Novalis on Nature's Embrace and a New Humanity, with a Further Note on Novalis's 'Brother' in "Christendom, or Europe" (2022) (original) (raw)

Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon

State University of New York Press, 2007; edited, translated, and introduced by David W. Wood, [320 pp.].

The first translation into English of Novalis’s unfinished notes for a universal science, Das allgemeine Brouillon (1798-1799): https://www.sunypress.edu/p-4373-notes-for-a-romantic-encyclopae.aspx Composed of more than 1,100 notebook entries, this is the German romantic poet-philosopher's largest theoretical work. In it, Novalis reflects on numerous aspects of human culture, including philosophy, poetry, the natural sciences, the fine arts, mathematics, mineralogy, history, and religion, and brings them all together into a "Romantic Encyclopaedia”, or what he calls a “Scientific Bible”. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon. Edited, Translated and Introduced by David W. Wood, published by SUNY Press (State University of New York Press), Albany/N.Y., 2007, xxx + 290 pp.

Revitalizing Romanticism: Novalis' Fichte Studien and the Philosophy of Organic Nonclosure

2013

This dissertation offers a re-interpretation of Novalis' Fichte Studien. I argue that several recent scholarly readings of this text unnecessarily exclude "organicism," or a panentheistic notion of the Absolute, in favor of "nonclosure," or the endless, because impossibly completed search for knowledge of the Absolute. My reading instead shows that, in his earliest philosophical text, Novalis makes the case for a Kantian discursive consciousness that can know itself, on Jacobian grounds, to be the byproduct (or accident) of a self-conditioning being or organism, and even more specifically a byproduct of God's panentheistic organism, at the same time that Novalis does not allow the possibility of discursive immediacy with that absolute standpoint; the epistemic consequence is that, while empirical science can proceed in the good faith that it makes valid reference to being, nonetheless it can never know its description of being to be final or complete. I call this position "organic nonclosure," and argue that Novalis holds it consistently throughout his very brief philosophical career. The keys to understanding Novalis' reconciliation of organicism and nonclosure are contextual and textual. Contextually, Novalis appreciates the inadvertent organicism in Jacobi's metacritique of Kant and also applies Jacobi's organicist metacritique to Fichte as well, with the result that Novalis' position in the Fichte Studien bears much resemblance to Herder's panentheistic ontology and modest epistemology. Textually, Novalis engages in a polysemy in the fragments of his Fichte Studien that performs the dependence of the sphere of empirical consciousness on a higher, intellectually intuitive being (a being that ! "#! could only be a divinely creative intellection), and, simultaneously, the impossibility of presenting that identity in discursive terms. In other words, for Novalis, human knowledge of the existence of the organicist Absolute is enabled by, but also limited to, the merely contingent, empirical, and private experience of the dependence of the human subjective standpoint on an objectivity simply given to it.

Novalis. Three Philosophical Poems, with an Afterword by David W. Wood

Philosophical Forum 33 (2002): 318-325, 359-364

Novalis, Three Philosophical Poems: “Beginning”, “Know thy Self” and “When Numbers and Figures”. Translated from the German, and with an Afterword, by David W. Wood. In: Philosophical Forum 33 (2002): 318-325, 359-364: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14679191/33/3

The Irreducibility of Aesthetics in Novalis' Conception of Nature

L’homme et la nature dans le romantisme allemand: Politique, critique et esthétique/Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Romantik: Politik, Kritik und Ästhetik, 2021

The early German Romantics are often construed as irrationalist or proto-postmodern. As this reading goes, being critical of the myopic vision of modern science and the systematic tendencies of discursive reason, they prefer the openness of the fragment and the semantic inexhaustibility of poetic imagery and the feelings aroused by aesthetic experience. Novalis, like the other early German Romantics, is indeed pessimistic about the worldview endorsed by Enlightenment science and philosophy, which, he contends, disenchants nature by exclusively explaining its phenomena by quantification and mechanism, thus leading to alienation and nihilism. But Novalis envisages the then-emerging Romantic poetry as a distinctive a type of rational practice that can establish a new, more life-affirming conception of nature, one in fact already suggested by various developments in the science of his time. It accomplishes these feats by permitting us to gain, through the aesthetic experience of the beautiful whole of nature, a non-discursive, yet objective awareness of nature itself as a God-like organism to which we belong like limbs or organs to a body. However, not only is this poetic act of romanticizing, whereby we re-enchant a now disenchanted nature, “similar to algebraicizing” and hence on par with mathematical rigour, but also it, rather than philosophy, is the vehicle for truth. As Novalis encapsulates his approach: “Poesy is the truly absolutely real. This is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic, the more true.”

Novalis's Magical Idealism: A Threefold Philosophy of the Imagination, Love and Medicine

SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism 1 (2019): 129-165

This article argues that Novalis's philosophy of magical idealism essentially consists of three central elements: a theory of the creative or productive imagination, a conception of love, and a doctrine of transcendental medicine. In this regard, it synthesizes two adjacent, but divergent contemporary philosophical sources - J. G. Fichte's idealism and Friedrich Schiller's classicism - into a new and original philosophy. It demonstrates that Novalis's views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now. RÉSUMÉ Cet article défend l'idée selon laquelle trois éléments centraux composent ce que Novalis nomme « idéalisme magique » pour désigner sa philosophie propre : la conception d'une imagination créatrice ou productrice, une doctrine de l'amour et une théorie de la médecine transcendantale. L'idéalisme magique est en cela la synthèse en une philosophie nouvelle et originale de deux sources philosophiques contemporaines, à la fois adjacentes et divergentes : l'idéalisme de J. G. Fichte et le classicisme de Friedrich Schiller. L'article montre que les vues de Novalis tant sur la magie que sur l'idéalisme sont non seulement réellement rationnelles et compréhensibles, mais philosophiquement plus cohérentes et novatrices qu'on ne l'a admis jusqu'à présent. Journal website: https://symphilosophie.com/current-volume/

Alison Stone - Being, Knowledge, and Nature in Novalis - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1

2008

This paper reconstructs the evolution of Novalis' thought concerning being, nature, and knowledge. In his earlier writings (above all the Fichte-Studies) he argues that unitary being underlies finite phenomena and that we can never know, but only strive towards knowledge of, being. In contrast, his later writings, principally the Allgemeine Brouillon, maintain that the unitary reality underlying finite things can be known, because it is an organic whole which develops and organises itself according to an intelligible pattern. Novalis equates this whole with nature. However, because this organic whole exercises spontaneity in assuming particular forms of organisation, we can never know why it assumes just these particular forms; nature therefore remains partly unintelligible to us. I argue that Novalis' intellectual shift towards the idea that the whole can be known is motivated by his concern to explain how the modern, "disenchanted," view of nature could be over...

"Symphilosophizing": Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel after 250 Years

SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism 4 (2022): pp. 533-550

Review essay of: Nicholas Saul, Johannes Endres (eds.), Ich liebe Deine Liebe. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schlegel und Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). Eine Ausstellung zum 250. Geburtstag der beiden Dichter, Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Francfort, Göttinger Verlag der Kunst, 2022, 192 pp. ISBN 978-3-945869-13-0 Walter Zimmermann (ed.), Novalis ABC Buch. Das „Allgemeine Brouillon“. Materialen zur Enzyklopädistik, neu geordnet nach Novalis eigenen Klassifizierungen mit Zeichnungen von Nanne Meyer, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2022, 312 pp. ISBN 978- 3-7518-0366-3

Novalis. Studies in the Fine Arts and Five Fragments on Art

SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism 5 (2023): 241-249

Novalis. "Studies in the Fine Arts" and "Five Fragments on Art", translated into English by David W. Wood. The first of the following two short texts was written by Novalis in September 1798, just after his joint visit to the Dresden Art Gallery on 25-26 August 1798 with many of the other members of the Jena romantic circle. Given the title: "Studien zur bildenden Kunst" (Studies in the Fine Arts) by the editors of the Novalis, Schriften (Historisch-kritische Ausgabe: HKA; cf. vol. II: 648-651; nos. 474-487), it remains a highly terse series of fourteen notebook entries. This compact text is translated below in its entirety. It was obviously not intended for publication in its present form and requires annotations. Indeed, Novalis strove to rework these notebook entries himself, writing to Caroline Schlegel on 9 September 1798: "The letter on the antiquities has become recast. Besides an archaeological supplement, I'll send you a romantic fragment -The Visit to the Antiquities—I’m quietly counting on your interest." (HKA IV: 260- 261). Some of these further reflections on art can also be detected in the second short collection of poetic-philosophic fragments translated below, which I have called: “Five Fragments on Art.” Inter alia these Five Fragments contain Novalis’s thoughts on celebrated visual and poetic works of art such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the Laocoon sculptural group, or Goethe’s Fairy Tale. https://symphilosophie.com/volume-5-2023/

Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis' Christianity or Europe

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2008

German Romanticism is commonly associated with nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism. Against this standard picture, I argue that the early German romantic author, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) holds a decidedly cosmopolitan view. Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe” has been the subject of much dispute and puzzlement ever since he presented it to the Jena romantic circle in the fall of 1799. On the basis of an account of the philosophical background of Novalis’s romanticism, I show that the image of the Middle Ages sketched in “Christianity or Europe” plays a symbolic role and should not be taken as a literal description of the historical past or as a blueprint for the future. Rather, the romantic picture of medieval Europe serves to evoke poetically the ideal of a cosmopolitan re-unification of humanity.