkers,
art is claimed to be free in its means and ends:245 the aesthetic sphere is to hold its own domain
with its own rules and is an end in itself beyond epistemic or practical concerns; yet, the
243
Cf. Novalis: “a genuine club is a mixture of an institute and society. It has a purpose, like the
institute; not a determinate one, but one indeterminate and free: humanity in general. All purposes are
serious; but a society is completely joyful” (“Pollen” #43).
244
Thus Schlegel tells us that he “is often struck by the idea that two minds really belong together,
like divided halves that can realize their full potential only when joined” (Philosophical Fragments,
Athenaeum Fragments #125).
245
See Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 7.
119
aesthetic experience is also manifestly viewed as a means to an end, namely practical
betterment, moral edification and, ultimately, societal progress.
There is a way in which this means/ends tension can be questioned, if not entirely
dissolved. Indeed we can say, first, that such a tension is far from abnormal in the context of
education. Education is quite often and naïvely seen as both a means (to a skill, a job, etc.) and
an end (moral or ‘human’ betterment); although prima facie contradictory, there is in fact no
immediate reason why these two thoughts should prove at odds, particularly when dealing with
the aesthetic.246 That is, aesthetic formation in particular, uniquely and due to the intimate
connection between aesthetic freedom and human freedom, can be claimed to be a means only
insofar as it is also an end.
To explain: for Kant and Schiller, beauty is a only a means to human betterment insofar
as it bears an intimate relationship to human autonomy, one that implies that it is itself an end.
For Kant, for instance, this plays out in the isomorphism between reflection on aesthetic ideas
and ideas of reason (symbolism),247 an isomorphism which allows us to bridge the gap between
the phenomenal and noumenal realms; for Schiller this leads to the importation of a practical
246
Cf. Beiser, “Surely, it is possible to treat the aesthetic as both means and end; some goods in life,
viz. education and health, are valuable both as means and as ends” (Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher 166).
247
On Kant’s account of symbolism and its relation to ideas of reason, see: G. F. Munzel, “‘The
Beautiful Is the Symbol of the Morally-Good’: Kant's Philosophical Basis of Proof for the Idea of the
Morally-Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33.2 (1995): 301–330; A. Rueger, “The Role of
Symbolic Presentation in Kant's Theory of Taste,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 45.3 (2005): 229–247;
C. Brodsky, “‘Judgment’ and the Genesis of What We Lack: ‘Schema,’ ‘Poetry,’ and the ‘Monogram of the
Imagination’ in Kant,” Eighteenth Century 51.3 (2010): 317–340.
120
concept (freedom)248 into the aesthetic, i.e., the claim that the beautiful is the phenomenal
presentation of freedom as such, with its concomitant status as a kind of pre-moral archetype.
For both Kant and Schiller, therefore, the autonomous aesthetic realm bears a unique
relationship to human autonomy and, therefore, must be conceived as an end; to the extent that
this end-status holds, the aesthetic is also a—perhaps the—pathway to human betterment and
can likewise be a means. In a similar fashion we can say that Schleiermacher’s free sociality is
an end in itself, is free from external goals or strictures, and yet only insofar as it is its own end
can it lead to the development Schleiermacher envisions as possible for free and autonomous
subjects.
Yet beyond this, just how is Schleiermacher’s free sociality supposed to be free, in
contrast to the professional or domestic spheres? Central to his claim is what Schleiermacher
calls the ‘form’ of free sociality, that is, absolute reciprocity (Wechselwirkung). He begins by
drawing a series of concrete contrasts. First, he compares free sociality to the interaction
between theatre goers and people on the stage, as well as to the interaction between a lecturer
and the lecture hall. In all cases, the listeners are just that: they are listeners, and they are
248
We have already (s.1.2) touched in this point in relation to Hegel’s appropriation of Schiller’s
work. Beyond the confines of Hegel’s work, Beiser makes this point clearly: “since aesthetic judgment
applies the principle of practical reason to the sensible world, and since this principle is nothing less
than autonomy or freedom, the principle of aesthetic judgment must concern how freedom appears in
the sensible world. In other words, the fundamental principle of aesthetic judgment—the general
concept of beauty—is nothing less than the appearance of freedom in the sensible world. It is, to use
Schiller’s famous formula, ‘freedom in appearance’ (Freiheit in der Erscheinung), ‘autonomy in
appearance’ (Autonomie in der Erscheinung)” (Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher 60).
121
passive; such audiences form incidentally around the speaker or the actor, and they do not react
in a meaningful way upon the latter; furthermore, the audiences do not interact with other
members of the gathered audience.249
Whereas in constrained (or, as it were, ‘adherent’)250 sociality there is a unidirectionality
of action towards a passive audience (in a broad sense), in free sociality activity moves
reciprocally, i.e., centripetally and centrifugally in all directions. That is to say that there is,
strictly speaking, no lecturer and audience, no actor and audience, no reasoner and public, no
podium or stage. Instead we have a horizontal playing field: there are dialogue partners, and
like any good dialogue, there needs to be a to and fro, a give and take. To draw out this point,
Schleiermacher presents us with another concrete example that comes closer to, but does not in
the final analysis live up to, the ‘free’ label: he claims that a dance, while it may be closer to the
form of absolute reciprocity he seeks, is also not ideal. While there might be a kind of parting
out of activity and passivity between dance partners, the social dance of his day nevertheless
limits each individual to a single partner at a single time. For this reason, such reciprocity falls
short of his ideal, for free sociability requires not only a bidirectional reciprocity between
249
Cf. Schleiermacher’s claims that “[m]any persons are to act upon each other and this action
cannot be unilateral in any way” (“Theory of Sociable Conduct” 24). Thus free sociality is determined by
the audience it presupposes. The theme of audience will occupy us at length in chapter 4.
250
To borrow (in a similar fashion to Schleiermacher himself) a Kantian terme de l’art. For Kant,
adherent beauties are those rendered ‘impure’ by their presupposition of, and determination by, a
concept of what the object “ought to be” (Kant, Power of Judgment 114).
122
individuals, but—at least potentially—an absolute reciprocity, a pure co-activity between all
gathered individuals.251
For this reason, Schleiermacher’s final example brings us to the most reciprocal point
yet. He claims that a game (Spiel, or play) gets us closer to the ideal of freely social reciprocity
insofar as the to and fro of a game at least in principle involves all the players. Formally
speaking, therefore, all actions in free sociality must tend towards this kind of absolute
reciprocity, of a centripetal/centrifugal parting out of activity and passivity between all the
gathered individuals.252
This notion of an absolute reciprocity we can compare with two points to be found in
Kant’s corpus. The first is to be derived from Kant’s aesthetics. To be sure, one of
Schleiermacher’s chief influences for developing this notion of reciprocity was the famous
notion of free play, described in chapter 1. Indeed, Schleiermacher is explicit in his debt to Kant
here, and, in an echo of Kantian phrasing, he states that the freely sociable reciprocity between
individuals is designed to foster “the free play of one’s powers”253—that is, the reciprocity
251
“[A]ll action is to be reciprocal action” (Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 25). Again,
it is fairly easy to see the sonorous Kantianism of this claim; we need only recall Kant’s solicitation of an
“art of reciprocal communication of the ideas” (Kant, Power of Judgment 114; cf. Kneller, who makes a
similar claim in “Conduct of Philosophy” 112).
252
Thus he states that “all is to be reciprocal action” (Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct”
25).
253
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 21. Compare his comment elsewhere that
“nothing is more closely attached to this sense for the beautiful than the sense for social life [fürs
gesellige]” (Schleiermacher, On What Gives Value to Life, ed. and trans. Edwina G. Lawler and Terrence
N. Tice [Lewiston: E. Mellen, 1995] 31).
123
between individuals not only itself parallels, but also undergirds, the activation of the nonhierarchical interplay which occurs within cognition itself.254 Whereas in determinate
cognition the faculty of the understanding has the final say, we have already seen how aesthetic
experiences allow for the parting out of activity and passivity between the imagination and
understanding in a ceaseless interaction. Schleiermacher takes this form of reciprocity and detranscendentalizes it, deploying it heuristically to understand interactions between individuals
(although no longer limiting himself to two individuals) rather than the interaction between
mental faculties.
There is a second point of comparison to be made with Kant, this time with the
previously described enlightenment discourse. As we have seen, the writings on enlightenment
as cognitive autonomy place on Kant several strictures for an account of self-activity’s
emergence; that is, the enlightenment discourse must be non-hierarchical and (in some sense)
auto-affective while still avoiding the traps of voluntarism and logical egoism. With his notion
of free sociability, Schleiermacher provides an answer to this Kantian dilemma: ‘absolute
254
Although if we take seriously the fundamental sociality of cognition, then it is not clear how
rigid a boundary between individual cognition and social activity can be demarcated. Indeed, the
Romantics viewed even individual cognition as relying on a fundamental self-differentiation. On this
point, we can refer to two remarks, one by Schlegel and one by Novalis. The first is Schlegel’s addition to
Novalis’s “Pollen,” that “if in communicating a thought, one fluctuates between absolute comprehension
and absolute incomprehension, then this process might already be termed a philosophical friendship.
For it’s no different with ourselves. Is the life of a thinking human being anything else than a continuous
inner symphilosophy?” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Blüthenstaub #2). The second comment is
Novalis’s own claim that “[s]ociety is nothing more than communal life: an indivisible thinking and
feeling person. Each person is a small society” (“Pollen” #44).
124
reciprocity’ manages to condense both many of the Kantian insights and apparent blind spots
into a single notion, as well as gesture towards how the aforementioned dilemma can be
overcome. Schleiermacher writes, “The action of each individual should be aimed at the activity
of the others, and the activity of individuals should be their influence on the others. However,
nothing else can be affected in a free being except that it is thereby stimulated to its own
activity and that the activity is given an object[.]”255
This is no ‘object’ in a traditional sense, for here it is the very activity of others—the free
sociable discourse as such—around which the individual’s activity is able to properly coalesce.256
In other words, we could say that the nature of this Romantic auto-affection is, almost
paradoxically, routed absolutely through the reciprocal co-activity of others.
2.3.4 Self-limitation in Kant and Schleiermacher
As Schleiermacher continues to describe free sociality, he posits one more negative
stricture in addition to the first (purposiveness without purpose) and to the positive demand
for absolute reciprocity. Schleiermacher writes that ”your sociable activity should always
255
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 25.
As Schlegel’s words from the Ideas imply: “An artist is someone who carries his center within
himself. Whoever lacks such a center has to choose some particular leader and mediator outside of
himself, not, to be sure, forever, but only to begin with. For a man cannot live without a vital center, and
if he does not yet have one within himself, then he can only seek it in another man, and only [another]
man and another man’s center can stimulate and awaken his own” (Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #45).
256
125
remain within the boundaries within which a particular society can exist as a whole.”257 In other
words: while your own activity must express your individuality, this must not imply that
everyone else will find you incomprehensible, or your claims indefensible or overbearing.
Why does Schleiermacher demand this limitation within a purportedly free dialogical
setting? The answer, it seems, directs us once more to the importance of an absolute reciprocity.
We have seen that this latter term implies that activity must be at least potentially shareable
between all gathered individuals. With this negative stricture—we could call it the demand for
inclusiveness—Schleiermacher appends a practical rule, without which true reciprocity cannot
take shape. That is, the achievement of reciprocity implies a limitation in terms of the content
of dialogue for, if a topic is brought up about which only part of a gathering can fluidly converse,
this presents a de facto limit to the activity of individuals who are excluded. As such, “nothing
should be mentioned that does not belong to the sphere common to everyone[,]”258 for
otherwise activity cannot circulate; self-activity requires reciprocity, and yet reciprocity
requires self-limitation.
We see here another point of comparison arise between Schleiermacherian sociability
and Kantian enlightenment. Whereas Kant claims public reasoning (and hence enlightenment)
arise from individuals excluding their ‘private’ interests, that is, presupposing no authority on
the basis of prudential reasoning, Schleiermacher claims that an individual must engage in
257
258
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 25.
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 26.
126
self-limitation for the sake of fostering the reciprocity of intra-group activity. Although these
two positions initially appear at odds—one calls for self-limitation for the sake of the activity of
a particular group; one calls for (as it were) self-transcendence away from private interests—the
difference is not as stark as it may appear. Indeed, for both the goal is in principle the same: the
effective status of the discourse, their ability to develop the participants, depends on that
discourse’s ability to include participants fully. Kant, focusing on truth and justification—
potential grounds for claims which may nor may not be shared—calls for a kind of selftranscendence; Schleiermacher, focusing on the free circulation of activity within a society,
argues for a kind of self-limitation; nevertheless, the goal for both is a kind of inclusiveness.
The difference therefore stems not from the goals of these respective discourses (the
development of free activity). Rather, the contrast arises in a twofold manner: first, Kant’s
notion of audience is, as we have seen, that of an entire world of readers; this is much broader
than of Schleiermacher’s picture of a particular ‘society’ composed of proximate members.
Although Schleiermacher gives no ideal number for a social gathering (and indeed mocks Kant
himself for doing so), we can assume that claims to the maximization of the activity of
participants is thought within a much smaller range than that of Kant’s enlightenment
discourse. The second point of contrast here is that, unlike Kant’s confused coupling of the
form of thought (the ‘how,’ or the aspect under which thought takes place) and the content of
127
thought (the truth thereof and the ground of claims), Schleiermacher focuses almost solely on
the former.
What does it mean to say that Schleiermacher focuses on the form and not the content
of thought? In response to this question, we raise now a certain paradox emerging with the
arrival of Schleiermacher’s call for a prudential limitation. For the third rule seems to exclude
precisely that which is most important: if free sociality is to develop the active and co-active
individualities of those gathered, how will this be possible if what seems most proprietary,
idiosyncratic, and individual (as opposed to most communal) is now to be outlawed?
To Schleiermacher’s credit, he himself seems to realize this exact point: “the command
that I should leave part of my sphere out of society amounts to the command that I should cease
to exist as an individual[, which] apparently contradicts the purpose of free sociality[.]”259 He
attempts to resolve this tension by distinguishing between the form and matter of an
interaction or, as he puts it, style (Manier) and content (Stoff).260 He states that individuals are
unique not only because of their own unique experiences and histories (providing them with a
‘matter’ of dialogue), but because of how they “use, combine, cultivate, and communicate” the
259
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 27. Kneller rephrases the problem: “societies are
easily destroyed by self-centred members, but self-deprecating team-players are just as destructive
because they do not contribute their own, unique share” (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 118). And
indeed, every society should be composed of members are maximally different from one another,
according to Schleiermacher.
260
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 28–29.
128
material they are given.261 This combinatory and communicatory capacity262 constitutes an
individual’s unique style.
Schleiermacher therefore takes individuality in quite broad terms. It is a person’s
“principles, opinions … manner of expression [and] conduct[,]”263 in addition to the
combinatory act of ‘style,’ which we could gloss as follows: the individuality of the individuality
is all of the aspects of a person along with the ‘how’ of combination. Although the various
aspects of a person may be quite general (we may all share opinions, principles, and modes of
expression or conduct within a similar range), just how these things are combined is not so
constrained (style).264 Once more, we see that Hegel’s claims regarding the Romantic ego are
misleading. The ego is, much as it was for Hegel, a product of its historico-communal milieu;
accordingly, Schleiermacher sees every individual, human or otherwise, as absolutely
261
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 28.
In this sense, what Schleiermacher means by ‘style’ is related to the Romantic notion of wit as
the capacity to creatively combine and dissolve ideas that are not immediately or obviously related:
“Many witty ideas are like the sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation” (Schlegel,
Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #37). Yet it is important to note that this picture of wit
as combinatory does not reduce it to a merely subjective capacity. Indeed, Michel Chaouli has capably
argued for this capacity’s origin in language itself understood as chemical (Chaouli, The Laboratory of
Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002]
120–133). Nevertheless, even this extra-subjective wit is simply unavailable without the social circulation
of language; thus, wit also comes to be described as “logical sociability” (Schlegel, Philosophical
Fragments, Critical Fragments #56). For an examination of the historical antecedents to this Romantic
conception of wit in the work of Kant and Fichte, see Richard Findler, “Why Be Witty? Fichte and Kant
on the Nature of Wit with a View to Wit’s Political Ramifications,” The European Legacy 9.3 (2004): 331–
341.
263
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 27.
264
Thus Schleiermacher “conceives of each human being as having within him or herself that
which is particular and that which is universal” (Faull, “Beyond Confrontation?” 51).
262
129
idiosyncratic, prospectively opening into “a different and alien world”265 with an infinite and
divine value.266
Schleiermacher, in other words, seems to realize far more explicitly than Kant that selfactivity is a form and does immediately concern a content (truth and justification included).
With respect to content, by contrast, Schleiermacher sees it as more or less incidental. He
writes that, “with regard to [society’s] content,” I allow “myself to be led and limited by the
society [whereas] I yet remain at liberty within this sphere to give free reign to my unique
style[.]”267 Nevertheless, both discourses (free sociality and the discourse of Kantian
enlightenment) are centrally concerned with bringing the participants to a kind of autonomous
265
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 20.
Presumably the metaphysical grounds for Schleiermacher’s appraisal of individuality is to be
found in Spinoza, on whom Schleiermacher wrote extensively. Or, as Beiser writes, “Schleiermacher
held that individual differences do not disappear in Spinoza’s single universal substance but that each
finite thing has a distinctive value as an appearance of the infinite… it was this religious dimension that
lay behind Schleiermacher’s individualism” (Beiser, “Schleiermacher’s Ethics,” Cambridge Companion
to Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005] 61). Certain readings of
Spinoza’s view sub specie aeternitatis understand it to imply a mere ignoring of difference, and hence
the absolute submerging of the particular in the godly substance. While it is not clear that anyone truly
held such a facile monism, accusations of it being held abound: see, for instance, Schiller’s attack on
Fichte in his Aesthetic Letters (68n) where he defends an ethics of perfection and a universalistic human
ideal that balances the universalism of the moral law with the particularity of the sensuous individual
(for a reading of Schiller’s ethics, see Anthony Savile, “Beauty and the Ideal of Man,” Aesthetic
Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller [Oxford: Blackwell, 1987] 195–219);
on this point we can also refer to Hegel, who lampoons Schelling’s vapid Spinozism in his preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit, famously stating that such positions simply describe “the night” in which “all
cows are black” (9). Bracketing how accurate these readings of Fichte and Schelling are, we can say that
Schleiermacher’s Spinozism implies something quite different: each finite mode is infinitely valuable
just because it is infinitely idiosyncratic; indeed, each finite thing is a distinct, creative appearance of
the infinite, and it should be valued infinitely as such. This is why “man is Nature creatively looking back
at itself” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #28).
267
Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 29.
266
130
activity—even if, in Kant’s discourse, this activity comes to be mediated by a shared epistemic
orientation.
To reiterate: while Kant argues for a discourse that acts by way of a centrifugal
movement away from the individual, with his/her concomitantly private and ‘privative’
conditions, and towards the most thorough non-assumption of the grounds of truth,
Schleiermacher argues both for a centrifugal movement away from the individual and towards
the co-activity of all currently gathered participants as well as a centripetal movement towards
the individual’s individuality and activity. It is only by way of this double movement that both
individuality and community are attained.268
2.4 Egoism and Ethical Life
Having described and compared Kant’s enlightenment discourse with this free sociality
posited by Schleiermacher, we are now in a position to return to the guiding thread of our
exploration, that is, the social critique levied by Hegel against the Romantic genius. The specific
goal of this chapter has been to explore the charge of Romantic egoism, i.e., Hegel’s claim that
the individual genius within the Romantic framework bears the status of being the
spontaneous and absolute origin of sense and truth—that both the ego and the ego’s products
268
Thus David Klemm writes, “Schleiermacher’s view of the interrelationship of selves and
communal subjectivity [in a Fichtean sense] is best understood as one of mutual dependence” (Klemm,
Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy [Albany: SUNY, 1997]
210).
131
bear with them a kind of ontological privacy. As we saw in the previous chapter,269 Hegel argues
that the lone individual is no such thing; not only is product of the genius historically and
communally constituted, but Hegel argues that the ego must arise from and return to that same
milieu in order to attain to its true freedom and activity. We will now argue that, not only do
Hegel’s criticisms not hold against Schleiermacher’s picture of the self and community, but
there is also a further sense in which his own vision of ethical life may simply submerge the
individual entirely.
2.4.1 Against Hegel’s Accusation of Egoism
We have noted at several points that this same rift between egoism and social practice is
something that also preoccupies Kant; indeed, it is precisely his acknowledgement of this
danger that places his account on the tightrope between logical egoism and communal
heteronomy. In response to the sort of dilemmas faced by Kant, Schleiermacher develops his
position: while retaining the desire for an auto-affective development of active and
autonomous subjects (à la Kant), Schleiermacher’s ‘subject’ has shifted; whereas Kant begins
from the perspective of the ego and subsequently asks how it can be brought to its own proper
activity insofar as it is placed in expressive community, Schleiermacher begins at once with the
co-mediation of all individuals in a discourse and proceeds to give a more explicit account of
269
See s.1.4 of this thesis.
132
how this discourse plays out in practice. We could thus say that Schleiermacher’s ‘subject’ is
from the start a community—that is, a communal practice or discourse, and that it is this
community of practice which bears the ‘free’ predicate.
For Schleiermacher’s account of free sociability, as much as for Hegel’s ethical
community, we can therefore say that the individual as active origin, and hence qua individual,
is a product of his/her social milieu.270 It should therefore be quite clear that Hegel is deeply
uncharitable towards Romantics in this regard. It is simply not the case that the Romantic
space of sense and meaning (we might call this an 'aesthetic idea in a broad sense) is opened by
the heroic, a-historical, and spontaneous act of an individual ego; furthermore, it is simply not
the case that others can merely ‘play along’ after this act. The ego is not a pure and spontaneous
origin (pace Hegel), but is rather dependent on community for its very spontaneity and activity.
While this was gestured towards in Kant as well, it is only with the Romantics that the complex
dialectic between ego and community is brought to a level of thematic clarity. By appropriating
the notion of play from Kant’s aesthetics, but reimagining it as a kind of inter-subjective rather
than intra-subjective reciprocity, Schleiermacher allows us a more thorough conceptualization
of the mutually reciprocal, non-hierarchical activity of a community giving rise to the escalation
of the activity of all its members.
270
In the words of David Klemm: “individual subjects [are not] conceived by Schleiermacher as
ontological primitives” (Figuring the Self 210).
133
Indeed, in stating that the ‘free’ subject for Schleiermacher has been reimagined as a
communal body, this should remind the reader of none other than this same trenchant critic of
the Romantics. Yet if individual freedom requires the mediation of community for both Hegel
and Schleiermacher, what is also quite clearly emphasized with Schleiermacher is the inverse:
community is only possible with developed individualities, i.e., individuals capable of their own
proper activity; without this, one has merely a machine or an agglomeration instead of a
community. Rather than conceiving first of the individual ego and his/her activity (or lack
thereof) or of the prevailing community, Schleiermacher conceives of a communal genius, i.e.,
the mediation of all parts through all the other parts as well as the whole—an absolute
reciprocity of circulating and free activities. Alternatively, one could say that, for
Schleiermacher, the absolutization of reciprocity implies not only a reciprocal parting out of
activity and passivity, but also a reciprocal mutual determination of the two poles of
individuality and community, of self and sociality. It is this mutual determining that comes to
be seen as constitutive of the discourse of free sociality.
2.4.2 Criticisms of Hegel’s Conservatism
Schleiermacher posits a self that is formed discursively, but argues that the self is
formed by that discourse in such a way as to allow for that discourse, in turn, to be formed by
that self. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that absolute reciprocity as such here takes
134
precedence over both the individual and the communal; that is, Schleiermacher posits the
mutual mediation taking precedence over both of the respective poles.271 What becomes clear,
therefore, is not just that the individual ego is a social product, nor that the genius has come to
be reinterpreted socially; rather, the point of difference is also that with Schleiermacher, in
addition to the ego’s sociality, the activity of the community is also the product of individual
activities.
It is important to point out that many272 thinkers have challenged Hegel’s account of
ethical life on just these grounds. In short, critics of Hegel have argued against his picture of
Sittlichkeit due to its purported conservatism, a conservatism implying the very opposite of
271
The notion of a mutual mediation was in circulation among Schleiermacher’s peers and
contemporaries. For instance, Friedrich Schlegel claims that reality arises through the mutual mediation
of opposites, and develops an epistemological tool to tarry with this oscillating movement. Thus Dalia
Nassar, writing of Schlegel, states that his notion of a Wechselerweis or reciprocal proof implies “two
elements are in a necessary relation with one another, such that the one cannot exist without the other[,
each being] mediated through the other” (Romantic Absolute 153). In fact, we will see in the next chapter
that Schlegel associates this tarrying with Romantic irony. Yet both Schlegel and Schleiermacher were
here likely influenced by Fichte who, in his Science of Rights, develops the idea of a reciprocal concept
(Wechselbegriff); he writes that such a concept is “one which can only be thought of in connection with
another thought; it is a concept which is thereby conditioned in respect to its form by another thought,
and indeed by the very same thought” (J. G. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988] 146n). Robert Williams expands on the import of this claim for
Fichtean ethics and his concept of individuality (Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition [Berkeley and
Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997] 38).
272
This is why, as Charles Taylor puts it, “the crucial characteristic of Sittlichkeit is that it enjoins
us to bring about what already is… this is a paradoxical way of putting it, but in fact the common life
which is the basis of my sittlich obligation is already there in existence. It is in virtue of its being an
ongoing affair that I have these obligations; and my fulfilment of these obligations is what sustains it
and keeps it in being. Hence in Sittlichkeit, there is no gap between what ought to be and what is”
(Taylor, Hegel [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977] 376).
135
that for which he criticizes the Romantics; for Hegel’s critics, that is, ethical life implies a
hegemony of prevailing culture over the individual.273
Juliane Rebentisch is one such critic. In her recent article on Socratic and Romantic
ironies, she questions whether the sublation of subjective freedom into modern ethical life does
not simply dissolve the truth of the former. This truth is, as we have seen, the demand for truth
and being to be routed through the certainty of reflecting self, which in its more pernicious
forms gives rise a relativization of all value; if this truth is to be appropriately retained in
modern ethical life, the implication is not just that individuals will recognize themselves in the
prevailing norms of the community, but also that in this act of recognition there is a critical
moment—a critical moment that does not destroy the substantiality of the ethical as such.
Rebentisch claims that Hegel simply glosses over this tension. She argues that if freedom can
become concretely universal only through the prevailing norms of a people, then what follows is
that this aforementioned demand of reflecting subjectivity is not taken seriously at all; rather,
on such a picture it is the prevailing norms themselves that come to stand in for, and be seen as
the core of, intersubjectivity. For Rebentisch, such norms (taken as prevailing) are rather the
ossified results of an ongoing communal dialogue—the dialogue between individuals that
273
Cf. Frederick Neuhauser: “critics of Hegel have frequently objected that the rational social order
as he depicts it accords no place for the expression of the central feature of moral subjectivity that Hegel
calls conscience,” i.e., the demand for self-certainty and autonomy regarding duties (Neuhauser,
“Hegel’s Social Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy,
ed. Frederick C. Beiser [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008] 228).
136
articulates who ‘we’ are and how ‘things’ are for us, and which gives rise to norms in the first
place.
To elaborate: Hegel’s solution to the gap between subjectivity and universality is to
restrict the restriction274 on the universal to the community itself; only in doing so does this
restriction become concrete rather than merely fleeting and particular, since it comes to be
incarnated in the abiding ethos of a historical community. Yet in seeking substantiality of
content in this way, Rebentisch points out that Hegel risks reducing the social sphere—raucous,
multifarious, and in flux as it is—to a static and monolithic universality that marginalizes both
difference and change within the prevailing epoch. Thus she writes that Hegel “can only
celebrate the liveliness of a prevailing mode of ethical life insofar as all disputes about its
substance have been eliminated and the dynamic of intersubjective debates about the truth has
been put to rest in the affirmative reproduction of the prevailing norms[.]”275
In short, the result of Hegel’s ‘always already’—this closure between is and ought—is
that the intersubjective moment comes to be associated with prevailing norms themselves
rather than the intersubjective contestation of their content. While Schleiermacher echoes
Hegel in his attacks on the universalistic ethics of Kant and Fichte in his Monologues,276 it
274
Cf. Rebentisch, “Morality of Irony” 111.
Rebentisch, “ Morality of Irony” 110.
276
Schleiermacher writes, “if, by scorning the particularity of animal life, [people] attain
consciousness of a universal humanity and throw themselves before duty, they are not immediately able
to ascend also to the higher standpoint of the development of individuality and ethical life [Sittlichkeit]
[…] most people rise only halfway” (Schleiermacher, “Monologues II and III,” Early Political Writings 174).
275
137
seems that, without such contestation, individuality is submerged; indeed, perhaps all that has
shifted from Kant to Hegel is the historicized status of the universal, not a regained respect for
the claims of individuality.
Of course, we must be fair to Hegel here: his claim is not that each and every ethos must
(or can) be justified, or that, in each and every instance, an individual’s sole choice is to
uncritically appropriate some norm or other. For both points, we need look no further than
Socrates. To the first of the above points (the claim that a prevailing ethos is justified merely to
the extent that it is the prevailing ethos) Hegel states to the contrary that it was the very epoch
of Socrates that vindicated his negativity: “when the existing world of freedom has become
unfaithful to the better will, this will no longer finds itself in the duties recognized in this world
and must seek to recover in ideal inwardness alone that harmony which it has lost in
actuality[.]”277 It is not in every instance, therefore, that the ethical fully closes the gap between
subjective freedom and universality. To the second of the above points (the idea that the
freedom of an individual is possible only through the appropriation of some aspect of a
prevailing ethos) we need only to point to the historical place of Socrates himself. As we have
already noted, while Hegel sees a truth to the naïveté of the Greek ethos, it is nevertheless the
case that Socrates ushers in a truth that is opposed to his age. Still, such cases of tension remain
liminal, in the sense that they both represent the historical closure of a given ethos and, in
277
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 166.
138
addition, remain empirically quite rare. In Hegel’s own words, “The inconsistency of making
what is limited into an absolute certainty becomes unconsciously corrected in the ethical man;
this correction lies in the ethical status of the subject, in the whole of communal life. There can
be extreme cases of collision, which are unfortunate; but these are uncommonly rare cases[.]”278
To frame matters differently, we could say that Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit (as well as
his notions of art and religion) comes to be preoccupied with the dominant voice(s) of a
prevailing cultural ethos; this preoccupation occurs at the expense of taking seriously the
marginal voices, as well as shifts in the dominant voice itself. In addition to the question
regarding the monolithic gait of Hegel’s account (i.e., whether Hegel’s picture does justice to
the always-present contestations within a prevailing ethos), we may ask further just how a
subculture (a sub-ethos) is possible—how a new public or ethos, in other words, is formed (or
reformed) from within a prevailing one. Schleiermacher’s notion of an absolutely reciprocal
mediation between the particular and the universal represents our starting point in the
formulation of a response to this question, insofar as it does not foreclose the multifaceted and
in-flux status of the prevailing order merely for the sake of avoiding egoism.
278
111.
Hegel, from his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, quoted in Rebentisch, “Morality of Irony”
139
2.5 Conclusion
This chapter has argued against Hegel’s charge of Romantic egoism, or at least against
its applicability to Schleiermacher. We began with an exploration of the Kantian discourse of
enlightenment, arguing that it gestures towards, but does not adequately conceptualize,
cognition as a collective activity. Instead, it falls victim to insuperable tensions, the dangers of
egoism and communal heteronomy pulling at its seams. Schleiermacher, detranscendentalizing Kant’s picture of judgement and deploying the resulting concepts in the
realm of intersubjectivity, provides us with a more fulsome and explicit picture of the mutual
mediation of individual and community. This implies that Schleiermacher’s dialogical self
escapes the first aspect of Hegel’s social critique, namely the accusation of egoism. Beiser
points out that Schleiermacher explicitly makes this point in one of his notebooks, claiming
that “everything goes [astray] when society becomes a means to satisfy egoism[.]”279
We have argued against not only Hegel’s social critique of Romanticism, but also Hegel’s
own account of ethical life. Our claim has been that, insofar as Schleiermacher’s absolute
reciprocity takes seriously the necessity of subjective reflection as a communal task, it allows us
to turn the lens on Hegel’s own favouritism of the ossified results (norms) of that task and, with
this, reveals a conservative vein within Hegel’s corpus. Intersubjectivity for the Romantics is
not associated with the prevailing norms of a given ethos, but rather with the creative
279
Beiser, “Schleiermacher’s Ethics” 62.
140
communal practice of sense-making; indeed, Schleiermacher theorizes the communal practice
of free sociality itself as that which gives rise both to individuality and a community of sense.
It will be our task in the next two chapters to expand on the details of this Romantic
picture of community. We will endeavour to show that the arch-ironist Friedrich von Schlegel
provides further content to the Romantic position that we explored in this chapter in the work
of Schleiermacher. That is, Schlegel theorizes a philosophical discourse that is both social and
oriented towards a substantial result: with his notion of a mythology, Schlegel calls for a
collective truth-seeking and sense-making practice that is undergirded by an epistemology that
is non-egoistic, non-elitist, and relies on reciprocity between the individual and community.
141
3. ELITISM AND PARABATIC POPULISM: SCHLEGEL CONTRA FICHTE
To say the book is composed without digression means accordingly that if it has some
end, the approach to it is followed in as straightforward a path as the terrain permits.
This suggests that the end is, or requires, continuous self-interruption. But then this
will be a way of drawing the consequences of philosophy's self-description as a discourse
bearing endless responsibility for itself… and this could be further interpreted as a
matter of endless responsiveness to itself—which might look exactly irresponsible.280
3.1 Introduction
This chapter will explore the second aspect of Hegel’s social critique, namely the charge
of Romantic elitism. In chapter 1 we explored Hegel’s claim that the concept of genius opposes
the creative and spontaneous (i.e., the exceptional and exemplary) to the mass of individuals
who merely deploy taste. Although Schleiermacher takes up aesthetic and political concepts
from Schiller and Kant and transforms them into a dialogical theory of the ego and its
community that allows him to avoid Hegel’s accusation of egoism, it is important to ask
whether or not Schleiermacher’s call for free sociality may amount to something deeply elitist;
that is, it is still possible to ask of Schleiermacherian practices of discourse whether or not they
280
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1988) 43.
142
require so much luxury time and preexisting capacity for intellection that it makes itself
unavailable to most individuals. If we answer in the affirmative to this question, then this point
seems to confirm Hegel’s second critique of the genius, that is, the claim that the very concept
of genius has the effect of delimiting two strata of humanity. Schleiermacher’s ‘social’ genius
may therefore appear prima facie elitist even if it is not egoistic.
To put the matter differently: even if the origin of meaning and knowledge bears a kind
of duplicity or multiplicity, the ontological priority of the ego over its constitutive outside may
still be upheld in a general sense. Communalism and elitism are not therefore, as per Hegel’s
critique, directly opposable positions. Hegel himself seems to acknowledge something similar
when he directs us to the possibility of a community of ‘beautiful souls’281—individuals whose
egoistic self-satisfaction not only remains unchallenged by its proximate community, but is
indeed reaffirmed thereby:
[T]his absolute self satisfaction does not simply remain a solitary worship of the self, but
may even form a community whose bond and substance consist, for example, in mutual
assurances of conscientiousness, good intentions, and enjoyment [of] reciprocal purity,
281
Likely a reference to Schiller’s Grace and Dignity (1793). Hegel views the beautiful soul as
someone who has heaved themselves into a state of dim, Rousseau-like ‘naturalness.’ Thus Beiser notes
that “Hegel, Goethe and Nietzsche understood the beautiful soul as someone who tried to recover their
original innocence, as someone who wanted to flee from the corruptions of the world into some ideal
moral realm apart from society and state”; yet he then goes on to add that “such an interpretation cannot
withstand any close reading” of Schiller’s work (Schiller as Philosopher 79).
143
but above all in basking in the glory of this self-knowledge and self-expression and of
cherishing and cultivating such pursuits[.]282
For Hegel, the absolutization of the ego without an orientation towards truth results in
emptiness and passivity regardless of whether it is performed in isolation or in tandem with
others. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the latter picture of ‘community’ may even be
more pernicious, for the mutual assurances one receives from others can help to mask, for
oneself as well as for the community at large, a more fundamental self-aggrandizement. Thus,
even if the Romantic ego is not taken to be the self-grounding Fichtean origin that Hegel claims
it to be, it may nevertheless remain the case that the practice delimited by words such as
‘absolute reciprocity’ is riven with elitism, and that the authoritarianism of the particular has
simply been passed from the lone ego to a small cabal of discursive practitioners.
This chapter takes up precisely this issue of the purported elitism of Jena Romanticism.
At this point we will now turn directly to the main target of Hegel’s criticisms: Friedrich von
Schlegel.283 Accordingly, we must return to Hegel’s bugbear, viz. Irony. Up until this point we
282
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 140.
Pol Vandevelde points out that it was Friedrich Schlegel who, “to a large extent, held the loose
group of the early romantics together and formulated a sketch of their common project” (Vandevelde,
Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning [New York: Routledge, 2012] 22).
What is the connection between Schleiermacher’s and Schlegel’s respective visions of community?
Kneller points out that Schleiermacher’s “work on sociability represents the social cooperative turn of
early romanticism at its most intense, and is very closely tied to the views [of] Schlegel” (Kneller,
283
144
have more or less accepted the account provided by Hegel of irony as the stance of an objectpositing subject whose ‘freedom’ consists in the reflexive withdrawal from all objective
determinations. With an eye to troubling this Hegelian reading, we will bring Schlegel’s
scattered and unsystematic comments on the issue into dialogue with Fichte and the method
that he develops in his 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, which he calls ‘construction.’
As we will see, the later Fichte’s284 method bears a great deal of similarities with
Schlegel’s philosophical practices. For both thinkers, philosophy requires the performance of
the finitude of discourse over and against the infinity of truth. Yet while Schlegel shares Fichte’s
directedness towards truth and views on the necessity of self-critique, he does not share
Fichte’s faith in the arrival of insight through the escape from discourse; thus, whereas Fichte
performs the finitude of discourse in order to clear a space for the self-granting of a nondiscursive insight, Schlegel and company envision no resting point, arguing instead for an
absolutization of discursive self-critique; an absolutization which pushes us towards including
“Conduct of Philosophy” 117). Here we take it that the concept of absolute reciprocity is applied by
Schlegel, this time with an emphasis on mutual interpretation and reciprocity of creation.
284
Crucial to note is that Fichte’s 1804 lectures were given privately and at a point in Fichte’s life
when he had been ousted from his university position. He thereby turned to make a living from
publishing, especially older works, and giving private, paid lectures; as a result, it is highly unlikely that
Schlegel or his peers knew of the content of these 1804 lectures. As Walter E. Wright points out, “because
they took place in Fichte’s home and were not published during his lifetime, their contents were not
widely known to Fichte’s contemporaries” (Wright, “Introduction,” The Science of Knowing: J. G.
Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. and trans. Walter E. Wright [Albany: SUNY, 2005]
4). In comparing Fichte’s constructive method to Schlegel’s irony, our goal is not to contradict this
historical position; rather, our goal is to explore Fichte’s orientation towards truth, as well as the
peculiar character his discursive practices, in order to shed light on Schlegelian irony.
145
as many voices and perspectives in our dialogue as possible. In this sense, Schlegel’s discursive
practices imply a thoroughgoing epistemic populism and, pace Hegel, takes a stance of stark
opposition to any kind of elitism; accordingly, he calls the resultant discourse ‘mythology,’
allowing him to capture both the creative (mythological or poetical) and critical (logical) stances
required by the discursive practitioners. Schlegel thereby argues for the substantiality of a
philosophical and social practice that is oriented towards the infinity of truth; the response
thereto is not skepticism or subjective revelry, but rather irony itself, as a means of bearing
together the contradictions of humanity’s ‘amphibious’ nature.
3.2 On Hovering: Schlegelian and Fichtean Epistemological Methods
3.2.1 Fichte’s Constructive Method
Fichte states early in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1804 that he holds the presupposition of
there being “a truth which alone is true and everything apart from this is unconditionally
false[.]”285 Unsurprisingly, then, the task of his philosophy becomes the grasping of this
unconditional truth.286 This is Fichte’s absolute, and it is articulated soon thereafter in
Spinozistic terms: philosophy, he tells us, must “trace all multiplicity (which presses upon us in
the usual view of life) back to absolute oneness [Einheit.]”287
285
286
287
Fichte, Science of Knowing 22.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 23.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 23.
146
The problematic is an ancient one: unfolding the opposition between the many and the
one. Yet just how is the late Fichtean philosophy to trace back the manifold to back to
“indivisible oneness”?288 Indeed, what is this absolute, and by what method are we to embark on
this ‘tracing’? Noting the affinity that the Wissenschaftslehre has with Kantian philosophy,
Fichte goes on to tell us that one of the great advances made by the latter was the discovery that
consciousness is part of the absolute. Whereas “philosophies prior to Kant” declared that “the
absolute was located in being [i.e.] in the dead thing as thing[,]” critical philosophy announced
that “absolutely all being posits a thinking or consciousness of itself[.]”289 The result is that the
absolute could no longer be placed on the side of being alone; instead, the absolute must now be
seen as residing in the “indivisibility of both [being and thought], which is equally... the
principle of their disjunction.”290
Critical philosophy thereby advanced our understanding of the absolute; nevertheless,
Kantian philosophy errs at a certain point. Fichte states that “Kant very well understood A as the
link between B and T [being and thought], but… did not grasp it in its absolute autonomy…
instead, he made it the basic common property and accident of three absolutes[.]”291
288
289
290
291
Fichte, Science of Knowing 30.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 25.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 25.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 34.
147
These three absolutes correspond to the three critiques: the sense experience of the first,
the moral world of the second, and the incomprehensible principle of their connection found in
the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Fichte names these x, y, and z respectively.
Fichte’s point is the following: that Kant has grasped only that—beyond the opposed
terms of consciousness and phenomenal being, beyond the opposition between x/y/z—there
must be a unified ground from which these appearances proceed. Yet to point this out is, Fichte
claims, not enough. Merely realizing ‘that’ there must be a unified ground of appearances leads
Kant to understand it only as the accidental common element of all appearances
(Erscheinung).292 In doing so, Kant grasps the absolute as absolutely qualified or conditioned by
its finite appearances, hence missing it “inwardly and in itself as oneness[.]”293 In missing this
latter (proper) oneness, Kantianism leaves us only a “duality,” and its very highest principle is
but a “synthesis post factum[.]”294
Kant thus remains caught in multiplicity. Fichte proposes to correct him, and he sets out
by imploring us to seek oneness in that which is unchangeable in experience and thus
independent of all variations in subject and object. Following his lead, we hit upon that “selfidentical,” non-subjective knowing that subsists through all variations of object and
292
A term Fichte uses to denote both Kant’s sensible and supersensible (George J. Seidel, “The Light
That Lights the Seeing of the Light: The Second Wissenschaftslehre of 1804,” After Jena: New Essays on
Fichte’s Later Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale [Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,
2008] 92).
293
Fichte, Science of Knowing 37.
294
Fichte, Science of Knowing 37.
148
representation.295 This knowing is, for Fichte, “self-sustaining and self-identical[,]”296 the socalled ‘=A.’
It may seem as though we have surpassed Kant and made landfall upon the firm ground
of oneness. Yet if we now ask just how this unchangeability comes to be for consciousness, we
realize that it does so only in and as appearance (Erscheinung); this means that we grasp the
unchanging only in and through the various changes in “the object and its representation[.]”297
This implies, further, that since the unchangeable only appears through the changeable, we
again have only a qualified or conditioned—hence non-absolved—absolute. In short, our
‘absolute’ requires that from which it is supposed to be absolved; it is a reciprocal concept
(Wechselbegriff), and we therefore miss true absolution as it is “inwardly and in itself as
oneness”298—just as we saw occurs with Critical philosophy.
The lesson we can take from this is that a one-sided approach is doomed to failure. On
the one hand, if we take the absolute the be the purely unchangeable, we miss that this may only
appear as coupled with the changeable; if we do so, we are left with only an “empty and
objective image[,]”299 a vapid monism that posits an “inwardly dead”300 substance301 from which
295
Fichte, Science of Knowing 35.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 35.
297
Fichte, Science of Knowing 34.
298
Fichte, Science of Knowing 37.
299
Fichte, Science of Knowing 41.
300
Fichte, Science of Knowing 40.
301
This is Fichte’s critique of Spinoza: “Spinoza’s system, which also wants absolute oneness but
does not know how to make a bridge from it to the manifold [and] on the other hand, if it has the
296
149
no multiplicity can be salvaged. On the other hand, we may also err in taking the changeable,
which Fichte identifies with point of division (that which gives rise to both the disjunction B/T
as well as x/y/z), on its own. That is, changeability “is merely genetic,” Fichte says, and “mere
genesis is nothing at all[.]”302
Rather than taking either of the aforementioned one-sided approaches, we must come
to see that, for Fichte, “true and proper oneness can only be the principle simultaneously of
both the apparent oneness and apparent multiplicity[.]”303 More concretely, this means that we
need a higher perspective, one that allows us to take our “disjunction” as being just as “absolute
as oneness[.]”304 In other words, Fichte’s solution is to take ‘A’ and the division as composing a
single and organic totality. This is why “neither A nor the point can exist by itself[,]”305 that is,
“neither A nor the point [is the absolute],” but it is instead the “the inner organic oneness of
both”306 that we must seek. Or, to put it more accurately, it is the inner organic oneness that
must be constructed, since it is “a construction or a concept[.]”307
manifold, cannot get from there to oneness” (Fichte, Science of Knowing 41), and, eo ipso, Schelling’s
brand of Spinozism (cf. Seidel, “The Light That Lights” 92). This should recall once more Hegel’s jab at
Schelling from the preface of the phenomenology, where he associates the latter’s system with the night
in which “all cows are black” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 9).
302
Fichte, Science of Knowing 41.
303
Fichte, Science of Knowing 56.
304
Fichte, Science of Knowing 41.
305
Fichte, Science of Knowing 41.
306
Fichte, Science of Knowing 42.
307
Fichte, Science of Knowing 42.
150
With this word, ‘construction,’ we hit directly upon Fichte’s method. If A is inwardly
dead, and the point of division is but mere genesis, this means that we must construct a
transcendental principle—a principle from which both sides of the opposition are to be
genetically traced. In order to explore just what this means, let us venture further in the
Wissenschaftslehre of 1804. What is the higher (genetic) principle between A and the
disjunctive point, between the unchanging and the changeable? This turns out to be what
Fichte calls the principle of light. Light, for Fichte, is the midpoint,308 where the changeable and
unchangeable (A and all its subsequent disjunctive determinations) meet; it is the becomingmultiple of A and the becoming-one of the manifold.
This formula undoubtedly remains obscure. Yet the word Licht here represents a very
deliberate choice on Fichte’s part: strictly speaking, light is not an object, and hence cannot be
placed neatly beyond the disjunctive point; light is rather the condition for the possibility of
‘sight’ of all objects, that which acts as the ground of the changeable manifold. For this reason,
light is the very brink of multiplicity, or, as we put it earlier, the becoming-multiple of apparent
unity (the so-called ‘=A’). On the other hand, light is that which does away with all multiplicity
and division by its very luminescence;309 hence it is also the becoming-one of the changeable
308
Fichte, Science of Knowing 52.
This is a point Hegel makes in his Science of Logic: “the common practice is to imagine being,
as if it were a picture of pure light, the clarity of unclouded seeing, and then nothing as the pure night—
and the distinction between the two is then enshrined into this well-known sensuous difference. But in
fact, if this very seeing is more accurately imagined, one can readily perceive that in absolute light one
sees just as much and just as little as in absolute darkness; that the one seeing is just as good as the
309
151
manifold, the brink of the dissolution of all disjunction and division. Light, then, is Fichte’s
constructed midpoint: it is the transcendental or genetic principle of the appearance of the
changeable and unchangeable, i.e., the genetic principle “simultaneously of both the apparent
oneness and apparent multiplicity[.]”310
3.2.2 Fichte’s Non-discursive Absolute
Is light then the absolute which Fichte seeks? Can we, in other words, cease our
investigation where we stand? In order to answer that question, let us step back and speak
more reflexively about Fichte’s method. Light here is a “construction or a concept.”311 We
construct the notion of light, generating a transcendental abstraction in our attempt to retrace
the conditions for appearance (of the unchanging/changing). Indeed, this method appears
quite similar to a transcendental deduction; that is, from our standpoint in appearance, we
construct light as the condition of possibility of that which appears. Yet Fichte’s method differs
from that of Kant in the following respect: while we can construct light as the genetic principle
of sensible and supersensible appearance, this construct, by virtue of its very discursive
(constructive or conceptual) nature, cannot obtain the truth it strives for.
other; that pure seeing is a seeing of nothing. Pure light and pure darkness are two voids that amount to
the same thing.” (Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni [Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2010] 69).
310
Fichte, Science of Knowing 56.
311
Fichte, Science of Knowing 42.
152
In short, Fichte claims that, as soon as we reach the principle of light, we come to realize
that we have falsified our results. In the aforementioned case, light is only present by means of
its expression or appearance; that is, light is only as shining through “in a representative and
likeness of itself[.]”312 Upon realizing this, we take it that light breaks up before our very eyes
into a concealed inwardness and its appearance in appearance; while the former ‘shines forth’
in the latter, we are nevertheless forced to posit another disjunction, this time between light’s
immanence and its emanence.313 This disjunction reveals to us that light cannot be our final
resting place or true originative ground. Instead, our method has struck a “division in
something which… ought to be oneness”314—a necessary result of our discursive formulation,
since all language relies on such differentiation and division. Indeed, this process of
construction (and unavoidable falsification) continues throughout the lectures. The conclusion
that must be drawn is that the originative ground is, for Fichte, non-conceptualizable, nonconstructible, and non-discursive.
What, then, is the point? To put it bluntly, if we cannot totalize truth in discourse, why
do we bother constructing a discourse? The goal, it seems, has shifted from discursive
totalization to the enactment of a kind of philosophical stage-setting. In other words, Fichte’s
312
313
314
Fichte, Science of Knowing 45.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 54.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 52.
153
constructive method sets the stage for truth’s own self-bestowal315 within us and, with it, the
washing away of our discursive constructions.
To explore more concretely what this ‘bestowal’ of truth amounts to, let us return to the
aforementioned construction of light. As we have just pointed out, upon completion of this
construction, light shows itself to falsify what it aims to grasp, generates out of itself a new
disjunction. The construct of light, must be negated or deposed (abgesetzt), negated while held
in place as negated, making manifest its own insufficiency; or perhaps more appropriate, light
is deposed simply by truth’s own self-bestowal in the form of a self-evident insight into the true
pre-discursive ground of all appearances. We construct a concept that stretches towards the
unconditioned, but in the process of construction, that which is constructed “is denied by the
manifestness [Evidenz]316 of what exists autonomously”317; what we end up with is a grasp of the
inconceivable qua inconceivable,318 the “self-creation of inconceivability[.]”319 the makingevident of the inconceivable.
Thus we construct a discourse, yet the consummation of this tasks ends not with
discursive propriety in an ordinary sense (propositions tracking reality), but rather with the
falling away of discourse as such for the sake of a non-discursive truth. Thus Fichte tells us that
315
Walter E. Wright, “Reading the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre,” New Perspectives on Fichte, ed. Tom
Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International, 1992] 102.
316
In German, this word has the sense self-evident. Kant, for instance, speaks of “intuitive
certainty, i.e., self-evidence [Evidenz]” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A734/B762).
317
Fichte, Science of Knowing 42.
318
Fichte, Science of Knowing 32.
319
Fichte, Science of Knowing 43.
154
he is “constructing what cannot be constructed… with full awareness that it cannot be
constructed[.]”320 Discursive philosophy is, for Fichte, “only a means for leading the philosopher
up to the point of seeing”;321 it is like a ladder whose final wrung is the throwing away of the
ladder. Accordingly, Fichte implores us to do “away with all words and signs!” for in the end
“nothing remains except our living thinking and insight, which can't be shown on a
blackboard[.]”322
We could say that, given our position vis-à-vis appearance and ground, we have no
choice but to construct; yet we construct not with the goal of totalizing truth discursively, since
we cannot hope to do so. This means that our discourse must oscillate or hover (schweben)
between construction and that construction’s own negation, between discursion and that
discourse’s deposition in the face of truth. We posit a construction only to depose it, hovering
between conceptualization and the conceptual delimitation of conceptualization as such: the
“concept finds its limits... conceives itself as limited, and its completed self-conceiving is the
conceiving of this limit.”323
320
321
322
323
Fichte, Science of Knowing 34.
Wright, “Reading the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre” 95.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 60.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 72.
155
3.2.3 Schlegel’s Method: Irony as Permanent Parabasis
This word schweben324 (hovering or oscillating) should remind the reader of Hegel’s
critique of the Romantics.325 Irony, on Hegel’s account, denotes a kind of critical detachment,
wherein the artist rapturously posits its object and, in the same stroke, reflexively withdraws
and reveals its nullity. Irony is therefore a kind of hovering or oscillation between positing and
nullifying (de-positing). On his part, Schlegel tells us in a fragment that irony “is a permanent
parabasis [die Ironie ist eine permanente Parekbase][.]”326 Parabasis is a theatrical term,
denoting a literally ‘going aside’;327 historically, a parabasis occurred when the actors left the
324
Dieter Henrich provides an illuminating examination of the word schweben in Fichte’s earlier
work. He states that the term has two equally important senses: on the one hand, schweben denotes the
freedom of the one who schwebt, the freedom from any fixed state; on the other hand, schweben
denotes a double inclination, a wavering between and towards two directions. His example is that of a
“sea gull flying against a light wind” (Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism,
ed. David S. Pacini [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003] 212).
325
See s.1.2.2 of this thesis for Hegel’s understanding of irony, and s.1.5.4 for Hegel’s ‘social’
critique of the Romantics.
326
Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean J. Anstett, and
Hans Eichner (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958–) vol. 18, 85. De Man cites this passage and provides his own
translation, albeit dressed in his own theoretical accoutrement: irony “is (permanent) parabasis of
allegory—intelligibility of (representational) narrative disrupted at all times” (De Man and Warminski,
“Concept of Irony,” 185).
327
Schlegel provides a description of parabasis in his writings on Greek literature. He writes,
“With respect to form, the old-Athenian comedy is very similar to tragedy. From the latter it has derived
a dramatic-dialogical component, as well as monodies. The only difference lies in the parabasis, a speech
in the middle of the piece in which, as in the piece, extreme unrestraint is the rule, and the grossest
crudities are said to the people by the chorus, which has stepped out to the outer limit of the proscenium.
Also the name [parabasis] comes from this ‘stepping out’ (ἔκβασις [an egress]) [in der Form ist die altathenienische Komödie der Tragödie ganz ähnlich. Sie hat von dieser einen chorischen und dramatischdialogischen Bestandteil, auch Monodien. Der einzige Unterschied besteht in der Parekbasis, einer Rede,
die in der Mitte des Stücks, in welcher, wie in diesem, die größte Zügellosigkeit herrschte und dem Volk
von dem bis an die äußerste Grenze des Proszeniums heraustretenden Chor die größten Grobheiten
156
stage and the chorus turned to speak directly to the crowd—often on behalf of the playwright,
and in a meta-theatrical manner.328 For a prime example in Attic theatre, we can point to the
parabasis at line 515 of Aristophanes’ Clouds, where the chorus speaks to the crowd about
Aristophanes’ career as a playwright.
Schlegel’s work, as well as the various collections of fragments, are suffused with ironic
digression. It is not difficult is to find salient examples, such as the prologue to his Lucinde:
Petrarch smiles with emotion as he surveys and introduces the collection of his
immortal romances. Subtle Boccaccio speaks politely and flatteringly to the ladies at the
beginning and at the close of his opulent book. And even the sublime Cervantes—still
amiable and full of delicate wit, though old and wracked by pain—clothes the colorful
spectacle of his vibrant works in the costly tapestry of a preface that is in itself already a
gesagt wurden, Von diesem Heraustreten (ἔκβασις) kommt auch der Name” (Schlegel, Kritische
Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe vol. XI, 88). The theatrical connotations of the term parabasis will be
explored in the fourth chapter of this thesis when we examine the performative dimensions of irony (see
ss.4.3, 4.4 ).
328
Behler seems to trivialize parabasis, describing it as “the sometimes capricious, frivolous
addresses of the poet through the chorus and the coryphaeus to the audience that constitute a total
disruption of the play” (German Romantic Literary Theory 150). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics entry on parabasis describes it as a performance of the chorus, one in which “the
chorus, alone in the orchestra and out of character, came forward without their masks to face the
audience and delivered, in song or recitative, views on topics such as politics or religion about which the
dramatist felt strongly.” The parabasis is found in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as that
of Aristophanes (“Parabasis,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger
and T. V. F. Brogan with Frank J. Warnke, O. B. Hardison Jr. and Earl Miner [Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1993], xlvi; cf. De Man and Warminski, “The Concept of Irony” 178).
157
beautiful romantic painting. Lift a magnificent plant out of the fertile maternal earth,
and much will cling to it lovingly that only a miser would think superfluous.329
This is a prologue, then, but a prologue that does not artlessly follow through with its
own perambulatory function. Instead, this is a prologue that rises above itself, that steps back
from itself so as to turn to the audience and critique itself with an absolute self-awareness: to
write a prologue—this prologue—, it says, is to deracinate. Thus, we have here both prologue
and theory of prologues, a product that bespeaks its own criticism and, in doing so, interrupts
the naïve positing of said product.330 Nevertheless, prologues are by their very nature excursive
and quite often meta-discursive, as they stand, by definition, outside of the text itself. With a
parabasis, however, this is not the case. Thomas K. Hubbard points out that “what is distinctive
about the parabasis,” when contrasted with the digressive prologues of Jonson or Dryden, is “its
simultaneous digressiveness and integration with the dramatic events”;331 parabasis is a goingaside within the narrative, as well as an interruption in the continuity of that narrative. While
the prologue provides a useful touchpoint, it cannot be taken as exemplary of irony as such.
329
Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. P. Firchow (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1971) 42.
330
Compare the following remark from the Critical Fragments: “a good preface must be at once the
square root and the square of its book” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #8); that
is, a preface must both distill a text on the basis of itself—it must understand a text on the basis of itself,
or as its own ‘denominator’—and yet, since a preface is always a particular re-reading of the text by the
author, engage in a redoubling of the text itself.
331
Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1991) 1.
158
Yet Schlegel’s definition of irony as parabasis gestures towards not only the immanence
of interruption within the narrative, but also the permanence of this interruption. It is not
difficult to see the problem with this formulation: in Paul de Man’s words, “a parabasis [in
theatre] can only happen at one specific point, and to say that there would be permanent
parabasis is saying something violently paradoxical[.]”332 Indeed, what does it mean to say that
the interruption occurs at all points of the narrative? What becomes of the narrative (or, to be
appropriately broad, discourse) itself in such a situation?
Reference to Fichte here proves useful. If we take it that the Wissenschaftslehre of 1804
is an attempt to construct a self-criticizing discourse, that is, a mode of discourse that hovers
undecidably between discourse and that discourse’s self-negation—between narrative and
interruption—then we can begin to understand Schlegel’s position. For Fichte, we must posit a
construction while deposing it, hovering between discursive claims and discursive negation,
allowing for a higher perspective (the conceptual delimitation of conceptualization as such). It
is this free hovering, this attainment of a higher perspective on discourse as such, that is
constitutive of irony. In irony this free hovering takes the form of a pervasive mood that
“surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or
genius[.]”333 What is at stake in ‘irony,’ then, turns out to be similar to what is at stake in the
Wissenschaftslehre of 1804: the possibility of a discourse that—at all moments and all times—is
332
333
De Man and Warminski, “The Concept of Irony” 178.
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #42.
159
both self-constructing and self-deposing, both narrative and interruption, an “absolute
synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self creating interchange of two conflicting
thoughts [eine absolute Synthesis absoluter Antithesen, der stete sich selbst erzeugende
Wechsel zwei streitender Gedanken][.]”334
In placing irony alongside Fichte’s truth-oriented discourse, can one thereby make any
claim regarding the relation between Schlegelian irony and truth? That is, could irony be a
pathway to a substantial and abiding content? To the contrary, the comparison between irony
and construction seems only to provide support for the criticisms of Kierkegaard and Hegel.
Indeed, Fichte himself makes just this point during his 1804 lectures, when he remarks on the
danger of his undertaking. He tells us that, from the depths of his own investigation could
spring the most thoroughgoing skepticism imaginable:
Just as the possessor of this science (who surveys all disjunctions in consciousness,
disjunctions which, if one assumes the validity of consciousness in itself, become
contradictions) could present a skepticism which totally negated everything assumed so
far; a skepticism to which those who have been playing with all kinds of skeptical doubts
as a pastime might blanch and cry out: ‘Now the joke goes too far!’335
334
335
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #121.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 107.
160
By surveying the various contradictions found in finite thinking, the
Wissenschaftslehre crosses paths with a skepticism so pure it terrifies even the skeptical
dilettante. Yet, as we have seen, it does so for the sake of allowing for truth’s self-bestowal, i.e.,
for the sake of making landfall upon apodictic certainty of absolute truth. In Schlegel’s ironic
discourse, we find the surveying—that “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely
teeming chaos”336—and no such bestowal.
Are we to take it, then, that irony just is this supreme form of skepticism described by
Fichte? This would, by and large, fit with the criticisms levied against Schlegel by Hegel and
Kierkegaard. Fichte describes two types of individuals: first, those who do not accept that there
is a single truth (and that it is knowable), since it presents a limit to his/her free actions; second,
he describes those who are rooted all too firmly in the merely empirical, with “a perverted selflove for the empirically arisen self instead of for the self which is immersed in the good, the true
and the beautiful[.]”337 The latter individual likewise forgoes the search for truth, confusing as
they do the empirically proximate for the ontologically ultimate. When Fichte tells his listeners
to be on guard against that “spiritual lasciviousness” that revels in the “the free play of the [the
empirical ego’s] mental capacities,”338 it is difficult to avoid seeing the affinity between such
remarks and Hegel’s accusations about irony, as well as Schleiermacher’s free sociality.
336
337
338
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #69.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 49.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 50.
161
To defend Schlegel against the charges of skepticism, then, it cannot be enough to point
towards similarities between irony and the later Fichte’s method. Doing so does not allow us to
refute the claim that Schlegel engages in a similar practice for no end, that is, with no
orientation towards a substantial result; whether this result is what Fichte associates with “the
good, the true and the beautiful”339 or what Hegel would associate with the concrete universality
of ethical life, the danger is manifest in either case. In short, to defend Schlegel, we must
endeavour to understand why he deploys irony the first instance—what pushes Schlegel
towards irony, as well as towards what end, if any, he directs it.
3.3 Schlegel’s Motives and Mythology
3.3.1 Irony and Truth
What is the use of irony? Does Schlegel employ irony for the sake of some kind of
philosophical landfall—epistemic, ethical, or otherwise—or is it merely an outgrowth of his
‘superior indolence’? Let us begin by taking up an important fragment from the Athenaeum,
which makes a claim for a certain intimacy between irony and philosophy. Schlegel states that,
despite perceived notions of irony qua literary trope or rhetorical device, it is in fact philosophy
that is, “the real homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty: for
339
Fichte, Science of Knowing 49.
162
wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues—and is not simply confined into
rigid systems—there irony should be asked for and provided[.]”340
Why does Schlegel understand philosophy, properly speaking, to be irony’s true
homeland? And just what does the call to provide irony amount to in this context? Philosophy is,
both traditionally and for Schlegel, the domain of truth-seeking. Accordingly, the call to bring
irony into the domain of philosophy implies that irony must be related to this task. In order to
expound more precisely just what this relation is, we need to delve more deeply into Schlegel’s
just-quoted understanding of irony as ‘logical beauty,’ as well as to the more broad-reaching
implications for the goal and method of philosophy. This phrase hints at two crucial aspects of
Schlegel’s epistemic position: by way of the ‘beautiful,’ Schlegel implies that philosophy’s end
goal is regulative in a Kantian sense (conceptually untotalizable, as beauty was in Kant’s third
Critique); by way of the ‘logical,’ Schlegel implies that philosophy is to deploy a thetical method
paired with a kind of infinite skepticism—that is, a kind of dialectic.
The homeland of irony, Schlegel claims, is logical beauty; this formulation undoubtedly
requires further explanation if it is to be rendered intelligible. Let us take up each point in turn.
First, to connect irony with beauty is to connect it with the Kantian conception of beauty from
the Critique of the Power of Judgment. We have seen that Kant understands the representation
340
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #42. Schlegel further states that “a
dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments” (Athenaeum Fragments #77); thus the fragment becomes
the properly ironic mode of writing. This issue will occupy us in chapter 4.
163
of beauty as an “inexponible”341 sensuous representation, one which occasions much thought,
but which “no language fully attains or can make intelligible.”342 In placing irony alongside
beauty, Schlegel has both these positions in mind. As stated in the just-quoted passage from the
third Critique, beautiful representations (qua aesthetic ideas) are those which strive infinitely
to approximate that which is beyond finite thinking; thus they are the sensuous counterparts of
rational ideas, those regulative principles of human cognition for which it is not possible to
provide any intuition.343
To equate philosophy and beauty, therefore, implies both that the ultimate subject
matter of philosophy cannot be totalized—hence it is regulative in a Kantian sense—and that
philosophy is nevertheless ‘at least’ to strive towards this ultimate subject matter in an infinite
and infinitely approximating manner. Famously, Schlegel tells us that there is for us an
unavoidable and necessary “yearning [Sehnen]” or “longing [Sehnsucht] for the infinite[,]”344
and yet that this sense for infinity must nevertheless “always be a longing,” as the infinite
“cannot appear in the form of intuition [Anschauung]… the ideal never lets itself be
intuited/viewed.”345 Unifying these two ideas leads Schlegel to ask, in a fragment from the
Athenaeum, whether it may be “the same with the people as with the truth: where, as they say,
341
Kant, Power of Judgment 342.
Kant, Power of Judgment 314.
343
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B598.
344
Friedrich Schlegel, “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy,” Theory as Practice: A
Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writing, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Haynes Horne,
Elizabeth Mittman and Lisa C. Roetzel [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997] 245.
345
Schlegel, “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy” 246.
342
164
the attempt is worth more than the result.”346 The necessity347 of seeking an absolute standpoint,
combined with the in principle opacity of the absolute, is the point at which Schlegel’s retention
of truth-seeking comes manifestly into view.
Yet the above definition of ironic philosophy reveals to us not only its retention of an
orientation towards truth, nor only Schlegel’s conception of truth qua regulative; in addition to
the above, the connection of irony to logical beauty further implies the very method by which
philosophy is to proceed. As Andrew Bowie points out, the word ‘logical’ in Schlegel’s phrase
implies the retained dependence of philosophy on logos, that is, “on assertion, the locus of
propositional truth.”348 Philosophy is to begin by taking up finite theses (perspectives,
fragments) and, through the revelation of their finitude, ascend towards the infinite; this is a
point made in another fragment from the Athenaeum. Schlegel writes,
The demonstrations of philosophy are simply demonstrations in the sense of military
jargon. And its deductions aren't much better than those of politics; even in the sciences
possession is nine-tenths of the law. About its definitions one could raise the same
objection that Chamfort does in remarking upon the sort of friends one has in worldly
346
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #73.
Schlegel claims that “our I has the tendency to approach the infinite, and it is only because of
the fact that the I, so to speak, flows toward the infinite, in order to approach it, that we are able to think
the infinite” (Schlegel, “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy” 247).
348
Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary
Theory (London: Routledge, 1997) 86.
347
165
life. There are three kinds of explanations in science: explanations that give us an
illumination or an inkling of something; explanations that explain nothing; and
explanations that obscure everything. True definitions can't be made at will, but have to
come of themselves; a definition which isn't witty is worthless, and there exists an
infinite number of real definitions for every individual. The necessary formalities of
aesthetics degenerate into etiquette and luxury. As a way of verifying and testing
virtuosity, these latter qualities have their purpose and value, like the bravura arias of
singers and the Latin prose of philologists. Also they make a considerable rhetorical
impression. But the main point is always to know something and say something. To
want to prove or even explain it is in most cases wholly unnecessary. The categorical
style of the laws of the twelve tablets and the thetical method, where we find set down
the pure facts of reflection without concealment, adulteration, or artificial distortion,
like texts for the study of symphilosophy, are still the most appropriate for a studied
[gebildeten] natural philosophy [Naturphilosophie]. In a case where one has both to
propose and prove something, it's indisputably more difficult to pro-pose than to prove.
There are lots of formally splendid proofs for per-verse and platitudinous propositions.
Leibniz proposed and Wolff proved. Need one say more?349
349
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #82, emphasis added.
166
If we take it that irony, much like Fichtean construction, is an attempt to achieve a
higher perspective (hovering, surveying) on the antinomies of finite consciousness and finite
knowledge claims, then we can situate more precisely the role of the logos. Rather than
generating arguments or proofs designed to totalize truth, philosophy must take up its
epistemic finitude and realize that it may only posit and approach provisional theses. Yet, not
content merely with the positing of claims or the taking on of perspectives, philosophy is to
proceed by engaging in a kind of dialectic350 of infinite skepticism, showing how each
perspective leads to its own contradiction when they are taken as absolute; each thesis, as it
were, is to be placed before the tribunal of infinite and skeptical irony.351 Thereby beginning
with finite (conditioned, relative) knowledge claims, we deploy skepticism in order to cast light
upon the very finitude of the finite: the appearance (Schein) “of the finite should be overthrown,”
Schlegel says, “and in order to do this, all knowledge should be brought into a revolutionary
condition.”352
Why is it that we speak of irony here and not merely skepticism? The answer to this
question is that irony captures the necessary positive aspect of this process: the infinitization of
350
Behler argues that what Schlegel calls ‘logical beauty’ is essentially what Plato called ‘dialectics’:
“thought and counterthought as a progressive movement of thinking” (German Romantic Literary
Theory 147).
351
In Frank’s eloquent words, “something is uttered ironically when the way of saying it
neutralizes the determinateness of the content, brings it into suspense, or sets in motion a withdrawal
from it in favour of an infinity of options that might as well have been uttered in its place… ironic speech
keeps open the irrepresentable location of the infinite by permanently discrediting the finite as that
which is not intended” (Frank, “What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?” 24).
352
Schlegel, “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy” 248.
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skepticism necessitates irony for, having taking even our own theses353 up into the critical
whirlwind, the only manner in which our own claims can be claimed consistently is by means of
a discourse that hovers between itself and its own necessary negation (to again reference
Fichte).354 Thus, in a fragment Schlegel states ironically that, “there is as yet no consistent
skepticism… but it would be worth the trouble to construct one.”355 Irony can, accordingly, be
understood as the attempt to render an infinite skepticism ‘consistent’ by holding together both
its claims and the impossibility of naïvely making these claims; as such, it is the movement
through which the ironist can avoid the paradox of asserting truth’s ultimate inaccessibility in
the form of a truth claim. Irony is consistent not only insofar as it is reflexively critical of its
own claims, but further critical of the possibility of irony as such. Thus it is by means of irony
that philosophy may infinitely polemicize against the finite: “[irony] arouses a feeling of
indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative”356—yet this antagonism, this
353
Cf. Frank: “if there is no safe foundation that presents itself to our consciousness as evident,
then it is possible to doubt each of our beliefs,” with the alternative being dogmatism (Frank, “What is
Early German Romantic Philosophy?” 23). Hence the continual leitmotif of self-destruction in the
fragments (see for instance, Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #28 and #37,
Athenaeum Fragments #51 and #269).
354
Indeed, Fichte himself argued for the revelatory power of ironic wit: “the ridicule exposed by the
ironic wit produces laughter, which is a way to intuit the idea, since we are struck by the error and its
absurdity” (Findler, “Why Be Witty?” 338).
355
Schlegel, “Philosophical Fragments,” Theory as Practice 342.
356
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #108.
168
logical insurrection,357 stems less from a superior indolence than from an uncompromising
regard for our finitude as well as the transcendence of the absolute.358
Thus Schlegel views truth as ‘inexponible,’ or regulative in a Kantian sense; this
necessitates a philosophical method that allows him to engage in an infinite polemic against
conditioned knowledge claims, upon which philosophy still depends. Philosophy thus takes the
form of a rebellious government—a system that continually writhes and turns against itself—
yet this act does not amount to a kind of subjective revelry; it is rather a method used in our
striving infinitely towards the infinite, a method that can plausibly be described as a kind of
skepticism (or dialectic of skepsis), with irony being the means to avoid the paradox of
affirming statements without the backing of an infinite ground or principle.
It is therefore not incorrect per se to equate irony with a kind of skepticism, as Hegel
and Kierkegaard are correct to note; yet Schlegel is patently not retreating into a vainglorious
relativism (an absolute skepticism) so much as practicing a brand of infinite fallibilism359 and
357
“As a temporary condition skepticism is logical insurrection; as a system it is anarchy. Skeptical
method would therefore more or less resemble a rebellious government” (Schlegel, Philosophical
Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #97).
358
Cf. Schlegel’s insertion into Novalis’ “Pollen”: “If one becomes infatuated with the absolute and
simply can’t escape it, then the only way out is to contradict oneself continually and join opposite
extremes together. The principle of contradiction is inevitably doomed, and the only remaining choice is
either to assume an attitude of suffering or else ennoble necessity by acknowledging the possibility of
free action” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Blüthenstaub #3). This fact prompts Manfred Frank to
claim the project of the early Romantics was, in part, one of re-Kantianization (Frank, Philosophical
Foundations 101).
359
Cf. Bowie, Romanticism to Critical Theory 99.
169
humility. The aforementioned longing “for objectivity”360 pointed to by Hegel, then, must be
understood not as a by-product of the ego’s inability to recognize anything higher, but rather
that ego’s humble admission of a final truth’s transcendence.
Further comments on this topic can be found scattered throughout both the Athenaeum
and the Ideas, as well as Schlegel’s various unpublished notebooks. In these texts, we find a
similar refrain repeated time and time again: on the one hand, we have the mistrust of, even
(yes) an insolence towards, the philosophical presumption of our access to absolute knowledge,
to our access to a perfect knowledge in the etymological sense; yet, on the other hand, we find
the injunction to set for ourselves the goal of this knowledge, to strive and yearn for it, as
rational subjects we must. It is necessary for us, claims Schlegel, to orient ourselves towards the
infinite, even if this infinite is forever beyond our ken. In his words from On Philosophy, to
Dorothea:
[I]t is quite natural that a philosophy which, rather than giving the infinite, progresses
towards it and which, rather than completing anything in particular, connects and
mixes everything, that such a philosophy values nothing higher in the human spirit than
360
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 65.
170
the ability to join representations with representations and to continue the train of
thought in innumerable ways on into the infinite[.]361
This attempt to present the Romantic absolute is formally similar to an idea in the
Kantian sense—or perhaps better, an aesthetic idea in the Kantian sense—since the
combination of these representations is the sensuous striving for ideality. Comprehending this
attempt to reconcile the epistemic opacity362 of, with the practical necessity of seeking out, the
absolute is crucial if we are to properly understand Schlegel’s epistemic position for what it is—
a fallibilism.363
3.3.2 Mythology
Philosophy, according to Schlegel, is logical beauty. As we showed in the last section, the
implication of this picture of philosophy is that, despite the accusations of Hegel against the
Romantics, Schlegel retains a definite epistemic orientation towards truth and substantiality—
361
Friedrich Schlegel, “On Philosophy, to Dorothea,” Theory as Practice 432. Compare this with our
description of Kant’s aesthetic ideas in s.1.3.2.1 and s.4.3.3 of this thesis.
362
Cf. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy
(Albany: SUNY, 2007) 45–46.
363
Though I arrive here in a different manner, my reading dovetails with those of Beiser’s
Romantic Imperative, Bowie’s From Romanticism to Critical Theory, Millán-Zaibert’s Emergence of
Romantic Philosophy, and Frank’s Philosophical Foundations. Indeed, the epistemic import of the
philosophy of the Jena Romantics is an area that has, in recent years, been well trodden.
171
even if this truth is conceived as being regulative in a Kantian sense and hence untotalizable.
There is a further implication of this Romantic humility, one which stems directly from this
discussion of irony as an attempt to construct an infinite yet consistent skepticism. This is to
say that, much like truth itself, Schlegel understands that the mastery of his own philosophical
discourse represents an ideal, and ultimately regulative, goal. What does it mean to say that
Schlegel’s very discourse is regulative? In order to formulate a response to this question, we will
turn to Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poesy, comparing Schlegel’s meta-discursive commentary to
those of Fichte and Hegel.
In Schlegel’s Discourse, the character Ludiviko begins his speech364 with a question:
shall “the highest and holiest,” he asks the reader and his listeners, “remain forever nameless
and formless, left to chance in the darkness?”365 Following this, the speech goes on to present
itself as an exhortation to create a new mythology.366 In describing this mythology, Schlegel
echoes many of his contemporaries by contrasting the modern and the ancient ethoi as follows:
the poetries of the ancients are joined, he says, “one to the other until the whole is formed from
their ever-growing masses and members… everything interlocks, and one and the same spirit is
expressed everywhere, merely differently… and thus it is truly not an empty image when one
says: ancient poesy is a single, indivisible, completed poem.”367 Myth was the ordering principle
364
365
366
367
The Discourse is a dialogue or, or dialogical fragments.
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy,” Theory as Practice 182.
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 183.
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 183.
172
of the Weltanschauung of antiquity; it provided an Archimedean lever by which for the sensemaking activities of human beings came to be aligned. This lent the political, artistic, religious,
and cognitive undertakings of the ancients a shared language and, with this, a wholeness. For
Schlegel, this is a unity entirely lacking in modernity; that is, in contrast to ancients, we
moderns lack an ordering principle around which to fix our various efforts and activities.368
Schlegel’s response to this dearth is his aforementioned exhortation to construct such a
‘midpoint’ (Indifferenzpunkt),369 a point that is an “artwork of nature”370 while bearing all the
“necessary arbitrariness”371 of the modern subjective will; a point between the involuntary and
the deliberate, between the naïve and the savvy, and between the savoir vivre and the spirit of
scientism.372 Schlegel therefore calls for a mytho-logy,373 a discourse arising from both reason (it
is logical and critical) and the powers of the productive imagination (it is beautiful and creative).
368
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 186.
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 182.
370
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 186.
371
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 182.
372
Cf. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #108. This we can compare with
the so-called Earliest System Programme, the manifesto found in Hegel’s papers (and handwriting), but
which has been understood historically to have been penned by Schelling. Regardless of whether the
Programme was written by the young Schelling or the young Hegel, the themes described in its few
pages were shared, elaborated, and criticized by a whole generation of thinkers. The Programme calls
for a new mythology that would overcome the gulf between sensuous and the rational: “we must have a
new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of ideas; it must be a mythology of reason.
Before we make ideas aesthetic, i.e., Mythological, they will have no interest for the people. Conversely,
before mythology is rational, the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Hence finally the enlightened and
the unenlightened must shake hands: mythology must become philosophical to make people rational,
and philosophy must become mythological to make people sensuous” (Anonymous, “The Oldest
Systematic Programme of German Idealism,” Early Political Writings 5). In the words of Bruce
Matthews, this was an exhortation for the uniting of “the discordant notes of reason and sensuous
369
173
Mythology is thus for Schlegel the mode of discourse that strives to syncretically
overcome the antinomies of finite, historical consciousness. This means that the attempt to
construct374 a new mythology is the attempt to construct a trans-discursive ‘language’375
through which the sense-making activities of finite individuals can be aligned, united, and put
in dialogue with others. It is only with such a language, and with the concomitant provision of
wholeness, that the “the highest and holiest”376 can be properly approached.377 Nevertheless,
despite the lofty goals of mythology, this discourse is also where the greatest element of danger
nature into a symbolic narrative of hope,” coupled with the desire that “this new mythology would beget
a ‘new religion’ that, unlike its predecessors, would be one that joins hands with humanism to create
ideas whose aesthetic power would sanction the new normative values of this coming age” (Matthews,
“The New Mythology,” Relevance of Romanticism 202). Kneller connects this notion of mythology as a
bridge between low and high culture to Kant’s call for a more social sociability (see s.2.3.1 of this thesis):
“art of reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part [of society] with the cruder, the
coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of
the latter” (Kant, Power of Judgment 229; cf. Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 110).
373
Etymologically, mytho-logy springs both from the productive imagination and reason.
374
Just as we saw with Fichte’s constructive method, this mythological mode of discourse was to be
a creative act, a result of the imagination—a construction. The imaginative and creative element should
not imply to the reader a kind of falsity, whimsy, exaggeration, or enthusiasm. Since the Romantics saw
reality (the infinite) as historical and mutable, and further saw human activity as both partaking in and
creatively ‘elaborating’ the unfolding of the infinite, the element of creation is both necessary and
inevitable. We will return to this topic in detail in s.4.3.
375
Myth “is a process of securing ties, assembling, and interweaving that produces an interplay of
multiplicities. As such, myth, like philosophy in the Jena lectures, is in a state of becoming. A work of
shifting assemblages, it is intimately tied to the heterogeneous philosophical text that creatively mixes
different discourses” (Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff, “Romantic Crossovers: Philosophy as Art
and Art as Philosophy,” Theory as Practice 173).
376
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 182.
377
In part, this appears to be a call for what we would call in modern parlance ‘interdisciplinarity’:
“the 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” (Schlegel,
Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #115).
174
is to be encountered. Whereas Fichte is careful to direct his listeners to construction’s
proximity to an infinite and uncontrollable skepticism, Schlegel points a different danger—one
which calls for the highest degree of self-criticism. He writes:
[I]f the highest is truly incapable of intended formation [Bildung], then let us
immediately give up all claims to any free art of ideas, which would then be an empty
name.
Mythology is just such an artwork of nature.378
We have here critical hesitation. Rather than presupposing our access here and now to
the highest, Ludiviko’s counter-factual insinuates instead a guardedness: the highest may be
incapable of any sort of formation (bilden) within discourse, Schlegel writes; if it is beyond
formation, we must surrender our claim to a free art of ideas, and mythology is just this—a free
art of ideas that is perhaps capable of forming the absolute, coupled with the self-critical
awareness of the dangers of its inefficacy, that is, the danger of it being merely an empty name.
He writes that such a mythology cannot, “exist without something originary and inimitable,
which is absolutely indissoluble, which after all transformations still allows the old nature and
power to shine through, where naïve profundity allows the glimmer of the absurd and the crazy,
378
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 186.
175
or of the simpleminded and the stupid, to shine through [bestehn ohne ein erstes
Ursprüngliches und Unnachahmliches, was schlechthin unaufslöslich ist, was nach allen
Umbildungen noch die alte Natur und Kraft durchschimmern läßt, wo der naive Tiefsinn den
Schein des Verkehrten und Verrückten, oder des Einfältigen und Dummen durchschimmern
läßt][.]”379
The highest may yet have a higher, and we may in the end be unable to extricate
ourselves from this endless parade of derivatives, this “endless succession of mirrors.”380 This
means that the proposed mythological discourse runs the risk of leading us not only to falsity,
but even to absurdity, nonsense, stupidity, and insanity. The risk of which Schlegel speaks is
thus not only an epistemic failure, but the beginnings of a descent into social chaos—a collapse
of the tower of Babel which divides and scatters.
3.4 Schlegel’s Discourse
3.4.1 Negativity: Self-criticism and Fichte’s Pistol
We find in these short passages a condensation of Schlegel’s epistemic position; that is,
on the one hand we have an orientation towards (a now regulatively-conceived) truth; on the
379
Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 186; cf. Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe vol. II, 319.
De Man provides a post-structuralist reading of Schlegel's words near the end of the passage (I quote the
German for this reason): “The authentic language is the language of madness, the language of error, and
the language of stupidity […] it is such because this authentic language is a mere semiotic entity, open to
the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is
profoundly unreliable” (De Man and Warminski, “The Concept of Irony” 181).
380
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #116.
176
other hand, we find a radical attempt at auto-criticism—more radical, in fact, than the autocriticism found in Fichte’s constructive method. It is here where the tendencies of Schlegel and
Hegel parallel each other in a surprising manner. To explain what this means, let us inspect
what Fichte says near the start of the 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre. Here, Fichte
claims that we must, “presuppose here in all seriousness that there is a truth which alone is true
and everything apart from this is unconditionally false; further, that this truth can actually be
found and be immediately evident as unconditionally true[.]”381
The problem, then, is that “Fichte simply begins with the absolute and with Absolute
Wissen [absolute knowledge,]”382 a position he held even in his days as a young scholar, and one
that was graphically described by Hegel in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a
“pistol-borne absolute.”383 For Hegel, the absolute cannot be understood as a postulated
immediate unity, for this reduces it to the bare assertion of the subject-object identity; this
assertion, according to Hegel, has the effect of liquidating the absolute of true differentiation
and providing instead only a bovine-filled darkness.384 The result is a failure of the absolute to
381
Fichte, Science of Knowing 22, emphasis added.
Seidel, “The Light That Lights” 97.
383
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 10. This jab was likely directed at Schelling. Compare his
remarks about the beginnings of philosophy in his Science of Logic, where the remark seems more
clearly aimed at Jacobi: “It is only in recent times that there has been a new awareness of the difficulty of
finding a beginning in philosophy […] But the modern perplexity about a beginning proceeds from a
further need which [is] outright denied by those who begin, like a shot from a pistol, from their inner
revelation, from faith, intellectual intuition, etc. and who would be exempt from method and logic”
(Hegel, Science of Logic 45–46).
384
Cf. Hegel’s remarks in his preface to Phenomenology of Spirit (9).
382
177
reveal itself in history—for such a position cannot convince anyone or lead them to knowledge,
standing as it does as a toothless proclamation of oneness over and against the experiences of
differentiation by finite consciousness. Instead of beginning with the a pistol, Hegel begins
with consciousness as it is proximally, showing to that same consciousness how it itself rises to
the level of absolute knowledge.385
In claiming that irony is extra-critical, I take it that Schlegel’s position is rather close to
that of Hegel,386 that is, the auto-criticism that Schlegel describes is so thoroughgoing that it
cannot accept outright the presupposition at the very core of the Fichte’s project. Thus Schlegel
states in a fragment from 1796 that “if one is allowed to posit arbitrarily something
unconditional, nothing is easier than to explain everything […] for this reason, the Mystic
actually achieves the positive component of the philosophical task. No one has understood this
as well as the Greek Sophists and the modern Mystics, among them Fichte.”387 While he
achieves the positive component of philosophy, what the Mystic fails to actualize is the
385
Thus Hegel argues both that the absolute is with us from the start and that it must be
demonstrated. This picture of the absolute and absolute knowledge necessitates a radically different
demonstrative method. In Beiser’s words, Hegel’s solution is to begin not with a pistol but with a
critique of finite knowing itself: “consciousness would have to examine itself according to its own
standards, and by its own immanent necessity rise to the standpoint of absolute knowledge. But it was
just the critique of knowledge that seemed to lead to nihilism. Somehow, then, Hegel would have to
show how criticism, from its own internal dialectic, breaks outside the circle of consciousness so that
the self knows a reality independent of itself” (Beiser, Hegel 176).
386
Here I find myself in disagreement with Ayon Roy, who reads Schlegel’s epistemology as relying
on an intuition-grounded epistemology (Roy, “Hegel Contra Schlegel; Kierkegaard Contra De Man,”
PMLA 124.1 (2009): 107–126).
387
Schlegel, “Philosophical Fragments,” 335–336.
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negativity required for proper philosophizing. In attempting to realize exactly this, Schlegel
ends up with a discourse that generates both an intra-discursive skepticism (the relativization
of all finite claims to knowledge) and a meta-discursive self-critique (the hesitation about the
possibility of discourse as such); Schlegel’s philosophical practice, in other words, hovers
between assuming its own possibility and impossibility. Thus, if we accept that Fichte is fully
critical within his discourse, he perhaps nevertheless remains half-critical with respect to his
discourse; that there is an absolute truth and that it can be known are, for Fichte, pistol-borne
free of charge. It is in this sense that Schlegel’s mytho-poetic discourse is more deeply autocritical than Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1804, and it is this which constitutes the negative
half of Schlegel’s ironic epistemology.388
Yet it should now be clear that even if Schlegel’s ironic practice bears the “conceit that
knows how to belittle every truth,” it does not do so “in order to turn back into itself and gloat
over its own understanding.”;389 these finite truths are cast away in order to bestow upon us not
an absolute insight so much as our proper task of infinite truth-seeking—the self-criticism of
both our claims and our practices that give rise to said claims. Despite the potentially
388
Schlegel’s picture of irony as parabasis becomes manifest again. As Hubbard points out,
“comedy is in its essence an act of civic self-criticism, and the parabasis is comedy’s own pivotal moment
of self-criticism when the serious interests of the poet, chorus, and audience are aligned, but all are at
the same time allowed to take their share in the city’s ills and in the universal fact of human folly”
(Hubbard, Mask of Comedy 29).
389
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 52.
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misleading result of arguing for an infinite fallibilism, Schlegel’s philosophical project retains a
definite epistemic orientation towards truth and substantiality.
3.4.2 Positivity: Schlegel’s Mytho-poetic Symphilosophy
If Schlegel both holds an orientation towards truth and avoids the arrogance of merely
assuming that truth can enter his discourse, does this not just reconfirm Hegel’s social critique?
The finitude of human creatures implies, for Schlegel, that the substantiality of prevailing truth,
as well as the accessibility of truth as such, is always in question; we have argued that this is
more appropriately described as a fallibilism than a skepticism, due to Schlegel’s epistemic
orientation. Yet it seems that all we have here is a demand, however humbly expressed, on the
part of an ego for self-certainty; and, rather than constituting a defence of Schlegel against the
charges of egoism, elitism, and authoritarianism of the particular, this seems to re-articulate
Hegel’s social critique in more sympathetic terms. Accordingly, in order to defend Schlegel
against Hegel, we must ask just what (if anything) is substantial and abiding within Schlegel’s
work. What is the positive aspect of Schlegel’s philosophy? As we will argue in this section, as
well as in the subsequent chapter, what holds the status of substantial and abiding is not any
particular truth, but rather a shared communal practice—a communal discourse that Schlegel
associates with both mythology and Romantic poetry—through which truth is to be sought.
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As we have seen, Schlegel attempts to develop the consistent skepticism (ironic practice)
demanded of him by his Kantian epistemological position. Yet a discourse that recognizes and
attempts to come to grips with the finitude of its theses and operations vis-à-vis the infinity of
truth is a discourse that cannot presume its own totality and closure; this implies, furthermore,
that the adherents of such a humble epistemic stance can no longer relate to others—whether it
be other discourses or other individuals—merely as a kind of proselytizer from within the
cloistered walls of a closed system. Thus, although it may appear initially that Schlegel’s
epistemic humility is an issue entirely distinct from social or communal concerns, seeming to
involve only the demands of individual self-consciousness and its certainty, this is not the case.
In short, irony’s hesitation calls for humility, which in turn sends Schlegel on the path of
a populist discursive expansion; that is to say that the creation of his new mythology—the
shared language that is to provide poetic-sensuous wholeness and discursive unity to
modernity—is claimed to be unthinkable without the absolute plurality of creative perspectives
that currently lie unsynthesized. Thus, beyond the negative and meta-critical aspects of
Schlegel’s discourse, we find in his work a manifest ‘positive’ side, wherein Schlegel attempts to
gather and connect as many voices in his discourse as possible. In Ludiviko’s words from
Schlegel’s Speech on Mythology:
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Any view of poesy can be true and good if it is poesy itself. However, since one person's
poesy must be limited, precisely because it is his own, so too must his view of poesy be
limited. The spirit cannot bear this, doubtless because it knows, without knowing it, that
no human being is merely a human being, but rather can and should be, really and in
truth, all of humanity as well. Therefore a person keeps going outside of himself, ever
certain of finding himself again, in order to seek and find the completion of his
innermost being in the depths of a stranger. The game of communicating and
approaching is the business and the power of life; absolute completion occurs only in
death. Therefore the poet should not be satisfied to leave the expression of his own
unique poesy—as it was born and formed within him—behind him in lasting works. He
must constantly strive to expand his poesy and his view of poesy, and to approximate
the highest point possible on earth by striving to connect his part to the great whole in
the most determined manner possible.390
Poesy here is a creative power, that elemental force of which all individuals, as well as
nature itself, are possessed;391 as all individuals partake in the infinite, we can safely state that
all individuals are creative openings unto truth. In other words, the claim here is that all
390
Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 181, emphasis added. Thus Kneller states that “poetry is
expansive by nature and true poetry exists only when one seeks to expand one’s poetry to increasingly
incorporate the works of others”⁠ (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 115).
391
Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 180–181. Cf. Beiser, Romantic Imperative 21.
182
individuals are poetic geniuses,392 each capable of varying degrees of creativity and thetical
spontaneity from a respective situated standpoint.393 Yet, as finite individuals, Schlegel tells us,
we have only inchoate and fractured access to the infinity of creative power; for this reason, an
effort at self-transcendence towards infinity requires that we admit this finitude to ourselves—
admit, that is, that “there are an infinite number of philosophies with regard to man's formative
process,” and understand further that it is only “their reciprocal communication [Mitteilung]”
that will allow for the unfolding of the infinite’s “entire wealth of forms and nuances[.]”394
Mythology, therefore, is the meta-discourse that is the condition for this communication
(Mitteilung), since it implies the communal development of a shared ‘language’ by way of which
the panoply of poesies can be combined.395
392
Pace Hegel’s reading, Michel and Oskiloff claim that genius for Schlegel “is an agency, shared by
subjects and nature alike, for creating symbols. This production is the allegorical activity of forming
finite representations of the whole. It is necessarily endless, for the whole can never be grasped in a
single, finite object, but it is precisely through unceasing production that the infinite reveals itself”
(“Romantic Crossovers” 170). While this captures the Romantic sense of the term in part, we will show in
the final chapter that there is an explicitly social aspect to the term for, unlike Kant’s aesthetic ideas,
these representations (and the unceasing production thereof) are only available socially (see s.4.3).
393
Bowie provides a clear gloss of the post-Kantian notion of the spontaneity of the subject,
connecting it to the productive imagination (Urteilskraft) in Kant (Bowie, “Introduction,” Friedrich
Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Criticism [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998] vii–xxxi).
394
Schlegel, “On Philosophy” 438.
395
Schlegel’s use of Romantic poetry refers to both the individual openings unto infinity and the
discourse which aims to combine them—poetry thus allows him to pass from the subjective to the
intersubjective; mythology is therefore the meta-discourse which aims at the provision of a shared
language, on the basis of which this communication-cum-combination of poetries becomes possible.
These are not distinct discourses, therefore, but are rather the inverse and obverse of the human activity
of sense-making and truth-seeking (for why these are connected, see the Romantic vitalist picture of
nature and its relation to human production in s.4.3.2 of this thesis). While poetry emphasizes the
striving of subjective expression towards the establishing of an expressive community, mythology
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Brought into a shared horizon by the attempt to develop a new mythology, the
procession towards the infinite is to proceed along infinite paths. This is why Schlegel claims
that in our striving we must connect our situated perspectives “through communication with
those who have also found it in another way, from another direction”;396 thus Schlegel states,
“the time of [philosophy’s] popularity has come[.]”397 Popularity, for Schlegel, therefore denotes
more than simply a manner of communicating thoughts to the masses in simplified form;398
indeed, what emerges is kind of epistemic imperative against elitism. Romantic sociability, in
its Schleiermacherian or Schlegelian forms, stems from the acceptance of our individual
finitude, an acceptance of the ego’s dependence on community that spurs us to a humility that
crosses the aesthetic, epistemic, and ontological domains. We are not the absolute origin of our
begins with a social (if not yet communal) body and directs us to its ongoing struggle to construct a
shared horizon or ground for its expressive activities.
396
Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 181. Why associate this discursive practice with poetry in
particular? On this point, Kneller references Schlegel’s infinite fallibilism in the famous Athenaeum
Fragment #116 which describes Romantic poetry as progressive and universal, explaining that “poetry
(Poesie) is universal because it aims at an ideal that is itself never fully articulable and thus
‘incomprehensible’ […] it is progressive because it never gives up attempting to comprehend and be
comprehensible, that is, it aims constantly to better communicate itself to others, both present and
future” (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 114). Thus the term ‘poetry’ allows Schlegel to name a discourse
that is ongoing, not totalizing (it accepts the opacity of its ‘object’), and necessarily social. Poetry is also
historical and, however universalist its ultimate ambitions, is rooted in a tradition; this we can compare
with Ameriks’ reading of Hölderlin, when he uses the word “poetic,” before clarifying it to imply a
“creatively open extension of a tradition” (Ameriks, “History, Succession, and German Romanticism” 62).
397
Schlegel, “On Philosophy” 438.
398
Although it is important to note that few had such a simplistic view of popular philosophy,
Günter Zöller points out that Kant and Fichte, for instance, “oppose the dominating popular philosophy,
which turns generally comprehensible presentation into a criterion of philosophical content, with an
alternative conception of philosophy that keeps separate the popular presentation of philosophy and its
scientific development, and which places the two in a well-defined relation to each other” (Zöller, “The
Unpopularity of Transcendental Philosophy,” Pli 10 (2000): 50–76).
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own activity, Schleiermacher claims, and we cannot be insofar as this activity can take shape
only in a proper social context; we do not have absolute knowledge of the infinite and are
necessarily situated and finite. Romantic sociality thus calls for collectively creative practices,
calls to ascend from genius to geniality;399 and although truth’s closure can never be attained,
the substantiality of fixed truths have come to be replaced by the very substantiality of
discourse itself.
3.4.3 Hegel’s Narrow Reading of Romanticism
Crucially for the purposes of refuting Hegel’s charge of elitism, this discourse does not
denote a hierarchical or a “rigid and unchanging” dynamic between speaker and audience,
authority and subordinate—between cleric and congregation, as it were. Instead, Schlegel
follows Schleiermacher in claiming that we need a sociable dynamic—a dialogue of “friendly
exchange[,]”400 that is, of free and absolute reciprocity wherein each member is (potentially)
acted upon by all members. This is why, he claims, we must connect our perspectives with the
maximum number of other perspectives in conversation so that the search may be more likely
to produce results.401 We are to engage in an infinite dialogue with others, generating sense
399
The fragment #36 from the “Ideas” collection is useful here: “every complete person has genius.
True virtue is geniality” (Schlegel, “Ideas” #36, Early Political Writings). Compare this to Nassar’s
statement: “reality, like truth, emerges in and through meaningful relations. It emerges, in other words,
in expressive community” (Nassar, Romantic Absolute 112).
400
Schlegel, “On Philosophy” 431.
401
Cf. Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 181.
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and pressing our ‘friendly exchange’ towards the infinite. The more voices, in other words, the
more content brought into the discourse, the more likely we are to properly escape the bare
idiosyncrasies of our ego. Schlegel’s discursive practices thus combine an absolutization of
intersubjective critique with a call to futurity, or an epistemic humility with an almost dogmatic
belief in reason’s self-corrective power. We are to submit ourselves, he claims, to an endless
process of thetical (logical in an etymological sense) truth seeking in the form of perpetual
creation (poetizing and collective myth-making), as well as a critical guardedness against false
‘formation’ (bilden); with respect to both aspects of his mytho-logical discourse, the mythical
and the logical, philosophy is only possible socially.402
To call for a “friendly exchange,”403 therefore, although it may initially appear rather
innocuous and even bourgeois, presents us with something rather radical. For just as
Schleiermacher and Kant argue for the inability of the ego to act outside of a social milieu,
Schlegelian sociability in the broadest sense argues for the inability of the ego not only to grasp,
402
Poetry thus emphasizes the positive side of Schlegel’s project (the infinity of approaches to the
infinite), while mythology requires a moment of social negativity wherein discursive participants
struggle to establish a ‘we’—or to discover there is none. This social negativity will be fully explored in
chapter 4 of this thesis and described as a dialectic of genius (s.4.4). From this point on, we use the
phrases ‘symphilosophy’ and ‘Schlegel’s discourse’ as general terms which refer to Schlegel’s infinitely
social philosophizing. On this point, Ameriks claims that the Early Romantics propose “to move
religious and philosophical thinking away from an insistence on celebrating [only] one system, or
divinity, and toward a sensitivity for the multiplicity of connected forms that the ‘spirit’ of true peace
appears to take as history proceeds. [… T]he key to identifying the ‘prince’ of peace, that is, the figure
awaited and celebrated [in Hölderlin’s Friedensfeier], is to avoid the exclusivist fallacy of hypothesizing
that it is simply Napoleon, Jupiter, Jesus, the poet himself, or some other particular figure such as
Dionysus or Heracles” (“History, Succession, and German Romanticism” 60).
403
Schlegel, “On Philosophy” 431.
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but even to properly seek, truth outside of a social milieu.404 In other words, Schlegel argues for
the individual’s epistemic finitude and calls for the widening of our (sym)philosophic discourse
to the whole of society and societies—beyond the confines of academic discipline, institution,
caste, even nationality405 and contemporaneity.406
With Schlegel’s discursive practices in mind, let us now recall Hegel’s troubled
assessment of the elitism of the Romantic genius: Hegel’s claim is that the Romantic subject as
theorized by Schlegel and the Jena circle has the effect of parting out humanity in a stratified
manner; this meant that the whole of humanity comes to be divided along the lines of activity
and passivity, creativity and receptivity, genius and taste—and with a definite favouritism
towards the first parts of these dyads. Thus, for Hegel, the Romantic ego is the individual
genius, the presumed-to-be-spontaneous origin that gives rise not only to its ‘work,’ but also to
404
Recall Kant’s hypothetical question: “how much and how correctly would we think if we did not
think as it were in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts, and who
communicate theirs with us!” (Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 16).
405
As Schlegel’s frequent references to ‘the orient’ reveal. Still, as many have pointed out, Schlegel’s
cosmopolitanism always existed alongside a desire to revivify Germanic pride. In the words of Mary
Anne Perkins, the Schlegels’ “reviews in the [Athenaeum] are permeated with this peculiar blend of
nationalism and cosmopolitanism, of German pride and European-ism” (Perkins, “Cosmopolitanism
and Nationalism in the Writings of August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel,” in Nationalism Versus
Cosmopolitanism in German Thoughts and Culture, 1789–1914: Essays on the Emergence of Europe
[Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, 2006] 153; Vandevelde, Heidegger and the Romantics 86). For a recent study of
Schlegel’s role in the construction of German nationalism and identity, see Zimmermann, Sehnsucht
Nach Deutschland.
406
Schleiermacher makes a similar point in theorizing translation and the status of German as a
literary language: “just as it is perhaps only through the cultivation of foreign plant life that our soil has
become richer and more fertile, our climate more pleasing and milder, so too do we feel that our
language [can] most vigorously flourish and develop its own strength only through extensive contact
with the foreign” (Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” The Translation Studies
Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti [London: Routledge, 2000] 62).
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a thoroughgoing elitism. It should be clear at this point how narrow this interpretation is. Irony
is the infinitization of critique, the attempt to render an infinite skepticism consistent. It
follows that, while Hegel argues that irony leads the Romantic genius to an elitist and selfabsorbed and nihilistic elitism, Schlegel’s own understanding of irony and skepticism implies
an infinite fallibilism in the face of truth’s infinity; this, in turn, demands humility before
others and a turn to communal practices. We could say that, while Hegel accuses Schlegel of
only deploying irony towards others, Schlegel sees irony’s destructiveness as first and foremost
directed towards the self, clearing a space for the sort of absolute reciprocity envisioned by
Schleiermacher.
Further, it should be clear at this point that any reading focusing exclusively on the
status of the ego will lead to a rather myopic understanding of the Romantics’ philosophical
practices. It should be clear, that is, that the discursive practices of Schlegel and company go far
beyond Hegel’s more narrow overview of Romanticism. To delineate a this type of populist
discourse seems not only to imply that Schlegel’s work is no egoism, but also that it is the
furthest thing from a hubristic elitism—this is why he associates philosophy with “oral or
written dialogues”407 and collectively written fragments as opposed to systematic treatises
penned by single authors. Hegel, in focusing on the purported auto-affection and elitism of
407
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #42.
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irony, seems to wilfully ignore these other aspects of the Early Romantics’ epistemology and
practice.
3.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have shown that Hegel’s criticism of the elitism of the Romantic
genius—that the very notion of genius delimits two strata of humanity, opposing the creative
and spontaneous (i.e., the exceptional and exemplary performer) to the mass of individuals who
merely deploy taste—is clearly misapplied to Schlegel. That is, we have noted that Schlegel’s
mytho-logy aimed at creating a populist discourse, of gathering as many positions and claims
to truth and sense as possible;408 we have noted, furthermore, that Schlegelian irony represents
not a playful nihilism, but rather the deliberate subjective polemic against these limited
knowledge-claims. Not only do the Romantics claim that all individuals have their own creative
power vis-à-vis their perspective on the infinite (all individuals have their own poesy or genius),
they also demand that philosophy foster these separated poesies, gathering as many of them as
possible into a dialogue and thereby allowing any artificial straits to be widened. Rather than an
elitism and arrogation of authority by the genius, therefore, Romantic sociability issues a
mandate of philosophy’s popularity; what is crucial is not the productive power of the
408
Here we can recall Schleiermacher’s desire for free sociality to connect an individual’s sphere of
propriety with that of others, such that “it is intersected by the spheres of others as diversely as possible”
(Schleiermacher “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 20).
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exceptional ego, but rather the substantiality of a shared discursive practice, i.e., a
symphilosophy.
Still, there is more to be said regarding Hegel’s social critique and its applicability to
Schlegel’s work. What is missing is an account of just how Schlegel’s discourse can make a
claim to sort even provisional truth from falsity within its infinitely fallibilistic framework,
rather than merely liquidating all truth claims of validity. With a strict notion of the opacity of
the infinite, will not all claims ultimately be overturned by the ego? And was this not part of
Hegel’s reading of irony as the infinite demand for self-certainty by the ego, leading eventually
to despair? Even if Schlegel substantializes a social practice, in other words, the result may
simply be the same vacuum that resulted from the individual ironization of the finite.
Sense, reason, and truth are not for Hegel incidental but rather, insofar as they require
the self-transcendence of individuals, represent the matrix within which sociality becomes
possible; by contrast, a vacuum is a vacuum even if it is shared. If there is no mytho-poetic
operation that sorts sense from nonsense, then the resulting ‘discourse’ (if it can still be called a
discourse) can be described as simply a proliferation of privacies, each individual called to
generate sense infinitely and critique infinitely with nothing resulting that would resemble
progress or even dialogue.409 This monadological result would surely not live up to the
409
Millán-Zaibert, referring to Athenaeum Fragment #116, writes that “a philosophy that will never
be ‘completed,’ a philosophy that is always in a state of becoming, should not just develop blindly, with
no critical perspective to guide it” (Emergence of Romantic Philosophy 161). She argues that Schlegel
saw the Enlightenment notion of progress in just this manner.
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standards of the word ‘community,’ nor would it constitute an infinity of approaches towards
anything, let alone the highest truths.
This is a question that relates quite closely to the third aspect of what we have dubbed
Hegel’s ‘social’ critique: the issue of the bare authority granted to the particular over and
against the universal. Hegel sees the Romantic ego as the apotheosis of morality; that is, he
reads this ego as jettisoning all authority that it did not itself establish. Our fourth and final
chapter will take up precisely this issue. It will ask by what criteria Schlegel sees his practice as
being able to sort sense from nonsense—by what criteria Schlegel’s mytho-poetic discourse is to
provide something like ‘truth,’ however provisional, for a historical community. As we will see,
his method is intimately connected to a framing issue of this whole text, namely the Romantic
notion of genius. We will see that the touchpoint of truth for Schlegel’s discursive practitioners
comes to be understood in a similar manner to that of the Kantian genius: a claim to sense can
only be vindicated by a public warrant, that is, by way of finding an audience.
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4. COMMUNITY AND GENIAL AUTHORITY: ON IDEALIZING AN AUDIENCE
I therefore presuppose readers who would not want a just cause to be defended with
injustice. Now with regard to them it is already decided that, in accordance with our
principles of critique, if one looks not to what happens but to what properly should
happen, then there really must not be any polemic of pure reason.410
It is not without significance that the old myth makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge
fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is warlike.411
4.1 Introduction
Throughout this text, we have explored the merits of what we have called Hegel’s social
critique of the Early Romantics, in particular Schlegel. In the previous two chapters we have
challenged Hegel’s narrow reading of the Romantics’ philosophical practices. But as we argued
in chapter 1, there is another core tension flagged by Hegel, namely that of the authority
granted to bare particularity over and against the communal ethos. For Hegel, it is only within a
communal nexus that the particularity of the free subject can achieve substantiality and hence
410
411
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A750/B778.
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters 49.
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authority; on the grounds that he posits the opposite, Hegel attacks Schlegel as exemplary of the
problems incited by modern freedom (morality).
In a certain light, it may seem as though this issue (of the authority of particularity as
such) has been handled, albeit obliquely. If we accept the claims of the previous chapters
regarding the communitarian and (regulative) truth-oriented practices of Schlegel and
company, that is, it may seem as though the question of whether or not the Romantics grant
authority to the ego is almost non-sequitur. As argued in the last two chapters, if the Romantic
ego is communally constituted in discourse, and if the discourse in question demands a
populist and inclusive expansion, it seems difficult to see just how the Romantics could
understand the lone individual to act as the authority on issues concerning truth, knowledge, or
freedom.
Yet even if the question has been answered negatively, it seems we have much work to
do in order to answer the question positively. For if Schlegel and company remain oriented
towards truth and substantiality in their practices, the question raised but not answered in the
previous chapter was just what this truth amounted to—by means of what criterion or criteria,
beyond a reckoning with others, is this truth-seeking to take place? Even if the content of
Schlegel’s discourse, the poesies which are gathered, are furnished by its inherent sociable
aspect, we may still wonder after the negative, that is to say critical, aspects of Schlegel’s
discourse. We may well wonder: is it the case that Schlegel, in sending us on the path towards
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synthesizing a plurality of perspectives and historical tendencies, forces us to abandon a kind of
Enlightenment-style progress for a relativized notion of cultural accretion: an absolute
proliferation of sense in all directions with no ability, and perhaps no requirement, for
normativity?
We will see that Schlegel’s response to these issues, like Hegel’s, argues for the
historicity of truth—that is, truth’s incarnation in the concrete norms of a community. In
contrast to Hegel, however, Schlegel argues for the responsiveness of this community to the
spontaneous creative powers of the individual; furthermore, and against Hegel’s
characterization of the Romantics, Schlegel’s recognition of the individual does not imply an
authoritarianism of the particular. Rather, taking a cue from Kant’s notion of genius and its
concomitant account of genial authority, Schlegel argues for a complex interplay between the
particular and the universal; indeed, it is through by way of this interplay that prevailing
cultural order can undergo substantial transformations.
4.1.1 The Empirical and Ideal Audiences
Much of this text has been concerned with a particular translation of the Romantic
philosophical practice into the language of discursive practices. The issue of the criterion or
criteria of truth—of what Hegel understands as the substantial truth of Spirit, and which he
associates with the prevailing ethos of a community—must in turn undergo a translation into
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the vocabulary of discourse. While we will still speak of the truth of a community, our
translation of Romanticism will reinterpret the notion of community along relational lines:
rather than a community in a broad and monolithic sense, we will begin to speak of various
communities of sense that come to be formed or reformed around individuals, specific claims,
shared practices, and the authorities they suppose (hence a relation between individuals and
criteria). This means, in short, that from the perspectives of individuals, communities will come
to be seen as audiences.
What is an audience, for Schlegel and company, and how does it relate to the issue of
truth? Let us begin with a broad overview of the Romantics’ comments on this issue by turning
to one of the Critical Fragments, wherein Schlegel takes on the idea of a public; he writes that
“one sometimes hears the public being spoken of as if it were some-body with whom one had
lunch at the Hotel de Saxe during the Leipzig Fair. Who is this public? The public is no object,
but an idea, a postulate [Postulat], like the Church.”412 Thus a public is not to be sought after as
an object; it is rather to be postulated, that is, set forth as an ideal by an individual. It is clear at
several points that Schlegel holds a notion of the public or audience that foregrounds this
idealizing act on behalf of a communicator. He states, for instance, that it is a “poor way of
thinking” for an author “to despise and deprecate the existing public and to ignore the ideal
412
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #35. This “Like the church” rings of
Schiller’s end to the Aesthetic Letters: “Does such a State of Beauty in Appearance really exist, and where
is it to be found? As a need it exists in every finely tuned soul; as an achievement we might perhaps find
it, like the pure Church, or the pure Republic, in only a few select circles where it is not the spiritless
imitation of foreign manners but people’s own lovely nature that governs conduct” (140).
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one.” He continues, putting the point in stronger terms: “the public does not exist; this idea can
at best be represented by that which we empirically call the public.” The claim Schlegel makes
here is that the empirical public exists only as a representation of the ideal one, and not vice
versa. Rather than a ‘best fit’ attempt on behalf of a discursive practitioner to delimit the
indirect object (the ‘to whom’) of their address—to understand the others with whom they
interact—the positing of an ideal audience must be understood to hold priority. This is
eminently clear in the closing essay of the Athenaeum journal, Schlegel’s infamous “On
Incomprehensibility,” where he writes:
[I]t is my own peculiarity that I cannot bear ignorance, nor the ignorance of
ignoramuses, and even less the ignorance of the informed. Therefore, I decided long ago
to converse with the reader on this matter, and to construct before his very eyes—and in
his face, if necessary—a different, new reader, one constructed according to my own
ideas, and even to deduce him should I find it necessary. I meant it seriously enough,
and not without my old inclination towards mysticism. For once, I wanted to proceed
methodically, through the whole chain of my attempts, to admit the often poor results
with ruthless openness, and in so doing gradually lead the reader towards the same
openness and honesty with respect to himself.413
413
Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility (1800),” Theory as Practice 119.
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With this passage in particular, we can see that tension is beginning to become
apparent. That is to say that one prima facie implication of claiming audience to be ideal is that
there is an implicit normative claim regarding audiences: the Romantics might be taken to be
claiming that empirical audiences should be judged by their ability to approximate or ‘represent’
an already cognized ideal object or form. If this is indeed the implication—and if, furthermore,
a speaker or writer is to direct his or her discourse to a public as it should be rather than as it
is—the danger is precisely the kind of self-exile that Hegel posits to be exemplary of Romantic
irony. In the second volume of his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel devotes a lengthy passage to
precisely this self exile of the artist, as well as the logical egoism of both artist and audience
member, in the context of drama. He writes that,
Since Tieck's time [a] contempt for the public has become the fashion, especially in
Germany. The German author insists on expressing himself according to his own
private personality and not making his works agreeable to hearers or spectators. On the
contrary, German self-will requires that everyone shall be some thing different from
everyone else in order to display his originality. For example, Tieck and the brothers
Schlegel with their pre-meditated irony could not master the mind and spirit of their
nation and time; they declaimed against Schiller especially and maligned him for
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finding the right note for the German people and gaining the height of popularity. Our
neighbours, the French, act altogether to the contrary: they write for immediate effect
and keep their public constantly in view, and it for its part can be, and is, a keener and
severer critic of the author because in France there is an established artistic taste, while
in Germany anarchy reigns. Here everyone pronounces judgement out of his own head,
and approves or condemns just as the accident of his own personal views, feelings, or
caprices dictates.414
With this passage in mind, we can simply rephrase Hegel’s social critique: to speak only
to oneself or to one’s own ‘circle,’ to measure and perhaps even to discard the claims made by
(or the non-comprehension of) empirical others as boring or harmonious or inadequate, is
precisely the hubris Hegel claims to have seen in Romantic thinkers.
4.1.2 Idealizing One’s Audience and the Authoritarianism of the Particular
Schlegel is at the very least ambivalent towards his audience. Yet at this point the role it
plays in his discourse remains opaque. In order to more deeply explore these issues we will
begin our chapter (s.4.2) with three thinkers who likewise idealize their respective audiences.
Fichte, Jean Paul Richer, and O’Neill’s reading of Kant all deploy an ‘idealized’ audience in
414
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, 1175.
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different ways; that is, each faces the problem of the authoritarianism of the particular in a
different way.
O’Neill reads Kant as holding a similar position to the Romantics, i.e., as arguing for an
ideal conception of audience; indeed, it is precisely in equating the community or audience of
reason with the range of all possible reasoners that she is able to claim that Kant himself avoids
the dual discursive pitfalls of heteronomy and (logical) egoism. Yet the question to pose to
O’Neill is, as we will see, the same dilemma parodied by Jean Paul: insofar as no empirical
others seem to be required for the purported ‘discourse,’ it seems as though the individual
speaker or writer simply arrogates authority. The question then becomes: do we need other
empirical individuals at all, or is self-activity sufficient insofar as it passes through ideal
interlocutors and a volitional act of self-transcendence?
Section 4.3 of this chapter argues that this picture is quite false when applied to the
Romantics. Indeed, it attempts to give further weight to the Romantic discourse as being
dialogical rather than egoistic. Indeed, it is true that Schlegel and company view their
philosophical practices as being dependent on an idealized audience, and specifically an
audience capable of genial and creative activity; yet it is true that the Romantic discourse
itself—through a theory of creative interpretation and discursive practices designed to foster
this—operates with an eye to closing the gap between the ideal and the real. Rather than merely
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positing an ideal and being content to measure the empirical world thereby, the Romantics aim
to have an effect on the prevailing social world.
In s.4.4, we will argue that this position does not imply a stance of hubris, but one of
humility. That is, the Romantics follow the model of aesthetic normativity offered by Kant’s
account of art history: a genius not only generates novelty, but must also solicit a community;
indeed, it is only the latter that acts as the true empirical touchpoint of sense as opposed to
nonsense. We will explore this dialectic of genius and audience before claiming that a similar
dialectic is at play in the Romantic conception of its public.
In short, we find that while the Romantic fragments call for the idealizing of one’s
public, the fragments make continual reference to humility before what they call the genius of
the age. The genius of the age is, for the Romantics, the attunement of a historical epoch; this
attunement or sensibility denotes that age’s general receptivity to certain theses (claims,
positions, works). Crucially for our purposes, we will note that before this historical sensibility
the Romantics call for a thoroughgoing humility. The genius of the age functions, in other
words, in a similar manner to Kantian ‘taste,’ sorting sense from nonsense and clipping the
wings of individuals who stray too far; this means, furthermore, that the discourse of the
Romantics—as much as the discourse of enlightenment, Kant’s genius, and Hegel’s account of
ethical life—acknowledges the criterial role of a public warrant in sorting sense from nonsense.
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Hegel’s critique of the authoritarianism of the particular will thereby prove itself to be deeply
limited when applied to the Romantics.
Finally, it must be asked just why the Romantics associate this ‘public’ not with taste (or
something similar) but rather with the genius itself. We will note that, in the first instance, this
claim for a historical attunement of genius dovetails with Schlegel’s claims towards the popular
availability of genius (previous chapter), as well as the claim that the ego is a socio-historical
product (chapter 1): if all individuals are creative openings unto infinity, and yet these openings
are themselves the result of their embeddedness in a historical milieu, it seems clear that a
given epoch will have a certain character or tendency.415
Yet we will not stop at explicating the Romantic position. To conceive of the public as a
kind of genius is to make a stronger claim: with the sense of spontaneity related to the term
‘genius,’ Schlegel develops a notion of the public as one that, while making demands on
individuals, is nevertheless receptive to transformation. The direction of this transformation
415
The use of the word ‘tendency’ is clearly connected to Schlegel’s regulative picture of truth and
knowledge; thus he speaks of “a tendency, a preliminary sketch” (Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility”
122). Describing Schlegel’s use of the word, Millán-Zaibert writes, “For Schlegel, our knowledge claims
are never rooted in an absolutely certain foundation. We cannot be so arrogant as to think that we will
ever have the last word on the meaning of any given event or text or idea, and certainly, his critiques of
Fichte, or of Jacobi, Reinhold, Niethammer, or Kant, for that matter, were not attempts to complete
what they had not finished, for he was well aware of the inherent incompleteness of knowledge and of
philosophy itself” (Emergence of Romantic Philosophy 1667–167).
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does not merely unfold teleologically from the genius of the age itself, but is mediated mutually
with the activities of individuals partaking in communal life—including a critique of that age.416
What this implies, in other words, is that to demarcate a historical attunement and yet
call it genius implies what we have already gestured towards: it is not enough to claim the
individual to be a product of their socio-cultural milieu (à la Hegel); rather, we must recognize
that milieu to be capable of transformation through an interplay with the individuals who are
embedded therein.
Schlegel’s genius and genial community—call it the Romantic sociability of genius—
thus allows him to push back against the monolithic account of culture provided by Hegel. This
translation of the Romantics into the language of discourse will therefore allow us to explore
just how the Romantics think cultural practice in a way that allows for both subcultures and
cultural change. Let us turn to our final chapter.
4.2 Ideality of Audience: Three Forays into Idealization
4.2.1 Fichte’s Idealization: Being Understood
This section examines Fichte, Jean Paul, and O’Neill. We find that each thinker holds an
ideal conception of audience. While Fichte assumes his audience’s capacity to understand him,
416
Thus Schlegel writes, “what should I possibly say of our age? The same age in which we also have
the honor to live; that age which has, in a word, earned the modest but highly suggestive name of the
Critical Age, so that soon everything will have been criticized—except the age itself—and everything will
become more and more critical, and artists can entertain the justified hope that humanity will finally
arise en masse and learn to read” (Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility” 120).
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Jean Paul radicalizes and ironizes this tendency, satirically portraying the best audience as
wholly fictional. In contrast to what may be naïveté on Fichte’s part and comedy on Jean Paul’s,
O’Neill provides us with a sophisticated reading of Kant’s enlightenment discourse that relies
on the positing of ideal audiences. For O’Neill, the idealizing of a public is an essential aspect of
the ongoing construction of human rationality as such.
We have already noted that Fichte, as the author of many so-called ‘popular’ works of
philosophy, strives for a level of methodological self awareness about the reciprocal capacities
of his audience vis-à-vis his task as a communicator. Realizing that philosophical
comprehension depends on self-activity,417 Fichte opts to perform philosophy before his
audience: the audience, in turn, is called to repeat the original philosophical act (though the
outer trappings may differ entirely). Though Fichte admits that this ‘proper participation’ is no
easy task, he claims it is nevertheless in principle possible for everyone; the catch, however, is
that it does demand “a particularly high degree of attention[.]”418 It follows that any individual
417
For example, “not even the least spark of [the Wissenschaftslehre] can be grasped or
communicated historically as an appropriation from someone else’s mind” (Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre
1804, 22). Compare the statement of Novalis: “how can a person have the sense for something which he
does not have the germ in himself? What I should understand I should develop organically in myself”
(“Pollen” #18).
418
Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804, 76. The topic of attention (Aufmerksamkeit) and its relation to
philosophy was something that seems to preoccupy Fichte throughout his works. See, for instance, his
1795 “The Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy,” where he associates attention with the ability of a
philosopher to displace passive representations with spontaneous ones: “what the philosopher is
supposed to do is to displace a present representation voluntarily and consciously through his own
intellectual spontaneity,” which Fichte associates with abstraction; subsequently, Fichte claims that the
philosopher is also to “fill the place occupied by the displaced representation with another specific
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can enter into the movement of the Wissenschaftslehre, as long as they are willing to submit
themselves to it with “full and complete attention.”419—an attention that so thoroughly throws
itself into its object that no “other thought or fancy can occur to it,”420 an attention which allows
one to follow the increasingly detailed conceptual constructions laid bare by the speaker.
In this sense, Fichte has simply assumed a certain capacity of his audience; he assumes,
in other words, that the listeners will be able (at least in principle) to banish all thoughts or
stimuli that impede their focus; he further assumes that, provided a proper object is presented,
the listeners will spring to their own autonomous activity. Nevertheless, Fichte himself was no
stranger to the problems of communicating scientific philosophy popularly,421 that is, to a broad
audience outside of the academy. Indeed, as his career went on Fichte appeared more and more
desperate to find a receptive public, which is only to say: more and more desperate to be
understood.422 Desirous of understanding and unwavering as much in his optimistic populism
as in his faith in the self-disclosure of truth, Fichte appeared time and again to be faced with a
representation,” which he associates with reflection. This entire process, Fichte claims, is attentiveness,
and those who lack it “cannot philosophize” (Early Philosophical Writings 202). On this passage and its
relation to intellectual intuition, see Halla Kim, “Abstraction in Fichte,” Fichte and Transcendental
Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale [Palgrave Macmillan, 2014] 143–162).
419
Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804, 47.
420
Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804, 47.
421
For an examination of Fichte’s relationship to philosophical ‘popularity,’ see Zöller,
“Unpopularity of Transcendental Philosophy” 50–76.
422
As the title of Fichte’s 1801 A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual
Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand [Sonnenklarer Bericht
an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. Ein Versuch, die Leser
zum Verstehen zu zwingen] implies. Schlegel states with some irony that Fichte’s “latest writings are
friendly dialogues with the reader in the candid, simple style of a Luther” (“On Philosophy” 436).
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vexed audience or readership which had grown increasingly incredulous of his claims to
require only bare attention for the promised insight.
4.2.2 Jean Paul’s Idealization: Being Alone With Others
In short, Fichte’s frustration with his empirical audience for failing to live up to an ideal
standard of astute attentiveness and reconstruction seems to imply an unsociable egoism of the
sort delimited by Hegel; the ground of authority is ultimately taken to be the individual
philosopher who bears the key to the gates of insight. Yet while Fichte may assume certain
capacities on behalf of his audience, it seems unfair to apply the Romantics’ statement that the
empirical audience is a mere representation of the ideal to his lectures. For whereas the
Romantics were concerned primarily with the written word, and hence required a concept of
the public in general, that is of their readership, Fichte preferred to engage himself with his
public face-to-face; as a result, there was a necessary degree of reactivity to those present, even
if this reaction occasionally took the form of bafflement, admonishment, or frustration.
If Fichte gives us an intimation of the problems of writing for an ideal audience, a more
reflexive account of these problems can be provided by a turn from Fichte’s empirical lectures
towards Jean Paul’s423 fictional lectures, specifically his Lectures on Aesthetics.424 It is perhaps
423
Richter was associated with the early Romantics, personally as well as in his writings
(theoretical and literary, if such a distinction can be maintained) (see Christopher John Murray,
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 [New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004] vol. II, 853–854).
205
unsurprising that the Lectures, concerned as it is with communication and the form of the
lecture, remarks explicitly on the idealization of one’s public. Indeed, by the time Jean Paul
arrives at the lectures that close out the text, the leitmotif of failed (ideal or real)
communication seems to preoccupy him. Time and time again, Jean Paul describes himself as
losing or having lost his audience, often in the middle of the communicative act itself. In the
second lecture, for instance, he closes with the bare acknowledgement that he is alone:
“Gentlemen, as I perceive that you have all together gone home—probably from vexation—so
that none of us is left here except myself alone, I break off without further comment and shall
also depart myself. For surely I have no need to persuade myself[.]”425
Jean Paul’s audience has simply up and left. Much like it did for Fichte, oral
communication—the epitome of sociable and immediate communication—proves also to
provide immediate feedback for the reach of one’s communicative address. That is to say that
Jean Paul finds himself a Robinson Crusoe: fictionally alone.426 Yet this fictional solitude is soon
turned on its head, and it is in the third of Jean-Paul’s lectures where his audience becomes
explicitly idealized.
424
In my reading of these sections of Jean Paul’s Lectures, I am indebted to Sean Franzel’s “The
Romantic Lecture in an Age of Paper (Money): Jean Paul’s Literary Aesthetics across Print and Orality,”
Romantic Cultures of Print 57–58 (Feb.–May 2010): 23.
425
Jean Paul Richter, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics (Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1973) 298.
426
Cf. Novalis: “a Robinson Crusoe—a scientific fiction” (quoted in Nassar, Romantic Absolute 74).
206
At the start of the third lecture, Jean Paul waits “an hour before beginning,”427 as no one
has shown up. Soon thereafter, a youth appears and, with a prickly disposition, challenges Jean
Paul at every turn. Their discussion passes polemically through the philosophical and the
poetical, before Jean Paul finally requests of his “honoured audience”428 his name. After all, Jean
Paul points out, this would be only fair: the youth seemed already to know his.429 Initially
claiming to prefer anonymity (“the infinite is anonymous”)430 and opting to leave the scene
rather than be cajoled from his anonymity, the youth soon returns, declaring himself to be none
other than Albano—the protagonist of Jean Paul’s own novel Titan431—whom Jean Paul loves “so
much[.]”432 After learning his identity, Jean-Paul’s stance towards the youth changes
dramatically: his faults become wholly pardonable,433 and Jean Paul proceeds with his lengthy
eulogy for Herder.434 The two characters, Albano and the self-aestheticized Jean Paul, tend
towards identity: it is thus after losing his actual audiences in his first two lectures that Jean
427
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 305.
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 305.
429
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 310.
430
“‘Anonymity, preferably reciprocal,’ I said, ‘certainly has a spiritual quality in investigations. On
journeys I often tried to get by with another investigator without given names or surnames, like the
unnamed butterflies, the fish about us, or the unchristened suns of a constellation. One would even be
more anonymous without a face; since facial traits are half signatures’” (Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 310–
311).
431
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 311. Cf. Franzel, “The Romantic Lecture” 23.
432
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 312.
433
Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon 312.
434
Who the youth now, in another shift of stance, admits that he likes.
428
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Paul discovers his most eminently instructable, in the form of an entirely constructed and
idealized, audience.
At this point we can see that Jean Paul’s text neatly illustrates the dilemma afore-posed
to Schlegel and Fichte: if by Romantic ‘postulation’ we mean only the bare assumption of the
capacities and characteristics of an audience, communication comes to be seen as a deeply onesided affair; that is, if an audience is conceived as being the favoured construction of the
creator of a text (or an address), it follows that all empirical communication occurs only in a
fallen and imperfect form outside the auto-affective relation of the author with him- or herself.
In other words, we could say that, even if communication in fact is to occur between a speaker
(or writer, or reasoner, or artist) and an audience that exists empirically, the telos of
communication here is taken to be the imaginative reverie between the artist and him/herself, a
fantasy where the audience represents a pure pole of receptivity and identity with the (active)
speaker. For Fichte and, in a satirical fashion, Jean Paul, the empirical audience comes to be
dissolved in the ideal. Yet it is clear that, if this is the ideal, the opposite is surely the norm:
empirically speaking, communication between individuals (or between an individual and a
group thereof) exists only in a mutilated form of this ideal, and a communicator’s striving
towards the latter leads only to the founding of an idiocracy.435
435
“Once more parodying the scene of literary-critical communication, Jean Paul leaves the readers
of the Vorschule with a final provocation: if the ideal pedagogical transmission of his “School of
Aesthetics” is really only realizable in the realm of poetic fantasy, what then are the genuine public,
pedagogical stakes of literary criticism? Must readers of Jean Paul aspire to communing with him in an
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4.2.3 O’Neill’s Idealization: Logical Egoism Through Communication
4.2.3.1 Normativity and Audience in O’Neill
There is one more touchpoint to be explored here, an account of an idealized audience
which fares far better in the face of Hegel’s social critique: Kant’s account of enlightenment as
cognitive autonomy. In chapter 2, we explored the Kantian work on this topic, which we briefly
recapitulate here. After claiming that the emergence of cognitive autonomy occurs only for a
community as opposed to an individual (a public as opposed to a public reasoner), we noted the
various tensions that arose for Kant’s framework as an explanatory device: unable to think of
active individuals acting upon passive ones, Kant must provide an auto-affective account of
Enlightenment’s emergence, yet this auto-affection must not be confused with any sort of
cognitive absolution or logical egoism. We can summarize the above by stating simply that, in
the discourse of enlightenment according to Kant, the individual must bring him/herself to
his/her own activity; this demand for auto-affection notwithstanding, it is also the case that the
individual’s activity must pass through the community, i.e., be mediated by the activity of
others—so as not to fall into a kind of logical egoism or naïve voluntarism.
What came into view was the following: there appears to be in Kant’s work on this topic
a complex, if inexplicit and unthematized, dialectic at play between the individual and the
imaginary garden idyll as if they were figures in a novel of his composition?” (Franzel, “The Romantic
Lecture” 24).
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community. The relation between an individual and a community must be one of mutually
reciprocal mediation, whereby the individual attains to activity in and through a flight from
‘private’ conditions, an insight that Schleiermacher seemed more capable of articulating than
Kant himself.436 Thus, concluding that Kant’s own account of Enlightenment remained too
much of a sketch to fill in these gaps, we turned to Schleiermacher and his notion of an absolute
reciprocity.
In recent decades, however, there has been an attempt to read these short works by Kant
in a way that more adequately responds to just such tensions on Kantian grounds. Due to its
preoccupation with issues concerning audience, it is one such reading, proffered by O’Neill,
that we turn to now. O’Neill’s starting point is the attempt to read Kant’s account of reason in a
deflationary manner, i.e., pragmatically rather than metaphysically.437 She notes that for Kant,
the attainment of self-activity just is, almost paradoxically, the attainment of a kind of selftranscendence. This attempt at self-transcendence, crucially for our purposes, is intimately
bound to the positing of an audience and the normativity solicited thereby. In order to
understand this in detail, it is clear that we must understand more precisely what Kant, on
O’Neill’s reading, understands by the public use of reason. According to O’Neill, it is not any
and every communication involving any and everything resembling a public that would qualify
436
Although indeed with the aid of concepts from Kantian aesthetics.
In her own words, her reading is “deeply anti rationalist and profoundly political” (O’Neill,
Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy [Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge UP, 1989] 4).
437
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as a public use of reason; rather, embedded within Kant’s account of this discourse of
enlightenment are certain norms and strictures, without which no discursive act or situation
qualifies as public and ‘reasonable.’438
The norms O’Neill has in mind are suggested by Kant’s statement defining public uses
of reason: “by the public use of one’s own reason… I understand that use which someone makes
of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers[.]”439 In this innocuous looking
claim O’Neill unearths a key normative aspect. A public use of reason, according to O’Neill, is
“defined in terms of the audience whom an act of communication may reach[,]”440 i.e., a world
of readers. Yet O’Neill has in mind here not the de facto reach of a communication—something
like the extension of phone lines, the quality of television reception, or the strength of an
orator’s voice. Instead, when O’Neill uses the phrase ‘may reach,’ the extension that she has in
mind is that of authority: precisely what is constitutive of an ‘audience,’ to O’Neill, is just this
shared horizon of authority within which discussion or debate takes place.441 O’Neill here
further unfolds the implications of Kant’s own distinction between public and private uses of
reason: when writing a deposition, for example, a lawyer writes to an audience of other lawyers,
438
According to Deligiorgi, “unless we identify the ways in which public argument is principled
argument, we should lose any connection between it and independent reasoning, for one can just as
freely be the mouthpiece of a guardian as to voice his or her own thoughts” (Deligiorgi, Culture of
Enlightenment 62).
439
Kant’s Practical Philosophy 18, emphasis Kant’s.
440
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 32, emphasis O’Neill’s.
441
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 34, emphasis O’Neill’s; cf. O’Neill, “Enlightenment as
Autonomy” 196.
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all of whom accept the limiting horizon of specific laws, as well as the justice system as a whole,
the authority of the state setting forth its laws, and so on.
While these frontiers may be nested or overlapping, each of them also, according to
O’Neill, delimits something which would qualify as an ‘audience’ or a ‘public’; that is, it is the act
of the address itself that can make manifest the horizons at stake in a particular instance. In
other words, even if the fact of a shared horizon may, prior to the address, remain unknown to
the audience as well as the scholar, individuals are nevertheless always embedded within
preexisting contexts of cares and commitments (personal, cultural, professional, religious, etc.).
Such contexts articulate the regions of practical normativity which, in certain debates, come to
be made manifest. Kantian public reasoning, on O’Neill’s reading, thus can be said to have a
clarificatory effect on the participants, both in the sense that we come to realize the
commitments of others (if we were not aware of them beforehand), and that we can come to
realize our own commitments (if we were not aware of them beforehand).442
It is on the basis of the above that O’Neill distinguishes between “full uses of reason”443
and partial (privative) uses of reason. Broadly speaking, we can say that an audience (a public)
442
With this we spot an affinity with Schleiermacher’s arguments for a self that comes to be both
bounded and revealed through discourse and dialogue: “every true act of communication takes into
yourself what is yours, and each time you speak to someone you give the other a feeling of his or her own
boundaries” (Schleiermacher, quoted in Faull, “Beyond Confrontation?” 53).
443
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 34, emphasis O’Neill’s.
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comes into being for O’Neill on the basis of shared authority.444 Again, we can contrast public to
private uses of reason, the latter restricting their range on the basis of some authority and, in
the same stroke, restricting their audience: “communications that cannot, however
disseminated, reach those who do not accept or assume some authority are not full uses of
reason at all.”445
4.2.3.2 Reason’s Authority
Yet O’Neill has in mind something far greater than the clarification of commitments,
that is, the revealing of prevailing and contingent spheres of normativity. It is telling that the
above examples of the lawyer and clergyperson were, from the start, private uses of reason. This
means that in either case there were more or less obvious empirical authorities that could be
invoked: the legal system, the state, the church, and so on. It is not yet clear, in other words,
what all of this can tell us about the aforementioned full uses of reason: when a scholar
addresses the entire world of readers, that is, it is less clear just what this ‘range’ of address is to
imply. Just what horizon of authority does the world of readers446 find itself within? What
authority does the entire public, that is, the world at large, presuppose?
444
This, it seems to me, is similar to Davis’s description when he claims that a public, in all of
Kant’s multifarious definitions thereof, has the peculiarity of transcending “particular interests” (Davis,
“Kant’s Different ‘Publics’” 172), i.e., has a shared communal horizon.
445
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 34.
446
Kant Practical Philosophy 18.
213
The widest horizon of authority, it turns out, is the authority of reason as such,447 and
how the details are understood is here crucial. For, if the ‘world of readers’ presupposes reason
in the same way that a lawyer presupposes the judicial system, it is not clear how we can
qualitatively distinguish between one incidentally wider horizon (qua ‘full use’) and any other,
narrower horizon of authority; in this hypothetical situation, we would have only degrees of
authority along a spectrum, some (arguably) wider than others, and yet we would lack the
ability to make landfall on one in particular as a final resting point. Kant makes it clear at many
points in his writings that, though we can understand reason as being authoritative, it does not
have the same sort of authority as, say, the state. O’Neill directs us to the following passage:
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the
freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon
itself a disadvantageous suspicion. Now there is nothing so important because of its
utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and
inspection, which knows no respect for persons. The very existence of reason depends
upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never
447
And contrariwise, on O’Neill’s reading, reason as such is understood fundamentally as this
widest horizon of authority.
214
anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to
express his reservations, indeed even his veto without holding back.448
There is no boot nor billy club of reason. The authority of reason, rather, is claimed to be
qualitatively different from those horizons which we may describe as being ‘narrower’;
nevertheless, at this point we do not know how it differs. Worse yet, if reason is defined as not
only lacking in dictatorial authority itself, but also spurning dictatorial authority in all forms,
then it seems we may simply be led to a regress of horizons. For if to qualify as a ‘full use of
reason’ a communicative act needs only to reject such narrower horizons of authority, or if the
freedom of which Kant speaks is a merely negative cognitive freedom, a freedom from all
authority, it seems we are forced to acknowledge all species of cognitive libertinism, all flights
from the world and others into idiosyncratic Schwärmerei, not only as rational but indeed as
the purest incarnations of reason.449 This is, unsurprisingly given his aforementioned distaste
for logical egoism, a possibility that Kant ardently seeks to avoid. Indeed, he explicitly censures
448
A738f/B766. O’Neill argues for the importance of this socio-political imagery in the Kantian
account of reason, a topic which we will return to with respect to the Romantics.
449
“[I]f reason requires only rejection of ‘alien authorities’ and a strategy of meeting conditions for
intersubjectivity, wouldn’t the most chaotic, structureless thought and action count as reasoned?”
(O’Neill, “Enlightenment as Autonomy” 192). “The form of independence that counts for Kantian
autonomy is not just the independence of the individual ‘legislator,’ but rather the independence of the
principles ‘legislated’ from whatever desires, decisions, powers, or conventions may be current among
one or another group or audience” (O’Neill, “Kant’s Conception of Public Reason” 147).
215
such flights in What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? when he speaks of
lawlessness of thought.
In this discussion of cognitive lawlessness, Kant draws attention to those who seek to
place themselves beyond the reach of reason’s authority, “in order, as genius supposes, to see
further than one can under the limitation of laws[.]”450 Though the cognitive ‘genius’ may first
experience a degree of success—at least to the extent that his or her bold flights can draw forth
an enraptured community (genius can “enchant others” with its “triumphant pronouncements
and great expectations”)451—this success will remain short-lived. For soon, in the absence of
reason’s laws (“which alone can command validly for everyone”),452 the tower of Babel453 will
collapse, resulting in disparate geniuses, each left to their own enthusiasms and inspirations,
each unable to communicate with the rest. This situation is not only a confusion of tongues: it
450
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 16.
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 17.
452
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 17.
453
A favoured Kantian metaphor. Kant writes that, with the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,
“we have made an estimate of the building materials and determined what sort of edifice, with what
height and strength, they would suffice. It turned out, of course, that although we had in mind a tower
that would reach the heavens, the supply of materials sufficed only for a dwelling that was just roomy
enough for our business on the plane of experience and high enough to survey it; however, that bold
undertaking had to fail from lack of material, not to mention the confusion of languages that
unavoidably divided the workers of the plan and dispersed them throughout the world, leaving each to
build on his own according to his own design” (A707/B735), and, in the Prolegomena: “high towers and
the metaphysically-great men that resemble them, around both of which there is usually much wind, are
not for me. My place is the fertile bathos of experience” (Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
That Will Be Able to Come Forward As Science: With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, ed.
and trans. Gary C. Hatfield [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997] 125n).
451
216
could also be described as a feudal proliferation of towers, each tower babbling to itself within
its own petty princedom.454
Once more, it is not difficult to see in Kant’s words resonances of Hegel’s critique of the
Romantics: the accusation of hubristic ‘genius’ that both repels the authority and attracts the
curiosity of a community—such charges were levied in an almost identical form by Hegel.
Indeed, the similarities run even further. For Kant, as for Hegel, a purported lawlessness in
cognitive matters will simply lead to all thought being trifled away455 by arrogance, or for the
sake of idiosyncrasy. That is to say that for both thinkers a vacuum of authority, true cognitive
anarchy, will (much like political anarchy) not be tolerated for long;456 rather, involved
individuals will be moved to superstition,457 or towards silence, by the external duress of the
reigning political authorities. Thus Kant believes that, if reason does not limit itself, the only
possible result will be that a-rationality, whether it be cognitive or political despotism,458 will
come to limit reason by force; thus Hegel’s accusation that the conversion of Schlegel and
Dorothea to Catholicism (the most ‘tyrannical’ of positive religions) is a direct fallout of their
earlier philosophical inclinations. Though he does not deploy the Hegelian vocabulary of
454
Idiocracies, as it were.
“[F]reedom to think will ultimately be forfeited” due to arrogance (Kant, “Orient Oneself in
Thinking” 17).
456
“[W]ithout any law, nothing—not even nonsense—can play its game for long” (Kant, “Orient
Oneself in Thinking?” 16).
457
Since superstition at least bears the form of law (Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 17).
458
Or indeed, even a “ridiculous despotism” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Bxxxv), as when, in
order to retain authority, genius simply retreats into abstract cobwebs.
455
217
dialectical overturning, Kant implores the reader, “have you thought about what you are doing
[and] where your attacks on reason will lead?”; for without “freedom to think.. even your own
free flights of genius would soon come to an end.”459
4.2.3.3 The Categorical Imperative and Communication as Praxis
We see therefore that in reference to both logical egoism and lawlessness in thought,
Kant and Hegel bear not only similar concerns, but also a deep affinity on these issues; in other
words, they both seem repelled by the kind of egoism and libertinism of which Hegel accuses
the Romantics, and view it as the untenable subject of a dialectical overcoming. In short, the
lawlessness of genius, for both Hegel and Kant, amounts to nothing more than a situation of
present or forthcoming heteronomy; this can, it is clear, in no way be synonymous with Kantian
enlightenment and substantial self-activity. While Hegel claims that the lawlessness of genius
must bend the knee to the prevailing historico-ethical world, Kant posits instead an a-historical
and transcendental buttress against such cognitive anarchy.
That is, Kant defines the freedom of reason not as a merely negative freedom; rather, he
sets forth a definition of the cognitive autonomy of reasoning in the Conflict of the Faculties as
“the power to judge autonomously—that is, freely,” before appending a crucial parenthetical:
“according to principles of thought in general[.]”460 Just what are the principles of thought in
459
460
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 16.
Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” Religion and Rational Theology 234.
218
general alluded to by Kant, and how are we to arrive at them? Taking her cue from Kant’s
understanding of autonomy in his moral works, O’Neill directs us to a famous footnote in What
Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? Here, Kant elaborates on his notion of
enlightenment as autonomy in cognition,
[T]hinking for oneself means seeking the supreme touchstone of truth in oneself (i.e. in
one's own reason); and the maxim of always thinking for oneself is enlightenment. Now
there is less to this than people imagine when they place enlightenment in the
acquisition of information; for it is rather a negative principle in the use of one's faculty
of cognition, and often he who is richest in information is the least enlightened in the
use he makes of it. To make use of one's own reason means no more than to ask oneself,
whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to
make the ground or rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of
reason. This test is one that everyone can apply to himself; and with this examination he
will see superstition and enthusiasm disappear, even if he falls short of having the
information to refute them on objective grounds. For he is using merely the maxim of
reason’s self-preservation.461
461
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 18.
219
To readers of Kant’s moral philosophy, this passage should sound quite familiar. If, to
qualify as autonomy, both independence from external governance and a form of lawfulness
are required, it follows that autonomy requires a capacity for the self-imposition of lawlikeness,
or auto-nomy.462 Yet this, in turn, implies a particular understanding of a law, namely as one
that at least can be applicable universally. O’Neill puts this point quite succinctly when she
states, “the form of independence that counts for Kantian autonomy is not just the
independence of the individual ‘legislator,’ [an individual’s freedom from heteronomy
(subservience to other thinkers, or to purported rules of thought)] but rather the independence
of the principles ‘legislated’ from whatever desires, decisions, powers, or conventions may be
current among one or another group or audience.”463 It is this type of autonomy which comes to
be corroborated, though only negatively,464 by the categorical imperative.465
The sort of Kantian autonomy implied by the categorical imperative, and the
universality that is central to it, may simply appear more manifest when applied to moral issues.
462
This parallels his notion of autonomy from the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals:
“Autonomy of the will is the property of the will by which it is a law to itself (independently of any
property of the objects of volition” (Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary
J. Gregor and Jens Timmerman [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012] 47).
463
O’Neill, “Kant’s Conception of Public Reason” 147). In the words of Allison, “one is to ask oneself
whether the ground of one’s assumption can be regarded as suitable for all cognizers” (“Kant’s
Conception of Aufklärung” 233).
464
Though this does not lessen its value. For as Kant claims in the first Critique, “where the limits
of our possible cognition are very narrow, where the temptation to judge is great, where the illusion that
presents itself is very deceptive, and where the disadvantage of error is very serious, there the negative
in instruction, which serves merely to defend us from errors, is more important than many a positive
teaching” (Critique of Pure Reason A709/B737).
465
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 53.
220
Yet upon further reflection it is not hard to see why the categorical imperative holds dominion
here in the context of communicative practices. That is (and this is ultimately O’Neill’s prime
insight) one must realize that communicative practices are indeed practices in order to
interpret Kant’s train of thought. Insofar as “the structure of human communication is not
preestablished” in any harmonious fashion, its conduct—and moreover its bare operation or
existence—can only be seen as “a practical problem[.]”466 How so? For prospective
communicators (cum-would-be reasoners), O’Neill467 describes the situation as follows: “there is
no maxim of reasoning whose antecedent authority can compel them; and yet they cannot
share a world if there is no cognitive order… the most then that they can do is to reject basic
principles of thought and action that are barriers to cognitive order.”468 On O’Neill’s
constructivist reading, this is all that was meant by the claim that reason is the widest possible
horizon of authority, as well as the claim that this horizon was non-dictatorial: reason does not
consist of ‘thick’ rules of thought or dictatorial quasi-institutions; rather, its dominion is
understood as the furthest-reaching precisely because of its minimalism. Reason is a minimal
466
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 43.
In broad terms, O’Neill argues that Kant’s claims that the practical use of reason is more
fundamental than the theoretical, in combination with his claim that the categorical imperative is the
fundamental principle of the former, commits Kant to the position that the categorical imperative is the
supreme principle not only of practical reason, but of reason as such. It follows that it is by means of the
categorical imperative that thought’s principles—and hence autonomy in a positive sense—are provided.
468
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 23. Cf. “the most remarkable feature of Kant's vindication of
reason is that he does not appeal to reason to explain the importance of autonomy: he invokes autonomy
to explain why we should think that some standards of thinking and acting deserve an unrestricted
authority, and that we are warranted in calling them principles of reason” (O’Neill, “Enlightenment as
Autonomy” 192).
467
221
strategy for beings to share a world despite their many differences (dispositional, professional,
cultural, etc.) through striving to transcend themselves, that is, their own egos and
idiosyncracies.469
It should be clear from the above that the categorical imperative is not seen as a robust
means for achieving consensus.470 Kant’s formulation does not imply that all possible others
would or will in fact agree: consensus is no orienting point here, neither in the form of a de
facto agreement amongst real individuals, nor even as the telos of accord amongst others in
general. Instead, the categorical imperative serves as a negative instruction, disallowing those
claims that destroy the very possibility of “action, interaction, and communication”471 by
revealing their roots in the bad faith of self-exemption.472 The categorical imperative, in other
words, humbly disallows claims to which others could not agree without undermining the
discursive situation qua discursive.
469
That is, Kant “does not depict theory as impeccably grounded in reason, and the rationality of
practices as derivative… his account of reason is in the first place an account of constraints on practices
of thinking and acting among any plurality for whom interaction and communication are possible”
(O’Neill, “Enlightenment as Autonomy” 194).
470
“Kant does not ground reason in actual consensus, or in the agreement and standards of any
historical community; he grounds it in the repudiation of principles that preclude the possibility of
open-ended interaction and communication” (O’Neill, “Enlightenment as Autonomy” 194).
471
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 24.
472
Here, and in the whole of her project, O’Neill has surely been influenced by twentieth century
theorizers of discourse such as Habermas (who is himself heavily indebted to Kant). Attempting to find
a way out of the post-Kantian proliferation of lifeworlds and ‘grammars,’ Habermas argues that what is
transhistorical(izing) is precisely the procedure of argumentation. Discourse, claims Habermas,
“commits participants to strong idealizations,” making language users orient “themselves to
unconditional validity claims and presupposing each other’s accountability[.]” In this way, “interlocutors
aim beyond contingent and merely local contexts” (Habermas and Fultner, Truth and Justification 17).
222
It is thus on these grounds that reason represents the widest horizon of authority within
any discursive context: not because it bears within it the power of an absolute dictator to crush
lawlessness and egoism, nor because it gives us the most foolproof or fulsome account of what
to do in any situation of (purportedly) public reasoning; rather, reason represents the minimal
conditions for a discursive situation to persist as what it is, without devolving into
authoritarianism (cognitive or otherwise) or lawlessness (as a forthcoming authoritarianism).
O’Neill’s reading, then, hinges on normativity’s broad emergence out of practices, that is, the
practical exigencies of sharing a world with others. The sort of reason that emerges is one that
is, once more, “never anything more than the agreement of free citizens.”473
4.2.3.4 The Ideal Public and the Sensus Communis: O’Neill’s Logical Egoism
What should be clear from that above is that, on O’Neill’s reading, the generation of
Kantian normativity is not an idealistic picture, as though the norms were either transcendent
or transcendental, but rather historical, contingent, and practical. Yet, thus far, we have not
focused on the motif in O’Neill’s work which brought us into dialogue to begin with: audience.
Since, as have already seen, public reasoning is “defined in terms of the audience whom an act
of communication may reach[,]”474 it is clear that the practical emergence of normativity (qua
the movable horizon that is reason) is closely tied to a particular idea of audience. Furthermore,
473
474
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A738f/B766.
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 32.
223
despite O’Neill’s pragmatism, she appears to hold the rather peculiar stance that the audience
of reason, the public with which the scholar must engage, is not only or primarily the historical,
contingent, and empirical public reached by a communicative act.
To elaborate: in order to be authoritative in a non-dictatorial way, O’Neill argues, reason
must be maximally inclusive. Accordingly, she recognizes no distinction between publicizability
and inclusivity.475 Whereas publicity emphasizes something like the de facto reach of a
communication, publicizability is a matter of reaching audiences in principle, that is, on the
basis of shared horizons of authority. It follows that a use of reason qualifies as truly public only
when the range of an address—the authority or authorities presupposed in the
communication—is that of reason as such. Yet, since reason as such comes to be seen as the
minimal condition for a world to be shared, the widest possible horizon of authority, the public
in question can be understood accordingly as the universal public, the projected horizon of all
possible participants. It follows that reason’s audience, much like Fichte’s and Jean Paul’s, is an
ideal one.
To support her position, O’Neill claims that the ideality of the public is not limited to the
enlightenment essay, and indeed other Kantian sources support such a reading. We see the
same implication in the statements Kant makes in the third Critique regarding the sensus
communis, which he understands as “a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a
475
As Deliogiorgi points out, this amounts to collapsing inclusivity and publicity (Culture of
Enlightenment 182).
224
priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its
judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective
private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence
on the judgment[.]”476
Kant claims that the sensus communis consists of three maxims: 1. To think for oneself;
2. To think in the position of everyone else; 3. To think in accord with oneself.477 With slight
rephrasing, all three maxims should be immediately familiar: the first is the maxim of a neverpassive reason, of cognitive autonomy as the supreme touchstone of truth; the second is the
demand from What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (of which we spoke at length
above), the demand of the categorical imperative, to question whether that which undergirds a
claim is suitable as a universal rule;478 the third is the demand for consistency, to square one’s
cognitions over time with one another.479 Furthermore, in placing oneself “into the position of
everyone else” by means of abstraction “from the limitations that contingently attach to our
judgement[,]”480 Kant claims that one is concerned with the “merely possible”481 judgements of
476
Kant, Power of Judgment 173.
Kant, Power of Judgment 174.
478
Which is the test of universalizability (Deligiorgi, Culture of Enlightenment 81).
479
Kant claims that the third maxim is an outgrowth of the previous two: “[the third maxim] is the
most difficult to achieve, and can only be achieved through the combination of the first two and after
frequent observance of them has made them automatic” (Kant, Power of Judgment 175).
480
Kant, Power of Judgment 174.
481
Kant, Power of Judgment 174, emphasis added.
477
225
others. In judging, one holds one’s judgement idealizingly482 up to the whole of human reason,
engaging in a double movement which distances the reasoner from both heteronomy and
egoism. Indeed, it is this movement which constitutes the attempts at self-transcendence from
the perspective of O’Neill’s individual communicator.
The public here is an ideal one. Indeed, it is in precisely this manner that O’Neill’s
reading attempts to avoid both the trap of the logical egoist and a subservience of reason to
(factual, empirical) opinion. That is, a public use of reason cannot be accused of logical
egocentrism insofar as the others are structurally taken into account in the very act, despite the
judgement being individually performed. To frame matters in a slightly different light, let us
return once more to the afore-posed dilemma faced by Kant’s thinking on cognitive autonomy.
That is, the necessary condition for the coherence of Kant’s account of the social emergence of
enlightenment is the avoidance of the problems of the logical egoist (the account must not
conceive of the individual as being cognitively absolute) and of voluntarism (the account must
render comprehensible the emergence of enlightenment as emergence without implausible
moralizing), as well as the troublesome results of what we might call ‘hierarchicalism’ (the
account must step beyond the auto-affective grounds necessitated by understanding
enlightenment as cognitive autonomy). Framed by these requirements, what O’Neill has in her
sights is clear. By positing a horizontal field of interaction—an absolute reciprocity—as
482
O’Neill writes that the sensus communis consists of three maxims “that constrain
understandings, indeed practices of communication, that can be shared in any possible community”
(Constructions of Reason 25).
226
opposed to a vertical and hierarchical donation of autonomy, O’Neill remains within the
necessity of an auto-affective account of enlightenment’s emergence (hence not the
reinstitution of a kind of cognitive heteronomy); yet, far from being a logical egoist, the
individual judgement is understood here as already de jure implying the judgements of others.
Furthermore, in providing a sophisticated account of Kant’s social epistemology as
being undergirded by the categorical imperative, thus as being at base practical, O’Neill allows
us to understand how the Kantian individual’s emergence from unmündigkeit is both autoaffective and comprehensible qua emergence without resorting to voluntarism. We posed the
question before as to whether Kant must presuppose what his account of enlightenment claims
to explain, namely the capacity of individuals to reason independently. Though it seems clear
that, on O’Neill’s reading, the individual must be capable of minimally independent reasoning
to the extent that reasoning in this sense is undergirded by the practical interests involved in
sharing a world, the expansion of an individual’s horizon is no ‘secret buried within the human
soul’; though it is still ultimately an auto-affective act, the motivations for the inclusion of
others is rooted in thoroughly practical concerns.
4.2.4 Conclusion
Despite the brilliance and sophistication of O’Neill’s reading, it seems that the danger
for her is quite similar to that posed to Fichte and Jean Paul: by emphasizing publicizability
227
over publicity, and in focusing on the importance of the categorical imperative, a picture of
Kant emerges from O’Neill’s reading in which the necessity of concrete others prima facie
disappears. In short, it seems that O’Neill’s account, in taking the public to be ideal, is from the
first instance entirely oriented towards the productive powers of the individual ‘speaker’ or
public reasoner. To understand how, we need only to look at the understanding of (the role of)
the public. The individual reasoner is seen as exercising acts of judgement ‘in public,’ that is to
say exercising fully public uses of reason, when he or she judges on the basis of the widest
possible horizon of authority. We could also say, on the basis of O’Neill’s understanding of
publicizability as inclusivity,483 that a use of reason tends towards being fully public when it
aims to reach the widest audience. The result is a sophisticated account of the dialogical field
understood through the cognitive/communicative484 action of the individual, that is, from the
perspective of the singular reasoner; in turn, an understanding of interaction between the
speaker and the empirical public appears secondary and perhaps even entirely obscure; in a
strange turn of fate, publicity here ends up having little to do with (actual/empirical) others.
The problem should not be underestimated. For, in equating publicity with inclusivity
within the structure of an individual’s act of reasoning, we may be led not only to deemphasize
actual dialogue, but to understand that no empirical dialogue, no actual interaction between an
individual and the empirical public, is necessary at all. If all that is required for ‘public
483
484
Deligiorgi makes this point in Culture of Enlightenment (64).
The two being here the same.
228
reasoning’ is the projection of a maximally inclusive horizon, that is, could we not reason
publicly regardless of whether any empirical interlocutors are present, or even in existence?
Thus, despite the elegance and sophistication with which O’Neill takes on these Kantian
dilemmas, her compromises place her in a similar position to Jean Paul and Fichte, that is,
vulnerable to a kind of discursive logical egoism. Whereas Fichte and Jean Paul show the danger
of equating the Romantic’s postulation of an audience with the egoistic idealization of the
character and capacities thereof (as well as the judgement of prevailing audiences by such a
standard), O’Neill goes further, allowing us to see some of the connections between audience
and normativity that are implicit in many of the thinkers we have explored. Thus, we are now in
a position to rearticulate Hegel’s social critique of Romantic subjectivism in discursive terms:
for all three thinkers (O’Neill, Jean Paul, and Fichte) the danger is that an audience, idealized
from the perspective of a lone communicator, stands in as a kind of egoistic ground of
normativity, allowing this communicator to hubristically avoid the pushback of actual social
interplay. This is especially problematic for O’Neill, whose account explicitly gestures towards a
pragmatic and social ground of normativity as such. If the Romantics measure the real
audience by the ideal audience, it seems the result could be either deep frustration (Fichte) or
the banishment of any empirical audience whatsoever (Jean Paul and perhaps O’Neill). The
result could be not only the founding of various idiocracies, but likewise abandonment of
normativity as such—just as Hegel’s social critique implies. In any case, the result of this
229
equation is a gap of communication, a paucity of actual and generous social interplay, and the
potential exile of the communicator to an egoistic puppet show of author and audience.
4.3 Towards a More Sociable Rhetoric: Summoning an Ideal Audience and
Romantic Humility
All of the philosophers we have touched on in this tract share at least one thing: in all of
the discourses we have explored—Kant, O’Neill, Fichte, and the Romantics—a speaker
(reasoner/philosopher/writer) postulates an audience through their act of communication; this
audience may be ideal or empirical, yet each discursive act bears with it an indirect object (a ‘to
whom’) towards which the communication is directed. Further, each discursive act presumes
not only some audience in general, but stakes a claim to the capacities and character of that
audience: this capacity may be attentional (Fichte), authority-bound (O’Neill), or simply a
matter of agreement-cum-identity with the writer (Jean Paul). The perhaps initially puzzling
Romantic claim that the public or audience is a postulate (Postulat)485 of the writer has thus
come to be contextualized, and indeed has been shown to reach far broader than the confines of
Jena and Berlin.
The Romantic postulation is similar to O’Neill’s reading of Kant insofar as Schlegel and
company explicitly idealize their audience. Although we have not stated the content of this
485
chapter.
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #35, see also the introduction to this
230
idealization (the character and capacities of this idealized audience) it has in fact already been
hinted at in the previous chapter. Indeed, the character of the Romantics’ idealized audience is
nothing more than the claims made by Schlegel in the previous chapter regarding the infinity
of individual poesies, that is, the infinite availability of creative power (genius). All individuals
are active openings unto the infinite; as such, all individual poesies have potential value in a
mythological project—this is the Romantic conception of audience.
4.3.1 The Two Audiences, the Two Schlegels
Nevertheless, it seems clear that to assume the creative and spontaneous powers of
one’s audience is to assume a great deal, as we have already seen with the various tensions
arising from the enlightenment of a public in Kant and O’Neill. Is Schlegel claiming that all
empirical individuals are truly at present capable of the mutual activity of the sort described by
Schlegel’s use of the word ‘genius’? If so, it seems difficult to reconcile this stance with certain
claims put forth by the Romantics; indeed, many of the Romantics’ comments regarding their
audience—and this is partly what Hegel is picking up on—tend to be dismissive of just this
possibility. There are, as it were, two Schlegels: as much as one voice tends towards populism
and humility, arguing for what we have called the genius of geniality, there is another voice
claiming that one does not want to symphilosophize with just anyone.486
486
“You shouldn't try to symphilosophize with everyone, but only with those who are à la hauteur”
(Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #264). Nor is this arrogance dissolved by
231
It seems clear therefore, that at the very least there is a gap between the audience as
ideal and the empirical audience: with the former we have innumerable spontaneous geniuses,
innumerable openings unto the absolute called to engage in a genial discursive practice; with
the latter we have the panoply of empirical individuals, pulled in various directions towards
limiting horizons of authority, vulnerable to passivity and demagoguery, lacking in creativity
and wit, and so on. Schlegel appears to conceive of his public alternatingly in both senses. How
are these two voices of Schlegel, the populist and the elitist, to be reconciled? How are these two
audiences, the ideal and the factual publics, to be reconciled?
What is clear is that the Romantics do encounter the problems involved with logical
egoism, and it must also be admitted that they at times do little to discourage a reading along
such lines. One of the Athenaeum Fragments, for instance, states the following: “People are
always complaining that German authors write for such a small circle, and even sometimes just
for themselves. That’s how it should be. This is how German literature will gain more and more
spirit and character. And perhaps in the meantime an audience will spring into being [Und
unterdessen kann vielleicht ein Publikum entstehen][.]”487 German authors must write with a
claiming that the masses simply require education: “people who write books and imagine that their
readers are the public and that they must educate [bilden] it soon arrive at the point not only of
despising [verachten] their so-called public but of hating [hassen] it. Which leads absolutely nowhere”
(Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #70).
487
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #275.
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small audience in mind, an ideal circle—even a circle of one.488 According to Schlegel, it is only
by ignoring the prevailing opinions of his day that the literary field as such will gain spirit and
character. While, for instance, Schiller’s classicism leads him to call on the artist to reject the
opinion of the age and turn towards eternity,489 the Romantic emphasis on individuality leads
Schlegel to call on writers to turn towards themselves, or towards a select few with whom one
can symphilosophize; only in claiming authority for the ‘small circle’—the genius individual or
the genius community—Schlegel states, will a substantial change of the artistic landscape
become possible.
By appearances, the Romantics jettison the claims made on themselves by the broader
empirical community (of which they are surely a part), a reading that dovetails with Hegel’s
accusations. Yet alongside this Jean Paul-esque ironic flippancy, there is a note of hope in
Athenaeum Fragment #275, and it is this hope which the remainder of this chapter will take as
its guiding thread. For it is not only that Schlegel calls for a turn to idiosyncrasy followed by a
mocking state of revelry; rather, Schlegel turns explicitly to the notion of audience, claiming
that it is at least possible for a receptive audience to emerge (enstehen) in the very gap between
creative spontaneity and the ultimate reception thereof. This emergence is picked up again by
Schlegel in another one of the fragments:
488
Reid thus speaks of the ironic artist “who disdains the public while only producing or
reproducing himself FOR himself” (The Anti-Romantic 37).
489
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters #9.
233
The analytic writer observes the reader as he is; and accordingly he makes his
calculations and sets up his machines in order to make the proper impression [Effekt]
on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates [konstruiert und schafft] a reader as
he should be; he doesn’t imagine him calm and dead, but alive and critical. He allows
whatever he has created to take shape gradually before the reader’s eyes, or else he
tempts him to discover it himself. He doesn’t try to make any particular impression on
him, but enters with him into the sacred relationship of deepest symphilosophy or
sympoetry.490
We must note in this passage a deep and fundamental ambiguity in Schlegel’s use of the
phrase ‘construction and creation’: is the implication here that the synthetic writer must merely
assume some ideal audience in and through the act of writing, or is it the case that the synthetic
writer must bring his or her ideal audience, an audience capable of receiving the discourse, into
being empirically?
We claim that it is the latter sense that the Romantics have in mind. The Romantic
discourse attempts not only to present some ideal of and/or to the public, but to close the gap
between that ideal and the factual—to create a discourse that generates an audience capable of
participating in that discourse. Insofar as this is true, it can be seen as a kind of rhetorical and
490
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #112.
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performative exercise, designed to have an effect on the prevailing socio-historical world. This
kind of performative picture of philosophical communication should recall, among other things,
Fichte’s lectures; yet while Fichte’s preference for in-person dialogue implies that he can speak
directly to his listeners—he performs the constructive method and hopes his listeners have the
attention to follow—the Romantic focus on writing necessitates an account not only of this
performance of the author-cum-speaker, but also the performance of texts themselves. In doing
so, as Jane Kneller points out, they transform sociability into a model not only for their
interpersonal activities, but also “for their criticism, poetry, and philosophy.”491 For this reason,
we must turn to the Romantics’ favoured mode of writing, that form which became the
paradigm of the performative text as well as exemplary of the sociable potential to be found in
the written word: the Romantic fragment.
4.3.2 The Fragment and Romantic Hermeneutics
Schlegel and company collectively wrote and published four collections of fragments
(Critical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments, and, published but not written collectively,
Friedrich Schlegel’s Ideas and Novalis’ Pollen). These volumes were a communal product,
unsigned and alien from the usual expectations, as well as the usual strictures, surrounding
491
Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 112–113.
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authorhood.492 This was surely intentional, for the fragment was designed not (only) to express
a specific calculated point on behalf of an individual writer, but rather—as essentially
incomplete493—to explicitly open itself to a proliferation of reinterpretations and
recontextualizations. For an account of the fragment’s social infinity we need only look to the
words of Novalis, whose collection of fragments was published in the Athenaeum. Novalis
dubbed the text “Pollen” because, as a collection of fragments, it was designed to act as the seed
for future thinking.494 Accordingly, he commences and closes his text by touching on this theme,
framing his work with the following two statements: “friends, the earth is barren, we must
strew ample seeds that only a modest harvest prospers for us”495 and “[t]he art of writing books
is still to be discovered. But it is on the verge of being discovered. Fragments of this kind are
492
The anonymity of the fragments Vandevelde calls “an ironic attack and a challenge to the view
that was becoming accepted at the time”; the view that “an author is recognized as the owner of his work
[as] the product of his labor” (Vandevelde, Heidegger and the Romantics 28).
493
As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out clearly, the fragment is not only contingently or
accidentally incomplete; rather, the very idea of the fragment must be taken “as [a] determinate and
deliberate statement, assuming or transfiguring the accidental and involuntary aspects of
fragmentation” (Literary Absolute 41). This distinction is put in historical terms by Schlegel as the
difference between modernity and antiquity: “many of the works of the ancients have become fragments.
Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written” (Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum
Fragments #24).
494
Vandevelde's formulation is useful here. He writes that the Romantics claim, “that what is
written is to be considered not backward-looking as the expression of something that has been
previously well thought-out before being expressed and is thus independent of its expression, but
forward-looking: what is written is a seed for thought—pollens, in Novalis’ expression—as a stimulation
for further thinking, giving traction to thought” (Heidegger and the Romantics 21).
495
Novalis, “Pollen” #9.
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like a literary sowing of the fields. Of course, there may be many sterile seeds in them.
Nevertheless, if only a few of them blossom!”496
Borrowing a new testament metaphor,497 Novalis likens the creation of fragments to the
casting of seeds and the blooming of an infinity from small beginnings. Yet the goal of “Pollen”
was not to proselytize, but to educate498 in a sense we have already encountered, that is, to set
the conditions for autonomous thinking. In this way, fragments are objects around which
autonomous activity can coalesce: they were conceptualized as ‘writerly’ texts,499 objects of
thinking from which a reader is to leap in novel and autonomous directions. Just as with the
positive aspect of Schlegel’s discourse, the issue here is pure production. In order to understand
what this autonomous production implies, and why this is seen as the operation of a kind of
creative and imaginative genius as opposed to the exegetical work of a passive reader, we must
in turn endeavour to understand the Romantics’ own model of hermeneutics. For the
496
Compare the words of Novalis with Athenaeum Fragment #259, which itself takes the form of a
miniature dialogue: “A. You say that fragments are the real form of universal philosophy. The form is
irrelevant. But what can such fragments do and be for the greatest and most serious concern of
humanity, for the perfection of knowledge? B. Nothing but a Lessingean salt against spiritual sloth,
perhaps a cynical lanx satura [full plate] in the style of old Lucilius or Horace, or even the fermenta
cognitionis [leaven] for a critical philosophy, marginal glosses to the text of the age” (Schlegel,
Philosophical Fragments).
497
Cf. “Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of
mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when
it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and
lodge in the branches thereof” (King James Bible, Cambridge ed. [1769] Matthew 13:31–32; cf. Mark 4,
Luke 13 where a similar metaphor is used).
498
“We are on a mission. We have been called to educate [bilden] the earth”⁠ (Novalis, “Pollen” #32).
499
I.e., texts where the reader is called to productively co-author meaning. See Roland Barthes, S/z
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
237
Romantics, the critical reader is no mere reviewer, no mere exegete tasked with unfolding a
previous telos of the work; rather, on the Romantic hermeneutic model, the capacity to review
and the capacity to produce are intimately connected. As much as all creation is a work of
genius, all criticism of such works are themselves works of genius insofar as they are
themselves productive of meaning and hence themselves creative; we could think of the work of
criticism, therefore, as the reciprocally productive conversation between geniuses.
The Romantics associate the first ‘genius’ in a genial conversation with the artist who
interprets nature. In contrast to Kant (who set the bar of beauty as nature itself), the Romantics
claim that the activity of the artist, in bringing nature’s ideal to a level of reflection in
consciousness, implies both creativity and a fidelity to that object;500 the question is how to
reconcile these two prima facie opposed thoughts. On the one hand it is clear that the genius or
the creator of a work already, in this initial creative act, creates meaning; the Romantic genius
does not merely repeat nature, but rather deploys the productive imagination in an origin-al act.
The artist, therefore, can be said to engage in an idealizing act with the natural. Yet, if
performed properly, this is no exaggeration or falsification; rather, this creative act partakes in
nature’s original creative spontaneity. In Dalia Nassar’s words, the artist thereby raises that
which is implicit in nature “to a degree of consciousness[,]” reveals nature’s implicit ideality and,
500
Although of course it is true that for Kant, phenomenal ‘nature’ was already interpreted by the
understanding.
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in the same stroke, avoids the imposition of “a false order or concept on nature.”501 Indeed, not
only does the first act of genius not imply falsity as opposed to fidelity, there is even a sense in
which this activity of genius is more faithful than the primordial work of nature insofar as it
has attained a higher degree of conscious awareness and transparency.502
The work of genius is thus no bare imposition on nature or flight of fancy, but rather
both partakes in and is generative of nature itself.503 The second genius-moment occurs in the
criticism of that initial reading of nature. Critical interpretation again engages in the same
creative unfolding of the original spontaneity of the act, this time in the spontaneity of the
‘reader’ of nature, and again does so in a way that makes definite reference to that work;
501
Nassar, Romantic Absolute 73. Compare this with Beiser’s claim that, “if what the artist creates
is also what nature creates through him, then his activity reveals, manifests, or expresses nature itself; it
is indeed the self-revelation of nature” (Beiser, Romantic Imperative 22). See also the fragment from the
Ideas collection that claims that, “man is Nature creatively looking back at itself” (Schlegel, Philosophical
Fragments, Ideas #28).
502
Though Beiser is generally reticent to admit a close affinity between Kant’s Copernican
Revolution and the aesthetics of the early Romantics, he concedes this much: “the romantics did stress
the creative role of the artist, and they did not expect the artist simply to replicate the appearances of
external nature” (Beiser, “Romanticism and Idealism” 41). Yet with this, he continues, a problem is posed
for the adherents to such a position. Specifically, Beiser points out that it appears difficult to reconcile
how the Romantics can coherently stress “both the creative role of the artist and the power to reveal
truth,” that is, to (in some sense) imitate nature (41, emphasis in the original). Beiser’s solution to this
dilemma, which we follow here, relies on the Romantic conception of nature, the unfolding of which
reaches its own proper apex in the creative spontaneity of the subject; insofar as the genius is a part of
nature, their creations are not opposed to, but rather an extension of, the original spontaneity of nature
itself. For Beiser, the apex of this position was Schelling’s work.
503
The Romantic ontology thus bridges the gap between finden (discovery) and erfinden
(invention). Vandevelde notes that the latter is not taken in the sense of fabrication, in the sense of
“fiction as invention Newton himself had to invent a way to formulate whatever it is that he ‘saw’”
(Heidegger and the Romantics 6).
239
unsurprisingly, we once more have a higher attainment of self-consciousness.504 Thus we can
see that each of these manifestly creative (poetic) acts, these works-cum-interpretations do not
imply falsity. At the same time, to the extent that such acts are truly creative, we must
understand them as making reference to the work in a very specific manner.
In short, we cannot view the critic as merely elaborating the inchoate and murky as it is
found factually or even potentially in the work; while the production of the critic must be in
dialogue with its object lest it fall into mere fancy and enthusiasm, we must understand that
‘the object’ here is not taken in its bare factual and empirical state. To put things differently, we
could say that Romantic criticism involves not the mere unfolding of what is empirically
inchoate, that is, the unfurling of a potential or energy already inherent in the work under a
quasi-aristotelean framework.505 Thus Schlegel distinguished the classical conception of
potentia from his notion of the work, the latter coming to be called potentialization.
Potentialization implies that any proper text is in surplus of itself: “every excellent work […]
504
This is quite explicit in Schleiermacher’s picture of textual hermeneutics. Interpretation is the
reproduction of a production; yet it is the reproducer who in fact is at least capable of understanding
with a higher degree of conscious clarity the unconscious production of the creator. In Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s words, “the better understanding that distinguishes the interpreter from the writer does not
refer to the understanding of the text’s subject matter but simply to the understanding of the text—i.e.,
of what the author meant and expressed. This understanding can be called ‘better’ insofar as the explicit,
thematized understanding of an opinion as opposed to actualizing its contents implies an increased
knowledge (Gadamer, Truth and Method [London: Continuum, 2004] 191).
505
According to Vandevelde, the Romantic picture is thoroughly “non-Aristotelian... because the
Dichtung or the interpretation that brings a thing or a text to its second power without presupposing
that this potentiality was already lying in the thing or the work [what the romantics call
‘romanticization’] ... is not merely an auxiliary, helping out, as it were, a thing or a text to reach its
second power. Rather, that second power is what the configuration invents and not what could be
anticipated on the basis of the preceding energeia” (Heidegger and the Romantics 24).
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knows more than it says and wants more than it knows [jedes vortreffliche Werk … mehr weiß
als es sagt, und mehr will als es weiß.]”506 The critic’s work is to render this knowing and
desiring determinate in and through a creative act; yet this act is not merely the expediting of
an already-embedded teleological process, but the contextual transformation of the work as
well as a revealing of its status as kind of surplus.507 To the extent that the fragments tend
towards an absolute surplus of sense, the productive work of genius, according to Schlegel,
takes on a socio-religious connotation; he writes, “if every individual is God, then there are as
many gods as there are ideals. And further, the relation of the true artist and the true human
being to his ideals is absolutely religious. The man for whom this inner divine service is the end
and occupation of all his life is a priest, and this is how everyone can and should become a
priest[.]”508
Taking into account the Romantic picture, and universalization, of hermeneutics, we
are now in a position to understand just what the fragment was designed to effectuate. We see
that the fragment was an attempt to develop a form that would explicitly present509 the
506
Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. II, 140.
Here, we must note an intimacy of excess and dearth: the ability of the fragment to be infinitely
criticized (the fragment as surplus) is the inverse of the fragment’s necessary incompletion and
requiring of a ‘supplement’ (the fragment as a lack).
508
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #406.
509
Schlegel would surely agree with Schleiermacher that the talents of interpretation are, to an
extent, “universal gifts of nature” and hence that “hermeneutics is also a universal activity”
(Schleiermacher “Hermeneutics and Criticism,” Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism
12). The fragment can thus be taken as explicitly presenting what is always already at work in language,
namely the infinite potentializability of the text. This ‘raising to awareness’ of that which we cannot fail
507
241
unending social potential of textual interpretation, that is, the (excellent) work’s infinite
criticizability and potentializability. Rather than making a claim to map out the totality of its
potential on the basis of a telos or system, the fragment is reflexively designed to leave room for
an infinity of readings. Since the fragment is hermeneutically open in this way, it acts to spur
the reader to further thought.510 Again, this should recall that the content of the Romantic
idealization of audience is autonomous activity: the reader is to be constructed as alive and
critical as opposed to passive and inert. In this way, the fragment brings us to an aspect of the
Romantic discursive practice that is intimately connected with a leitmotif of the current tract,
namely the development of autonomous activity. Recall that in many of the thinkers we have
dealt with thus far we have encountered similar concerns regarding the development and
activities of autonomous beings; in many of the above thinkers, that is, we have encountered
practices designed to set the conditions for a public or an individual to be formed as active yet
autonomous. Crucially, we have seen that this setting of conditions does not and cannot involve
a forced ‘leading’ to activity by the scholar/writer/philosopher. Thus Schlegel calls for writers to
present objects (fragments) around which autonomous activity may coalesce, the effectuation
of which is the path of advancement for genial conversation; Schlegel would likely agree with
to know also, to be sure, stems from the fact that irony creates the fragment. Irony in all its applications
allows us to raise the background of our claims to level of explicit awareness.
510
Tanehisa Otabe makes this point with reference to Schlegel’s writings on Lessing: “what
Schlegel values most in Lessing’s work is the form’s ability to induce readers to think for themselves”
(Otabe, “Friedrich Schlegel and the Idea of Fragment,” The Japanese Society for Aesthetics 13 [2013]: 59–
67).
242
Schiller’s statement that, “eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, man
himself grew to be only a fragment”511—he would add that it is only with the acceptance of this
fragmentation that ‘wholeness’ in modernity is to be attained.
4.3.3 Fragments, Aesthetic Ideas, and Autonomy
In fact, a concept similar to the fragment was already present in Kant’s third Critique,512
and there as well it bore a connection to the oracular genius-figure. In order to see how this is
the case, let us return to Kant’s claim that the genius is the individual capable of presenting an
aesthetic idea. As stated before, aesthetic ideas are unique in the phenomenal world insofar as
they are both sensuous and the presentation of an excess of sense.513 In Kant’s words, the
aesthetic idea is an “inexponible” representation514—one for which “no language fully attains or
can make intelligible[,]”515 but which effectuates activity in the perceiver (it occasions much
thought). In the first chapter we described the aesthetic idea as a space for free play, that ‘object’
around which the free activity of the understanding and imagination may coalesce as a ‘passing
511
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters 40.
Rodolphe Gasché makes a similar claim, arguing that it is both Schlegel’s own inability to
systematically develop his insights and Kant’s theory of transcendental ideas, that gives rise to the
concept of the fragment. He goes on to provide an in-depth reading of the fragment in relation to
transcendental ideas, arguing that the notion of systematicity elaborated by the Romantics represents a
re-grafting of Kant onto post-Fichtean idealism (Gasché, “Foreword: Ideality in Fragmentation,”
Philosophical Fragments vii–xxxii).
513
Cf. Guyer, Claims of Taste 359.
514
Kant, Power of Judgment 219–220.
515
Kant, Power of Judgement 192.
512
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over’ of conceptual content; the content itself, however, as well as the way in which this activity
commences, has not been described. Kant associates this with what he calls ‘aesthetic
attributes.’ Aesthetic attributes, on Kant’s formulation, are “those forms which do not
constitute the presentation of a given concept itself, but, as supplementary representations of
the imagination, express only the implications connected with it and its affinity with others.”516
Aesthetic attributes are, in other words, representations of the imagination that are associated
“with [ideas of reason], and which [arouse] a multitude of sensations and supplementary
representations for which no expression can be found[.]”517
We have seen that Kant associates aesthetic ideas with ideas of reason. What Kant
implies by this is that, when presented an aesthetic attribute, we engage in a kind of free
association: aesthetic attributes are imaginative representations that, when reflected upon,
allow us to call to mind a boundless series of differing but related representations. Indeed, Kant
claims here that we co-represent so many supplementary representations that the process
quickly outpaces our ability to conceptually expound them. Thus a set of aesthetic attributes,
when reflected upon, yields an aesthetic idea.518
For an example of what this implies, let us turn to Kant’s example of an aesthetic
attribute: Jupiter’s eagle. This, Kant claims, “is an [aesthetic] attribute of the powerful king of
516
517
518
Kant, Power of Judgment 193.
Kant, Power of Judgment 193–194.
Kant, Power of Judgment 193.
244
heaven.”519 When we represent the eagle, we co-represent many more supplementary
representations: the mountains over which it soars, the power of its talons, and so on.520 These
yield an aesthetic idea, the aesthetic idea of God, which “serves that idea of reason instead of
logical presentation,” although, Kant states, “really only to animate the mind by opening up for
it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations.”521
It is the passing over of innumerable aesthetic attributes, as a kind of subjective free
association, that yields an aesthetic idea. The Romantic fragment represents nothing less than
an attempt to render this internal process intersubjective, to historicize and concretize the
internal workings of the Kantian transcendental subject in the activity of a communal poetic
project. In short, we could say that the Romantics transform Kant’s subjective free association
into a call for intersubjective association; the activity of separate individuals, in other words,
stands in for Kant’s supplemental representations, and the aesthetic ‘idea’ is reinterpreted as
the social totality of discourse itself.522 Yet, whereas Schleiermacher saw this project as having
its place in a dialogical society, Schlegel argues for the sociable power of the written word.
519
Kant, Power of Judgment 193.
Cf. Wenzel, Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics 102.
521
Kant, Power of Judgment 193.
522
Cf. Kneller on Schleiermacher’s social model: “the partial representations in the mind of Kant’s
genius become the individual members’ contributions to the conversation [… Schleiermacher] took the
complexities of the Kantian notion of the imaginative creative functioning and instantiated them in a
network of individual thinking, sensing, and feeling human beings who are drawn together by a natural
urge to communicate even more intimately” (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 123).
520
245
The connections between the Kantian and Romantic geniuses does not stop with a
similar notion of the generative potential of ‘partialities’ (“poetical sketches, studies, fragments,
tendencies, ruins, and raw materials”523). Kant, much like the Romantics, claims that the
aesthetic idea bears with it a developmental potential. On this topic Kant is at his most
enigmatic: at one point in the third Critique, he tells us that poetry “[s]trengthens the mind by
letting it feel its capacity to consider and judge of nature, as appearance, freely, self-actively,
and independently of determination by nature, in accordance with points of view that nature
does not present by itself in experience either for sense or for the understanding, and thus to
use it for the sake of and as it were as the schema of the supersensible[.]”524
What does it mean to say that phenomenal nature can act as a schema for the
supersensible? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that schema are forms that manifest
the ‘appropriateness’ (or, as Kant puts it elsewhere, the homogeneity)525 of our concepts and
intuitions, and hence allows for the application of the former to the latter; thus, the claim that
nature acts as the schema of the supersensible implies that phenomenal nature, through the
imagination’s free and creative activity, is rendered appropriate for the supersensible. By
passing over what Kant calls supplementary representations, those same representations that
yield an aesthetic idea, the individual comes to a quickened state of activity commensurate with
ideal, that is to say autonomous and moral, thinking. In other words, Kant’s artists are capable
523
524
525
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Critical Fragments #4.
Kant, Power of Judgment 204.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A137.
246
of sensuously bringing rational ideas (such as the idea of ‘justice,’ or even ‘autonomy’ itself) to a
state of presentation; in doing so, the artist helps to bridge the chasm between sensibility and
reason by incarnating autonomy in the historical world.
Thus the Romantic and Kantian geniuses parallel one another once more: just as Kant’s
individual genius aims to bridge the gap between sensibility and reason by rendering the
sensuous appropriate for reason, so too does the Romantic discourse of geniality aim to foster
the autonomy of its participants. With the presentation of fragments, that is, the Romantics
aim to foster the ability of a public to think for themselves and, in doing so, open them up to the
proper deployment of reason as such. Again, we see that the Romantics incarnate the perpetual
reciprocity of the Kantian faculties in the form of a public body: Romantic genial discourse is
the social totality of reciprocal activity that both generates and is generated by the activity of
the participants, and the Athenaeum journal was the experimental seed of that conversation.
Thus Schlegel writes in the closing essay of the journal, “Concerning this reciprocal
communication of ideas, what can be more compelling than the question of whether such
communication is even possible? And what could be more suitable than to experiment with this
possibility or impossibility by either writing a journal like the Athenaeum oneself or taking part
in it as a reader?”526
526
Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility” 119.
247
4.3.4 The Sociable Effects of Irony on the Fragment
At this point it seems necessary to ask how the earth can be (as it were) tilled. How is it,
in other words, that the fragment can generate a harvest? What is it about the fragment that
renders it a sociable seed527 rather than something inert? Despite Novalis’s hesitations about
some of Schlegel’s lengthier fragments, surely he did not think it a ‘writerly’ text simply because
it was penned in a pithy, quasi-aphoristic manner. As a matter of fact, it is here where we must
return to the topic that so troubled Hegel, i.e., irony.
Irony is the atmosphere that suffuses the various collections of fragments.528 If we take
it from the above that Romantic philosophizing demands a participatory audience, we will now
argue that it is through this atmosphere, that is, through the textual performance of irony’s
negativity, that the work is revealed as what it is, namely the sort of finite infinity capable of
being infinitely potentialized as opposed to teleologically ‘energized.’ Irony, in striving towards
a kind of infinite critique of its own intra-discursive claims clears a space for others to engage
in philosophizing, since it not only theoretically disavows truth’s closure in this particular
discourse and at this particular moment, but performs it; in this sense, the hesitations of irony
lead directly to the form of the fragment as a solicitation to auto-production.
527
Although we must ask what the sociability of the fragments implies. As Chaouli points out, “the
final tally favours Friedrich Schlegel far too lopsidedly for the Athenaeum fragments to be an example of
the communal intellectual production that he calls ‘symphilosophy’” (Laboratory of Poetry 63). Still, as an
unrealized ideal, the fragments present us with what the Romantics saw as the sociable potential of
writing.
528
Schlegel writes, “a large part of the incomprehensibility of the Athenaeum lies unquestionably
in irony, which expresses itself more or less everywhere in it” (“On Incomprehensibility” 123).
248
This is why the Romantics saw themselves as something like the prophets of the
fragmentary conversation, proselytizing with an eye to bringing new voices into the fold. The
fragment, revealing as it does the infinite surplus of the text, has the effect of extending the
conversation infinitely in writing; that is, infinitely beyond the confines of the salon and indeed
beyond the confines of the socio-historical milieu itself.529 The Romantic fragment acts to spur
the reader to further (autonomous) thought, and although the fragment may act as the seed, the
sociable ‘earth’ is equally necessary; in this sense, the fragment was the sociable form par
excellence,530 but irony was the performative means to engender it.
In fact, it should become clear at this point that the general character of the relation
between irony and the fragment, as a solicitation to production, has already been adumbrated:
we have stated in various ways that the infinity of irony’s auto-critique leads Schlegel not to the
vainglorious revelry and elitism implied by Hegel, but to the opposite; that is, irony’s humility
leads Schlegel to argue for an epistemic populism, an infinite discursive expansion that
parallels, and attempts to mirror, the infinity of truth. Our discussion of fragmentary
sociability shows Schlegel to take this thought a step further. For it is not only that ironic
discourse merely demands of him epistemic humility on a principled theoretical level; rather,
irony also allows Schlegel to textually perform such humility: by presenting thetical claims as
529
Schlegel writes, “I am first and foremost an author. Writing holds for me an indescribable
magic, perhaps because of the glimmer of eternity that hovers around it” (Schlegel, “On Philosophy” 420).
530
Compare this claim to a statement we have already cited: “a dialogue is a chain or garland of
fragments” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #77).
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what they are—always already deposed constructs and provisional theses which fall away in the
face of the absolute as opposed to final and authoritative conclusions—Schlegel productively
abrogates rather than arrogates control of his discourse. The textual result of Schlegel’s ironic
humility just is the fragment as a solicitation to genial critique. This means, in other words, that
irony’s self-destruction leads not to a kind of logical egoism, but the polar opposite. Schlegelian
irony calls out to his audience, this time to join the genial chorus,531 to join (that is) in the
activity of sense-making we described in chapter 3. Given this solicitation, it is no surprise that
irony comes to be associated with a fourth wall-breaking theatrical trope, and indeed a turn of
the chorus. To quote this important passage once more: “Irony is a permanent parabasis[.]”532
As we have seen, parabasis is a theatrical trope. Just as a parabasis in ancient theatre
implies a point where the members of the chorus direct themselves towards the crowd and
speak directly to them, so too does irony as permanent parabasis imply the performance of a
permanent fourth wall-breaking directedness of the author towards their readership. Yet
whereas the eruption of the chorus into the narrative allows merely for a moment of meta-
531
In this sense, Schlegel and company place themselves in the position of coryphaeus or
coryphaei—choral leaders. This does not mean to speak on behalf of the chorus, but rather to stand
before it and engage in a performance combining satire, self-praise, civic mockery and exhortation. This
aligns with one canonical element of parabasis in Attic theatre, namely the epirrhema (literally ‘that said
afterwards’). The epirrhema was “a speech […] whose content was satiric, advisory, or exhortative,” and
“was delivered by the leader of one half of the chorus” (Preminger et al., “Parabasis” xlvi). On this point,
see also Novalis’s understanding of a modifying translation, wherein the translator “must be the poet of
poets, and be able to allow the poet to speak according to his and the poet’s own voice. The genius of
humanity stands to each individual in a similar relation” (“Pollen” #68).
532
Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, 85.
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theatrical commentary on behalf of the playwright, the performance of permanent irony, with
its concomitant suspension of the fourth wall, solicits a particular type of response from a text’s
readers: irony, in short, solicits the bountiful interpretive ‘harvest’ of which Novalis speaks.533
Thus irony in principle necessitates, and in practice creates, the fragmentary form. Irony as a
recognition of finitude necessitates the fragmentary form of philosophy, since it is social and
future oriented; yet irony likewise creates the fragment, since it is irony’s negativity that
infuses the fragment with its explicitly reflexive, audience-directed open-endedness.534
533
In a similar vein, Kneller writes that the Romantics “enthusiastically embraced the project of
giving voice to chorus, and a chaos, of multiple perspectives” (“Conduct of Philosophy” 113).
534
“Isn’t poetry the noblest and worthiest of the arts for this, among other reasons: that in it alone
drama becomes possible?” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #123). It is indeed
in the dramatic sphere, Hegel points out, that the issue of audience becomes pointed: “If a book does not
please me, I can lay it aside, just as I can pass by pictures or statues that are not to my taste, and in that
case the author always has available more or less the excuse that his book was not written for every Tom,
Dick, or Harry. It is quite otherwise with dramatic productions. They are confronted by a specific public
for which they are supposedly written, and the author is beholden to it” (Aesthetics, vol. II, 1174–1175). We
can note in passing an affinity between Romantic irony and Bertolt Brecht’s conception of a
Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). We have said that irony renders the fragment open, calls for a
specific kind of cognitive/creative engagement. For Brecht, theatre was capable of rendering the
familiar ‘alien’ through a variety of performative maneuvers; these maneuvers were designed to halt the
sym- or em-pathetic identification of the audience with the characters, and to effectuate a conscious and
intellectual engagement with the shared horizon of everyday life that generally is presupposed and
hence unavailable. Brecht writes, “eine verfremdende Abbildung ist eine solche, die den Gegenstand
zwar erkennen, ihn aber doch zugleich fremd erscheinen läßt” (Brecht, quoted in Horst Weber, “Bertold
Brecht und Friedrich Schlegel: Zur Theorie und Praxis von ‘Verfremdung’ und ‘romantischer Ironie,’”
Beiträge zur neueren Literatur [Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1985] 115–122). Weber gestures towards an
‘estrangement effect’ of Romantic irony as well (119); yet while Brecht’s estrangement is designed to
clear a path for a political awakening and an awareness of systemic oppression, Romantic irony seems
aimed more precisely at the pretensions of all finitude—see, for instance, Antonio’s words from the
Dialogue on Poesy “Even in quite popular genres such as drama we demand irony; we demand that
events, people—in short, the entire game of life—really be taken as a game and represented as such
(Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy” 189).
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Nevertheless, even if it is irony that reveals the always-already provisional status of
claims within the Romantic discourse, this does not immediately seem to be enough to draw
others into the play of genial activity. Indeed, it is unclear why one should respond to this
provisionality of intra-discursive thetic statements by engaging with those statements at all as
opposed to, say, giving into egoistic despair, or simply abandoning the seemingly deficient
discourse entirely for one less humble and hence, at least by appearances, more likely to
produce results. Even if irony’s negativity—its hovering and hesitation—have the effect of
leaving a space for the engagement of extra-discursive others, since it makes no claims to
having already totalized truth, this seems insufficient to show what form that engagement
could take, positively speaking.535
Yet we must recall something that Hegel, and indeed arch-ironist Socrates himself,
knew all-too well: Romantic irony, although it is, perhaps even primarily, directed towards the
self, and hence revelatory of the provisional status of all claims (as we saw in chapter 3), it is not
only self directed. There is, in other words, an irony turned outwards: whereas irony as selfcritique simply attempts to banish elements of an asocial and totalizing arrogance, irony as
outwardly directed—as the kind of skepticism which became Hegel’s preoccupation when
dealing with the Romantics—brings with it social implications.
535
This is the problem Fichte avoids by appealing to the pistol-shot of insight.
252
What does the performance of irony effectuate when turned towards the world? The
answer to this question is simple. By troubling all prevailing truths and held beliefs, the
performance of Romantic irony fosters the kind of non-comprehension that is essential to
proper—that is, infinite—truth-seeking. Schlegel speaks to this issue at length in the final essay
of the Athenaeum, “On Incomprehensibility.” There, he writes,
But is incomprehensibility actually something so completely reprehensible, so base? I
think that the welfare of families and of nations rests on it. […] An unbelievably small
portion of incomprehensibility is adequate if it is only kept completely true and pure,
and no heinous understanding dares to approach its holy confines. Yes, the most
precious thing man possesses, inner contentment itself is, as anyone knows, ultimately
connected to such a point, which must be left in the dark, but nonetheless carries and
holds the whole.536
536
Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility” 126. Schlegel does not greatly elaborate on this point, but for
illumination as to what he has in mind we can point to the productive risk-taking performed by the
confused genius as described by Novalis: “Confusion indicates superfluity of power and ability, but
deficient circumstances; clarity indicates adequate circumstances but modest power and ability. Hence
the confused is so progressive, so perfectible, whereas the ordered mind ends so early as a philistine.
Order and precision alone is not clarity. Through self-exertion the confused comes to that divine
transparency, to that self-illumination, that the ordered mind seldom achieves. The true genius unites
these extremes. He shares the speed of the second with the richness of the first” (“Pollen” #54).
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The self-satisfaction of tarrying with the provisional must, for Schlegel, be avoided if we
are to properly engage in our infinite philosophical vocation.537 Thus irony renders philosophy
sociable not only by providing the material for conversation (the humbly-negated fragment
around which autonomous interpretation can coalesce), but also by providing the impetus (the
insight of the Socratic gadfly) to philosophize.538
4.3.5 Authority, Hubris and the Romantic Ideal of Audience
We are thus in a position to answer part of Hegel’s claim regarding the authoritarianism
of the particular. Although the Romantics see that there is always and in principle a gap
between the ideality of a writer’s audience and its factual being, to claim this as a failing is to
fall prey to an impoverished account of the depth of reality and the subject’s relationship
thereto. This means that the Romantic subject can do more than simply compare the ideal and
empirical audiences as lining up (or failing to do so). The Romantic is not in a position merely
to judge the empirical by the ideal or vice versa; rather, they see themselves as being in a
position that is generative vis-à-vis the prevailing factual community. In short, the Romantics
537
This deeply Socratic tendency is manifest in another passage from the Athenaeum: “The more
one knows, the more one still has to learn. Ignorance increases in the same proportion as knowledge—
or rather, not ignorance, but the knowledge of ignorance” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments,
Athenaeum Fragments #267).
538
Thus, this ironic and destructive aspect of Romantic solicitation is tied to the Latin ‘sollicitare,’
meaning “to shake to the ground” (Vandevalde, Heidegger and the Romantics 24). In Millán-Zaibert’s
words, “Irony is sure to generate misunderstandings for the reader who is not willing to attempt to
understand the text ‘on its own terms.’ But irony is also a tool that serves as a hermeneutical motor,
fueling the never-ending process of understanding a text” (Emergence of Romantic Philosophy 167).
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strive not only to communicate, but also to alter the addressee of that communication by that
very communication. We could say that the Romantic discourse attempts to bring into being
the conditions for its own reception; insofar as this is true, it is as much a performative
propaedeutic designed to set the conditions for proper truth-seeking as it is this truth seeking
exercise itself.
Irony is the parabatic oscillation between the self and the community, the push/pull
between self-destruction and the perpetual ironic revelation of non-comprehension; these we
can understand as self-directed and other-directed irony, respectively. Hegel is correct to note
the latter, although he misunderstands the goals thereof; further, he ignores the self-directed
irony entirely. It is thus the performance of Romantic irony that shows these limitations of
Hegel’s criticisms; that is, the Romantics are not content merely to measure the empirical by
some ideal standard, nor are they content to postulate some ideal, however derived, and hope
that this alone would enact change in the prevailing world. Indeed, they view themselves as
philosophical performers, soliciting others into the grand conversation they associate with
philosophical practices.
Given Hegel’s social critique, is a strange turn of fate that it is by way of the
performance of irony itself, as the infinitization of intra- and extra-discursive critique, that
philosophical practice extends its hands and comes to be made popularly available to those
currently incapable of partaking thereof. Irony performs this popularization not by somehow
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reducing the complexity of philosophical theses or practices, but by humbly revealing the
provisionality of all claims—all claims made by the Romantic circle, as well as their broader
community of interlocutors. Nevertheless, we have not answered one final aspect of Hegel’s
criticisms. Indeed, we must note that the very idea of ‘idealizing’ the public in this manner, that
is to say determining its crises, grasping its tendencies, designating the trajectories of its
striving and subsequently trying to close the gap, may seem only to be a more sophisticated
version of the hubris we have returned to time and again throughout this text with the name of
Hegel’s social critique. After all, is it not pure arrogance to assume that, from the finite and
situated perspective of a subject, such things can be determined on behalf of the community
itself? Is it not arrogance to don the robes of the fragmentary priest or ironic prophet? As we
will see, things are not so simple. For the Romantics do not merely take themselves to hold pure
authority over their audience; rather, in their idealizing activities, they take a stance of humility.
And although this may appropriately be described as their self-ascription of the label ‘genius,’
this is not in the Hegelian sense of the Fichtean genius-ego; rather, the genial authority of the
Romantics falls closer to the Kantian genius, who was, as we have seen, and will reiterate in the
coming section, caught in a complex dialectic between itself and taste, the latter holding the
final say. It is to this final issue we now turn.
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4.4 Genius and Authority in Kant and Romantic Discourses
The Romantic social critic (the critic of a public, audience, or community) places itself
into the position of productive prophet vis-à-vis its community, seeking change of the
prevailing order; thus Hegel is not wrong to see that the Romantic ‘genius’ takes a certain
stance of opposition towards its community. Yet it was not the bare opposition of the genial self
to the community that troubled Hegel, but rather the authority granted to the self—what we
have called the authoritarianism of the particular. To understand the difference between these
two thoughts, we need only take up an instance of friction, that is, conflict, between
particularity and universality (to use Hegelian terms). Kant once more proves a useful
touchpoint. In the previous section we posed Kant’s concern regarding ‘original nonsense’ in
terms of Hegel’s social critique, asking whether or not Kant’s emphasis on the novelty of the
creations of genius implies a kind of self-exile of the sort Hegel finds in Jena.
In the case of Kant, it was clear that the conflict between particularity and universality is
resolved in a way that does not favour the bare authoritarianism of the individual. That is, we
have seen that Kant realizes that the authority of the absolutely particular (novelty as opposed
to origin-ality) presents a danger to his system and argues at length that taste tempers the
arbitrary authority of genius. This is why, for Kant, transcendental taste and not genius holds
ultimate authority, and we cannot say that the particular is placed in a position of absolute
authority over the universal. With respect to the Romantics, Hegel writes, “on the part of irony
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there are steady complaints about the public’s deficiency in profound sensibility, artistic insight,
and genius, because it does not understand this loftiness of irony[.]”539
According to Hegel, this authoritarian flight to particularity is precisely what occurs in
the more pernicious understanding of this opposition between genius and audience. The
Romantic genius does not unfold itself concretely into the universal ethical world, nor does it
bow humbly before the community like the Kantian genius; rather, the Romantic genius tarries
with the particular, allowing the genius to attain a state of playful authoritarianism. This leads
to an egoistic alienation from other individuals as much as a thoroughgoing homelessness in
society and history for the inward-facing subject. While the authority of the particular in the
aesthetic leads only to bad art (as we have seen in Hegel’s notion of mere ‘mannerism’ and the
problems he finds with Early Romantic literature), it becomes all the more pernicious when
exported to other domains.
Thus the issue here is not the bare idealization of the audience, but the way in which the
empirical and ideal are measured against one another. Do the Romantics, insofar as they both
posit an ideal audience and (subsequently) seek to ironically close the gap between this ideal
and the prevailing socio-historical audience, end up arrogating authority towards the self? As
we will see, things are not so cut and dried. For the Romantics, the authority of the self—the
sort of normativity involved in the essais of mythology—is analogized not by the dictator, but
539
Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, 68.
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by the Kantian genius. With this in mind, we now turn to one final detour through Kant and
O’Neill, arguing that the model of authority held by the Romantics is not the bare authority of
the particular over the universal, but is analogous to the complex dialectic between taste and
genius found in Kant’s third Critique.
4.4.1 Genial Authority in Kant
4.4.1.1 A Real Public?
As we saw in the first section of this chapter, Kant’s public, according to O’Neill, is an
ideal entity posited from the perspective of an individual. This position is not uncontentious,
that is, it is unclear how plausible this is as a reading of Kant, who clearly at least in part is
envisaging the burgeoning public sphere of his day and attempting to theorize it.
Picking up on this theme, Kevin Davis argues that Kant’s use of the word ‘public,’ being
as it is unthematized and spread across various contexts, has led to a great deal of confusion
amongst interpreters—O’Neill among them.540 He differentiates some of the uses to be found
in Kant’s oeuvre. First, he directs us to the empirical publics of readers, scholars or
intelligentsia, as well as ‘the people,’ taken as an (existing) whole;541 second, he points to two
more ideal publics, those of moral agents and rational beings. Although all publics in Kant’s
540
541
Davis, “Kant’s Different ‘Publics’” 170–184.
Davis, “Kant’s Different ‘Publics’” 178.
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sense have in common the transcending of particular interests, it is only these latter ideal
publics, Davis claims, that can in any way grant normativity.
In Perpetual Peace, for instance, Davis argues that it is precisely such an ideal public
that comes to be seen as the arbiter of just action. When Kant writes that “all actions relating to
the rights of others are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with the publicity,”542 it is clear
that he is not here referring to any existing empirical group. For Davis, Kant’s claim holds only
to the extent that this public is itself rational, in the sense of being uniformly capable of
recognition and opposition to injustice. Yet, as it seems clear that any empirical public is
vulnerable in degrees to demagoguery and manipulation by political authorities, the public
invoked here can be only an ideal one. Indeed, Kant states so quite explicitly: publicity in this
sense, he says, requires an abstraction from all material aspects, and only through this
abstraction does it gain transcendental validity. Thus it is Kant’s positing of an ideal public,
rather than an empirical one, that allows him to claim publicity as an a priori for just action.
In this essay then, normativity is easy to come by: when measured against one another,
the ideal public holds authority over the empirical. While so far this may not seem to differ
wildly from O’Neill’s interpretation, Davis argues further that the public found in the
Enlightenment essay and other texts precisely does not constitute such an ideal, normativitygranting public. While Davis too directs us to Kant’s definition of public reasoning as that use
542
Kant, “Perpetual Peace” 347.
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“which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public world of readers[,]”543 he claims
that O’Neill jumps too quickly to associate this ‘readerly world’ with the world as such. Davis
makes two points to argue that O’Neill errs in taking the ‘public’ to imply the ‘world’ (in a
maximally inclusive sense)—in collapsing inclusivity and publicity. In the first instance, he
points out, Kant’s phrasing already implies a limitation, one which may be obfuscated by the
differences between Kant’s historical context and our own. When Kant states that a scholar
writes for the world of readers, Davis notes that in Kant’s Prussia this ‘world’ would have
denoted a very small minority of the citizenry—those with the ability to read. Or, put otherwise,
the ‘public world’ bears an ambiguity544 in this particular context, namely between being simply
‘the possible everyone’ and being the empirical intelligentsia who seem already to be capable
not just of understanding and critical thought, but even the mere ability to read.
There is no reason, according to Davis, for O’Neill to equate this empirical group of
literate individuals with a maximally inclusive ideal entity.545 Thus he argues that O’Neill, by
543
Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 18.
“By carefully distinguishing among the many publics of which Kant writes, we can see that only
a completely rational public could serve as the moral judge of political actions… this rational public is an
ideal group of people” (Davis, “Kant’s Different Publics” 171).
545
Along these same lines, Davis directs us to Kant’s defence against the accusations of religious
dissent by the Prussian authorities; his defence, Davis shows, reposes upon just this very distinction
between publicity and inclusivity. To the claim that he was guilty of sowing religious discord, Kant
argued his innocence on the grounds that the text in question was directed only to a small cadre of
concerned scholars who would not be ‘discordantly’ affected. This group, again a very small minority in
Kant’s context, was the subject of the text’s address; by contrast, the ‘world at large’ in O’Neill’s sense, as
well as the possible response thereof, was not taken into account at all; this public would be capable
neither of understanding nor a fortiori judging such texts.
544
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ignoring the above distinctions, erroneously equates an empirical public with the ideal 'world at
large’; accordingly, the broader reading she provides falters. By contrast, Davis argues that the
public in the context of What is Enlightenment? is rather a “real social group[.]”546 This is,
furthermore, no sociological claim: even if this public is no concrete social group in the usual
sense (since its interests may cross divisions of class, race, profession, etc.), it is nevertheless
not an ideal group that could be constitutive of a maximally inclusive horizon. O’Neill is led to a
conclusion, claims Davis, that simply “reaches further than is warranted by the texts.”547
4.4.1.2 The Horizon as the Interaction Between the Ideal and the Real: Notes for a Defence of
O’Neill
Though O’Neill is not particularly concerned to develop this issue explicitly, there is a
reading to be provided that could allow her interpretation of Kant to escape such criticisms. It
is important to point out that, while O’Neill understands public reasoning to involve an ideal
public, it is a leap to claim that she ignores the distinction between this ideal public and the
empirical public(s). It is not that O’Neill assumes an ideal that results from the (egoistic)
idealizing activities of an individual (abstraction from the empirical, etc.) and that would
vouchsafe a kind of authority; rather, she understands a postulated ideal public to gain
authority by its very interaction with the empirical public. In other words, the interaction
546
547
Davis, “Kant's Different ‘Publics’” 184.
Davis, “Kant's Different ‘Publics’” 183.
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sought by O’Neill is not just between the individual and the group (whether ideal or empirical),
but indeed an ‘interaction’ between the ideal public and the empirical public: for a speaker to
invoke an audience (ideally, in discourse) is to engage in a kind of performance; the
reverberations of this performance are part of the interaction between reasoner and empirical
audience.
As we have been speaking in broad and rather abstract terms, we must now turn to ask:
what is this performance? What does it mean for an ideal public to interact with an empirical
public? Our key term in understanding this interaction is invocation: an individual projects an
ideal audience, one capable of receiving his/her communicative address; since this projection is
part of the discursive act itself, we have been led to claim that this very ideal is part of the
interaction between an individual and a public. That is, an individual engages in this projection
of an ideal and uses it to measure the prevailing empirical audience which receives it. As stated
earlier, the categorical imperative is only a negative indicator and, even assuming a speaker has
used it as a touchpoint, the empirical public may have little or no overlap with the (ideal) public
invoked. What is required, therefore, is an account of this ‘gap’ between the posited and the
actual, between the ideal and the real publics.
In broad strokes, therefore, the point raised obliquely by Davis’s criticism is crucial. To
put the matter differently: whereas Davis might be quite right to direct us to Kant’s differing
uses of the term ‘public’ in different contexts, this does not seem to preclude both the
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coexistence and the mutual interaction of the ideal and empirical publics in the discursive
performance of individual reasoners.
The issue is not whether the Kantian public is merely ideal or empirical, but rather the
way in which the idealizing activities of the individual interact with the empirically existing
public(s) to reveal, or even potentially to reconfigure or create, communities of sense. Contrary
to the claims of Davis, the task of the interpreter now comes to be seen not only to rigorously
draw out these conceptual distinctions, but to give an account of how these different ‘publics,’
the ideal and the empirical, interact.
4.4.1.3 The Dialectic of Taste
In fact, there is a touchpoint to be found in Kant’s corpus, and indeed one which we
have already explored in a different context: Kant’s genius in the third Critique. As we have
seen, Kant’s naturalistic account of beauty demands of him a quasi-naturalistic account of art;
accordingly, he turns to the naturalistic genius figure to bridge this conceptual gulf. A byproduct of this position is, as we have briefly discussed, that the genius must be the wellspring
of novelty (lest the activity of genius fall to the mere purposeful application of concepts).
Nevertheless, in our previous discussion we sped over a clear problem with this account,
namely that such an emphasis on novelty seems to give rise to a warped picture of art history
wherein each artist must chase the new at the expense of everything else. In other words, one
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must ask of Kant whether or not his genius must only generate absolute novelty in each
individual act of artistic creation simply in order to qualify as beautiful. If Kant answers ‘no’ to
this question, it seems he must provide criteria beyond novelty for the determination of his
genius.
It is possible to reframe the danger posed to Kant in terms of Hegel’s critique of the
concept of genius.548 That is to say that one way of understanding Kant’s concern regarding
‘original nonsense’ is to take the genius to be speaking an idiolect, to take the genius as
engaging in the kind of subjectivist exile of the self that Hegel sees in the Romantics. Yet Kant’s
genius patently does not hold absolute authority over the space of meaning he/she declares; in
contrast to Hegel’s account of the Romantic genius, an account which we have already done so
much to trouble, and which claims that the genius can write off those refusing their insights as
so many harmonious bores, Kant’s genius is caught in a complex interplay between its own
productive activity and taste—an interplay in which taste, as opposed to the genius, ultimately
has the final word.
This is all to say that Kant seems to realize the danger of his emphasis on novelty—the
danger, that is, of the idiolectical. Kant recognizes that novelty can in some instances imply the
creation of original nonsense, and in response he develops a complex interplay between genius
and audience, that is, between genius and taste. He claims that the works of genius, while they
548
See s.1.3.2 of this thesis.
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cannot themselves be imitative without violating the strictures of purposiveness without
purpose, must nevertheless give rise to imitation; works of genius must serve others as a rule
both for future creation and future judging: “Since there can also be original nonsense, its
products must at the same time be models, i.e., exemplary, hence, while not themselves the
result of imitation, they must yet serve others in that same way, i.e., as a standard or a rule for
judging[.]”549
Kant’s claim, in other words, is that the origin-ary character of genius has the effect of
founding a public (a ‘school’ of artists, a receptive audience capable of deploying the work as
criterion); accordingly, when he first sets forth his definition of the genius, Kant emphasizes
not the excessiveness of genius in relation to rules but the rules themselves: genius is that
through which nature gives the rule to art. Yet, in order to avoid misunderstanding this ‘rulegiving’ as the provision of a determinative rule (hence as the abandonment of Kant’s whole
framework), we must understand this ‘giving of the rule’ through the genius in a particular way,
namely by exploring what Kant means by ‘exemplary necessity’ in the third Critique as a whole.
For Kant, the aspect under which the judgement of beauty occurs is one of necessity.550
In claiming that the judgement of beauty’s necessity, Kant does not mean that the judgement of
549
Kant, Power of Judgment 186–187. Compare Bernstein’s comment that “Kant equates
exemplarity, and hence succession, with providing new ways of making sense” (Fate of Art 93).
550
In this section I am indebted to the readings of Kant by Wenzel, Guyer, Bernstein, Heidegger,
and Cavell.
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the beautiful is a necessary facet of living a human existence,551 nor does he mean merely that
beautiful objects seem to bear a non-contingent relation to my free contemplation (i.e., to my
ability to engage in free play with them). Although both of the above may also be the case, Kant
claims something different. First, we must keep in mind that, quite early in his investigation of
beauty, Kant is brought to the fact of its subjective universality: when I make a judgement of
taste (‘object X is beautiful’), I stake a claim to universality; in the very structure or (if you
prefer) ‘grammar’ of my claim is the idea that every cognizing, rational subject with faculties
like mine should agree.
Yet, as we saw earlier, this sort of aesthetic universality cannot, for Kant, depend on the
object; beauty is not rule-governed, if by this we understand ‘being determined as beautiful by
judgement operating determinatively.’ This kind of universality can therefore not be
vouchsafed by reference to concepts; I cannot point to rules as the determiners of beauty, either
ontologically or in the context of an aesthetic disagreement (which might otherwise be
construed as a kind of epistemic divide). Instead, this universality is understood to be
subjectively universal: the contemplative pleasure we feel from aesthetic objects is not purely
subjective (or we could not say that the grammar of our judgement implies that everyone
should agree), but it likewise cannot be entirely objective (or we would be irrational if we
551
As would (perhaps) Schiller, who states that, “Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition
of humanity” (Aesthetic Letters 60). For an adept unpacking of this claim in relation to Kant’s
transcendental philosophy, see Savile, “Beauty and the Ideal” 195–219.
267
disagreed);552 when contemplating beauty, we claim it as valid for all others like us (rational
subjects with similar faculties), but we can do no more than direct others to the object itself so
that they themselves may judge.
Yet within the structure of judgement, Kant argues, a predication of beauty to an object
stakes a claim to being valid for all rational beings, and it does so without rules. This is much
the same as O’Neill’s practical account of Kant’s theoretical reason. But beyond this
characteristic, we must also ask what is to act as the basis for this universality if not for rules.
For Kant, the judgement of taste exhibits a logic of exemplarity: each instance of a judgement
becomes itself a claim to being an incarnation of—or better, a paradigm for—a rule that cannot
be thematically produced; that is to say that the singularity of the empirical judgement (as well
as the singularity of the judger)553 takes the place of an ideal rule.554 Each time taste must begin
552
Kant claims that “the should in aesthetic judgements of taste is thus pronounced only
conditionally even given all the data that are required for the judging. One solicits assent from everyone
else because one has a ground for it that is common to all” (Power of Judgment 121–122). Or, as Beiser
puts it, “If we establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that a composition complies perfectly with all the
rules of its genre—if we show convincingly that it conforms precisely to some alleged first principle of
beauty—it still does not follow that the composition is beautiful. The problem is that, despite its formal
correctness, someone might not like the composition. In the end, the ultimate test of whether
something is beautiful is simply whether people take pleasure in it” (Schiller as Philosopher 50). This
means, in Guyer’s words, that the aesthetic realm permits “contention” but not “dispute” (Guyer, Claims
of Taste 297). For a conceptual analysis of the character of this ‘should,’ see Cavell’s reading of Kant in
“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays
[Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976] 88–89).
553
Kant’s account also implies the individual autonomy of the judger, as it rests “on an autonomy
of the subject judging about the feeling of pleasure in the given representation, i.e., on his own taste, but
yet is also not to be derived from concepts” (Kant, Power of Judgment 162).
554
Wenzel puts this point clearly, stating “Someone has to step forward, so to speak, and actually
make a judgment of taste before anyone can be expected to agree to anything. The judgment itself is
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again, without being able to rest on what came before in the history of beauty, but each time
one’s judgement solicits others; with each act of judging there is the hope, therefore, of finding
or founding a community (a public).
Furthermore, and crucial for our purposes, exemplary necessity applies not only to
judgements of taste, but also to the activities of genius. The parallel between creation and
reception is clear: with genius one creates and demands assent, where assent implies not only
finding the reception of an audience, but also the founding of something like a school555 (and
hence acting as a rule for imitation), which Kant implies is inevitable for the true creator of
beauty. This is why, for the genius, “succession is the test of exemplarity,” and community its
realization.556 Kant thereby solves the problem posed earlier. Recall that his notion of
purposiveness without purpose pushes him towards the genius as not only a quasi-natural, but
also necessarily original, creative force. The fallout from this is that he must find a way to sort
out original sense from original nonsense without availing himself of a rule-governed theory of
artistic beauty. By positing this dialectic between taste and beauty—taste clips the wings of
exemplary. It looks like an example of a rule, as if a general rule preceded it. But in fact there is no rule to
start with, and it is the judgment of taste that comes first, that simply occurs, that stands on its own feet,
so to speak, and is exemplary for other human beings to follow (Wenzel, Introduction to Kant’s
Aesthetics 78).
555
See Bernstein’s claim that “an example of succession [in this Kantian sense] would be the
founding of a new ‘school’ of painting or poetry” (Fate of Art 94). Bruno writes, “the genius, through his
or her original work, acts as a mediator for the exemplary works of the past by making exemplary work
for future artists[, a meditation] undertaken without the help of concepts” (Kant’s Concept of Genius
115).
556
Bernstein, Fate of Art 107.
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genius, the hallmark of which is not mere originality but the ability to concretely form a
community of sense—Kant is able to sort out the origin-al from the merely novel.
Exemplary necessity is the coming together of normativity and particularity, of the
transcendental and the empirical, of the finite and the infinite; it is the empirical touchstone of
normativity. Yet how can we explain the appearance of aesthetic normativity without norms,
that is, the idea that there seems to be a rule-likeness but with the utter impossibility of
producing the rule itself? This is not a mere epistemological problem; it is not a matter, in other
words, of the rule simply being unknown or subconscious (but nevertheless ‘out there’); rather,
Kant is consistent in claiming that de jure (not just de facto) there are no rules to beauty nor the
judging thereof. Kant seems aware of this problem, and it is in fact here that he is again led to
the idea of a ‘sensus communis’—a shared sense that we understand as a stand-in for the rule,
something that might make me justified in presuming the necessity I see. Just as before, we can
see that there is a (‘as it were’) comparison of the judging with the (ideal) activity of all others;
similarly, it is a way in which the double aspect of the aesthetic judgement and creation—its
singularity/subjectivity and its transcendental/grammatical necessity—can be squared with
one another.
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4.4.1.4 The Authority of Taste in Kant
Thus it is important to ask: whence the authority of taste? In fact, we have already
encountered Kant’s response: as the whole of Kantian aesthetics is grounded in the
transcendental universality of cognition in general, the authority of taste is a direct fallout
thereof. Kant ultimately admits, in other words, that the dialectic of taste and genius is
grounded in something more fundamental. If we ask after what it is that is supposed to ground
the exemplarity of genius, we are led also to Kant’s reasoning for his prioritization of taste over
genius. In short, Kant claims that, despite the lack of rules, the aesthetic judgement is grounded
in its universality by the more fundamental universality of cognition in general, that is, by the
imagination and understanding; this cognitive structure holding as it does across the domain
of all rational beings, we can say that the particular aesthetic operation (free play) is also
universal. For Kant’s genius, the fact of finding an audience is an empirical touchpoint of the
validity of the claim to transcendental universality.
Taste holds precedence, in other words, because taste bears a more immediate
connection to the free play of cognition in general.557 This point is clearly evinced by Kant’s
claim to the ‘internal taste’ of genius;558 that is, Kant goes so far as to direct us towards a
557
In addition, it seems clear given the space Kant allots to art and art history that “Kant’s
fundamental concern is with the nature of aesthetic judgement, not artistic production” (Allison, Kant’s
Theory of Taste 271).
558
Wenzel: “A genius certainly has taste. A genius pays attention to what he or she is doing. The
artist almost continuously evaluates his or her work during the process of creation by making
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primordial instantiation of taste within the genius’s activity, that ‘nature’ through which genius
offers rules to art, i.e., the subject’s own nature: “since without a preceding rule a product can
never be called art, nature in the subject (and by means of the disposition of its faculties) must
give the rule to art, i.e., beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius.”559 In other words, it
is a particular attunement of judgement, alongside a spontaneous creativity, that allows the
genius to begin to create objects that could qualify as beautiful. The genius must be his/her own
critic, and the dialectic of taste and genius, therefore, takes place both within and outside the
artist.560
4.4.1.5 Horizon and Finitude
This genius, as original, is the origin of community. We see then that the issue that
arose with O’Neill, namely how ideal and empirical audiences interact, is not merely a matter of
her own idiosyncratic reading; pace Davis, such issues are manifestly a concern of Kant’s, albeit
in contexts transcending the issue of enlightenment. Just as O’Neill’s reasoner invokes an ideal
public that stakes a claim to authority and community, so too does the genius; just as the genius
is measured by the formation of an audience around the work (posterity), so too must we
judgments of taste, although these judgments do not have to be consciously or even explicitly made”
(Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics 100).
559
Kant, Power of Judgment 186, emphasis added.
560
Ultimately, this seems to be why Kant raises the idea of a sensus communis in his third
Critique: it gives a name to the self-transcendence of a subject (genius) beyond the private conditions of
its ego.
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understand O’Neill’s reasoner as being open to empirical rebuke—the rebuke of not finding an
audience. The genius does not, in other words, assume an existing audience; rather, he/she
posits an ideal audience and thereby solicits an empirical audience, calling out for a public to
form around the work. Rather than measure the real by the ideal, Kant’s genius humbly allows
him/herself to be judged.
What of O’Neill? In order to see this aspect of O’Neill’s account, we need look no further
than the implications of O’Neill’s use of the word ‘horizon.’ That is, the word horizon already
implies the fact that any public deployed in the act of judgement is projected from a given
‘position,’ that is, a finitely situated understanding. In more concrete terms, we can understand
that, in speaking of an ‘ideal’ public, we do not picture an individual abstraction that is brought
into a cognitive/communicative act, an ideal that is supposed to grant authority à la “Perpetual
Peace”; on the contrary, the act itself has a kind of idealizing tendency and potential that may or
may not find empirical traction. As Katerina Deligiorgi puts it, “communication [de facto]
allows us to discover what might count as universalizable… publicity, taken now as the practice
of 'making public,' acquires thus a criterial function for universalizability.”561 Her point is that it
is only in communication with others that the force of the requirements of critical reflection is
recognized and their application to a particular case is tested and contested. Rational autonomy
cannot be exercised by a solitary thinker.562 Thus publicity is both a principle and the practice of
561
562
Deligiorgi, Culture of Enlightenment 82.
Cf. Deligiorgi, “Universalizability, Publicity and Communication” 143–144.
273
making public, and this is precisely why an actual empirical audience is necessary (and why
such readings of Kant do not obviously fall once more into logical egoism). The implication is
that the ‘ideal’ public—now not purely an ideal—is a result of the idealizing activity of a speaker,
a speaker who, motivated to share a world and reposing upon the categorical imperative as a
test of what could be universalizable,563 makes a claim to a shared horizon, i.e., he/she makes a
claim to community.
A public reasoner, in other words, does not repose on an ideal but postulates it and, in
doing so, humbly solicits an audience. As this invocation takes the form of public reasoning in
Kant’s sense, it may not be borne out in terms of results. Others may rebuff or rebuke the
reasoner as well as his/her claims as absurd, groundless, or logically egocentric, and it is
precisely through these rebukes that this egocentricity is continually challenged and unwound:
a horizon is posited on the basis of what ‘could be’ universalizable, but continually shifts to
reflect the new understanding of the ‘we’—or simply the discovery that there is none at all. Thus,
whereas Kant asks, ‘How is it that a cognitive autonomy can emerge from the reciprocal
interaction of a public?’ we can see O’Neill, while taking up the same concern, as gesturing
towards a more fulsome account of what this interaction implies, namely the postulation in
discourse of idealizing claims to community from the perspective of an empirically situated
563
Kant, “Orient Oneself in Thinking” 18.
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individual, along with a dialectic between such claims and the prevailing empirical public(s);
just as taste clips the wings of genius, the publics leash the forays of public reasoners.
The concept of horizon, always implicative of a dialectic between the ideal (individual)
and empirical (public), already thereby provides a more ‘horizon-tal’564 picture of enlightenment
than allowed for by, for instance, Davis’s criticisms of O’Neill: authority does not simply
transfer its autonomy downwards, nor is the ideal to act as a measure for the real. Rather, each
claim to shared authority and community—and the two in our sense are interchangeable—acts
as an object towards which an individual’s autonomous activity can be directed,565 sending the
ideal and real into a ceaseless interplay. It is thereby clear that O’Neill’s reading is more
sophisticated than Davis’s criticism allows,566 and indeed follows Kant’s spirit if not his letter.
Thus, comparing O’Neill’s account of public reasoning and the genius of the third Critique, we
could say the following: the activity of Kant’s genius, like the public reasoner, invokes an ideal
audience (a community of sense capable of both receiving and reiterating the novelty of genius)
that comes to be vindicated by the precise extent of its finding a foothold in the prevailing
empirical world.
564
In the sense both of ‘being concerned with horizons of authority’ and of the interactivity of
speakers that sketches out those horizons as non-hierarchical.
565
“The action of each individual should be aimed at the activity of the others, and the activity of
individuals should be their influence on the others. However, nothing else can be affected in a free being
except that it is thereby stimulated to its own activity and that the activity is given an object”
(Schleiermacher, “Theory of Sociable Conduct” 25).
566
Davis also glosses over the manifest similarities between the explicitly ideal public of the sensus
communis and Kant’s writings on enlightenment. At the very least we can say on that basis that Kant
himself muddies the waters.
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4.4.2 Genius of the Age
It should be clear at this point in our discussion is that the notion of postulating an ideal
audience is not the same thing as measuring an existing audience by an absolute and ideal
standard, which we have called the authoritarianism of the particular. Indeed, what is
important is not whether the speaker invokes an ideal audience, but rather the authority
presumed over and against that audience. Yet it likewise should be clear by now, having
explored the Romantic picture of reciprocity and critique, that this absolute authority of the
individual critic cannot match their own position. Indeed, we have seen all along that the
Romantics claim their ‘mythologizing’ efforts to be in a kind of dialogue. Thus for the
Romantics, the empirical public itself cannot be treated as inert but is, rather, responsive to the
very idealizing activities; just how is it that something like a ‘conversation’ can take place
between an individual and that individual’s audience? It with this picture of genial conversation,
as well as the aesthetic normativity granted by a social warrant, that the Romantics’ discourse
takes its cue most explicitly from Kant’s account of genius. Karl Ameriks points out that,
despite Kant’s limitation of the concept of genius to art, and despite the briefness of his own
theory of genius, Kant’s genius could hold a reserve of conceptual tools for his successors; he
writes, “Whatever the limitations in Kant’s own sparse discussion of specific aspects of art as it
has actually developed in our history, there remains the issue of whether one could extend his
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influential remarks on genius in a way that would help with more general philosophical puzzles
that remain for understanding interpretation after Kant.”567
This creative extension of Kant’s genius is, we argue, exactly what is found in the
Romantic conception of genius as geniality. According to Schlegel and company, the idealizing
activity of the individual, or of the small free society, gives rise to a humble solicitation to
community, one patently open to rebuke.568 Yet the Romantics are not content to merely adapt
Kant’s picture of art history for their own purposes; indeed, their position inverts the purely
passive and negative picture of the audience of the Kantian genius, claiming that it is in fact a
kind of ‘genius’ itself, taken in a historical and communal sense and renamed the ‘genius of the
age,’ that acts as the buttress against original nonsense.
4.4.2.1 Invocation
The Romantic idea of ‘postulating’ an audience bears an essential ambiguity, namely
between invoking an audience as an appeal to an already-existent public (a call upon) and
invocation as a performative solicitation (a call for). With the former notion—calling upon a
public—there is a potential for a kind of logical egoism that is bound up with a dissimulated
authoritarianism of the particular: deploying (by necessity) certain assumptions about the
capacities of its empirical audience (Fichte, Jean Paul), an author-cum-speaker effaces the
567
Ameriks, Kant’s Elliptical Path 337–338.
In Kneller’s words, “creative free societies can serve as exemplars for other would-be societies,
just as genius can give examples to other budding geniuses”⁠ (Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 123).
568
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contribution of this assumption and proceeds as though the empirical audience already lines up
with this ideal (Fichte) or, alternatively, simply claims that it should line up (Jean Paul).
Invocation in the sense of a ‘calling upon’ thus grants authoritative status to the author’s
idealized picture of the public and proceeds to measure the empirical thereby; the particular
holds absolute authority here, but uses ‘communication’ in a self-directed manner to hide this
fact.
With the second notion of an invocation—a calling for—a speaker likewise begins with
an audience as idealized by the activity of a speaker; yet here the reasoner proceeds not with
his/her ideal’s presumed authoritative status; rather, here an empirical audience is solicited to
form an audience around the reasoner: the ideal does not act as the absolute measure of the
empirical. There is, in short, the possibility for rebuke or rejection, just as there was with the
Kantian genius. The difference between a ‘calling upon’ and a ‘calling for’ is that the former
sense presumes the authoritative status of the ideal, whereas the latter humbly posits an ideal
that may not be borne out by the practice of communication itself. Indeed, the English word
‘invocation’ already bears this ambiguity, as it can be used to cite an authority (for example, in
legal contexts), or to make an earnest plea (for example, when one invokes a guiding spirit).569
569
Cf. Novalis: “genius is the capacity to describe imaginary objects as if they were real, and to act
upon them as if they were real. The talent to depict, to observe exactly, and to describe effectively is
therefore distinct from genius. Without this talent one sees only half, and is only a half-genius; one can
have the disposition to genius, which never comes to fruition if it lacks that talent” (“Pollen” #21).
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4.4.2.2 Daimon and Genius
With this, a final thematic interlacing of the genius with Hegel's social critique comes
into view. For, on the one hand, it is well known that central to the character of Socrates was the
fact of his having his own personal attendant spirit,570 his famous daimon; yet, on the other
hand, the original semantic range of the word ‘genius’ in Europe fell remarkably close to this
connotation571—a sense which still resonated clearly in ears of Kant in 1790. In his third
Critique, Kant writes that,
[T]he author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the
ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at
will or according to plan, and to communicate to others precepts that would put them in
a position to produce similar products. (For that is also presumably how the word
‘‘genius’’ is derived from genius [the Latin word] in the sense of the particular spirit
570
This is partly what motivates our deployment of the word ‘invocation,’ with its clear spiritual
implications, in this context.
571
Cf. Bruno, “In its Latin usage, genius is understood in reference to a pagan belief in a tutelary
god or attendant spirit. Every person is born with such genius. It functions as a determinant for
character and is thought to govern one’s fortunes, not only functioning as a guide for one’s life, but as a
conduit out of this world and into the next after death” (Kant’s Concept of Genius 9). For an examination
of the daimon’s historical valences in relation to Hegel’s social critique see chapter 1 in Frieden, Genius
and Monologue.
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given to a person at birth, which protects and guides him, and from whose inspiration
those original ideas stem.)572
What are we to make of this connection? Richard Velkley573 explores the importance of
the daimon in Hegel’s own (Platonic) reading of Socrates and the historical progression
towards ethical life. He begins with Hegel’s infamous support for the Prussian monarch.
Velkley’s claim is that, although our twenty-first century sensibilities are often offended by
Hegel’s defence of the monarch in the Philosophy of Right, the monarch’s “will is the final will
to be consulted” only in those situations when “governmental deliberations have reached their
end”;574 the monarch is not a whimsical tyrant, but the incarnation of the alienated will of the
citizenry. Indeed, Velkley claims that this symbolic relation between the monarch and the state
is not incidental or arbitrary. It is not that the individual monarch wields power of
capriciousness and particularity over the populace—this would be the ‘moral’ rather than the
‘ethical’ monarch—but rather that the monarch as a figure represents the immanentization of
right vis-à-vis the community.
572
Kant, Power of Judgment 187. See also Kant’s “Anthropology,” where he speculates as to the
connection between his concept of genius and its spiritual roots: “the reason why exemplary originality
of talent is designated by this mystical name is because the man who has genius cannot explain to
himself its outbursts or even make himself understand how he arrived at an art which he could not have
learned. For invisibility (of the cause of an effect) is an accessory concept of spirit (a genius which is
already assigned to the gifted man at birth), whose inspiration only he follows, so to speak)”
(“Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” 330).
573
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 577–599.
574
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 590.
280
A comparison with the unreflective ethos of antiquity is helpful here. Velkley points out
that the “highest decisions [of the ancients] depended on consulting a sphere beyond human
powers… in oracles, the entrails of animals, the flight of birds, and so forth.”575 In contrast, the
monarch is the human community’s appropriation of that will; though this will is indeed
embodied in a particular individual, the very particularity of that individual has been
symbolically sublated.
Velkley then directs us to the Socratic daimon and its philosophico-political
implications. Citing Hegel, he states that it is for the first time with the “daimon of Socrates”
that “we can see the beginning of how the will which in the past had simply projected itself
beyond itself turned to itself and recognized within itself—the beginning of self-knowing and
hence truthful freedom[.]”576 What interests Velkley is that both the Socratic daimon and the
constitutional monarch are incarnations of “something like the voice of reason”:577 in each we
have a reason that comes to be incarnated in a distinct ‘entity’ or effect (daimon or monarch),
yet in both cases this entity does not exist for itself. In the case of the Socrates, the daimon
exists for the sake of his particular and philosophical life; in the case of the state, the monarch
exists for the sake of the realization of the entire organic structure. Both the monarch and the
daimon are merely for the sake of another.
575
576
577
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 590.
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 590.
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 590.
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If, on Hegel’s reading, the inwardness of Socrates begins the ongoing and historical
process of the immanentization of reason from its previously assumed divinity and
transcendental position, this process finds its culmination in the modern state; the daimon,
therefore, represents an intermediary passing point on the road to the unfolding actualization
of the Idea as well as the humanistic self-reliance of reason on itself.
Yet, on Hegel’s reading of Socrates, reason is not equated with universality. This is why
Socrates’ daimon cares for all aspects of his person that are not related to universality; “it is
related to somnambulism, magnetic states, and unconscious impulse… it is not the seat of
opinions and convictions, but a new sort of oracle (internal rather than external) addressing
contingent affairs demanding decisions”578—though it of course lacks all “popular or public
authority[.]”579
The implication of this, for Hegel, is that the daimon is an oracle that competes with the
prevailing oracles of the city—and it is in this sense that Socrates is guilty of religiously
corrupting the youth. Velkley writes, “the daimon introduces a disturbing and disruptive form
of transcendence”;580 even if he continues to perform his civic duties, Socrates comes to be
spiritually alienated from the prevailing ethical world, choosing to live instead in the ideality of
inwardness; it is this gap that gives rise to the necessity of the reflexive irony of which we have
578
Indeed, there is a sense in which Socrates simply lacks his own personal, individual will (Velkley,
“On Possessed Individualism” 596).
579
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 597.
580
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 592.
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spoken at length, for it is only by way of irony that Socrates can reconcile his position between
the infinite reflexivity and the demands of the subjective will and the demands of civic duties.
There are thus, as per Velkley’s article, two aspects of the daimon corresponding to its
status as a mediate position. On the one hand, the daimon is the concrete incarnation of the
historical process of the Idea’s unfolding in the world and as a progress towards the modern
state; on the other hand, the daimon is the incarnation of the ideal estrangement of Socrates
and the subject from that world towards inwardness. If the inwardness of Socrates originates
the ongoing and historical process of the immanentization of reason from its divinity, this
process finds its culmination in the modern state; the daimon, therefore, represents an
intermediary passing point on the road to the unfolding actualization of the Idea as well as the
humanistic self-reliance of reason on itself.
4.4.2.3 The Romantic Daimon: The Genius of the Age
We will now suggest that a similar process of alienation and re-appropriation is at work
with the Romantic picture of genial conversation. Yet, while the Romantic genius does
represent the transcendentalization of the finite, the Romantics themselves are not content to
set the particular individual (the cognitive monarch, as it were) as the teleological locus through
which the human will as such aims to re-appropriate itself. While the Romantic genius is
indeed a passing point—between the alienation of subjective immanence and the
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immanentization of something like Hegelian divinity (the Idea)—the Romantics themselves
argue not for a monarch whose particularity has been sublated, but for a truly universal subject
who maintains the particularity of being rooted in a socio-historical epoch.
While the Romantics do speak to an individual notion of genius,581 in other words, there
are crucial moments in their texts when a different, and far more collective, conception of
genius appears. Specifically, in the context of the authority of claims made, the Romantics
speak of a collective and historical ‘genius of the age’ (Genie des Zeitalter) which operates as a
social limiting horizon. To elaborate: beyond the popular availability of Romantic poesy (as the
individual creative power), the notion of genius plays another crucial role for Schlegel and
company, this time as a skeptical guard and corrective; this is concretized in what Schlegel
associates with the genius of the age. He asks us in a fragment from the Ideas,
Why does all that is highest nowadays reveal itself so often as a false tendency? Because
nobody understands himself who doesn't understand his fellows. Therefore you first
have to believe you’re not alone, you always have to intuit everything infinitely and never
tire of cultivating the intellect until you've finally found what’s original and essential.
581
As we saw in chapter 3 in our exploration of Schlegel’s mythologizing discourse.
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Then the Genius of the Age will appear to you and gently intimate what is proper and
what isn’t.582
Thus, within the Romantic discourse, the individual can only posit a claim and solicit an
audience; the result, much like the Kantian dialectic of taste or O’Neill’s reading of the
enlightenment discourse, may well be rebuke.583 Recall that Schlegel’s mytho-poetic discourse
could be described as the discourse of genius, or genius as geniality: his claim is that all human
beings are possessed of a seed of creative spontaneity, that all individuals are an opening unto
infinity; insofar as we partake in the absolute, each seed has potential value for his mythological
project. It was this potential to potentialize that the ‘seeds’ of the fragments were designed to
foster. At the same time, Schlegel clearly does not want to abandon normativity, nor does he
wish to give in to the notion that all creative activities are equal. Some tendencies can turn out
to be false, and it is the genius of the age—“the greatest contemporary of the brotherhood, the
582
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #24. Again, we can compare this to the Socratic
daimon. Frieden points out that the daimon acts as a corrective force for Socrates, pushing him away
from error; Frieden cites the Euthydemus, Theaeutetus, and the Phaedrus: “Socrates, despite his
extreme rationalism, cannot master all situations […] the daimonion is a mysterious, extrarational force
that opposes false steps” (Frieden, Genius and Monologue 46).
583
This hypothesis-positing and model of solicitation is also comparable to Schleiermacher’s
strategy for approaching the hermeneutic circle. Typically, an interpreter “will have to start out, on the
basis of the available text, with an interpretative hypothesis, measure it against the available historical
material (other texts by the same author, texts by his or her peers, the larger cultural horizon), and then,
if needed, revise her initial hypothesis… Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics thus includes a reference to the
interplay between divination, intuitive hypothesis-making, and comparison, that is, historicalphilological work” (Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition” 96).
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master of masters”584—that sorts sense from nonsense.585 Genius for the Romantics is therefore
not only not purely individual, it is precisely the bearer of the social warrant which Hegel
accuses the Romantics of brazenly ignoring.
To put matters differently, the finitude of human beings requires that we strive towards
self-transcendence, and yet this is not possible in general or in the abstract. To connect oneself
to the whole “in the most determined manner possible”586 implies a self-transcendence towards
empirical others, that is, a necessary grappling with alterity. Sociality allows for a process of
ideation whereby the abiding and substantial can be sorted from the temporary and
idiosyncratic. This is why in the Discourse on Poesy, while discussing the very possibility of his
project, Schlegel tells us that he welcomes doubts “from all sides and in all directions,” so that
the investigation may “be all the freer and richer[.]”587
584
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Ideas #139. The whole passage reads as follows: “There is no
self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his
contemporaries are, particularly the greatest contemporary of the brotherhood, the master of masters,
the genius of the age.”
585
We have seen at several points that the Romantics describe poesie as progressive. It is only now
that we can understand what this implies. In the words of Kneller, “what constitutes progress in
Schlegel’s expansive ‘poetry’ is not its becoming more and more true, or ‘real,’ but rather when it tries to
connect its own particularity to all other poetry” in a determinate manner (Kneller, “Conduct of
Philosophy” 115). Sociability, in the form of a public or communal warrant, is at the very heart of the
Romantic notion of normativity; indeed, this represents the Romantic debt to Kant’s genius, even if
Kant limited the range in which this sort of normativity could hold. Thus Ameriks also points out that
Kant’s limitation of genius to art is clearly a matter of the method of progress, that is, the historical
development, of art and the cognitive disciplines (Ameriks, Kant’s Elliptical Path 336)—a disciplinary
divide that the Romantics themselves deny.
586
Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 181.
587
Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 182.
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We must be careful here, for it is not the case that Schlegel is providing us with a theory
and criterion that would delimit truth as grounded in consensus or a sort of quasi-consensus;
this is not consensus theory of truth, but rather the idea that the empirical foothold of taste
bears a kind of criterial function with respect to truth as regulative. When Schlegel speaks of
the genius of the age, therefore, he appears to have in mind something similar to what Kant
called ‘taste,’ or what Hegel saw as the symbolic role of the monarch: a historical community’s
own activity has become alienated, and must be reappropriated.
There are also clear differences between this Romantic daimon (as it were) and the
community of taste or the monarch. With taste acting as a criterion, we find an empirical
touchpoint to a transcendental attunement which acts as the buttress against nonsense; yet the
Romantics also follow Hegel in claiming that the public warrant granted by the genius of the
age is historical; that is, with the notion of a genius of the age we have a historico-cultural
attunement that acts as the buttress against both nonsense and the authoritarian egoism of
which Hegel falsely accuses the Romantics. In short, the Romantics combine aspects of Kant’s
account of the authority of the individual (the genius, the reasoner) with Hegel’s emphasis on
historicity and the self-grounding normativity of a historical people.
But just what is this genius of the age? Schlegel and company seem to pick up on prior
historical conceptions of genius as a kind of daemonic ‘entity.’ His point is that individuals,
insofar as they are embedded in their socio-cultural milieus, tend towards an alignment of
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perspectives; individual poesies, being as they are only articulated with and against those of
others,588 tend to be attuned to a sense of what is meaningful as opposed to nonsensical, and
this attunement occurs within a particular historical age. The genius of the age thus represents
a historical alignment of a community and, with this, the community’s concomitant
amenability to certain works, positions, theses, and claims that are brought about in discourse;
it is not itself a “particular being of a higher kind,” but—much like Schleiermacher’s reading of
the Socratic daimon—“only a special effect [Wirkung] or revelation of the, or of a definite,
higher being.”589 For an individual, an alignment towards this revelation will allow for a the
possibility of finding a wide(r) audience. This means, furthermore, that the Romantic ‘genius’ is
not to be taken in the sense of the term outlined by Hegel, that is, as a non-historical or
naturalized force (Wirkung). It is indeed quite the opposite: the individual genius is not only
historical in a thoroughgoing sense, it also bears a necessary relation to the collective and
communal genius of the age.
Since the Romantics send us on the path towards gathering together into dialogue
innumerable perspectives and historical tendencies, we must have a way to sort out the merely
idiosyncratic; this way, it turns out, is embedded in the act of opening our discourse to as many
perspectives as possible. Yet there is more to be said on this topic. We must explore the way in
588
This mutual and reciprocal articulation is likewise how the genius of the age comes to be ‘found.’
Schleiermacher’s footnote to Plato’s Apology (27c), quoted in Frieden, Genius and Monologue 32.
Frieden goes on to state the influence of this interpretation, given Schleiermacher’s stature as a
translator; he writes, “since Schleiermacher’s commentary, modern interpreters doubt that the
daimonion is rightly conceived as a guardian genius” (Genius and Monologue 39).
589
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which the genius of the age ‘corrects’ and orients the discursive practices of individuals. The key
is in the word ‘tendency.’ The genius of the age is no giant on the hill who comes down to
rebuke the false and the wicked; rather, the analogy seems to be strictly organic, namely to
plant life. If we imagine a plant growing in mixed darkness and sunlight, we can further
imagine a side of the plant that is not properly oriented; to claim a tendency as false is less a
matter of a philosophico-argumentative conflict (for the genius of the age is no individual), but
more a kind of passing away that we might associate with communal forgetfulness; a ‘false’
tendency is one that has failed to enter with a community into the sacred relationship of
deepest symphilosophy or sympoetry; it has proven itself to be a non-exemplary or unoriginal.590 Thus Schlegel projects the resolution of these tendencies into the future,
proclaiming with some irony that,
I am giving up irony and declare point-blank: in the dialect of the Fragments, the word
would mean that everything is still only tendency, that this age is the age of tendencies.
Whether I am of the opinion that all of these tendencies could be ordered and resolved
by me, or perhaps by my brother, or Tieck, or someone else in our faction, or by a son of
590
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy connect this Romantic logic of exemplarity with the fragment’s
filial connection to the aphorism or maxim—the genre of the moralists. They write, “in its modern
version [...] the moral genre of the fragment assumes that the paradigmatic and the exemplary have
entered the sphere of Subjectivity. The model [is] one that gives itself the right to say, ‘Me (the truth), I
am speaking...’”, before adding a caveat describing the de-centred Romantic subject (Literary Absolute
66).
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ours, a grandson, a great-grandson, a grandson twenty-seven times removed, or not
until Judgment Day, or never: this I leave to the wisdom of the reader, to whom this
question, strictly speaking, belongs.591
Irony thereby throws the genius of the age into relief, rendering it strange so that it may
be reflected upon; or better—irony reveals the genius of the age as the shared horizon upon
which all claims to meaning and truth are set into relief.592 The genius of the age is at once
revealed in its contingency and held in place as the necessary bearer of a social warrant.
4.5 Conclusion
We began by posing the question of the status of audience within the Romantic
discourse; having acknowledged that the Romantics argue for the necessary postulation of an
ideal audience, we strove to both contextualize this claim (with reference to Fichte, Jean Paul,
and eventually O’Neill’s reading of Kant) and unfold the Romantic picture in its full potential by
exploring the Romantic genius. The Romantics declare both that the possibility of an audience
is shaped by a performative text (by means of irony and fragmentation) and that the status of
591
Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility” 122–123.
In the same pages Schlegel states that “[p]oesy and idealism are the centers of German art and
culture [Bildung]; everyone knows that. But whoever knows this can-not be reminded often enough that
he knows it. All of the highest truths of every kind are altogether trivial; and for this very reason nothing
is more necessary than to express them ever anew, and if possible ever more paradoxically, so that it will
not be forgotten that they are still there and that they can never really be entirely expressed” (Schlegel,
“On Incomprehensibility” 122).
592
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this performance is a humble solicitation as opposed to arrogation of authority. While the
Romantics surely have an ideal picture of their audience and attempt a performance designed
to bridge the ideal/factual gap, this performance is no sort of absolute or hubristic demand;
rather, the Romantics develop a concept of social genius that allows them to account for the
spontaneity of the historical community itself. It follows, therefore, that Hegel’s accusation of
authoritarianism of the particular has been shown to miss its mark.
To frame the matter in a differently: all along in this tract we have followed the thread of
Hegel’s critique of Romantic ‘genius.’ We have seen the accusations of particularity, of egoism,
and of authoritarianism of the particular. In an odd turn of fate, it is finally the Romantics’ own
conception of genius—having undergone a radical shift in polarity through dialogue with Kant
(or O’Neill’s Kant)—that allows them to escape the criticism levied by Hegel. The term ‘genius’
no longer implies a wilful self-exile from the demands of a social warrant; rather, the term is
now deployed to encapsulate this very social warrant.
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5. CONCLUSION: THE PARTICULARITY OF ROMANTIC COMMUNITY
5.1 Hegel’s Social Critique
We now find ourselves in a position to return to our framing narrative, i.e., Hegel’s
social critique. We have seen that Hegel’s critique involved three separable, yet deeply
interwoven, aspects: he claims that the Romantics hold the lone ego to be a kind of ontological
fundament, that is, the ground and origin of all truth and meaning; he claims further that this
picture of the ego is ultimately elitist in tendency, for it is not just any ego that can function in
such a way, but rather only the exceptional and spontaneously creative genius-ego. Finally,
Hegel argues that these dual aspects of the Romantic position both stem from and imply a
broader stance of opposition by the Romantics against their community; this absolute authority
arrogated on behalf of the genius-ego implies not only an abandonment of a public warrant but
also a flight to irrationality and (whether intentional or not) totalitarianism.593
It should come as no surprise at this point that we claim Hegel’s vision of Early German
Romanticism to be deeply limited. In chapter 2, we showed that the Romantics do not argue for
any sort of egoism or picture of the self as the ground of all meaning and truth; rather, we
argued that the Romantic ego is not properly speaking capable of grounding itself, for even its
own autonomous (cognitive) activity was seen as arising only in a social milieu. In chapter 3 we
593
See s.1.4.3 and s.1.5.4 of this thesis.
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argued that, rather than a pernicious elitism, the Romantics present us with a fallibilism which
calls for the inclusion of as many voices as possible; furthermore, we argued that irony is not
the stance of an elitist ego who creates and destroys for whimsical pleasure, but that it is the
stance of a subject who, having taken seriously the opacity of the infinite, must cast all finite
claims to truth into question—even its own. Schlegelian irony is thus truth-oriented and
humble rather than haughty; it is, as per Hegel’s own taxonomy of irony,594 deeply Socratic in its
aims and goals.595 Finally, we elaborated Hegel’s claim regarding the authority arrogated by the
Romantic genius: we showed that, rather than simply granting absolute authority to the
particular, the Romantic discourse brings with it the requirement of a definite social warrant,
the model of which was the dialectic of genius and taste.
Thus the non-egoistic picture of the ego’s Bildung posited by Schleiermacherian free
sociality is explored further by Schlegel, who extrapolates the absolute reciprocity of the salon
to the written—to the circulation of writing and reciprocity of interpretation and ‘critique.’
Further, the Romantics are not content to simply describe this reciprocity as an ideal goal.
Rather, Schlegel’s understanding Romantic reciprocity is applied performatively in his own
texts: the Romantics aim for a sociable expansion of absolute reciprocity by casting fragments
into the world; further, these fragments are created as reflexively open and solicitous objects
through the performance of irony. Thus, against Hegel, these ironized Romantic texts were
594
595
See s.1.2.4 of this thesis.
See s.1.5.1 of this thesis.
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designed to put into practice the principles of non-elitism and the humility of the ego put forth
by Schlegel and company.
It is clear that one of the aims of the Romantics’ discursive practices is the proliferation
of meaning and creative activity; in this sense, it is a theory of social Bildung as well as a picture
of the meaning-making activities of finite creatures. Yet this theory of the formation of ‘genial’
individuals is not merely a theory of creativity and imagination, as though one were able to
divorce education from understanding and (accordingly) from truth and normativity. Although
this Romantic discourse does call for myth-making—the creation and creative interpretation of
fragments—it is not without a normative or ‘logical’ aspect. Here again we run up against the
limits of Hegel’s reading: we saw in chapter 3 that, rather than an arrogation of authority on
behalf of the genius-ego, the Romantics instead explicitly acknowledge the need for a public
warrant; yet, instead of following existing scientific or philosophical models of normativity, the
Romantics present us with an aesthetic account of normativity that parallels the Kantian
account of genius wherein a social warrant is seen as the central empirical touchpoint of sense
as opposed to nonsense.
As a broad response to Hegel’s criticisms, therefore, we could claim that what is
substantial and abiding for the Jena circle is genial discourse itself as oriented by a regulative
picture of truth; this both implies and is necessitated by a thoroughgoing humility of the ego
and its attempt to transcend itself. Quite in contrast to Hegel’s reading, the Early Romantics
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themselves provide us with a rigorous thinking of truly sociable philosophizing—that is, of
genius as geniality.
5.2 The Genius of Community
It is important to ask why, on a terminological level, the Romantics associate their
discursive practices—the mytho-poetic symphilosophy of our third chapter, elaborated as the
reciprocity of interpretation and performance in the fourth—with the notion of genius. After all,
someone like Kant was quite clear in his restriction of genius to the artistic, as well in his
picture of the genius as an exceptional individual; furthermore, since it is undeniable that the
word ‘genius’ does for us bear the connotation of the (naturally-gifted) exceptional individual, it
seems at least potentially misleading or even dangerous to put the term to work on a communal
register and thus to work against itself—against, that is, the sense of egoism, elitism, and
authoritarianism that the word bears. Why call the genius of the age a genius as opposed to a
(say) a community, a community of taste, a mass of harmonious bores, etc.? And in broader
terms, why understand this discourse as the discourse of genius?
There are several reasons for the Romantics to make this association between their
discourse and genius, most of which we have already encountered. First, it is important to point
out (if beyond the limits of our study here) that the idea of the genius in the limited sense as the
exceptional individual is a relatively recent one; in the days before Kant and his immediate
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successors, laypeople and philosophers both deployed the term in a way that already implied
some of the senses of the Romantic social picture.596 The Romantics, as much as they were the
inheritors of the Kantian picture of the genius, were nevertheless responding to the more
distant historical resonation of the term. Second, although the Romantics do indeed view the
individual as a genius—a creative performer and origin of a unique outlook on the infinite—the
individual genius requires a communal nexus in order to attain to activity; in this sense, the
reciprocal circulation of activity within a community can be understood as the ground of sense
and meaning, and thus can be understood as itself a kind of genius.597 Third, just like the
Kantian genius, a social warrant is required to prevent individuals from verging towards
nonsensical creation and doomed tower-constructions; by thus appropriating the Kantian
dialectic of genius and taste, the Romantics find one more reason to associate their discourse
with genius.
Yet the Romantics are not content to merely appropriate this dialectic from Kant; rather,
the genius of the age is not passive in the way taste is for Kant, and this is the fourth and final
reason behind the association of the Romantic discourse with genius. For the Romantics, the
community itself is seen to be ‘genial’ in the sense that it (taken as a co-active whole) is capable
of engaging in its own creative self-transformations. The Romantics thus avail themselves of a
596
For instance, Bruno points out that both David Hume and Edmund Burke deploy the term
‘genius’ to mean a “disposition or inclination” that is characteristic of “a person, a nation, or an age”
(Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius 11).
597
Thus the term ‘genius’—much like the term ‘poetry’—allows the Romantics to pass from the
individual to the communal (and back again) and to theorize their necessary interrelation.
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concept that allows them to conceive of the community itself as active and spontaneous, which
is to say capable of substantial self-transformation in and as the dialogue of participants that
constitute it, as opposed to the passivity to be found in Kant’s account of transcendental taste.
Although we have already made this point above, we are now in a position to contextualize it
and reveal its full import, for it is here that, avoiding the association of community with the
bare repetition of a prevailing order of truth and substantiality, the Romantics embody a
Socratic and modern counterpoint to Hegel’s notion of Sittlich life.
5.2.1 Fichte's Audience of Insight
The Romantics associate their communal discourse with genius in order to theorize the
self-creating and malleable nature of the broader socio-historical community. In order to
unfold the importance of this claim, it will be useful to draw our reading of Romantic discourse
back to Hegel and Fichte, specifically to their respective visions of sociality and social interplay.
We have already seen that, with Fichte’s constructive method, discourse is to give way to its
own overcoming and thereby truth’s self-disclosure in the form of insight. Nevertheless, this
skepticism towards discourse does not imply that Fichte’s lectures are bereft of social concerns,
for is not merely the philosopher’s own insight that is at stake here. As we have seen, Fichte is
engaged in the always social and contextually specific activity of lecturing. As such, his
constructive method has definite social consequences—consequences which prove to be a
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repeated object of his own reflection. Accordingly, Fichte tells us in the second lecture that he
will be giving us advice about fixing the lectures in “memory and of reproducing them for
oneself.”598 Crucially, he does not mean a bare mechanical memorization; the reproduction he is
thinking of is not a literal re-producing of the same, but rather the living, inward grasp of the
meaning of the discourse—it is a spiritual repetition of the original cognitive act of the speaker.
If one engages in such a repetition, one will be able to proceed through it forwards, backwards,
or indeed even “both ways at once.”599 In this sense, what Fichte has in mind is closer to an
active re-creation than a reproduction; he even goes so far as to say at one point that “the
subject cannot remain simply in the form in which I express myself here.”600
This a theme that has been well-explored in this thesis: Fichtean sociability mandates
for his philosophical discourse no fourth wall between an active philosopher and a passive
public. This is due to the fact that, for Fichte, philosophical communication depends on the
ability of the audience (of listeners or readers) to think for themselves. Just as we have already
touched upon with the work of Kant and Schleiermacher, Fichte attempts to conceive of a
discourse that allows for both the transformation and the recognition and preservation of the
autonomy of individuals. Hence for Fichte as much as for Kant and the Romantics themselves,
the words of Novalis ring true: “to arrive at truth, all we can do is bring someone to the right
path, or better, give him a particular path to truth. He must then from himself, if he is
598
599
600
Fichte, Science of Knowing 27.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 27.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 29.
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ambitious, arrive at the truth.”601 Fichte’s performance can be seen as just such a path,
demonstrating the way and soliciting others to follow on the basis of their own autonomy.
This solicitation to autonomy is why Fichte’s listeners must think for themselves and
grasp the sense of the discourse inwardly; only insofar as they do so does philosophical
communication (as a kind of self-bestowal of truth in and through the discursive falling-away)
become possible. Thus Fichte mandates a goal for his listeners: the “free, personal re-creation of
the exposition of the science of knowing in its living profundity”602; this is to say that, even if
the outward form will vary with personal capacity and all the idiosyncrasies of an individual
style, “the act itself will be identical in each one who does it.603” That is, the inward sense of the
Wissenschaftslehre of 1804, as well as the self-evident insight which is to occur, will be identical
for all who properly participate.
This is not the communication of ‘facts’ passing from one mind to another.604 Instead,
Fichte performs philosophy, making himself exemplary in the presence of his audience and
subsequently soliciting others to follow his lead. It is obvious, therefore, that Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre, as much as the Romantic genial discourse, belies certain notions of
philosophical communication. For both, philosophy becomes a kind of performance aimed at
establishing the subjective conditions for truth and human autonomy, and the philosopher
601
Novalis, quoted in Nassar, Romantic Absolute 40.
Fichte, Science of Knowing 29.
603
Wright, “Reading the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre” 101.
604
“[N]ot even the least spark of [the Wissenschaftslehre] can be grasped or communicated
historically as an appropriation from someone else’s mind” (Fichte, Science of Knowing 22).
602
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performs by making him/herself exemplary. Furthermore, we do not only have Fichte’s
performance for his audience, but—again like the Romantic notion of reciprocal interpretation
and symphilosophy as reciprocal interpretation—the performance of the ‘audience,’ here no
longer strictly an audience, since there is no shielding of them by a fourth wall. Indeed, the
audience here is to become a community, and an active community of insight becomes the
realization of philosophical insight.
5.2.3 Fichtean Conversion
For Hegel, the early Fichte falls near the end of a long philosophical lineage (Moralität)
beginning with Socrates and, over time, staking a claim to more and more territory for the
individual reflecting subject;605 indeed, the very apex of this tradition takes the form of
Romantic irony. For this reason Hegel echoes to Fichte the charges laid against Socrates,
namely that, insofar as truth comes to depend on the whims of a situated and particular
subject’s reflection, truth’s disclosure is far from guaranteed;606 that is to say that, although
Hegel recognizes Socrates as deploying his negativity in a way that makes reference to an extrasubjective truth, there is nothing in particular that demands this negativity stay oriented in this
605
606
See s.1.5 of this thesis for Hegel’s understanding of morality.
See s.1.5.1 of this thesis.
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direction as opposed to the terrifying skepticism to which Fichte himself admits his
proximity.607
In other words, Hegel claims that insight along Fichtean lines is a contingency; that is,
insight comes to depend entirely on the “desire, drive, inclination”608 of the reflecting subject.
This ‘subject’ can be taken in two different senses: first, it can refer to Fichte’s audience, the
group of listeners whose own desires, drives, and inclinations are in flux;609 Fichte, appearing to
realize this precise point, asks of his listeners a stolid attention to stay the course.610 Second, the
‘reflecting subject’ can refer to the philosophical performer whose personality and will can, at
least temporarily, hold fast the constructive discourse’s orientation towards truth. Yet, much
like Hegel claims of Socrates, Fichte’s personality can only provide so much solidity. Velkley
describes Hegel’s take on Socrates as follows: “[Hegel] claims that Socrates’ thought acquires its
power through contingent, personal attributes of the mind, or the impressive force of his
character. From that source also comes Socrates’ notable failures as a teacher—Hegel mentions
Critias and Alcibiades—since the force of character can have particular effects contrary to the
607
“Just as the possessor of this science (who surveys all disjunctions in consciousness,
disjunctions which, if one assumes the validity of consciousness in itself, become contradictions) could
present a skepticism which totally negated everything assumed so far; a skepticism to which those who
have been playing with all kinds of skeptical doubts as a pastime might blanch and cry out: ‘Now the joke
goes too far!’” (Fichte, Science of Knowing 107).
608
Hegel, Philosophy of Right 167.
609
Rebentisch points out that Hegel makes a similar point with respect to the Romantics
(“Morality of Irony” 124).
610
See s.4.2.1 of this thesis.
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philosophic and intellectual intent of the teacher[.]”611 To repose on personality implies an
unpredictability, that is, a contingency of both insight and ultimate effect; yet this reliance has
another implication, one which has bearing on our understanding of the sociable element of
Fichte’s discourse.
How does Fichte’s reliance on personality have implications for his conception of
sociability? On this point we find Schlegel and Hegel in agreement in their respective readings
of Fichte, both noting a specific arrogation of authority (we might call it an authoritarianism of
the particular) by the philosopher. Indeed, Schlegel echoes Hegel’s ‘social’ critique in stating
that the status of the absolute in Fichte’s system gives rise to a pernicious unsociable and
egoistic aspect; specifically, they claim that Fichte’s philosophy bears a particular tension
between his ardent populism and the content of his philosophy. As Schlegel puts it in a
fragment from 1796,
If one is allowed to posit arbitrarily something unconditional, nothing is easier than to
explain everything. For this reason, the Mystic actually achieves the positive component
of the philosophical task. No one has understood this as well as the Greek Sophists and
the modern Mystics, among them Fichte. This is a new reason why Mysticism is
incurable. It has in fact no interest at all in the technical and the historical. Bring the
611
Velkley, “On Possessed Individualism” 596.
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Mystic whatever you will from this domain in order to embarrass or confound him, and
prepare him for conversion; he will smile and as easily as a child explain, solve—
destroy—everything by means of his talisman. In fact, he is pope in his domain, and has
the infallible power to open and shut heaven and hell with his keys. It is an
inconsistency in Fichte that he takes an interest in the dissemination of his
philosophy.612
Since it is only by way of particular personality and will that a mystical discourse can
remain properly ‘oriented,’ Fichte appropriates a particular kind of authority which can
appropriately be described as papal. This in turn explains Schlegel’s words regarding Fichte’s
philosophical catholicism: the contingency of insight, coupled with the ‘object’ of Fichte’s
philosophy (the unconditioned), lead him to appropriate a kind of infallibility within his
domain. If discourse is to result in its own falling away, Hegel and Schlegel claim, the truth
disclosed therein seems to depend not only on truth’s self-disclosure to a situated and finite
reflecting subject, but on the final word of the speaker-cum-authority whose personality can
hold fast the ephemerality of the various subjective conditions at play truth. Thus if we ask after
the implications of Fichtean sociability, with its concomitant telos of conversion,613 we begin to
612
Schlegel, “Philosophical Fragments” 335, #2.
Fichte himself takes on the tone of religiosity elsewhere when he states, “I am called to testify to
the truth... I am a priest of truth" (Fichte, “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” Early
Philosophical Writings 176).
613
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see that he demands more of an echo than a group of interlocutors. This is not, furthermore, an
accidental position. Even if it takes place socially, Fichte’s performance is not only foremost, but
necessarily, a solo performance, for it is only by way of personality that insight can be
vouchsafed.
5.2.3.1 Social Metaphors and Romantic Contingency
It is also clear from our fourth chapter that the Romantic discourse aims to provide
more than simply constant, irredeemable flux. We must ask how Schlegel sees his own
discourse to be avoiding such a (as it were) cult of personality à la Fichte or even the Socrates of
Hegel’s reading. For, beyond the aforementioned affinity between Romantic and Socratic
practices, we have already seen the deep affinity between Fichte and Schlegel: both Schlegel and
Fichte operate philosophically by means of an exemplary deposition of the concept through
(de)construction or irony; in both Schlegel’s ironic discourse and Fichte’s constructive
discourse, that is, we find that the philosopher (or a free society)614 performs an exemplary
‘hovering,’ a performance that both demonstrates the means (the method) by way of which
truth is to be approached and solicits others to join the philosophical chorus. For Schlegel’s texts
as much as for Fichte’s speech, the hovering activity of philosophical discourse thereby takes on
a performative element, acting as an object around which an audience’s activity can coalesce.
614
Cf. Kneller, “Conduct of Philosophy” 123.
304
Given this, we must endeavour to understand what, if anything, allows Schlegel to avoid relying
on mere personality to avoid the pure contingency of discursive results.
In short, it appears that Schlegel is in a difficult position: if he wishes to place a limit on
contingency (and he seems to), Schlegel may valorize the ego615 as the exemplary performer and
posit ‘personality’ as the ground to render it substantial (a communal ethos, a genius of the age,
or some sort of prevailing order), but then he falls victim to both Hegel and his own critique of
Fichte’s catholicism from the previous section; alternatively, Schlegel may jettison the need to
render contingency into solidity, in which case truth and normativity are simply abandoned; in
taking this latter route, the Romantics would indeed fall victim to Hegel’s social critique. We
have argued at length in this text that the Romantic symphilosophy does not absolutely valorize
the exemplary ego, nor does it absolutely valorize the exemplary society; further, in the last
chapter we argued that the Romantic discourse does not abandon this rendering of
contingency into something socially substantial.
How is it that the Romantic discourse overcomes contingency if not by personality?
There may be no better illustration of the Romantic response to this question than Schlegel’s
own deployment of political metaphors to describe his project. We have seen that Kant deploys
many socio-political metaphors understand the activity of critique: the images of compelling
itself to testify, the talk of the authority of the dictator and the non-dictatorial authority of
615
souls.
Or the exceptional society. See s.3.1 of this thesis for Hegel’s view on the community of beautiful
305
reason, the metaphor of the judge, and so on.616 In the first Critique, deploying Hobbesian
imagery to depict the process of reason coming to authority, Kant writes that without the
critique of reason,
Reason is as it were in a state of nature, and it cannot makes its assertions and claims
valid or secure them except through war. The critique, on the contrary, which derives all
decisions from the ground-rules of its own constitution, whose authority no one can
doubt, grants us the peace of a state of law, in which we should not conduct our
controversy except by due process. What brings the quarrel in the state of nature to an
end is a victory, of which both sides boast, although for the most part there follows only
an uncertain peace, arranged by an authority in the middle; but in the state of law it is
the verdict, which, since it goes to the origin of the controversies themselves, must
secure a perpetual peace[.]617
Reason, Kant claims, must be established through a prior sociable contract and the
establishment of a ‘constitution,’ by way of which anything resembling due (rational) process
616
On the use of metaphors in Kant’s account of reason, see Predrag Cicovacki, “Pure Reason and
Metaphors: A Reflection on the Significance of Kant’s Philosophy,” Annales Philosophici 1.2 (2011): 9–19.
O’Neill likewise dwells on this issue at length in Construction of Reason.
617
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A751/ B780. He goes on to claim, “the state of nature is a state of
injustice and violence, and we have no option save to abandon it and submit ourselves to the constraint
of law” (A752/B780).
306
can be established; it is only critique, the act of compelling reason to map out its own
boundaries—to act as its own judge, witness, and jury—that can establish such a constitution.
It is the establishment of this constitution of reason that O’Neill takes as her guiding thread in
her reading of Kant. That is, throughout her non-metaphysical account of Kantian reason and
critique, we can understand O’Neill to be arguing for the practical and social genesis of reason’s
authority; she seeks, in short, a description of reason’s own self-founding act; further, she
argues for the social emergence of reason from the practical exigencies of sharing a world, and
the continual efforts by individuals to transcend themselves avoid chaos.618 Thus, after citing
the above passage from Kant, O’Neill writes, “the images of a contract or tribunal of reason
need not [be] taken literally, or as referring to historical events. The central point that Kant
makes with these analogies is that reason’s authority must (since it receives no antecedent or
transcendent vindication) be seen as a practical and collective task, like that of constituting
political authority.”619
The Romantics draw from a strikingly similar metaphorical reserve:620 Athenaeum
Fragment #266 asks, “couldn’t we have a provisional philosophy right now, even before drafting
a logical constitution? And isn’t every philosophy provisional until that constitution has been
618
The fundamental strategy being the categorical imperative itself.
O’Neill, Constructions of Reason 18.
620
Gerald N. Izenberg writes, “the metaphor that Schlegel offered to illuminate [the] ideal of the
new literature [Romantic poetry] is politics” (Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism,
Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001] 64).
619
307
sanctioned by acceptance?”621 Thus, the Romantics seek to give an account of this fundamental
horizon—this limit of sense, or sociable contract of rationality; that is, the Romantics provide
us an account of the generation of truth, normativity, and meaning as it arises from the
contingent interplay between finite creatures.622 Indeed, their relying on community to operate
this ‘rendering’ of contingency into substantially implies that the Romantics fall closer to Hegel
than the latter is likely to admit.
Yet, in general, the metaphorical imagery used by the Romantics operates on a different
register to that of Kant. Whereas Kant uses images of order—governmental and juridical
metaphors—the Romantics use the language of disorder: provisional governance, revolution,
rebellion, and insurrection.623 These images of disorder do not replace images of order, but
coexist with them, for it is impossible to have a rebellious government, or a revolutionary
condition, without an existing order. Just as one must both have and not have a system,624 one
621
Philosophical Fragments. See also Critical Fragments #65: “Poetry is republican speech: a speech
which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to
vote.”
622
This means that the Romantic thinkers share with Hegel and O’Neill a position claiming the
essential discursivity of thought itself (Michael N. Forster, “Romanticism and Language,” Relevance of
Romanticism 69).
623
For examples in Schlegel’s texts, see the following two passages: “As a temporary condition
skepticism is logical insurrection; as a system it is anarchy. Skeptical method would therefore more or
less resemble a rebellious government” (Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #97); “the
semblance [Schein] of the finite should be overthrown [and] all knowledge should be brought into a
revolutionary condition” (Schlegel, “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy” 249).
624
“It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to
combine the two” (Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #6).
308
must combine order and anarchy. The Romantic metaphors are thus more aptly described not
as disorder in general, but images of fluidity, rise and fall, shift, collapse and wilful upheaval.
On the one hand, such images imply that the Romantics view the fundamental horizon
as being already socio-historically shared, for it is only thereby that it can be overturned by an
ironic insurgency; on the other hand, such images imply that—no matter the ‘socio-political’
structure, the constitution, or the court—anarchy can never be completely overcome. This is
why, as we saw in s.3.3.2 on Schlegelian mythology, the attempt to seek the highest opens the
possibility for the shimmer of the absurd, the crazy, and the stupid to step forth.625 It is telling
that, at that point in the Discourse on Poesy, Schlegel simply accepts the danger: although the
discourse will perhaps provide results, he claims, there is simply no guarantee. The Romantic
genial discourse is thus a discourse that may allow us to attain towards the highest, but it is also
where the anarchic foundations of human existence and experience, of ethos and culture, are
most likely to burst forth.
This acceptance of the (as it were) necessity of contingency contrasts to Kant. If a
constitution of reason is not established, Kant and O’Neill would view cognition as doomed to
remain as in a Hobbesian state of nature—solitary and anarchistic, if not brutish and short.626
625
Cf. “something originary and inimitable, which is absolutely indissoluble, which after all
transformations still allows the old nature and power to shine through, where naïve profundity allows
the glimmer of the absurd and the crazy, or of the simpleminded and the stupid, to shine through”
(Schlegel, “Discourse on Poesy” 186).
626
Hobbes understood the state of nature not only as a state of war but—to employ the language
elaborated in the earlier chapters of this thesis—an absolutely reciprocal state of war: “Whatsoever
309
Furthermore, we have seen Kant’s and O’Neill’s claims that anarchy is only a forthcoming, or
presently obfuscated, state of despotism;627 this means that anarchy is not a backdrop from
which true order can emerge, but is rather the wellspring of political or cognitive heteronomy.
The Romantic thinkers, while they agree with Kant and O’Neill that the establishment of a
shared communal horizon is an ongoing, practical, and collective task, disagree with Kant and
O’Neill about the role, and even the necessity, of this horizon’s anarchic foundation. For the
Romantics, not only must we think of the way in which a shared communal horizon emerges
from anarchy, we must also take seriously the way in which any existing horizon cannot
entirely preclude or exclude nonsense, madness, and stupidity.
Schlegel thus sees clearly the contingency that arises in discursive interplay and
embraces it. That is, Schlegel and company accept the march of culture to be progressive, but
not linearly or teleologically oriented628 and, furthermore, not without the dangers of simply
therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is
consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their
own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the
fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the
commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and
removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time,
no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and
the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin
[Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998] 84).
627
Thus O’Neill states, “those who reject the authority of reason… whose chaotic building projects
collapse like the tower of Babel: there must be a shared plan if there is not to be anarchy in thinking…
any authority that reasoning can have must be constituted by those who reason; it cannot be imposed
and it will not emerge from anarchy” (Constructions of Reason 22).
628
See s.4.3 of this thesis for the Romantic non-teleology. As Bowie puts it, “grounding either from
the outset, as in Fichte, or in the anticipation of the absolute Idea at the end, as later in Hegel, is never
310
realizing that there is no ‘we.’ This resolute acceptance of contingency finds perhaps no more
beautiful description than through the work of one of the modern inheritors of Jena
Romanticism, Stanley Cavell:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect
others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this
projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping
of books of rules), just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand the same
projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and
feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and of significance and fulfilment, of
what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of
when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl
of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’629 Human speech and activity, sanity and
community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple
as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.630
definitive” (“Gadamer and Romanticism,” Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical
Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski [Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2004] 78).
629
The Romantics would associate these with genial discourse and the genius of the age.
630
Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” Must we Mean What We
Say? 44–72.
311
5.2.4 Conclusion: Socratic Contingency and the Infinite Conversation
In addition to the danger, this irreducible contingency, this chaotic interplay of
stupidity and madness, is also what gives spirit to culture, revivifying it and allowing it to
change. Furthermore, despite Hegel’s critique of Fichte described above, the monolithic and
unchangeable aspect of Fichte’s discourse should remind us of something of which Hegel
himself has been accused. That is to say that, much like Rebentisch points out with respect to
Hegel, Fichte too associates intersubjectivity not so much with an arena of shared activity, that
is, of collective sense-making, but rather with the repetition of the prevailing content of the
philosopher’s performance.631 For Fichte, a community is to collectively repeat the original
‘insightful’ act of the philosopher, and only in doing so is this community of insight forged;
similarly, with his notion of ethical life, Hegel is led to equate intersubjectivity with prevailing
norms and to think community as formed and reformed in the repetition thereof. Yet for both
Hegel and Fichte the intersubjective activity of individuals in these respective communities
(philosophical or ethical) comes to be reduced to a single recourse: repetition.
In contrast to this stands the Early German Romantics, who call for an infinite632
communal dialogue that both determines and is determined by the prevailing ethos. Let us step
631
See s.2.4.2 of this thesis.
Ameriks praises the pluralistic tendency of the Romantic philosophy and its notion of progress,
stating that the “notion of an elliptical path is often shorthand for the thought of history as a kind of
gyre, or open-ended rising spiral, such that there is directionality and progress in a multidimensional
632
312
back a moment to the previous chapter and recall Schlegel’s claims regarding the
unattainability of truth.633 A question to be posed is just what substantiality of discourse
amounts to if truth cannot be fully attained and, furthermore, comes to depend on the auspices
of a prevailing community. For even if one accepts that the above account of discursive
practices has the effect of doing away with egoistic arrogance, it seems to be not immediately
obvious just what result is to be expected. If truth cannot be brought into the discourse, why is
it that we are to bother making claims at all? Why is it that the humility of said discourse does
not lead simply to giving up, to nihilism, or passivity in the face of the prevailing ethos?
We see now that, while it may be the case that truth cannot be totalized in discourse, it
is nevertheless the case that the prevailing epoch and community can change and progress;
what becomes crucial in the abandonment of attaining truth is precisely such shifts in the
collective landscape of sense and the public warrant afforded thereby.634 Schlegel writes, “The
age isn't ready for it, they always say. Is that a reason why it shouldn't happen? If something
can’t yet be, then it must at least always continue to become.”635
fashion, one that requires repeatedly returning to one’s original place in a way that involves
development through off-center movements with more than one focal point” (“History, Succession, and
German Romanticism” 47). He goes on to explicate this movement in terms of the call for a universal
and progressive poetry.
633
See s.3.3 of this thesis.
634
The Romantics themselves are engaged in precisely such a project—a collective shift in the
community.
635
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #334.
313
Thus the prevailing ethos—the genius of the age—is capable of substantial shifts in its
sensibility; further, these shifts are not divorced from the ongoing and creative (if necessarily
frictional) interactions between individuals and the various communities in which they find
themselves.636 In other words, the Romantic picture of culture and cultural production, as well
as their use of the word ‘genius’ in these contexts, implies a degree of spontaneity and creative
power on behalf of the community itself. It is for this reason that the Romantics demarcate the
guardian for their public warrant the genius of the age rather than taste: the spirited
spontaneity of the term ‘genius’ is better able to capture the sense of a community capable of
the reciprocal conversation constitutive of its own creative transformation. This Romantic
reconceptualization of genius as genial reciprocity gives a name to the creative self-creation of
the community that remains both under-emphasized and under-theorized in Hegelian
Sittlichkeit.
This, furthermore, is why the kind of solicitation differs between Schlegel and Fichte’s
discursive practices; while Fichte calls for repetition, Schlegel demands a future-oriented and
creative practice—readerly texts and creative co-activity. We could put it in the following terms:
Fichte, positing a non-discursive absolute and a discourse that overcomes itself, demands of his
audience a conversion; the Romantics, by contrast, present a theory of truth as absolutely
636
Compare Rebentisch’s statement regarding the Romantic affinity to Socrates: “the logic of
morality is by no means to be understood as an abstract opposition of subjective freedom and ethical
universality… such considerations rather reveal the necessity of dynamic mediation between these two
sides” (Rebentisch, “Morality of Irony” 119).
314
regulative (in a Kantian sense) and call for an infinitely social, and always discursive, approach
thereto. Schlegel, in short, calls not for a conversion, but rather for an infinite conversation,
inviting his interlocutors into a horizon that both shapes and is shaped by that conversation.
The Romantics’ unruly, gadfly-like attempt to direct their interlocutors to an alreadyshared horizon should not, in fact, appear deus ex machina to students of the history of
philosophy; indeed, this should remind the reader of none other than Socrates. While Hegel
understands Socrates,637 Fichte, and the Romantics themselves to be at various points of a long
philosophical lineage (morality), Rebentisch argues that a less Platonic Socrates reveals
something radically different. That is, in the texts of Plato, Rebentisch finds a Socrates who
avoids the arrogation of authority, not only by positing an extra-subjective substantiality, but
first and foremost by an abrogation of authority, i.e., by a humble and earnest claim to know
nothing. She directs us to the fact that many Platonic dialogues have the ironic Socrates not
only negatively and destructively taking on the ‘obvious’ claims of the sophists, nor even
making claims to the ideal substantiality of the Good; rather, Socrates welcomes his
interlocutors into a new—and burgeoning shared—horizon of cultural ethos-making, one
which is not only substantial but whose character is substantially under way (capable of being
shaped substantially), and in which he himself claims no greater authority than any other.
637
“Hegel only considers the dialogical form of Socratic philosophy insofar as its function is to
unsettle the ethical convictions of the interlocutor, but not as a medium for an intersubjective truthpraxis” (Rebentisch, “Morality of Irony” 109).
315
For Rebentisch’s Socrates, the culmination of philosophy is not systematicity, concrete
universality, nor truth in the form of insight; rather, philosophy culminates in a community of
sense-making and the contestations that occur in the establishment of a ‘we’; on the Socratic
model, this involves the practices of irony as self-transcendence, of sense-making in the form of
giving and responding to reasons, and of unearthing and questioning the (perhaps shared)
socio-historical backdrop upon which all such practices take place. We might add to her
account that such questioning may indeed result in the discovery that there is no horizon—and
no resultant ‘we.’ Rebentisch claims, furthermore, that it is precisely the Romantics who inherit
and take up this Socratic notion of philosophizing in modernity.
Our reading has paralleled Rebentisch’s understanding of the Romantic practices as an
attempt to, as it were, re-Socratize philosophy. Alternatively, taking seriously the Kantian
sensibility of Romantic epistemology and aesthetic normativity, we might say that the
Romantics wish for a symphilosophy between Kant and Socrates, something along the lines of
which Schlegel describes in a fragment as the art of ‘amalgamating individuals’:
Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new era of the sciences and arts if
symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartfelt that it would no longer
be anything extraordinary for several complementary minds [Naturen] to create
communal works of art. One is often struck by the idea that two minds [Geister] really
316
belong together, like divided halves that can realize their full potential only when joined.
If there were an art of amalgamating [verschmelzen] individuals, or if a wishful
criticism could do more than merely wish—and for that there are reasons enough—then
I would like to see Jean Paul and Peter Leberecht combined. The latter has precisely what
the former lacks. Jean Paul’s grotesque talent and Peter Leberecht’s fantastic turn of
mind would, once united, yield a first-rate romantic poet.638
To wish for the amalgamation of Kant and Socrates—for this there is, perhaps, reason
enough. Drawing heavily on Kant’s epistemology and the exigencies that arise therewith, as
well as Kant’s own theory of genius, the Romantics develop a picture of the community as
genial discourse; in doing so, Jena Romanticism opens philosophy to the need for the futureoriented communal practices associated with poetry, mythology, and symphilosophy.
Approached from a slightly different historical trajectory, we could say that the early Romantic
discourse does not only not amount to a bare egoism, elitism, or authoritarianism of the
particular, but constitutes a critique of all egoisms and elitisms—a critique of all monologues,
including the prevailing image of the lone philosopher toiling away in solitary thought.
Monologue is attacked on behalf of a Socratic and cosmopolitan urbanity that disrupts the
closure of any and all cloisters, whether they are disciplinary, institutional, even academic and
638
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, Athenaeum Fragments #125.
317
national.639 This call for an infinite conversation is the Romantic translation of the spirit of
Socrates—humility, irony, urbanity—into modernity and the philosophical vocabulary of their
time.
639
On this point, Ameriks claims that what the Early Romantics propose, “is to move religious and
philosophical thinking away from an insistence on celebrating [only] one system, or divinity, and toward
a sensitivity for the multiplicity of connected forms that the ‘spirit’ of true peace appears to take as
history proceeds. […] the key to identifying the ‘prince’ of peace, that is, the figure awaited and
celebrated throughout [Hölderlin’s Friedensfeier], is to avoid the exclusivist fallacy of hypothesizing that
it is simply Napoleon, Jupiter, Jesus, the poet himself, or some other particular figure such as Dionysus
or Heracles” (“History, Succession, and German Romanticism” 60).
318
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