Discovering Novalis: The Poetic Transmutation of Philosophy
- Luke Fischer
- 19 hours ago
- 15 min read
Luke Fischer on James D. Reid's Novalis: Philosophical, Literary and Poetic Writings
Within German culture, Novalis holds a place comparable to that of Keats and Shelley in the Anglophone tradition: the gifted poet and writer who tragically died in his youth, a little more than a month shy of his 29th birthday. Novalis––the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801)––more closely resembles Coleridge in his philosophical acumen, and he deserves to be far better known in the Anglosphere. He was polymathic in his range of interests and abilities: a poet, philosopher, scientist, mystic, director of salt mines, and the list goes on. In this he is akin to his elder contemporary, the giant of German letters, Goethe, whom the pioneers of Romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel, August Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, among others) revered. Goethe was not only the consummate writer and poet, but also made major contributions to natural science in the fields of comparative morphology and anatomy––in botany and zoology––and optics, as well as to politics and practical life in his role as minister for the Duke of Weimar. Novalis similarly engaged with the natural sciences, poetry and literature, and deeply identified with Goethe’s studies of nature, in which he saw an epistemically beneficial synthesis of poetic capacities and scientific observation. But whereas Goethe’s oeuvre and long life (1749-1832) stands for the classical completion of great works and epitomizes a historical period––die Goethezeit or “the Age of Goethe”––Novalis bequeathed us genial works that are mostly unfinished, yet convey a vitality and originality that remain stimulating today.
Novalis in Context
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, intellectuals, poets and artists became aware of the increasing specialization of the sciences and industry. While it was clear that the division of labor in research and industry would generate more detailed knowledge and greater economic productivity, they already ascertained its negative repercussions both for the formation of individuals and for the pursuit of knowledge. In his influential work Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind (1795), Schiller diagnosed the anthropological consequences of increasing specialization. For Schiller, the latter leads to a fragmentation and one-sided development of the human being. As an antidote, he recommended an aesthetic education, as the unique power of art and poetry lies in their capacity to integrate the various sides of human nature. Art at once engages our sensible and rational capacities and harmonizes them with one another. A painting, for example, engages my sense perception, refined feeling, and intellectual power, whereas a tasty meal, even if it is nicely presented, appeals to the cruder feeling of desire (hunger) and lacks the universal significance of art. According to Schiller, an aesthetic education can thus help to shape integrated human individuals. The poet (especially the representative poet-scientist, Goethe) stands for the true person. In contrast, the philosopher one-sidedly develops his rational mind is an abstract caricature of a human being. In part inspired by Schiller, Novalis––and fellow poet-philosopher Hölderlin––developed related ideas and sought to conjoin philosophy and poetry. Novalis and Hölderlin also both formed their own philosophical views in direct response to Fichte’s philosophy or Wissenschaftslehre [Doctrine of Science].
One of the many fragments that stood out to me when I first encounted Novalis in translation was from Logological Fragments I (trans. Stoljar), which like the majority of Novalis’s fragments and notes, were first published posthumously:
8. Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.
Through the metaphorical expression of “humanity” as “the eye” that the earth “raises to heaven” Novalis’s view of the human being as a mediator between the sensible and the supersensible, the below and the above, is encapsulated. The human being has the task of granting the earth a higher meaning and significance, something that is achieved through philosophy, science and art (or what Novalis more specifically calls the act of “romanticization”). Novalis’s debt to transcendental philosophy––to Kant, but especially Fichte––is well-known, but the discerning reader will already sense in this fragment his interest in Neoplatonism and more esoteric currents of modernity (Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme). The human being joins together, as participant in both, the sensible world and the intelligible world, the terrestrial and the celestial.
While detailed argumentation and the defense of one’s own position against competing positions have an important role to play in philosophy, a vital source of philosophy is the new ideas that we conceive. The flagbearer of the romantic movement, close friend of Novalis, and brilliant writer of fragments F. Schlegel indicates that the justification of these ideas to others is a secondary step. The fragmentist is concerned with the ideas in their dynamic emergence and seeks to capture them in concise and potent language. Moreover, both Novalis and F. Schlegel did not regard philosophical fragments as a simple rejection of systematic philosophy. Rather, they discerned a latent unity of thought in fragments, but one that avoids the rigidity and potentially deadening effect on the mind of a static system. In their frequent metaphoricity, pithiness and openness to interpretation, fragments are a form of philosophy that resonates with poetry.
Reid on Novalis and the Status of the Absolute
In Novalis: Philosophical, Literary and Poetic Writings (Oxford University Press, 2024), editor and translator James D. Reid has realized the tremendous feat of providing the most extensive collection in a single volume of Novalis’s writings to date. The volume contains over 300 pages of Novalis’s notes, fragments and essays (including Reid’s introductions), among them Novalis’s Assorted Remarks (Pollen) (1797/8)––the manuscript version of Novalis’s fragments that were published under the title Pollen in the Athenäum––Logological Fragments 1 and II, Novalis’s controversial essay Christianity or Europe (1799), his celebrated Monologue (1799), which influenced the French symbolists (though they somewhat misinterpreted it), and many other philosophical writings. While they are crucial texts in Novalis scholarship, Reid chose not to include extracts from Novalis’s Fichte Studies (1795) and Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798/9), as they have already appeared in accomplished translations by Jane Kneller and David W. Wood respectively. I support this editorial decision (although I was at first unsure about it), as the selections by Reid more than suffice on their own to give the reader a good sense of Novalis’s philosophical thought as a whole. Moreover, his inclusion of the less well-known texts, Hemsterhuis Studies (1797) and Kant Studies (1797), sheds important light on Novalis’s philosophical development. These works give us a window into how Novalis sought to respond to Kant, and in certain respects go beyond him, and underscore the importance of the Dutch Neoplatonist, Franz Hemsterhuis, to Novalis. Hemsterhuis’s notion of a “moral organ” was particularly important to Novalis and it is striking how the notion of non-physical “organs” (and “senses”) comes to play a crucial role throughout Novalis’s writings. In all these instances an “organ” is something that must be activated by the I (this emphasis on self-activity is one of Novalis’s appropriations from Fichte), while it at the same time has an aspect of the receptive quality of a “sense.”
Reid’s inclusion of Novalis’s major literary and poetic works (except for Spiritual Songs)
alongside Novalis’s more obviously philosophical writings, is itself an important contribution to Novalis scholarship. There has been a tendency since the pioneering research of Manfred Frank on early German Romanticism to put great emphasis on Novalis’s Fichte Studies and to sideline Novalis’s later philosophical and literary writings. While Frank’s research presented Novalis as a significant post-Kantian philosopher, rather than as an enthusiastic poet-mystic of primary interest to Germanists, it has also influenced the scholarship to paint another one-sided picture of Novalis. As I read the selection of texts by Reid, I was struck by the transition that happens in Novalis’s philosophical voice from his Hemsterhuis Studies and Kant Studies to Assorted Remarks (Pollen). In the latter, Novalis comes into his own as a philosopher and the reader becomes convinced that they are encountering the thoughts of a brilliant and original philosophical mind. This perhaps also has to do with the fact that the earlier writings were responses to other authors and Pollen was written with a view to publication.
Moreover, the positions that Novalis comes to formulate in his fragments and short essays––on subjects such as the relationship between the self and nature, the philosophy of history, the notion of the “golden age” (in the past and future), the centrality of poetry in transfiguring the world––often find their richest elaborations in Novalis’s literary and poetic works. For example, if one wants to understand Novalis’s philosophy of history, it is not only important to read his philosophical essay Christianity or Europe and the relevant fragments, but also the Fifth Hymn of the Hymns to the Night (1800), which in its mythopoetic figuration of world history is comparable to Hölderlin’s great elegy “Bread and Wine.” Here Novalis takes up the image shared by his contemporaries (Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel and others) of ancient Greece as a former golden age of unity between nature and culture, but supplements this with an image of the Christian event as overcoming the human fear of death that still defined the Greek world (conquering “death by death,” as it is gnomically put in the Eastern Orthodox liturgy). Similarly, to ascertain Novalis’s perspectives on nature and scientific knowledge, it is not only important to read his short essay On Goethe and numerous fragments, but also his unfinished novella The Disciples at Saïs (Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs, c. 1798-1800). To offer one more example: If one wishes to understand Novalis’s conception of the place of poetic imagination in giving meaning to the world, one needs to decipher Klingsohr’s Märchen (fairy tale) in the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799/1800). This is not a straightforward task given its fusion of alchemical allegory (stars and metals are personified) and qualities we associate with fairy tales. Two of the central figures are the Scribe, who clearly represents the understanding or a dividing intelligence, and Fable, who embodies the poetic imagination. This aspect of the narrative is a vivid, symbolic portrayal of something Novalis sketches in a fragment: “Poetry heals the wound inflicted by the understanding. (Fragments and Studies:1799-1800, no. 572)”
As I have argued elsewhere, for both Hölderlin and Novalis, the poetic elaboration of “philosophical ideas” is not mere window dressing or an ornamental way of putting what could be better expressed in purely conceptual terms. Rather, the poetic transfiguration of ideas is a higher expression of them. In contrast to the mature Hegel who thought that philosophy exceeds art––including poetry––(and religion) in its capacity to articulate the Absolute, for Hölderlin and Novalis, poetry is the fulfillment of philosophy. Thus, in Assorted Fragments III (1798) Novalis writes: “Poetry is the hero of philosophy…. Philosophy is the theory of poetry. It shows us what poetry should be, one and all. (no. 280)” These brief reflections suffice to show that the division of Novalis’s corpus into philosophical works, on the one hand, and literary/poetic works, on the other, is an artificial one.
The fragment in itself is a poetic form of philosophy and Novalis’s “poetic texts” are infused with “philosophical ideas.” Recent decades have invested much in the ideal of interdisciplinarity as a means of overcoming the epistemic and ethical impasses resulting from the division of disciplines. But Novalis is a far more radical cross-disciplinary thinker. He did not aim to fuse disciplines in an external manner; rather, as a philosopher he was a poet and scientist, and as a poet, he was a philosopher and scientist, and so on. Or, to use Coleridge’s relevant terminology, all of Novalis’s writings display the esemplastic power of the poetic imagination (“esemplastic” = the power to shape into one). Unfortunately, Novalis scholarship (like Hölderlin scholarship) has not reached the point of an adequate fusion of philosophical and literary interpretation. This also highlights the degree to which expertise in the humanities remains, for the most part, compartmentalized. The synthesis of disciplines required for an adequate understanding of Novalis is a task and ideal that stands before us, and one towards which Reid’s volume will offer an important stimulus.
Reid provides an extensive introduction to the volume and Novalis’s oeuvre as well as shorter introductions prior to specific texts by Novalis. These offer an insightful overview of Novalis’s work, his main ideas, and the current state of Novalis scholarship. They are invariably illuminating and accessible, and even indicate Novalis’s relevance to contemporary philosophical concerns. These will be of great value to scholars and students who are looking for a general orientation with regard to Novalis’s oeuvre and a starting point for their own further research. Reid presents the lay of the land and the key issues without getting bogged down by scholastic disputes in the secondary literature.
One of the central issues in philosophical scholarship on Novalis is the status of the Absolute within his thought. (The Absolute is the name, within German idealist philosophy, for the all-encompassing reality, for what in a theological context might be identified as a pantheist [or panentheist] conception of God.) Frank made strong arguments for the case that Novalis is a Kantian skeptic about the Absolute, that it lies beyond the limits of human knowledge. The best we can do, according to Frank’s reading of Novalis, is intimate the ineffable in art and poetry. While this remains the dominant reading, historians of philosophy, including Frederick Beiser and Dalia Nassar, have made strong cases for Novalis as an Absolute Idealist in close proximity to Schelling, for whom the Absolute––the unity of mind and nature––can be known through intellectual intuition, with art providing the exemplary instance of this intuition. Novalis, on this interpretation, thinks that the Absolute transcends discursive knowledge, but is manifest in poetry (broadly conceived). Schelling and Novalis also similarly endeavored to combine transcendental philosophy with a philosophy of nature. Novalis’s position is nonetheless distinct from Schelling’s. Schelling is a systematic and architectonic thinker (like Kant and Hegel), even if he is known for the protean transformations of his philosophical positions. Novalis is a more poetic philosopher in that analogy and metaphor play a more intimate role in his writing. And in Novalis’s philosophical reflections on nature there is more empiricism (“active empiricism” as he describes Goethe’s approach to science) and less a priori construction than in Schelling. Rather than a conceptual system, we find in Novalis an interwoven, yet incomplete, tapestry, in which medicine and philosophy, mathematics and poetry, music and nature, the inner and the outer, are entwined to form a vivid picture of the cosmos. While it is not incorrect to describe Novalis’s philosophical standpoint as a form of Absolute Idealism, in light of the primacy of poetry, it is perhaps better designated as Absolute Poetry. In one telling fragment he writes: “… Poetry is the truly absolute reality. This is the core of my philosophy. The more poetic, the truer. (On Goethe, no. 473)”
Reid aims to steer a middle, and diplomatic, course in the moments when he touches on the debate concerning the status of the Absolute in Novalis, though he tends more in the direction of Frank’s position. In this context, Reid also affirms an affinity between Novalis and the twentieth-century conceptions of human finitude that we find in Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre and others. One passage that is often cited in support of the view that Novalis was a Kantian about the limits of knowledge is the very first fragment in Pollen: “We seek the unconditioned [das Unbedingte] everywhere and always find only conditioned things [Dinge].” However, one must be careful with how one interprets a single fragment. First, elsewhere Novalis quite clearly articulates a position which rejects any unbridgable chasm between the conditioned and the unconditioned, the finite and the infinite. Central to Novalis’s philosophy is the notion that the finite is the manifestation or mediation of the infinite, that for the poetic imagination the appearances are “hieroglyphs”––symbolic presentations––of the Absolute. As he puts it poetically in his notes for the continuation of his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen: “The supernatural must already shine through everything here––like a fairytale.” Second, in a number of fragments Novalis affirms the knowability of the Absolute. While it is true that Novalis regards the Absolute as inexhaustible and as incomprehensible––in the sense that we can never have a comprehensive or totalizing grasp of it––this inexhaustibility of the Absolute has been mistaken for the inaccessibility or utter transcendence of the Absolute. In contrast, for Novalis the Absolute is a positive infinity, which we know through our own spiritual activity. He expresses this clearly––if somewhat paradoxically––in Assorted Fragments III (no. 304). It is important to preface this fragment by noting that the word here translated as “thing” is Sache and not Ding (“thing” in the first fragment of Pollen)––Sache could also be translated as “matter” in the sense of a “subject matter”: “Everything worthy of love is an object (a thing)––the infinitely worthy of love is an infinite thing––something that one can have only by way of ceaseless, infinite activity. One can only possess a thing.” In the Teplitz Fragments Novalis goes so far as to make the bold claim: “Nothing is more attainable for the spirit than the infinite. (no. 335)”
Reid draws attention to several places in which Novalis positions his own philosophy, which he termed “magical idealism” (in contrast to “transcendental idealism,” “subjective idealism,” and other related termini), as an improvement on Kant as well as Fichte. Even more interesting is Novalis’s confession in a letter to F. Schlegel that “Plotinus is dearer to my heart” than Kant and Fichte (10 December 1798). Throughout Novalis’s writings there is an emphasis on self-activity and transcendental reflexivity in which Novalis is open about his indebtedness to Fichte. While it is wrong to regard Novalis’s philosophy as no more than a poeticized version of Fichte’s Wissenschaftlehre (Doctrine of Science), as Hegel and others have done, this is nonetheless an important strand of his thought. Novalis writes that “Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is nothing but the schema of the inner being of the artist” (Marginalia on Friedrich Schlegel) and elsewhere: “… The transcendental poet is the transcendental human being as such. (Poetry, no. 47 [1798])” But, beyond this, we find in Novalis a clear affirmation of the “intelligible world”––the Platonic realm of ideas––in sympathy with Neoplatonism. Readers of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will remember that, for Kant, while there is a correspondence between the categories of the understanding and (sensible) intuitions (sense perceptions), our human faculties do not grant us access to intuitions that correspond to “ideas of reason” such as God, freedom, and immortality. Novalis, in contrast, clearly believes that we can cultivate our spiritual senses or organs, such that we do have (non-sensible) intuitions that correspond to these ideas. He refers to the human soul as a sense system of the “spiritual world” (Assorted Fragments I) and writes in Assorted Remarks (Pollen): “The most arbitrary prejudice is to deny the human being the capacity to be outside himself, to be beyond the senses with consciousness. At every moment, the human being can be a supersensible being…. (no. 23)” We should, I think, take Novalis at his word when he affirms his close affinity to Neoplatonism.
Reid’s translations of Novalis’s writings are reliable and excellent on the whole, especially his translations of Novalis’s fragments, essays and poetic prose. The renderings of Novalis’s formal poetry, which appears in various places including Heinrich von Ofterdingen and parts of Hymns to the Night, approximate the original rhythms and convey the meaning as well as the rhyme schemes of Novalis’s verses, but are not as accomplished as the prose translations. There were a few places, unsurprisingly, where I wondered about individual word choices, and at first I was unsure of Reid’s choice to translate Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs as the The Disciples at Saïs. This unfinished poetic novella about nature––and the ways in which we might come to know nature––has been previously translated as The Novices at Saïs, in the sense that we speak of a “novice” or student of a religious order. One of the primary meanings of the German word “Lehrling” is that of an “apprentice,” such as an apprentice of a trade, and the word calls to mind Goethe’s celebrated Bildungsroman, on which Novalis remarks in several places, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). While I first considered “novice” a better translation as it has a certain lightness to it like “Lehrling,” and similarly implies a person who is still in the formative stage of learning, as I re-read the novella I came to appreciate Reid’s choice of “disciple.” The word’s gravitas came to seem quite fitting after all. Such is, of course, the great benefit of translation––and the plurality of translations––as each translation is inevitably an interpretation of the original source, diverse translations serve to bring out aspects of the wealth of the original text, which we might otherwise miss.
Reid has provided Anglophone students and scholars alike with the go-to volume for those who wish to get acquainted with the scope and character of Novalis’s philosophical and poetic works, and the volume makes a convincing case for the integrity––though inevitable incompleteness––of Novalis’s oeuvre. The volume also has appeal for general readers, though they are likely to be less interested in tracing the formation of Novalis’s thought in his early notes and fragments and in deciphering some of Novalis’s more obscure reflections. I wonder whether a companion volume, something like The Essential Novalis: Selected Philosophical, Literary and Poetic Writings, would be inviting to general readers. It could include Novalis’s most striking literary works, The Disciples at Saïs, Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Hymns to the Night. These could be preceded by a kind of “best of” the fragments and essays––a selection amounting to 100 pages or so from Pollen, Logological Fragments, On Goethe, Monologue, Christianity or Europe, and a few other texts. The selection would, of course, be a one-sided reflection of the individual editor’s take on Novalis, but it would serve to bring into relief the potency and brilliance of Novalis’s thinking and writing. That said, the general reader can also read selectively, or wend their own path, through Reid’s ample and invaluable volume.
Luke Fischer is a poet and philosopher. His books include his third collection of poetry A Gamble for my Daughter(Vagabond Press, 2022) and the monographs Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking: Romanticism and the Living Present (Bloomsbury, 2024) and The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the “New Poems” (Bloomsbury, 2015). His co-edited volumes include The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021) and Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019). He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney where he is also an Honorary Associate in Philosophy. For more information, visit: www.lukefischer.net
Read Luke Fischer on Ellen Hinsey's The Invisible Fugue
