Abstract
Novalis’, or Friedrich von Hardenberg’s, Fichte-Studies is most likely the initial draft of an article commissioned by his former fellow student from Jena, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, as a contribution to the Philosophical Journal. This journal saw itself as the forum for testing the usefulness or impossibility of foundational philosophy, which Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, following in Reinhold’s footsteps, had recently revived. Like his Jena friends and co-disciples of Reinhold, Franz Paul von Herbert, Johann Benjamin Erhard, Friedrich Karl Forberg, his tutor Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, and Niethammer himself, Hardenberg was sceptical of such an undertaking. He held “the Absolute” to be non-representable in thought, and the “I” to be not the highest principle, but something dependent on the Absolute. What constitutes the point of departure in philosophy is not a “fact-act” (Thathandlung), not something manufactured or constructed, but rather a (passive) “self-feeling,” “something given.” The Fichte-Studies represent the most elaborate instance of early Romantic philosophy, which demonstrates the renunciation of absolute idealism by acknowledging the antecedence of Being to consciousness. Novalis’ Fichte-Studies have yet to be submitted to systematic interpretation, to which this chapter makes an initial contribution. My contribution shows that Novalis’ thought moves through three mutually distinct approaches, which reflect successive disillusionment: initially, he seeks to show that and how consciousness can only provide a negative account of its relationship to “primal being” (Urseyn), namely, by way of the proof that it necessarily lacks direct knowledge of the Absolute (“self-feeling,” “ordo inversus of reflection”). The second part is devoted to the negative dialectic of feeling and reflection, substance and form, “Gegensatz” and “Gegenstand” or “Zustand” and “Gegenstand” (literally, state and opposite state, sub-ject and ob-ject), and, finally, essence (or substance) and property. In the third approach, Novalis moves on to elucidate the absolute in terms of the Kantian concept of an idea, which we can only approach to infinity, but never grasp in thought, let alone “realize.” Novalis holds the thought of absolute knowledge to be an absurdity—a notion which leads us “into the realm of nonsense,” indeed something “impossible.” From this there emerge allusions to the aesthetics of German Romanticism, which seeks to represent the unrepresentable as such: in the inexhaustibility of the wealth of its meaning. Where philosophy fails it is only art that succeeds. Consequently, Novalis clearly positions himself as a successor of critical philosophy and refutes the prejudice that early Romanticism is a form of epistemic fundamentalism. It is with Novalis that secular modernity begins.
I wish to thank Justin Morris for translating this demanding text. I also thank Simon Waskow for careful proofreading that brought to light some inconsistencies between the original and the translation, and Michael McGettigan for his generous help as a second proofreader. Thanks to them, many formulations became clearer, missing passages were added, and all already existing English translations of the Fichte and Novalis passages were carefully checked and included. Differences between the translations provided in this text and already existing ones are noted in brackets.—Manfred Frank
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- 1.
The same holds for the impressive works of Frederick C. Beiser (see the works cited in the bibliography).
- 2.
- 3.
As protection against political censorship—the reaction to his collection of fragments Glauben und Liebe—von Hardenberg changed his aristocratic name in 1798 to his pseudonym “Novalis.”
- 4.
Reinhold 1790, in the essay entitled “Neue Darstellung der Hauptmomente der Elementarphilosophie,” §1, 167 (passim).
- 5.
Namely, the opening essay “On the Difference between Common Sense and Philosophical Reason with respect to the Foundations of Knowledge Possible for Each” (in Reinhold 1794, 1–72). The essay must have been written in the summer of 1792, as Reinhold’s “preface” indicates (ibid.), namely, “at least a year and a half before the appearance of the instructive review of Aenesidemus (in the Allg. Lit. Zeit.).” Reinhold means Fichte’s review published in January 1794 in issues 47–49 of Jena’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (Fichte 1971 1, 3–25).
- 6.
I provide a characterization of this review in Unendliche Annäherung (Frank 1998, 348ff.) and point out the parallels to Diez’s critique.
- 7.
Novalis returned there once again around New Year (according to several accounts he was in Jena again in February). On Novalis’ close contact to Reinhold and to the Schmid circle, cf. Hermann F. Weiss (1991).
- 8.
Reinhold’s elementary philosophy and the arguments of its most important critics are given exhaustive treatment in the first two parts of my Unendliche Annäherung (Frank 1998).
- 9.
This is the essence of the critique to which Reinhold refers in his letter to Erhard dated June 18, 1792, and which Marcelo Stamm printed in Henrich 1997, 911–14, esp. 912f., with commentaries (898ff.).
- 10.
On Novalis’ relation to Erhard, cf. lecture 14 in Unendliche Annäherung (Frank 1998). Von Herbert’s letter to Erhard (from August 5, 1798) is unprinted. I was entrusted by Wilhelm Baum with the original in which the ailing von Herbert requested of the physician Erhard’s “advice under cover of Friedrich Baron von Hardenberg (at the Golden Lion in Teplitz)” and added: “The first page was not sent because Hardenberg will only today have collected the letter to you.” Thus, thanks to his aristocratic title, Novalis played the letter carrier in order to elude the omnipresent censorship.
- 11.
Cf.—with reference to Crusius—also §XII of part I of Empirische Psychologie (164). Here Schmid ridicules the practice, of “arbitrarily imputing so much [to an object], that one afterwards draws out again everything one wanted to explain.” This is the historical source for Nietzsche’s taunt that Kant answers the question as to the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori with the finding: “by the faculty of a faculty” (part 11 of Beyond Good and Evil, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” in Nietzsche 1988, vol. 5, 23–5). For the whole context, cf. Frank 1998, 275f.
- 12.
See his letter to Reinhold from July 30, 1792. In his letter to Niethammer from May 19, 1794, Erhard once again took up the same line of argument under the influence of Fichte’s attempt to outdo Reinhold: “Kant’s philosophy is by no means predominant among his students since they insist on reason being constitutive. The ideas are recognised as a priori in us, though they are not recognised by us a priori, but rather analytically, and because, as ideas, they possess attributes of the genus, we then assume that through such attributes we have abstracted, even discovered, them. I have already written to Reinhold on the matter” (in Niethammer 1795b, 79).
- 13.
Published in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, no. 319, Tuesday, October 11, 1796, cols. 89–91.
- 14.
Cf., above all, lectures 15 and 17 of Frank, Unendliche Annäherung.
- 15.
Unfortunately, no letters have come down to us; but Schmid’s estate has yet to be assessed, whereas the substantial part of Novalis’ has been lost; nor do we possess the letters between Niethammer and Novalis, about which Ludwig Döderlein, a descendant of Niethammer’s wife, still had information (NS 2:32f.), and which are now in the possession of an heir or owner who guards over them like the dragon Fafner in Siegfried; and we have no more information about Niethammer’s diary entries concerning Novalis’ Tennstedter days detailing a collaboration on the Philosophisches Journal. Henrich reports extensively on the situation of Niethammer’s literary estate in his 1997, 832ff.
- 16.
Julius Wilhelm von Oppel (1765–1832) was Confidential Minister of Finance in the first Departement des geheimen sächsischen Finanzkollegiums and Advisor for the salt mines; like Novalis he was a student of Abraham Gottlob Werner, already known by Novalis from Freiberg, and his friend and sponsor following an inspection of the Dürrenberg, Artern, and Kösen mines in May/June 1799.
- 17.
Due to the size of the first group, Hans-Joachim Mähl finds the “September estimate more probable” than the November one (which was the date of the letter to Erasmus; this letter also includes a reference to a developed working schedule the beginning of which must have been previous to this [NS 2:43]).
- 18.
I have not personally carried out an analysis of handwriting, but have no grounds whatsoever to dispute the results arrived at by Havenstein, Ritter, or Mähl when comparing handwriting samples. Firstly, all the relevant examples of handwriting show the round st, which was abandoned between September 20, 1796 (letter to Erasmus) and January 1, 1797 (letter to Friedrich Schlegel) in favour of the hooked st. Furthermore, there exist many precise similarities of all handwriting in the lettering, as well as in the texture and format of the paper. Here I quote the decisive criterion used for dating in Mähl’s own words: “But the remaining uncertainty triggered by the ‘relapse’ to the old rendering of the round st between May 23 and September 5, 1797, which caused Haering, without any knowledge of the manuscripts, to deny any evidentiary force to the lettering, has been eliminated by a new observation, whose significance corresponds to those of Havenstein. It is the merit of Dr. Heinz Ritter to have first drawn attention to a shift of the ‘R’ forms between 1795 and 1796, which has made possible a new grouping of the manuscripts. This observation, which can be supported and confirmed by an examination of all available letters and by employing all criteria pertaining to objective content and biography from the Fichte-Studies , has proved invaluable for the dating of the studies. In spite of the relatively narrow basis consisting of 14 dated letters from the last months of the year 1795 and 1796, the observed shift in handwriting can be considered conclusive. It occurs between November 20, 1795 (letter to Karl von Hardenberg) and February 21, 1796 (letter to Friedrich Brachmann). All letters dating from the year 1795 show, up until the said date, a normal looped ‘R’ (from September to November, this can be verified in five dated letters), whereas all letters subsequent to February 21, 1796 indicate a new, open-top and oblique ‘R’, which is retained from this point on (from February to September this can be verified in eight dated letters and a further one that can be dated indirectly). In the period between November 20, 1795 and February 21, 1796 only two letters are available, which do not contain ‘R’ forms (December 27, 1795 to Brachmann and February 6, 1796 to Erasmus)” (NS 2:37f.). In the portfolios of the Fichte-Studies , Mähl—naturally supported by the meticulous research of his predecessors—could distinguish three periods of writing. The one important for us is the old R-group, documented to November 20, 1795. One may, with certainty, conclude from this that the Fichte-Studies were begun prior to this time, since the first group encompasses 114 (!) pages. The second group (between November 20, 1795 and March 21, 1796) contains transitional and mixed forms; the new R-forms (the third group) are documented from March 21, 1796 (NS 2:38f.). Since Novalis was frequently travelling between September 21 and October 22, the notes begin either before the end of September or after the end of October. The first possibility Mähl considers “more probable” (NS 2:43). Furthermore, we have an unambiguous terminus post quem for the writing of the Fichte-Studies since Novalis used Fichte’s programmatic writing On the Concept of the Science of Knowledge in addition to the lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (both from 1794) and the three parts of the Fichtean Science of Knowledge, the last of which—as well as the similarly used Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Science of Knowledge—was published in 1795 (as was the third issue of the first edition of the Philosophisches Journal , wherein Fichte’s treatise on the origins of language appeared, and of which Novalis made extensive use). One may assume that Novalis had been given the sheets of the Wissenschaftslehre as it appeared and generally received Fichte’s books right away (cf. Mähl in NS 2:30f.). People from the house of Hardenberg were by no means unfamiliar with Fichte, for Fichte’s discoverer and patron, Baron Ernst Haubold von Miltitz (1739–74), was a relative of the Hardenbergs and father to Novalis’ cousin and friend Dietrich Freiherr von Miltitz (1769–1853), who had been adopted by the Hardenberg family following the death of his father. After the Baron’s death, Novalis’ father purportedly assumed patronage of the grant for Fichte. There is no incontestable evidence of this, but only the testimony of Cölestin Just whose source was Novalis (NS 4:539) along with drafts of Fichte’s letters to Hardenberg’s father and Miltitz’s widow.
- 19.
The fact that Novalis understood his studies as meta-philosophical can be seen above all in the decisive note no. 14, in which a question is asked about the essence of philosophy. Looking back, Novalis talks of “our deduction of philosophy” (NS 2:117; FS 16). Cf. also no. 9 (NS 2:108; FS 7): “The requirement of a universally valid philosophy.” And in note no. 566 (NS 2:269ff.; FS 167) he once again poses the question: “What do I do when I philosophize?”
- 20.
Novalis consistently advances the thesis that mistakes occur by taking the part for the whole (cf. esp. no. 234, NS 2:176ff.; FS 75ff.; and 180: “since illusion is everywhere half—only the half of a whole is illusion” [NS 2:180; FS 78]; “Thus illusion arises … from the elevation of the part to the whole” [l. 25f. and passim]).
- 21.
Hans-Joachim Mähl points out in his commentary on this passage (in: NS 2:724) a passage in Fichte’s Begriffsschrift (Fichte 1971 I, §7, 70f.). There the what is defined as the object of “what is present in the human mind independent of knowledge,” namely, its actions. Fichte does not introduce an etymological reference, which would be utterly preposterous. “Knowledge” (Wissen) is derived from old high German wizzan, having seen (cf. Gr. eidenai and Lat. videre).
- 22.
This corresponds to the definition of the I as ek-stasis: “It finds itself, outside of itself” (NS 2:150, no. 98; FS 48). Novalis interprets this ecstatic self-finding as sensation and this in turn (following Fichte [cf. Fichte 1971 I, 339]) as a “Finding-One-Within [Ein-Innenfindung] in reality” (NS 2:150, l. 30f., where since the empirical tradition and Kant “reality” has been the essential companion of sensation [A225f.]).
- 23.
The thesis of the principally unconscious nature of original being is to be strictly distinguished from Fichte’s (frequently referenced) theory according to which the I cannot concurrently have an intuition and be conscious of itself (e.g., Fichte 1971 I, 349a., 376a.). Accordingly, Fichte at least works in this phase with the assumption of unconscious representations. In the special case of self-consciousness, this results in manifest logical circles or regresses. For how can the representing I capture the represented I as itself, since the former, among other things, does not exhibit the characteristic of consciousness (since it is not itself represented)? By contrast, Novalis’ former teacher, Schmid, dismisses the hypothesis of unconscious (or, as he says, “consciousness-less”) representations as utter nonsense: Empirical Psychology (Schmid 1791), part 2, §VIII, 184; §LVIII, 216 ff. (“Ueber Bewußtseynslose Vorstellungen”). Here it is not possible to validate the cogency of Schmid’s conviction for all that follows, although I myself find it entirely convincing.
- 24.
“The real separated from the ideal is objective. Matter considered alone, that is object. Feeling would be relation to the object. Reflection would be relation to the subject. The subject is, however, the mediated I. The medium must be that through which the subject ceases to be the subject—but this is matter and form, feeling and reflection, subject and object in alternation. Here the roles are exchanged—object becomes subject—subject [becomes] object. For the subject is a complete contradiction here—it sublates itself—thereby it is nothing—so that here the absolute I is postulated—now everything is set right. If the subject does not postulate the absolute I, it must lose itself here in an abyss of error—this can only happen [for] [trans. modified, J.M.] reflection—thus only to a part of the subject, the merely reflecting part. This loss is a deception, as every elevation of a part to the whole is a deception; the subject remains what it is—a divided absolute and identical I” (NS 2:130f., no. 41; FS 29).
- 25.
“How can thought divide what God has joined[?]” (NS 2:173; FS 71).
- 26.
One may also see in this a devotion to Jacobi’s thought which was to come to fruition in Schleiermacher’s theory of feeling. I have traced the history of the word “feeling of self” or “sense of self” through to the end of the eighteenth century in my eponymous work (Frank 2002). A student of Jacobi, Johannes Kuhn, had provided an excellent though conceptually less evolved appraisal of Jacobi’s pioneering theory of non-objective self-consciousness or “feeling” (Kuhn 1834). Kuhn saw clearly the infinite regress that occurs if one props up the fact of “self-observation” on an already “reflected consciousness … and so on to infinity” (Kuhn 1834, 19). “Derived or reflected consciousness” presupposes an irreflexive, “primitive,” or “basal consciousness” in which no articulation into representing agent and represented content is present, as is characteristic of derived consciousness (Kuhn 1834, 35f.). Since all explanation takes place in the sphere of reflection, basal consciousness—and imagination, too—appears to be “inexplicable” (Kuhn 1834, 38f., note.). On page 409ff., Kuhn examines the way both—immediate feeling and the mediate knowledge-of-self-as-object—are connected to one another (and thus what, as such, the structural unity of consciousness is). He seeks to provide an interpretation of immediate consciousness as merely potential difference (with identity predominant) of the ideal and the real, which cannot contradict the actual difference between both in mediate self-knowledge (Kuhn 1834, 411f., 514). Alexander Weber brought my attention to J. Kuhn’s text, which I acknowledge with gratitude.
- 27.
Cf. Fichte 1971 I, 295f., 305. Naturally, Fichte warned philosophers that “[t]o postulate the occurrence of a specific feeling is a shallow way of proceeding” (296; SK 260). Fichte also makes reference to “how the I [trans. modified, J.M.] is able to feel itself driven towards something unknown” (296f.; SK 260–1). Cf. also the discussion of how the I “feels itself and its own power within itself”; only as determined, as feeling itself, is feeling at all a characteristic of the I (299; SK 263). As we will soon see, such formulations indicate the true practical-philosophical context of self-feeling. (However, the expression “self-feeling” is used almost synonymously with “feeling” in the Grundriß: Fichte 1971 I, 360, 366, 396, cf. 372.)
- 28.
“Every object of reflection is necessarily limited” (Fichte 1971 I, 300f.; SK 264). Where infinite drive becomes the object of reflection, it appears to that extent limited (and the one reflecting itself in the feeling, the reflecting agent that is actually infinite, forgets itself as such, thus is “as always” not conscious of itself [302f.]).
- 29.
Fichte straightforwardly calls this action by which the absolute I affects itself as relative I “not conscious.” In virtue of this structural unconsciousness he can successfully draw the conclusion that a not-I is the source of the counter-effect (Fichte 1971 I, 290; SK 255).
- 30.
Cf. Johann Heinrich Abicht 1975, 234: “All appearances of volition stand under empirical feelings, as the determining grounds of the being and the reality of the appearances of our will.” Incidentally, like Schmid, Abicht distinguished intentional representation from non-objective feelings.
- 31.
Schmid, Empirische Psychologie, 33.
- 32.
Schmid 1791, 199.
- 33.
L.c. Cf. 187, §XVI (object in itself—image.)
- 34.
Hardenberg’s former teacher, Schmid, also holds this view in the Empirische Psychologie (part I, §II, 154f.; part II, §I, 179f.; §XXIX, 199f.; esp. part III, §§VIIff., 258ff.). Not all modifications of mind—as he puts it—are representations of something different from the representing subject (an intentional object); such are, for example, the feelings. Even if a representation is to “attach” to them, they still differ from the representation itself (cf. §CX, 320). In short, “Not every determination of the mind is a representation” (§VIII, 258). According to Schmid, one essential characteristic of representation is reflection (part II, §LXXII, 226), in which the foregoing activities of combining and separating are first prepared for conceptualization. Feelings, by contrast, are pre-conceptual. Hence, as with Novalis, “feeling” stands in clear opposition to “reflection,” though the former may serve to prepare for or to trigger the latter.
- 35.
Clearly, Hardenberg’s reference to positing or non-positing (or to positing by non-positing or non-positing by positing ) takes up a Fichtean theorem from the Science of Knowledge . In connection with “interaction and passion” reference is also made to the “transference” of the overall reality of the absolute I to the alternating actions of the I and not-I. In so far as action is “posited” in the not-I, it is correspondingly “not posited” in the relative I, and vice versa (cf. Fichte 1971 I, 150, 160, esp. 171 in context; SK 142, 150f., and 159).
- 36.
Empirische Psychologie, 33; cf. the “Third Part of the Empirische Psychologie. On the Faculty and Power to Feel as Such” (255–328).
- 37.
A reading of Fichte lends support to these terminological rules (which trace beings outside of me back to feeling, and feeling to belief). Cf., for example, Fichte’s essay on the origin of language in the third and fourth issues of the first volume of the Philosophisches Journal, 298 note, or the following passage taken from the Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge: “As to reality in general, whether that of the I or the not-I, there is only a belief” (Fichte 1971 I, 301; SK 264).
- 38.
Similarly, in such formulations one might believe one had found reflexes of the theory of feeling in the practical part of the first Science of Knowledge . Here, too, the expression “feeling” occasionally accompanies that of reflection (e.g., Fichte 1971 I, 297; 299[ff.]). For a more detail account of this, see Frank 2002, 34ff.
- 39.
“[T]his thing [feeling] that must be given to it [consciousness] would appear to be the original act, as cause and effect” (NS 2:115; FS 14).
- 40.
Cf. the introduction to my Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frank 1989), above all lectures 15 and 16.
- 41.
A first expression of the awareness that it is not the positing of being that constitutes the highest, but its unity with non-being, can be found as early as the third note of the Fichte-Studies : “Should there exist an even higher sphere then it would be between being and non-being—the hovering between both—an inarticulable; and here we have the concept of life. Life cannot be different—the human being dies—the substance remains—the member, if I may put it thus, between substance and elimination is no longer there—the substance is indeterminate—all things acquire what they can. This is where philosophy stands still, and must stand still—since it is in this that life consists, namely, that it is impossible to grasp it” (NS 2:106; FS 6).
- 42.
The full quote runs: “If the subject reflects on the pure I—then it has nothing—in that it has something for itself—if on the other hand it does not reflect upon the pure I—then it has nothing for itself, in that it has something” (FS 36). Frank Rühling, in his Jena dissertation from 1994, entitled Friedrich von Hardenbergs Auseinandersetzung mit der kritischen Transzendentalphilosophie. Aspekte eines Realitätsbegriffes in den “Fichte-Studien ” (which I personally assessed), showed very well that here, and in many other similar formulations, Novalis provides variations of a quote from Fichte’s Science of Knowledge : “If the I reflects upon itself and thereby determines itself, then the not-I is unending and unlimited. Should, by contrast, the I reflect on the non-I as such (on the universe) and thereby determine it, then it is itself infinite. In representation, I and not-I stand in reciprocal determination; where the one is finite, the other is infinite; and vice versa: however, either the one or the other is always infinite” (GA I.2:284).
- 43.
This formulation once again points to the influence of Schmid’s Empirische Psychologie: “Belonging to every representation is this three-fold consciousness [namely: consciousness of the representation’s object, consciousness of the representation, and self-consciousness], but we do not have in every representation a special representation of this consciousness or of those determinations carried out by the mind. We are conscious of the representation each time, of the object and subject, but we do not always represent these relations in their particularity, namely, we do not always have a consciousness of the representation, of the object and subject” (part two, §XXXVI, 203). Although Schmid did not explain the structure of this non-objective and pre-reflexive consciousness (which forms a substantial part of his theory of feelings), merely adopting it helped him to avoid the regresses, which were the cause of the ruin of Reinhold’s and Fichte’s early theories of consciousness.
- 44.
Naturally, this corresponds to Fichte’s oft-repeated thesis that intuition cannot at the same time be self-intuition. Cf., for example, the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Science of Knowledge, of which Novalis made a thoroughgoing study: “This intuition is unconscious exactly for the same reasons it is present, namely, because the I cannot act in two ways at once, and hence cannot reflect on two objects simultaneously” (Fichte 1971 I, 376; EPW 280; cf. the entire deduction of intuition in the Science of Knowledge , ibid., 229ff.). The thesis, with which Brentano would later critically engage, was already disputed by Descartes in discussion with Burman: “Être conscient, c’est assurément penser et réfléchir sur sa pensée, mais que cela ne puisse se faire, tant que subsiste la pensée précédente, c’est faux, parce que … l’âme peut penser plusieurs choses en même temps, préserver dans la pensée, et toutes les fois qu’il lui plaît réfléchir sur ses pensées, ainsi, être consciente de sa pensée” (Descartes 1953, 1359). Similarly, with Schmid in his Empirische Psychologie, which, above all in part two, denies the existence of “representations without consciousness,” which first become conscious by way of retrospectively added representations.
- 45.
I have supplied evidence of this in the afterword to Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre (Frank 1991, 450ff.).
- 46.
Similarly, for Novalis the highest, which he temporarily calls “synthetic I,” is “without consciousness” (NS 2:142, no. 63; FS 40). And yet this thesis about the absolute is logically distinct from the other thesis, according to which representations must remain unconscious until they are made conscious by reflection (a thesis which leads to the infinite regress).
- 47.
Cf. also NS 2:172, no. 228, l. 8–10; FS 70: “The substance of all form is something about which it is possible to assert, no less and no more, than the fact that it is.”
- 48.
Cf. already NS 2:104, no. 1, l. 2–4; FS 3: “In order to make a more distinct, A is divided (analyzed). ‘Is’ is presented as universal content, ‘a’ as determinate form” (cf. §513 of Hoffbauer’s Logik).
- 49.
“Reflection is nothing—if it is something—it is only for itself nothing—so it must thus be something. Feeling is nothing, if it is something in reflection—/Apart from this reflection, as it were, it is nothing//In this reflection feeling must always be something and reflection nothing” (NS 2:118; FS 17).
- 50.
This givenness is itself only illusion. This is because original act and intellectual intuition are themselves mere concepts of reflection, namely, displacing predicates of life (as the incomprehensible oscillating between abstracta: NS 2:106, l. 25 ff.). Cf. also NS 2:198, l. 25–7; FS 96: “For us there is only negation, an undetermined, an unconditioned, etc. It is only illusion [trans. modified, J.M.]—objectivity of the opposite, oppositionality of the object.”
- 51.
Novalis speaks of material and form as of “reciprocal concepts—the one presupposes the other and postulates it” (NS 2:176, l. 30f.; FS 74). The ordo inversus presides over them: “As soon as something is predicated of both, they are transformed” (NS 2:176, l. 26f.)—into one another, of course (since at this level of abstraction there is no third thing alongside the poles of the relation). On the expression “alternate concepts” in the sense of expressions with different meanings but identical references (such as three-sided and triangle), cf. Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s Analytik der Urtheile und Schlüsse (Hoffbauer 1792, 2, 7, 114f.), as well as Kant’s Logik, §12 (AA 9:98).
- 52.
In connection with a list of successive pairs of opposites without commentary characteristic of the Fichte-Studies which, in addition to “synthesis–analysis,” include “spontaneity–receptivity,” there is a reference to Schmid’s “Wörterbuch der Kantischen Filosofie” as well as to “Hof[f]bauer’s Logik” (NS 2:191, no. 269; FS 89). As we have noted in connection with his theory of signs, Novalis used Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s Anfangsgründe der Logik, nebst einem Grundriss der Erfahrungsseelenkunde, Halle: 1794. Admittedly, in this book emphasis is placed not on the interpretation of the opposition of “analytic” and “synthetic,” which was otherwise an object of Hoffbauer’s attention. However, he had already attacked Kant’s and, above all, Reinhold’s derivation of the “forms of judgement” in Analytik der Urtheile und Schlüsse mit Anmerkungen meistens erläuternden Inhalts (1792, 118ff., 148 ff.).
- 53.
However, Novalis’ terminology fluctuates. There are certainly passages (e.g., NS 2:139f., no. 53; FS 37f.) in which the “absolute I” is virtually equated with the “synthetic I.” One has the impression that Novalis’ later thesis corrects this earlier one in the spirit of their reciprocal determination, which is everywhere central.
- 54.
The entire fragment (no. 78; FS 42) runs, “The analytic [path] is conditioned through a synthesis, the synthetic through an analysis. The effect here is the cause there. Space is as big as time, that is, they stand in alternating unity. Eternity a parte post and a parte ante. The former an analytic path, the latter synthetic [cf. no. 153]. That synthesis and analysis stand in these relations—that is the simple I. / The I is merely the highest possible expression of the genesis of analysis and synthesis in the unknown. / The unknown is the holy nothing for us.” This corresponds to the determination of the sphere, the oscillating between being and non-being, that is even “higher” than the poles of the relation, as “life .” “Here philosophy is at a standstill and must remain so—because life itself consists precisely in this, that it cannot be grasped” (NS 2:106, no. 3, l. 27–34; FS 6).
- 55.
In reference to this experience, which acknowledges a kind of original passivity before the activity of positing, Novalis refers in the fragments of 1798 to a “higher science of knowledge” (NS 2:528f., no. 21). This corresponds to the self-correction in Fichte’s later formula of the I as the “power into which an eye is inserted.” Here, the I-activity is also “anticipated” by a passivity; it denotes being posited by non-positing, as is the case with feeling in Novalis.
- 56.
Isaak von Sinclair, Philosophische Raisonnements, in M. Frank (ed.), Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre (Frank 1991, 30–51).
- 57.
Novalis later interprets this presupposition as the ground of our temporality: the finite subject is always beyond its ground—now interpreted as past—and seeks to compensate for the loss of this ground by way of an always unsatisfying, therefore “unending striving” into the future. Cf. the 16th lecture of my Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frank 1989, 262ff.).
- 58.
“Unendingly determined is without determination in the most general sense—since unending is also a concept of determination—unendingly determined [things] cannot be further determined—it is then undetermined for the determining power, since it is indeed unendingly determined” (NS 2:201f.; FS 99).
- 59.
“Everything, irrespective of whether we reflect upon or sense it, is an object and so stands under the laws of the object. The opposite itself is an object insofar as we reflect upon it. If the object in general is an object of reflection, then it also stands under its [the object’s] laws. It is determined by the opposite. If reflection turns from the object in general to the object’s opposite, then it only rotates, it has again one object before it, but a particular one—and so we discover that the particular object was the objective opposite of the object in general” (NS 2:206, no. 288; FS 103).
- 60.
Novalis also calls this unwavering purity of the abstraction “opposite,” “freedom ”: “The opposite of all determination is freedom . The absolute opposite is freedom—It can never become an object, as little as the opposite as such [can ever become an object]” (NS 2:202; FS 99; cf. no. 284f. as a whole). In the case of Friedrich Schlegel there is a similar eliding of freedom and non-objectivity: “Most significant is the expression: Freedom is a non-thing [Unding]; it is also the only Not and Contrary-thing [das einzige Nicht und Gegending]” (KFSA 19:115, no. 301).
- 61.
Incidentally, this formulation is first found among the Eleatics Zeno and Melissos (Diels/Kranz 1952, 29 A 30 [I 255, 8]; cf. the third volume, p. 149, under the key word εἷς). Similar usages can also be found in Heraclitus and especially in Empedocles.
- 62.
As is well known, Sartre (Sartre 1943, 107, 704) claimed that human beings bring themselves to ruin so that God may arise. But this is a useless via crucis: the human being dies, but God (the en-soi pour-soi as Spinozistic substance) does not enter reality. This corresponds to a passage in Fichte’s Science of Knowledge of 1804: “This is the difficulty with every philosophy that wants to avoid dualism and is instead really serious about the quest for oneness: either we must perish, or God must. We will not, and God ought not! The first brave thinker who saw the light about this must have understood full well that if the negation is to be carried out, we must undergo it ourselves: Spinoza was that thinker” (Fichte 1971 X, 147; SK 1804, 69).
- 63.
Novalis not only repeatedly dallied with Reinhold’s fourfold triadic drive-scheme (each drive is interpreted in three ways according to the four categories: cf. Versuch, 564 with note; NS 2:132, no. 41f.; FS 28f: “feeling drive,” “reflective drive,” “intuitive drive”; NS 2:139, no. 51: “visual drive,” “touch-drive,” “thought-drive”). Novalis also consistently follows Reinhold in the distinction between “powers” (they are the ground of reality) and “faculties” or “capacities” of representation (they are only its formal conditions [naturally Schmid is aware of the same distinction—also based on Reinhold (180): cf. the entire first two parts (“On the Soul as Such,” “On the Faculty of Representation”) of Empirische Psychologie]). Reinhold defines “drive” as “the relation of the power of representation to the possibility of representation determined a priori in its capacity.” “Desire” is accordingly referred to as “the capacity of being determined by drive”—precisely the “faculty of desire” (Reinhold 1789, 561). “Matter-drive” and “form-drive” are explained by the “need” or the “striving” of representation, to fill its emptiness through being affected by external objects or to spontaneously impose its form on them (561f.)—and accordingly the other drives, among which the striving to realize the unconditional (564ff.) was to become the model for Fichte’s, and indirectly for Hardenberg’s, doctrine of striving. Further elucidations of these connections would be called for, but presuppose detailed philological research on Novalis’ reception of Reinhold’s work. For the moment this remains a desideratum since there is no available or suspected documentation that could confirm it; it is, however, strongly suggested by the philosophical constellation and Novalis’ immediate contact with Reinhold as one of his students.
- 64.
Cf. NS 2:269, no. 565, l. 18–22; FS 167: “Golden ages might appear—but they do not bring the end of things—the goal of the human being is not the golden age—the human being should exist eternally and be a beautifully ordered individual and endure—this is the tendency of human nature.” See also note 508 (NS 2:259f.; FS 157): “To what extent do we never reach the ideal? Insofar as it would annihilate itself. In order to have the effect of an ideal, it may not stand in the sphere of ordinary reality ” (l. 20–2), and so on.
- 65.
I had earlier conjectured that Forberg was inspired by Hardenberg’s formulation in Forberg 1797 I, 66f., having visited him at the end of June or beginning of July 1796 in Weißenfels, just around the time when—according to the well-documented dating of the editor of the Fichte-Studies —Novalis had written down his notes. Naturally, it could be established equally well that Novalis oriented himself to the earlier formulations in one of Forberg’s letters dating from February 1795 (reprinted in Forberg’s Fragmente aus meinen Papieren, published in spring 1796), which likewise compares the search for the highest principle with embarking on the search for the philosopher’s stone: “That one highest principle ‘from which all truths unravel as if from a ball of thread’ [a quote from one of Erhard’s letters] is a need for speculative reason, I do not doubt this. But I fear that with their first principle the philosophers are like the alchemists with their philosopher’s stone. Their search will never cease and they will never find it. Not to find but to seek the solution is a task nature gave to reason. I assure you that there are times when the idea that reason cannot ascend any higher sends shivers down my spine!” (74f.).
- 66.
Fichte’s theory of abstraction is reproduced by Schelling in his System des transcendentalen Idealismus, cf. the transition from the second to the third epoch. Schelling employs the expression “absolute abstraction” in SW I/3, 336 (third epoch, d.); for the most part, he refers to a “transcendental” abstraction, esp. 516–23ff.
- 67.
Novalis had an even more fundamental objection to this concept, which is admittedly directed rather against Fichte and immediately challenges his idealism: “A self-determining activity is nonsense—all determinate activity presupposes something already posited [trans. modified, J.M.], something already at hand” (NS 2:242, no. 444, l. 7–10; FS 140).
- 68.
Cf. the entire paragraph, which tests out the concept of “definition”—as “contain[ing] the objective concept of the thing” (NS 2:262, no. 526; FS 160)—on the claim of “theory” in its entirety.
- 69.
Cf. l.c.: “When we speak of genus, we understand by that: a common fundamental character—but we do not find genera always contained in more comprehensive ones [?]” (FS 149).
- 70.
Cf. NS 2:256, no. 478, l. 3; FS 153: “I is an expression of the singular, which <has representation> judges.”
- 71.
Cf. Violetta L. Waibel’s exhaustive interpretation of this letter in Hölderlin (1996, 64ff.). In her doctoral thesis (Waibel 2000), she points out an interesting parallel to the Science of Knowledge (§4), where Fichte states that he will henceforth be using the expression “being” in a twofold sense, whereby the second meaning is not ontological, but teleological: referring to a purpose or an Ideal (Fichte 1982b, 52f.).
- 72.
For it is from precisely this time that Novalis’ penultimate notes for the Fichte-Studies date, namely, those of the fifth group (Mähl in NS 2:79–81, 89).
- 73.
See Novalis’ Notes, no. 566.
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Frank, M. (2020). Novalis’ Fichte-Studies: A “Constellational” Approach. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_2
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