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Peter Bornedal:
The Interpretations of Art
Part III: Romanticism

Contents
List of Tables

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Classical Transparency and Romantic Opaqueness

1) The Modern Conception of Poetry
2) A General Theme of the Work
3) The Question of Method and Reading-Strategy
4) A Brief Overview of the Composition of the Work

1
1
2
5
8

PART ONE: NEOCLASSICISM

Chapter 1: Neoclassicism, Its Freedoms and Its Norms
1) Rejecting Poetry as Irresponsible and Deceptive
2) The Consistency of Platos Doctrine on Poetry
3) Poetry as a Discourse Without an Object
4) The Justifications of Poetry
4.1) Poets are not Liars 25
4.2) An Evasive Distinction Between
Imitation and Inspiration 28
4.3) The Purposes of Poetry Between
History and Philosophy 32
5) Reason as an Image of Nature
5.1) Rationality as Self-Evaluation Under
the Influence of an Other 36
5.2) Moderation and Excess 42
5.3) The Dangerous Excess of Refinement in Art
the Medium as Structural Principle 45
6) The Rules of the Theater
6.1) The Justification of Rules 48
6.2) Aristotle and The Unities 50
6.3) The Unities as Imitation of the Theater 53

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15
17
21
25

36

48

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Chapter 2: The Law of the NameLe Cid as Example
1) Code and Text
2) The Code of Honor
3) The Lack of Choice and Freedom
4) The Deathdrive of the Text
5) The Role of the King

65
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70
73
76
78

PART TWO: TRANSITION AND PREROMANTICISM

Chapter 3: Classicists against Classical Ideals
1) Another Nature
2) Consequences of an Epistemological Breakdown
2.1) Transcending Discourse, Discovering Life 93
2.2) The Rejection of the Unities 98
3) Abolishing the Parallelism Between Poetry and Painting
3.1) Parallels Between Poetry and Painting 101
3.2) Interpretations of the Mouth of Laocoon 104
3.3) Lessings Semiotics 106
Chapter 4: Learning How to Judge Beauty
1) Abandoning the Neoclassical Episteme
2) Art and Nature, a New Juxtaposition
2.1) The Reorientation of Art 122
2.2) The Sublime as a Quality Found in Nature 125
2.3) Sight and Image, and the New Definition of Art 127
3) In Pursuit of a Uniform Standard of Taste
3.1) A Brief Sketch of the Problem 130
3.2) In Pursuit of Order (Hume) 131
3.3) In Pursuit of Order (Burke) 137
3.4) Burkes Analysis of Beauty and Sublimity 142
4) Kants Notion of Transcendental Beauty
4.1) Beauty as an Experiential and as a
Transcendental Quality 144
4.2) Beauty as Disinterest 145
4.3) Beauty as Universal 151
4.4) Beauty as Purposiveness Without Purpose 153
5) Kants Concept of Genius

89
89
93

101

119
119
122

130

144

155

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Chapter 5: The Origins of Man, Language, and Poetry
1) The Rational Principle: Origins and Differential Systems
2) The Formation of the First Words and Before
2.1) The First Passions and the Emergence
of Language 172
2.2) The Reflective Process, and how the First
Word Finds Its Way To Human Consciousness 176
2.2.1) The Non-Origin of Language 176
2.2.2) The Origin of Language in Reason 179
3) The Living and the Dead Languages, Voice and Writing
3.1) The Influence of the Climate 182
3.2) Sound and SenseA New Concept of Poetry 184
4) The Natural and the Contrived
4.1) A Desire for the Return of Nature 189
4.2) The Naive Artist 193
5) The Distinction Between Classic and Romantic
5.1) The Controversy About the Invention
of the Distinction 196
5.2) The Natural Realist and the Cultural Idealist 198
5.3) Schlegel About the Objective and the Interesting 203

169
169
172

Chapter 6: Emotions and Social Restrictions

Die Leiden des Jungen Werther as Example
1) Narrative Framework
2) A Natural Structure, the Seasons
3) The Ambiguous Evaluation of Naivet
4) The Sensitive Artist Contra the Prosaic Bourgeois
5) The Lack of Presence of Death

215

182

189

196

215
217
219
225
232

PART THREE: ROMANTICISM

Chapter 7: Inventing an Other Reality
1) Individualism and Transcendentalism in the
Romantic Paradigm
2) The Romantic Artist and the Discontent With the World
2.1) Inspiration and the Other World 241
2.2) A Ray of Dim Light 243
2.3) Art as Auto-Affection 245

239
239
241

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2.4) Music as Imitation of Feelings;
a Language of the Heart 249
3) Art as a Universal and Infinite Task
3.1) The View of Art as Mythology 253
3.2) Poetry as an Infinite Ideal 257
3.3) Romantic Irony 259
4) Philosophy and Art. Art Without Frame
4.1) The Work of Art In-and-For-Itself 262
4.2) Schellings Dialectics 263
4.3) The Universe as Art and the
Construction of Genius 268
4.4) Self-Reflection and Imagination 272
5) Imaginative Language Contra Rustic Language
5.1) Imagination 276
5.2) Coleridges and Wordsworth
Controversy over Poetry 279
5.2.1) The Problem Stated 279
5.2.2) Wordsworths Low and Rustic
Poetic Language 279
5.2.3) Why Rustic Language Bothers Coleridge 285

253

262

276

Chapter 8: Infantilizing People, Sentimentalizing Society

Heinrich von Ofterdingen as Example
1) Representing Romantic Reality
2) Beyond the Poetry of the Blue Flower
3) Descending into the Underground in Search of Truth
4) Metaphysical Ignorance and the
Importance of Illegible Books
5) The Metaphysical Task of Undoing the
Death of the Beloved
Conclusion: Summary of the Point of View
1) Neoclassicism
2) Transition and Preromanticism
3) Romanticism

302

Bibliography

347

Index

356

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320
331
331
336
343

Chapter 7
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Inventing an Other Reality

1) Individualism and Transcendentalism in the Romantic Paradigm

At the end of the 18th century, the so-called Romantic School was
established in Germany around the journal Athenum. The School included such names as August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel,
Schleiermacher, Novalis, Tieck, and Wackenroder. The program was to
formulate a romantic world-view in general, and a romantic view of art
and the artist in particular. A notion of a romantic poetry had already
been developed, but usually it appeared in a discourse where one distinguished between classicism and romanticism, or between related oppositions
such
as
ancient/modern,
objective/interesting,
naive/sentimental poetry.
Where there was a tendency to focus on classical and ancient history
in these oppositions, it now became the explicit task to focus on the
romantic side. One turned away from the nostalgic longing for a naive
beginning, a golden time, a prehistoric origin of people. If beforehand
one looked to the ancient Greeks in order to encounter an example of
ideal poetry, one now tended to project the ideal into the future as an
ideal one should approximate and ultimately join. Although one did not
lose the fascination with the ancient Greeks, one began to inquire ones
own present in order to apprehend what a sublime poetry should be like,
how it should be conceived, and under which conditions it could be developed.
In this attempt to reformulate the creative process, it is only partially
true that the romantics focused on the outstanding individual and its superabundance of overflowing feelings, as is commonly asserted. The
individualistic tendency in romantic art-production is only one element
in the romantic paradigm, one which has to be qualified, insofar as the
glorification of the ingenious individual is inseparably linked to the un-

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derstanding of this individual as a mere medium for an extraindividual spirituality. It is the outstanding individual privilege to partake in this universal spirituality; it is indeed only outstanding insofar
as it relates to this extra-individual spirituality from which it unconsciously receives inspiration. Hence, besides the individualistic tendency
in romanticism, there is a universal tendencya tendency according to
which the individual is absorbed in a universal spirit (nature, mythology, or a new religion). According to this understanding, the inspired
artist is transported to a transcendental world in which the entire actual
world is sublimated into poetry. (In the following chapter we will see
how Novalis represents this transcendental world.)
Thus, as a rule, romantic poetry is the product of individual inspiration, but only insofar as individual inspiration transgresses the purely
individual. Romanticism becomes a peculiar super-individualism, where
the outstanding poet transports him- or herself from the present world
into a universal spiritual world in which everything is poetry. What
characterizes the Romantic School is a longing, a desire to partake in
this supernatural world.
Obviously, a desire-object conceived in this manner is not easily
achieved. The mundane and social world, with its obligations and conventions, is an obstacle for participating in the spiritual world of poetry,
and romantic poetry is partly conceived to overcome this obstacle. The
bourgeois, the bureaucrat, or the politician are not typical heroes in the
romantic paradigm; neither are they expected to understand the romantic artists and their art. In turn, romantic artists do not make attempts to
understand a practical or political dimension of the world. Romantic
artists advance an artistic self-interpretation emphasizing innocence,
youth, sensitivity, delicacy, receptivityqualities as alien as possible to
matters concerning business, authority, or power. This hostility against
the social world finds radical expressions in Tiecks & Wackenroders
essays about art, and in Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
In the romantic paradigm, the longing for a poeticized other world
becomes a quality in itself. The desire becomes more important than the
desired object itself, because the object of romantic desire is purely
ideal. The object, or strictly non-object, of romantic desire is ultimately a fantasy of stopping the desire, of suspending it in a completely
fulfilled existence spent only with poetry and beauty. By the experience
of pure beauty (beauty of art, of nature, or of woman), the receptive individual is transported into the super-natural realm of the purely poeti-

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cal where all alienation is absent. Therefore the paradox, where the desire is a desire for its own suspension and annihilation, a desire without
an actual object, consequently a phantasm.
The logic of desire is a logic of difference since desire always presupposes a distinction between self and other, a separation between self
and other. The other is something or somebody which the self cannot
fully attain or possess but which it nevertheless (consequently!) desires
to attain or possess. When romantic desire first and foremost is a desire
for non-desire, for the halt, suspension, and annihilation of desire, it
isaccording to all logicalso a desire to annihilate the difference between self and other. One wants to erase differences encountered in
ones life-world, such as differences between self and beloved, self and
nature, self and art, or self and historical past. The desire is to become
one with the All. Therefore, an impossible and fundamentally narcissistic desire, a desire without actual object, a desire solely for identity,
sameness, and singularity.
At the peak of romantic self-reflection, the romantics realize the impossible in fulfilling this desire. They perceive both the desire and its
impracticality; they apprehend the irony of their own project. At the
highest point of self-reflection, romantic irony develops as a metaworldview, disclosing to the romantic poets that their enthusiasm, tirelessly expressed in essays and poems, is after all of no use in attaining
the projected ideal. In this meta-worldview, they self-deconstruct their
most dear convictions.1

2) The romantic Artist and the Discontent With the World

2.1) Inspiration and the Other World
Commonly, one determines romanticism by focusing on the belief in
inspiration, that is, the conviction that artists are creatively stimulated
by the power of a divine agent. The concept of inspiration dates back to
the beginning of Western philosophy, but as it is formed in the romantic
discourse, the notion of inspiration has its origin in the late 18th century. It is only in the most superficial way related to Platos concept of
inspiration. Rather it is related to ideas of simplicity and naivet, to the
conviction that grand art should be as natural as possible, that it should
develop spontaneously, and that it should consist of immediate insights
rather than of inherited dogmas.

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With this idea of inspiration, the source of art becomes something
incomprehensible. How one should compose a great work of art cannot
be prescribed, as it was among the neoclassical criticswhether one
recommended that artists carried out a fundamental rational attitude or
observed certain rules in their work. The romantic artists oppose the rational and commonsensical artists, who are carefully observing and carrying out social proprieties. The romantic artists are driven by forces
over which they have no control. They achieve their insights in the
work of art from sources unknown to them.
The perfect work of art emerges from somewhere beyond the perceptible and experiential world, beyond the apparent world. It is a
glimpse into a true and ideal world, which the artists themselves do not
comprehend as source and origin of the work of art. Although they are
convinced about its existence, they do not understand the nature of the
inspirational reservoir from which their creative forces flow.
Because inspiration requires a belief in another world, the notion
has inevitable Christian connotations. It makes sense only within a paradigm where a supreme being is assumed to protect the artistic endeavor. Inspiration is the postulation of a tie between a true and an apparent world in the specific Christian sense in which: a) the true world is
understood as sacred, and the apparent as profane; b) the true world is
conceived as divine, the apparent as a world for-us, as what appears
through perceptions and experiences; c) the true world is what we strive
to attain, the apparent is what we try to escape.
Artistic inspiration is like a bridge between these two worlds, a
bridge on which the ingenious artists are privileged to walk, but without
ever knowing the other side, which just announces itself as a blessing of
the inspired work of art. Inspiration imprints itself in the souls of artists.
When they create a work of art under this influence, they do not know
what they are doing. This incomprehensibilityas of both the creative
source and processbecomes one of the most significant distinctions of
art and the artist. If one cannot penetrate the mystery of a sublime and
beautiful work of art, it is only additional proof of the divine hand in its
creation. Insights in rules, decorum, dogmas of taste, etc., only degrade
the creative process; such insights only obstruct the spontaneity with
which divine inspiration influences the artist. If art is created by the intervention of God, it ought to remain one of the inexplicable wonders of
the world.

2.2) A Ray of Dim Light

In Herzenergiessungen, Tieck and Wackenroder narrate a story
about inspiration. The narrator has read the following enigmatic sentence of Raphaels: Since one sees so few beautiful images of women,
I constantly have a certain image on my mind, which comes to my
soul.2 What follows is supposed to clarify and interpret this sentence,
narrated by a friend of Raphaels. The reader is introduced to an incident enabling Raphael to create his Madonna in a flash of inspiration.
Not everybody can count on inspirational support in their creative
work. A keen sensitivity and receptivity in the artist is a must. When the
narrator records Raphaels story, he underscores time and again the sensitive emotional constitution of the artist. When the narrator himself
learns about the creation of Raphaels Madonna, it fills him mit Trnen
um den Hals, no less, although this is a happy story about creating
something marvelous. When he tells about what preceded Raphaels inspirational moment, he emphasizes the sensitivity of the artist: He told
me how he from his earliest childhood always had felt a certain sacred
devotion for the mother of Christ, such that the pronunciation of her
name always had made him quite sorrowful.3 When Raphael has a vision in which he sees the face of Madonna lighted up and revivified in a
ray of light from above, he breaks out in tears: The divinity of this picture affected him so much that clear tears welled up in his eyes. 4 This
delicacy and sensitivity is undoubtedly an integral part of the new image of the artist. Art moves to tears by its sheer beauty; or rather, because beauty is perceived as a product of something divine and innocent (the cause of Raphaels tears is explicitly die Gttlichkeit). Divine art moves to tears because it transports the recipients out of their
alienated existence and carries them beyond this apparent world into
another true world.
After Raphael in vain has been struggling to render the face of Madonna, he one night wakes up from sleep and sees, on the opposite wall,
an image of Madonna. In a ray of dim light her face is lighted up on his
unfinished painting.
One dark night his eyes were attracted to a bright light on the wall opposite his bed, and when he really looked at it, he became aware that
his picture of Madonna, still hanging unfinished on the wall, by the
most delicate ray of light had become a wholly perfect and truly living

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picture. The divinity of this picture affected him so much that clear
tears welled up in his eyes. . . . It seemed to him that this picture was
exactly what he had always sought, even though he had had only an obscure and confused idea about it. How he again fell asleep, he did not
remember. The next morning he woke up as born again. The apparition
was firmly engraved in his heart and mind, and now he succeeded in
rendering the mother of Christ exactly as his soul had envisioned; since
then he has always felt a certain reverence for his painting.5

This is how inspiration is represented and explained in the text.

The divine agent allows the artist to see something which he has only
faintly envisioned. In this textual representation of inspiration as
light and imprint, inspiration is conveyed to the artist in three phases. First, the ray of light passes from the undetermined other world into
this world, as such making itself visible to the artist as a projection on
the wall. Secondly, the light passes from the outer world of the wall into
the inner world of the artist, as such making an unconscious imprint in
his soul. These two phases are analogous. When the artist has his vision, he has just woken up and is still situated between sleep and wakefulness, between dream and reality. In this state, he seesor is it a
dreamMadonna dimly projected on the wall of his bedroom. This
dark bedroom becomes an analogy for his unconscious. As the light is
projected into his dark bedroom, it is projected into the interior of his
unconscious. The projection on the wall is parallel to the projection in
his soul. When he goes back to sleep, he forgets the incident, but it does
not forget him; the vision has inscribed itself in his soul. It first travels
from the other world to this world, as an emanation from God, and secondly, from the outer world of the dark bedroom to the darkness of the
artists interior life. From other world to outer world to inner world.
The final phase for this light of inspiration consists of its externalization and materialization. It finally dissolves itself as light; it manifests
itself in the product of art, by far the most dubious movement according
to the romantic critic. When Raphael wakes up, he starts working without remembering the events of the night. (How he is able to recount the
events to the narrator, who passes them on to us, remains an enigma.)
Now he accomplishes what he was beforehand unable to do; he depicts
the heavenly countenance of Madonna. He works as in a dream, his unconsciousness does the work.
Another story from Herzenergiessungen supports this general conception of ingenious creativity. It tells how a young painter tries in vain

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to copy and imitate Raphaels paintings, but cannot. Although he is successful in imitating paintings, and in this case has been particularly meticulous, he is never able to capture the liveliness, authenticity, and spirituality of Raphaels figures. He finally writes to Raphael in order to
inquire about his secret. Raphael responds:
What you want to know from me, I unfortunately cannot tell you, not
because it is a secret I will not reveal . . . but because it is unknown to
myself. . . . It [the painting] is completed like in a pleasant dream, and
during the work I was thinking more on the object, than on how I was
about to represent it.6

If there is a secret, it is secret to Raphael as well. He cannot tell

what he is doing. The creation of art is like dreaming, it is beyond conscious thinking. When working, he focuses more on the object than on
the means of representation. Rules, technical skills and devices, selection and organization of material, are not matters of concern. After God
has touched him, an image is imprinted in his soul, which is what he
renders in the painting. This story is an explanation of the enigmatic
words: Ich halte mich an ein gewisses Bild im Geiste, welches in
meine Seele kommt.

2.3) Art as Auto-Affection

The realization and materialization of art develops into a dilemma in
the romantic paradigm. The ideal is that art should remain detached
from the mundane world. However, as soon as it materializes as an artproduct, the profane world gets the opportunity to respond to it. What
should have been reserved the most delicate souls becomes a product
for the masses. Other essays from Herzenergiessungen deal explicitly
with this realization, materialization, and externalization of art. Especially the essays about the composer Joseph Berlinger deal with this
problem, and the theme is continued in Phantasien ber die Kunst,
where several essays presumably are written by Joseph Berlinger.
The essays narrate the story of young sensitive Joseph Berlinger,
growing up in an un-understanding and ignorant family, with a burning
desire of becoming an artist, a composer. Music becomes an escape
from his sad and dismal life, and throughout his childhood he finds escape in the dream of devoting his life to music.

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Joseph Berlinger is the epitome of a romantic artist. For him, music
is not simply music; it is existential-religious illumination of the receptive individual. It transports the individual into another world and helps
him/her escape from this world, obliterating the individuals unhappiness in this world.
Music makes Joseph Berlinger forget his unhappy life. After listening to music, he is like intoxicated. Music is spiritual wine: His
whole being was still burning from the spiritual wine that had intoxicated him, and he saw everything passing by him in another light. 7 It
is his dream to escape from this life through music, which serves a transcendental other world of delicate feelings. Music becomes a higher and
more refined language, a language without grammar and distinctive
signs.
It is commonly asserted that in the romantic paradigm one replaces
rules and dogmas with the idea of an inspirational creative activity. This
is certainly correct, but it is still only one tendency in the general replacement of language, reference, and distinctiveness with feelings,
translucency, and indistinctiveness. All affairs referring to a practical,
mundane, and apparent world are rejected as profane, even a language
referring to this worldinsofar as one pursues other non-linguistic
means of expression. Among else, music is perceived as such a replacement for language. Music becomes the symbol of a language of
feelings.
To Joseph Berlinger, music is the highest poetic expression. It is his
dream to transform his life into music: He thought, you must always
without cessation remain in this beautiful poetical chaos; your entire life
must become music.8 However, the romantic sensitivity of Joseph Berlinger implies insensitivity regarding worldly affairs. Here as in Novalis, romantic sensitivity concerns only the creative self, and becomes
easily a rebuff to actual sufferings. This is due to two assumptions inherent in the romantic paradigm. First, actual suffering is ignored in a paradigm where only the refined, the delicate, and the beautiful receive
recognition. Secondly, structurally the other in the form of an audience or a reviewer, as well as the representation of an actual other,
is suppressed. Sensitivity is cultivated exclusively in relation to the artistic work.
These assumptions are explicit in the story of Joseph Berlinger. His
father is a doctor who has devoted his life to help the poor and suffering, and he would like to see his son follow in his footsteps. The sensi-

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tive Joseph Berlinger, however, could never submit himself to such
mundane concerns.
My father was always preaching that is was the duty and obligation of
man to blend with the crowd and give counsel and alms, and bandage
disgusting wounds and cure hideous illnesses. And always was there an
inner voice crying out: No! No! You are born for a higher, a more
noble goal.9

His higher goal is to create music, but, as it finally shows, not for
the sake of an audience but only for the sake of the spiritual life of himself as artist. The God whom Joseph Berlinger in his youth beseeches to
realize his dream is a God specifically designed to suit the artist; a God
concerned exclusively with art, a God protecting the artist, and a God
wanting to see himself glorified in works of art.
Gradually he came to the conclusion, that God had put him into the
world because he was destined to become an excellent musical artist. . .
. It is the truth . . . that he often in his solitude fell down on his knees
and prayed to God to direct him to become a really brilliant artist for
the heaven and for the earth.10

Eventually God answers his prayers. Finally, Joseph Berlinger becomes a renowned composer. His dreams and aspirations come true.
But now this fulfilled desire is worse than the desire, the realization of
the goals worse than dreaming about the goals. In a situation where he
has finally obtained the goals he once desired, the desire is now to return to the past where everything was still merely a dream, an unfulfilled desire. This past is now recognized as ideal, as a moment of selfidentity and self-presence, because Joseph Berlinger in this past lived
for himself, in his own world of dreams, without bothering about social
obligations. Having realized his dreams, Joseph Berlinger now recognizes how disappointing this realization is.
When I think back on the dreams of my youthhow blessed I was in
these dreams! . . . But now I breathe a very impure air. How much more
ideal did I not live when I in my innocent youth and in quiet solitude
still only enjoyed art.11

His distress is caused by the relationship the artist suddenly has to

his audience. With the introduction of this relationship, art is no longer

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pure ideal as it was in the dreams of the adolescent. Now that it has obtained material form, its relationship to the mundane world and its audience becomes contaminating because art should exist beyond and
above the world. This relationship to a referent located in the practical
and political world fills Joseph Berlinger with indescribable, and outright physical disgust. The mere thought creates in him an aversion and
abhorrence that prevent him from speaking. Such relations are worse
than words can describe; they demean, corrupt, and deprave the artist
more than he is able to explain.
But the most repulsive is all the other relationships that restricts an artist. All the hideous envy and malice, all the pitiful customs and receptions, first and foremost the subjection of art under the will of the
court;it is beyond me to speak another word upon thisit is all so
unworthy and so depraving for the human soul that I cannot express
one more syllable about it.12

In his attempt to offer an explication, the artist must surrender. The

narrator reads us the conclusion at which Joseph Berlinger arrives, a
conclusion to which the narrator must also subscribe. Art is not meant
for an audience, but first and foremost for the artists themselves: He
arrived to the idea that an artist should only be an artist for the elevation
of his own soul and for a few people who understand him. And I can
not quite discard this idea.13
Thus, auto-affection is the economic principle for Tiecks romantic
artist, an artist creating for himself only. This is the reason why the romantic work of art does not need to take concrete material form; ideally
it can remain within the artist himself as a metaphysical dream. The
pure imaginative life of the artist is authenticated as the actual purpose
of art, whereas the actual production of a work of art is anguishing.
This feeling of agony, resulting from the contact with audience and
world, is also provoked by technique. Not only audience and world
force the artists to abandon their auto-affective imaginative life, also
technique serves such a function. Technique is understood as the
rules and laws for composition, as a certain grammara so-called
Kunstgrammatik by which artists create mechanically. Such mechanical means make the artists like machines. This Kunstgrammatik
makes the artists scientific machine-minds turning out routine products. The artists transform the work of art into a commodity, and artistic
vocation into a matter of trade and commerce.

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[I learned] that all melodies . . . are based on one single compulsive

mathematical rule! That I, instead of flying freely, first had to learn to
crawl around in the clumsy armor and cage of an art-grammar! That I
first had to endure learning how to produce, with a common scientific
machine-mind, a regular routine thing.14

By this Maschinenverstande art is estranged from human passion

and music becomes a thingeven a regelrechtes Ding. Undergoing
this objectification artists destroy their relationship to the divine in art.
Disciplines such as mathematics, grammar (language in general),
science, technique, and everything related to machines and machinery
become a disturbance of the ideal relationship between the artist and the
artistically divine.

2.4) Music as Imitation of Feelings; A Language of the Heart

In this romantic conception, writing is not only suppressed by
speech; it is more extreme, speech is suppressed by music. In general,
all forms of linguistic representations are suppressed. In this situation,
music becomes an example of a non-linguistic representation, a romantic anti-language of sorts. The musical representation understands
something our profane language could never grasp.
Music is an ideal which poetry can only strive to imitate though
never reach because poetry inevitably must use the linguistic sign it
tries to escape. Music becomes a language expressing human feelings,
but not simply in order to re-present them, insofar as re-presentation
implies a presentation of something existing on a level different from
the represented. The re in re-presentation indicates that there is a categorical difference between the representation and the thing represented.
Music is not simply representation of feelings because it is not different
from the feelings it represents. Music is essentially the same as feelings.
Music is an authentic representation of feelings by being essentially
the same, whereas language is an inauthentic representation of feelings
by being essentially different.
Music therefore is a language (strictly an anti-language) expressing the inexpressible, and it is so well equipped to the task because it is
a language without distinctive signs and without a grammar, and because it is incomprehensible by not referring to neither meaning nor

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world. Music cannot, as well as feelings cannot, be comprehended intellectually and rationally. Music is the equivalent to feelings because we
understand neither.
However, there is still an uncertainty as to what music represents
and how. It appears to represent several different affairs. Besides feelings, it represents, is an analogy on, human life as such.
Soon music appears to me to be an image on our livesa quiet-brief
joy, that is created from nothing and cease into nothingthat rises and
sinks down, one does not know whya small happy green island, with
sunshine, with song and clangthat swim about on a dark, impenetrable ocean.15

Music is like life eine schner Traum, eine liebliche Seiferblase.16 Like music, both the dream and the soap bubble emerge and
disappear from nowhere into nowhere. Consequently, what music and
life have in common is the structure of time. Life is for example not
similar to the poem or the painting, that neverunless by accident
disappear in time after having been produced. The painting is a petrified and frozen expression, it remains indestructible in time; the now
of the painting remains eternally present. Music, on the other hand, follows the flow of time as life does. In this flow, all its present instances,
its now-points, a priori sink back into the past and down into oblivion. Music has the character of a dream, or a soap bubble, something
we cannot put our hands on, something that easily bursts.
But music, although essentially time, also is a means to forget time.
As the quotation above already indicates, it is like a carefree, joyful island floating about by itself on a threatening ocean. The metaphor
crackslife is not, after all, a schner Traum, not a liebliche Seiferblasebut music is. Music and life may have time in common, they
may appear from nothing and disappear into nothing, but they do not also have the island as metaphor in common. Music may be an island of
sun and joy in the midst of a burdensome life, but by consequence, life
is not an island of sun and joy in the midst of a burdensome life. One
side of the metaphor is incompatible with the other. On one side, music,
as an island in life, represents the means to forget the hardships and ordeals of life. This is what the metaphor means to say, this is its intention. But on the other side, it also says that music is like life itself, because like life, it has the structure of time. It says both that music is like

13
life, and that it is a welcome oblivion of life. This is the doubledetermination of music, it is both life and non-life.
The unsuccessful metaphor already announces something complicated about what music is and what it does. It makes people forget, and
at the same time, remember. When Joseph Berlinger, the alleged author
of these papers, listens to music, then he forgets: Then I close my eyes
to all the wars in the world, and slip silently into the land of music, as
into a land of belief . . .
This is what music is as an island, as the sun, as joy, as forgetfulness
of the surrounding threatening ocean, etc. The quotation continues
still emphasizing the relief music offers, the oblivion one may find in
music: . . . where all our doubts and sufferings are submerged in an
ocean of toneswhere we forget all the irritations of man . . .
Thus, music is in itself a sea drowning our sufferings. This island in
the ocean is itself like an ocean submerging our pains, making us forget
the ocean surrounding us. The island of music is a sea in the sea, offering us relief from the sea. Its healing power consists not least in its suspension of language and writing. The quotation continues: . . . where
no word- and speech-chattering, no confusion of letters and monstrous
hieroglyphic written signs make us dizzy, but where by an easy touch
all anxiety of our heart is at once healed . . .
And how does this healing happen, we may ask? Does music reveal
secrets to us, answer questions? . . . And how? Are questions here being answered? Are secrets being revealed to us?Oh no! But instead of
answers and revelations we are shown beautiful ethereal cloudformations, whose sight touches us, we do not know why.17
No, music does not reveal the worlds secrets, or answer our questions; it does something much better; it shows us cloud-formations.
Cloud-formations! Writing causes only confusion and chaos. Writing is
a medium which our minds might understand, but not our hearts.
Through writing we do not understand ourselves as what we essentially
are. Our heart, our essential being, is healed by music: Our spirit becomes healthy by the disclosure of wonders which are still incomprehensible and sublime. Then it is as if man says: that is what I mean!
Now I have found it! Now I am happy and gay!18
Seeing these cloud-formations, humans begin to remember their lot,
their being as humans. This is the moment they tell themselves: Now I
have found it! Now I am happy! But what did they find by perceiving
these cloud-formations, or strictly, by perceiving music as if perceiving

14
cloud-formations? They found a metaphor for the indistinct, for the
shapeless, for the limitless and floatingthey found a metaphor for
music. And this, according to their self-understanding and selfpersuasion, illuminates their being, and makes them heiter und froh.
According to this quasi-theory a human being is made up of mind
and heart. The heart understands what the mind does not understand;
it understands the truth of humans. The heart therefore also reads and
understands music, while music remains inaccessible to the mind because it counts on signs and words, on distinctions and references. Music is the medium of feelings; it expresses feelings by dressing them in
golden clouds.
However, music I regard as the most wonderful of these inventions, because it renders human feelings in a superhuman manner, because it
clothes all the incorporeal moves of our moods in golden clouds of
ethereal harmonies . . . because it speaks a language, which we do not
know in ordinary life, but which we have learned, we do not know
where, or how?19

Clouds are contrasting speech because they lack regular shape and
are boundless. When music dresses moods in golden clouds of ethereal
harmonies, music becomes a signifier, but it remains indistinct. It becomes a signifier we cannot read and do not know what signifies. Thus,
music speaks a language we are ignorant about, a language which is,
nonetheless, inherent in our nature.20 The language of music and the
language of the heart are identical languages. Music is a mirror of the
heart; a mirror wherein the heart perceives and discovers itself.
It [the music] . . . strikes in the dim world certain obscure wonder-signs
in a determined order, and the strings of our heart clings, and we understand its clang. In the mirror of the tone the human heart learns to
know itself; it is through this we learn to feel the feeling.21

Music is a mirror, by which the human heart learns to know itself; it

is even a mirror in which humans learn to feel feelings. Feelings, consequently, result from music. They do not exist before they see themselves reflected in the mirror of music, that is, not before music is invented, composed, and performed.

15
3) Art as a Universal and Infinite Task
3.1) The View of Art as Mythology
Inspiration transgresses the individual. It is both something that
occurs to only a few select individuals and a source of creation beyond
the individual. The romantic critic try to establish an idea of this source
from which art seems to flow, but which seems to elude examination
because it announces itself only spontaneously and unconsciously.
Romantic poetry becomes typically a representation of a world infused with a higher poetry. Positing this poeticized world as the foundation for the inspiration of the poet, the romantic poets want to understand and disclose, to recreate and restore, this divine poeticized world.
This is the reason why, in his programmatic essay Gesprch ber die
Poesie, Friedrich Schlegel talks about creating a new mythology, a mythology which would constitute a foundation for the poet.
The inspiration of the single individual is an unreliable source for
the creation of grand art. It is so, first because when one relies on the
rare ingenious individual one depends on chance and randomness, and
secondly because the ingenious individual is merely a medium for a
poetic universe whose representation one should be engaged in, rather
than only in brief moments of inspiration. Thus, much poetry seems to
remain hidden to mankind because there are too few geniuses to convey
it and because those exclusive few exhaust their source of inspiration
quickly. Schlegels speculation leads to the problem of how to invent a
new mythology that could constitute a foundation that might support artistic creativity.
Should the force of inspiration also in poetry continue to split up and,
when it has exhausted itself by struggling against the hostile elements,
end up in lonely silence? Are the most sacred things always to remain
nameless and formless and be left in darkness to chance.22

We are talking here about poetry and its present limitations, its
present incapacity and inability to name and represent the world. It is
established as a fact, that artistic creation happens through inspiration,
but for Schlegel this inspirational creativity meets obstacles because the
artists have to struggle with a hostile social world. The narrator of this
dialogue reminds his poet friends on their difficulties in creating because of their lack of common ground: You above all others must
know what I mean. You yourselves have written poetry, and while

16
doing so you must often have felt the absence of a firm basis for your
activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere.23
For their support, the artists consequently need a mythical foundation, a firm basis to assist their natural dispositions. This is the situation
prompting the author to suggest a new mythology in Gesprch, something the poets can share as a basis for their poetic work: Our poetry, I
maintain, lacks a focal point, such as mythology was for the ancients;
and one could summarize all the essentials in which modern poetry is
inferior to the ancient in these words: We have no mythology.24
The new mythology would not emerge from sensuous experiences
of the world, as did Greek mythology, but from the deepest depths of
the spirit, depths so profound that they are, presumably, in harmony
with the whole universe. Only when created from this invisible abyss of
the human being does art attains universality and near perfectionan
absolutely perfect work of art is becoming a contradiction in terms.
The new mythology, in contrast, must be forged from the deepest
depths of the spirit; it must be the most artful of all works of art, for it
must encompass all the others; a new bed and vessel for the ancient,
eternal fountainhead of poetry, and even the infinite poem concealing
the seeds of all other poems.25

This new universal work of art is obviously not the product of a single individual. It is rendered less as a product than revealed as a condition. It is, consequently, created by nobody in particular although all the
members of the Romantic School have an obligation and interest in partaking in the creation of this universal and infinite poem. It is an already
existing potentiality, but one which is unnoticed. It exists in nature as
imagination and love. If it is anything, it is a vibration of beauty, imagination, and love pervading nature, but this description already goes
too far in determining a principle which has no being as such. A new
mythology becomes an expression of this vibrating poetic universe. A
mythology would be the hieroglyphic expression of surrounding nature
in this transfigured form of imagination and love. The members of the
Romantic School are urged to give expression to this universal poem.
(As we shall see, Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen attempts to
represent this universal poem which infuses the world with light and
love, only perceptible to the extraordinarily sensitive and receptive individual.)

17
The new mythology presumably reflects nature in its essence. If
poetry is created according to and reflects this mythology, the work of
art also achieves organic unity. One should not pursue laws or rules in
order to achieve unity in the poetic work; in order to achieve organic
unity, one should abandon the laws of rationally thinking reason and
instead permit the beautiful confusion of imagination, the original
chaos of human naturethe variety of ancient Greek gods serves as
the best symbol of this beautiful confusion. Instead of following laws
and rules, one should now depend upon the power of the universal artmythology itself. One should submit oneself to instinctive rendition of
unity and let unity grow organically out of the chaos as initially conceived. Unity conveys itself if only the artist follows the idealnever,
by any means, specified. Provided artists surrender themselves to the
new ideals and to their own enthusiasm, the poetry pervading nature
shall germinate in their work and make it powerful and homogeneous.
With this new art-ideology something uniquely has happened to
artit has lost its borders, its frame. Whereas in earlier criticism, one
discussed the content and form of a work of art, and with this its boundaries and its frame, one dissolves all boundaries, all frames in romanticism. Not only are the genres now questionedas one questions the
principles for their division and the rules regulating this division
borders are dissolved more profoundly because art understood as poetical spirituality engulfs all areas of nature and life. Art is no longer kept
within its usual framework (the painting, the book, or the stage), and
discussed according to what it is or should be within this formerly welldefined framework. When art becomes spirit, something inexpressible
infusing and permeating nature and humans, the concrete art-product
becomes only a modest derivation of this spirit, a dim light radiating
from a sun nobody has ever seen.
It is no coincidence that the Romantic School sees an ally in contemporary idealistic philosophy.
If a new mythology can emerge only from the innermost depths of the
spirit and develop only from itself, then we find a very significant hint
and a noteworthy confirmation of what we are searching for in that
great phenomenon of our age, in Idealism.26

A new alliance between philosophy and poetry is summoned because poetry approaches intuitively the same spirit in nature, which philosophy reflectively gives reasons for. Poetry and philosophy have ul-

18
timately the same object, but on different levels. They both represent
but differentlyan inspirited nature, which in Schellings philosophy is
named God. Novalis repeats this idea in one of his fragments: Poetry
is true IdealismObserving the world as observing a vast moodSelfconsciousness of the universe.27 The gift of the ingenious poet is to
perceive this world as a mood, as a self-consciousness. Here the poet
even surpasses the philosopher, who at best is capable of thinking selfconsciousness in nature. Nature becomes a symbol of the human being,
and the artist becomes the chosen one reading and rendering this symbol.
Coleridge also accentuates this correspondence between nature and
human.
They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred
power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol. . . . They know and feel, that the potential works in
them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of
sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it.
All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit. 28

This correspondence is not just a correspondence between world

and human, but more accurately a correspondence between senseimpressions and imagination. The world of sense, the empirical world,
becomes a symbol which only gifted individuals can decipher qua their
powers of imagination. The organs of spiritthat is, the imaginationare conceived to represent a world of spirit, a world not just apparent but symbolizing the divine. As such, the human being is inherently equipped to decipher the spirituality of the world. However, only
a few are equipped with this so-called secondary imagination by
which this deciphering activity becomes creative.

3.2) Poetry as an Infinite Ideal

With the abolishment of frame and borders, the work of art can never be completed in a strict sense. The published product obviously exists as such, but a paradigm has evolved according to which art and
poetry can never expect to reach the pure, the perfect, the complete
ideal of art and poetry. Consequently, when a work of art cannot be expected to attain this distant ideal of divine completion, it is not neces-

19
sary to complete it beyond a loose selection and organization of fragmentsfragments that are bestowed upon the artist in moments of genuine inspiration. Thus, the fragment and aphorism becomes a preferred
form for the Schlegels, and for Novalis, Tieck, and Schleiermacher in
their literary journals, Athenum and Lyseum. Also Coleridges Biographia Literaria is structured fragmentary, mixing genres such as philosophy, criticism, poetry, letter-writing, and autobiography.
Wordsworths Prelude is originally conceived as a mere preface to a
much larger work. Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen remains incomplete, certainly because of the early death of the author, but it is nevertheless immediately accepted as a work in its own right.
In contemporary romantic criticism, the ultimate ideals of art are interpreted as unachievable. Art is interpreted as an unending process of
becoming. The ideal of the perfect work of art may have been realized
in the past, in the golden ages of the Greeks, as the Greeks by some
happy circumstances achieved an exemplary poetry, a perfect example
of an unattainable idea. But this ideal is lost in modern times. Already
in his early work, ber der Grieschishe Poesie, Schlegel determines
Greek poetry as the unattainable ideal for modern poetry.
This last totality of the natural education of art and taste, this highest
point of free beauty did the Greek poetry really attain. . . . I can for
these heights think of no better name than the highest beauty. It is not
only a beauty beyond which it is impossible to think of anything more
beautiful, but it is the complete example of the unattainable idea which
here becomes wholly visible; it is the arche-image of art and taste.29

After the Greeks, art remains infinitely perfectible; that is, it remains
infinitely imperfect, infinitely fragmentary. It can never attain its maximum; it may strive perpetually towards the fulfillment of the lost ideal,
but it strives in vain: Art is infinitely perfectible, and to attain an absolute maximum is not possible in its continuous development; one can
only attain a conditional relative maximum, an insurmountable fix proximal.30 Romantic poetry is a poetry infinitely striving, always becoming, but never achieving its ideals,31
Ernst Behler has found a formula in Schlegels notebooks with
which Schlegel attempts to designate this absolute work of art, the unattainable highest maximum for poetry, the poetical ideal.32 The formula
looks like this:
_____ 1/0

20
Das poetische Ideal =

1/0

| FSM

Gott

| 0

The following is an interpretation of this formula. 1 divided by 0

strictly a mathematical impossibilitysignifies here an indefinitely high
number. A root-number denominated one above zero, therefore, signifies an infinite root of the factor FSM above zero, an infinite factor,
finally raised to the one-above-zeroth power, resulting in an indefinite
high number. The formula designates an infinite root of an infinite factor raised to the power of an indefinitely high number. Needless to say,
this formula was never meant to make mathematical sense; it emphasizes no less than three expressions of the infinite, and it is a mere metaphor for the unattainable absolute ideal according to which poetry is determined. The 1/0 at both sides of the square-root seem to cancel each
other outunintentionally as that may beleaving as a result of the
equation the much simpler expression: FSM/0.
The factor FSM above 0 designates the absolutely fantastic (F/0),
the absolutely sentimental (S/0), and the absolutely mimetic (M/0) literary form, as necessary ingredients in the absolute poem (FSM/0). The
product of these three literary forms in their absolute manifestation is
finally the poetical ideal, equal to God.
As the formula emphasizes, a successful poem is no longer something one can expect to achieve, it is an ideal. By the new logic, beauty
is no longer something accomplishable; it can only be thought within
the concept of approximation. The ideal may be approximated, but indefinitely and without ever being fully realized. A fully accomplished
poetical work becomes within the new paradigm a contradiction in
terms; it even becomes blasphemous, as it would equate the poet with
God. As the formula asserts: Das Poetische Ideal = Gott. Nonetheless,
the poets are encouraged to strive toward this ideal, to strive infinitely
to approximate their poems to this dimension of truth and God, which
perpetually escapes their grasp and vision.

3.3) Romantic Irony

From the point of view of the individual, artistic creation strives toward the ideal. However, when this striving is understood as an infinite
task, it is also impossible to accomplish, and the efforts of the artists

21
seem futile. From a transcendental point of view the efforts of the poets
appear to be merely a game. Poets strive towards an ideal which they
simultaneously recognize is unattainable. This constitutes the irony of
their endeavor. At the peak of self-recognition, romantic artists include
this insight in the irony of their project in their creative activity. They
represent to themselves poetic activity, and the object of this activity, as
a game. They perceive their creativity as an infinite task that, qua infinite, produces an incomplete product. In consequence, they perceive
themselves and their creation from a towering point of view that qualifies their activity.
Friedrich Schlegel recommends that romantic artists take into account this recognition of the irony of their poetic work. He advises them
to conceive and represent life as a game.
There are ancient and modern poems that throughout, in the whole and
in all the parts, breathe the divine breath of irony. A truly transcendental buffoonery dwells within them. Inside [there is] a mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above all that is contingent, even
above its own art, virtue, and genius;33

From this peak of self-recognition, the artists look upon themselves

and their creativity in retrospect. They assert a point in the future from
which they seem to have attained the synthesis of a negative present and
a positive future; a point from which they seem to be able to qualify the
negative and deficient life of the present. It is this anticipated point
which poets, in Schlegels recommendation, should try to include in
their present creativity. This is the transcendental buffoonery, the divine breath of irony, that transforms a deficient present to transcendental perfection and contingency to necessity.
From this point of view, the poetical endeavor becomes merely an
exercise, a fragment that preliminary and provisionally anticipates a future ideal. In irony one appears to have reached a point from which
ones present endeavors are already qualified and transcended. Irony
becomes a remedy for the limitations of the present.
In an article on romantic irony,34 Peter Szondi incisively analyzes
the logic by which the romantic artist tries to overcome the inadequacy
of present life: By playing his life, the early romantic believes he can
transcend it and thus, despite everything, share in the harmony that history has denied him.35

22
Szondi perceives romantic irony as the result of a basic split between ego and world, instituted not least by Kants critical philosophy.
The romantic subject longs for unity, and irony becomes a means of
reaching the absolute; it becomes a final identity-principle that can
overcome the division between ego and world: Through ever more intense reflection he [the romantic poet] seeks to reach a standpoint outside himself and to eliminate, on the level of appearance, the cleft between his ego and the world.36
The romantic subjects cannot attain this unity through action, but
they can anticipate future unity, and they can reevaluate present agony
in light of future fulfillment. Irony preserves present negativity, but it
makes it tolerable by measuring it against future completion. Thus, irony reevaluates and destroys present negativity.
By anticipating the future unity in which he believes, he declares this
negativity to be temporary, whereby it is both preserved and reevaluated . . . Tolerant of completion only in the past or in the future,
whatever irony encounters in the present it measures against infinity
and thus destroys it.37

In his Vorlesungen ber die sthetic, Hegel deduces Schlegels

concept of irony from Fichtes notion of the I. In Fichte, the I is the
origin of all knowledge and reason. In this I, all content of the world is
absorbed and negated. What exists, exists only through the I and has
no existence in itself. This Fichtian notion of the I is in Hegels view
the foundation for Schlegels concept of romantic irony. The affirmation of a negatively conceived world is the foundation of irony.
Thus, Hegel is critical of Schlegels concept of irony and the idealistic thinking from which is derives. To him, it appears to support the
notion of an autonomous geniusa so-called schnen Seelewhich
has lost all involvement in an obligating real world. In Die Phenomenologie des Geistes, Hegel already criticizes this beautiful soul, this new
romantic artistpresumably addressing Novalis.
It lives in dread of straining the radiance of its inner being by action
and existence. And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly perseveres in a state of self-willed
impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of
abstraction . . . The hollow object, which it produces now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of emptiness. Its activity consists in yearning,

23
which merely loses itself in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object.38

This criticism of the romantic subject, who shuns the world while
pursuing a vague and empty desire, Hegel applies to the concept of irony in Schlegel. Schlegels idea of irony is seen as a notion that totalizes
a subjectivity that transforms the world into its own game. It is a subject
that operates without seriousness (Ernst). The so-called An-und-frsich-seiende (reality) is, in the ironic attitude, experienced as mere appearance; it is neither experienced nor expressed with any seriousness.
Thus, the ironic subject is perceived as a subject who, in its totalizing
subjectivity, empties the world of content; only its own subjectivity is
now interesting: Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which
originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in
and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego.39 Hegel advocates a certain responsibility in the
aesthetic subject; he counters the separation of ethics and aesthetics,
which, in his interpretation, Schlegels notion of irony brings about. If
the romantic subject transforms the world into its own game, there is no
longer a sphere for morality, right, or religion.
But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and
in no sphere of morals, laws, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the
ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a
show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a
mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at
whose free disposal it remains.40

Hegel opposes the romantic suggestion that art represents a sphere

separate from world and society, something autonomous. Against the
idea that ethics and aesthetics represent two different and unrelated
spheres, Hegel rather defends classicist notions of the integration of art
in society and of artists as social subjects. Artists ought to exhibit certain engagements and obligations regarding their world, because artists
are perceived as chief exponents of the historic content of their Age.
Therefore an ironic poetry is without Ernst. It is reducing itself to an
aesthetic game nullifying social and existential engagement.41

24

4) Philosophy and Art. Art without Frame

4.1) The Work of Art In-and-For-Itself
Art-theory is no longer simply concerned with the material work of
art, but with a whole new ideology. This ideology assumes the existence
of an inspirited nature to which the ingenious artists may gain access.
In the actual work of art, the theoretical justification of an inspirited
world becomes a major theme. On the one hand, the content of the romantic work of art becomes romantic metaphysics, insofar as this metaphysics finds expression in the poem (or in painting or music). On the
other hand, this metaphysics supposedly gives rise to the actual artproduct, by imprinting itself in the soul of the receptive artist. The work
of art is never more than a by-product of something more grandiose,
universal, and infinite, and the purpose of a romantic criticismsuch as
Schlegelsis to lay down the conditions of how to produce a divine
and beautiful work of art according to this metaphysics.
The romantic poem becomes more engaged in rendering this evasive metaphysics, than in expressing itself as a work of art. It becomes
more interested in re-presenting and expressing this general poetry of
nature than in constructing itself as a work of art.
As soon as the work of art becomes a product, it is no longer spirit;
it immediately degenerates. As a productsubmitted to circulation, exchange, and evaluationart is deserted by the artist (as displayed in the
story about Joseph Berlinger, for whom art perceived as a commodity
becomes something unspeakably loathsome). Art should preferably remain immaterial, as art in-and-for-itself.
This construction, in-and-for-itself, was already well-established
by Kants philosophy, and among idealistic philosophers it is now applied to the arts. For Schelling, art is a mere reflectiona worldly imageof the perfect and unique principle he calls God, the unity and
origin of everything.
4.2) Schellings Dialectics
Before proceeding with the idealistic theory of art as conceived by
Schelling, it is requisite to know in essence his method and logic as ap-

25
plied to distinctions in his art-theory and to romantic art-philosophy in
general.
In Idealism in general, it is pertinent to determine a first principle
for all knowledge and reality. One seeks a principle which can resolve
the opposition between real and ideal. In Fichtes idealism subjectively constitutes such a principle. The idealist wants to annihilate, or
rather transgress, the duality of subject and object, of knower and
known, and of mind and matter because according to Kants philosophy
one cannot obtain accurate knowledge of the empirical and external
world; in its perception and cognition of the exterior reality the cognitive subject filters its impressions according to its own perceptive and
cognitive apparatus. The knowledge thus attained depends on subjectivitya positive knowledge about the world beyond the perceiving subject is not achievable. The unapproachable external world has become a
world in-and-for-itself.
Now the idealist philosopher pursues this argument in what seems to
be its logical consequence, and claims that since one possesses no positive knowledge of the world in-and-for-itself, one cannot even claim
that there is anything in-and-for-itself, since this particular quantity apparently does not pass through our cognitive filter. The only with certainty known entity appears to be the cognitive subject itself, as this
subject seemingly constitutes the foundation of all knowledge. It seems
to encompass both knowledge about the exterior and about the interior
processes of knowledge. It includes both what we perceive and the way
we perceive. Self-conscious subjectivity is posited as this absolute principle, as a knower who includes both the known and its own process
of knowing. Knower and known is, therefore, ultimately the same entity, and constitutes as such a first principle for knowledge, an ultimate
identity-principle, a primary source of things and states of affairs.
In his early work, System der Transcendentalen Idealismus, Schelling follows Fichte in these Kantian assumptions. However, in his later
work, Philosophie der Kunst he abstracts this subjective principle of
identity, talking about identity not simply as subjectivity but ultimately
as an absolute principle in its own right, sometimes termed God,
sometimes the All. This identity-principle becomes a metaphysical
figure rather than a subject.
In the ideal sphere of God, everything is the same. In the actual
world, there is desire to attain this absolute divine identity, but it is a
desire that can never be fulfilled. Nevertheless, as an abstract figure, the

26
principle of identity structures the universe, so that apparent oppositionsin the ideal sphere of Godalways are reduced and neutralized
as equalities.
This abstract identity-principle can be depicted as an equation like A
= A. Even though expressing identity, the formula still implies two
sidesto be brief, a left and a rightwhich necessarily constitute the
formula also as a difference-principle. This formula for absolute identity is consequently alsoand simultaneously soa formula for absolute
difference.
The abstract formula may be read and interpreted on several different levels, for example as the absolute identity between spirit and nature, subject and object, universal and particular, real and ideal, conscious and unconscious, and freedom and necessity. It implies then that
in the ideal, these distinctions are all identities, although in the real,
they remain differences.
However, also in the real these differences may be annihilated, reconciled and unified by means of particular third principles surpassing
themprinciples which in a dialectical fashion synthesize the two conflicting oppositions. This reconciliation and cancellation of the difference is termed the indifference of the opposition. In consequence, we
are dealing with an absolute identity and an absolute difference principle, depending on the perspective and general context of the formula.
In the idealthe All, Godeverything is identity; in this All/God,
every difference is annihilated; one could denote it: (A = A) = Aan
equation resulting in a singularity. In the absolute (the All/God), fundamental differences between subject and object, knower and known,
affirming and affirmed, active and passive are annihilated and reconciled. Only in the real are there still qualitative differences between the
two poles of the opposition; we could denote this less perfect condition:
(A = A) = (A = A)an equation resulting in a duality.
In this less perfect and less absolute state, differences are not necessarily annihilated. Although expressing an ideal identity the formula
still contains two components, such that either 1) one of the components dominates the other, or 2) they are united. This implies that there
are three potencies (three possibilities) for the formula A = A. First,
the affirming component in the equation is dominant. Secondly, the affirmed component in the equation is dominant. Thirdly, the components
are equalthe so-called indifference or reconciliation of the com-

27
ponents. Thus, from a fundamental duality, Schelling deduces a tripartite dialectics, as the mode of being of things in the real.
56. Triplicity of potencies is the necessary mode of appearance of the
real All as real, as well as of the ideal All as ideal, for the All can only
appear through finite things whose differences can be expressed only
through three potencies, of which the one designates the preponderance
of the affirmed condition, the other of the affirming element, and the
third the indifference of the two.42

In this dual scheme, we end up with three possibilities, three potencies. In elementary distinctions there are these three possibilities: either
a state of affairs where the first of the components is preponderant, a
state of affairs where the second is preponderant, or, finally, a state of
affairs where a balance between the components is attained. This latter
indifference between the two components reflects a higher perfection
because unity and indifference are closer to the original ideal of identity.
We shall represent this dialectics in a scheme where A = A remains
the general formula containing its three potencies, and where either
one of the components is preponderant (noted with a +), or where they
are equal. We shall add to the scheme some of the most common distinctions in Schelling to which this dialectics is applied: affirming/affirmed, active/passive, subject/object, freedom/necessity.
TABLE XI: Schellings Dialectics

(A = A) =

a+ >
a <
a =

a ~
a+ ~
a ~

affirming/active/subject/freedom
affirmed/passive/object/necessity
indifference/unity/identity/reconciliation

In System of Transcendental Idealism, the ingenious artist is described as unifying two antithetical distinctions, freedom and necessity,
where each of them may dominate in different affairs. If something is
created by necessity, it is created out of unconsciousness; if it is created
in freedom, it is created from consciousness. Ingenious artists combine
both; they are partly conscious, but there are still elements not under
their control, forces acting upon them and guiding them. The ingenious
work of art therefore is a reflection of the identity of conscious and unconscious activity, of freedom and necessity. The ingenious work of art

28
is the indifference of freedom and necessity; it represents the perfect
unity of these two quantities, attained in the real.
In this speculative dialectics God unifies everything. God is the
identity of idea and being, of universal and particular, of affirming and
affirmed, of knower and known, of ideal and real. God is the highest
point of this dialectics. God represents, as it were, the level at which the
dialectics ceases to work. But in the so-called real All there is no absolute identity; oppositions are not annihilated and eliminated, but separated and sundered. In this our apparent world, the real All, there exist
for example two crucial separated lower levels (which would have been
unified in God), the real world of nature, and the ideal world of intellect
and spirit. The indifference of these two worlds in the real All is our
present life-world, that which appears.
These two worlds, the natural and the spiritual world, are again
composed or formed according to a triadic structure. At the level of nature there is, on the one hand, matter, dominating in some instances; on
the other, light, dominating in other instances, and as the indifference of
the two, the organism. At the level of subject there is, on the one
hand, knowledge, dominating in some instances; on the other, action,
dominating in other instances, and as the indifference of the two, art.
14. Art is in itself neither mere activity nor mere knowledge, but is
rather an activity completely permeated by knowledge, or, in a reverse
fashion, knowledge which has completely become activity. That is, it is
the indifference of both.43

Art is therefore a higher perfection than both knowledge and action;

it incorporates both. Art is also, as one can notice, an analogy to what
the organism is in the world of nature. On the level of intellect and subjectivity, art mirrors the organism in nature. 18. The organic work of
nature represents the same indifference in an unseparated state that the
work of art represents after separation yet as indifference.44
On the two different levels, the organism in the natural world and
the work of art in the intellectual world, is the same. In our world, ideality and reality are not the same as in Gods perfect world. But actual
states of affairs may approach this ideal perfection in the upheaval and
reconciliation of their oppositions. The closer a thing is to the ideal of
the ideal world, the better its ideaas originally produced by God
shines though in the particular thing; it becomes what we call beautiful.

29
With this brief introduction to the dialectical system of Schelling
there are several different levels not accounted for, but which are structured according to the same basic dualism, developing into a tripartite
dialectic formula because of the ever-present three possibilities of the
opposition. If God is seen as a original point of departure containing all
of the following oppositions, we can produce the following simplified
table for the sake of illustration.
TABLE XII: Identity and Difference in Schellings Dialectics
Knowledge
Spirit

Art
Action

God
Matter
Nature

Organism
Light

4.3) The Universe as Art and the Construction of Genius

Schelling examines art as a universal object, not as a concrete. This
is art without boundaries and frames because here we are beyond art,
above art, or before art in its various concrete manifestations. Schellings art-philosophy is explicitly such an investigation, not of art in
particular but of the universe as art, of the infinite as art.
In the philosophy of art I accordingly intend to construe first of all not
art as art, as this particular, but rather the universe in the form of art,
and the philosophy of art is the science of the All in the form or potence
of art . . . In the philosophy of art, no principle other than that of the
infinite serve as our point of departure; hence, we must present the infinite as the unconditioned principle of art.45

The object of investigation is an art in-and-for-itself, transgressing

both the individual artist and the individual work of art. Art in-and-foritself is examined as absolute perfection and beauty infusing the world.
The object of Schellings speculations is this absolute beauty of which
the empirical art-product is merely a derivation and a reflection. This
conception of art is what he appropriately terms art taken from its
mystical side.

30
The first paragraphs from Die Philosophie der Kunst establish this
universal and mystical side of art. 21. The universe is formed in God
as an absolute work of art and in eternal beauty.46 In its perfect form,
the universe is such a work of art. As formed in God, it is beauty. This
implies that the archetypes of things, but not necessarily the things
themselves, are absolutely beautiful. Art and beauty become ideals. Rather than being goals to be attained through labor and skills, they are
always already imprinted in things as their original essence. Thus,
beauty is beyond man-made rules and laws since it is a quality inherently existing in things; it exists essentially in things as the image of Gods
perfection. With this, it is beyond the individual and its creativity.
Equivalent to Platos ideas, archetypes are the ideal forms of things.
Ugliness is considered a degeneration, something that does exists but
only in the so-called temporal view of the world, not in the eternal
view of the world. Ugliness exists in the world, but only as an aberration and a deviation from ideal and eternal standards.
22. Just as God as the archetype becomes beauty in the reflected
image, so also do the ideas of reason become beauty when intuited in
the reflected image.47 God imprints or informs his infinitude into the
real through art. Thus, the divine is represented through artthrough
art eternal ideas are objectified. The German notion, Ineinsbildung
(informing, according to the English translation; alternatively, imprinting, inscribing, engraving), means here to form an image into a uniform picture. The power of forming this image is the Einbildungskraft, translated imagination. This Einbildungskraft is that on
which all creation is based, it is to inform something ideal into something real; it is to objectify, materialize.
23 The immediate cause of all art is God.48 Schelling commentary clarifies this paragraph: The ideas originate only in God. Art,
however, is the representation of the archetypes, hence God himself is
the immediate cause and the final possibility of all art; he himself is the
source of all beauty.49 Since art represents eternal ideas and these eternal ideas originate in God, God is the final cause of art. Art exists as a
reflection and an image of the divine; it does not need a process of production. Art is transmitted rather than produced, for example in revelations happening to particularly sensitive and visionary individuals.
Compared to the paradigms of neoclassicism and preromanticism,
this view constitutes a new interpretation of the relationship between
humans and art. In classicism and neoclassicism one could typically de-

31
fine what rules, skills, manners, norms, and ways of reasoning the artist
had to carry out. The neoclassical work of art was basically created by a
conscious artist. The classical/neoclassical artist is located in the
conscious. During the Transition period, this notion of the superrational, moral, and conscious artist becomes increasingly unfashionable. Now genuine and ingenious artists create naively, out of necessity,
and without full conscious control. They are now located in the unconscious. However, even according to this preromantic model, the individual artist is still a source of the work of art. Even if unconscious
moments of the creative process are accentuated, it is never disputed
that a Homer or a Shakespeare are the unique originators of their artistic
work. But according to the romantic doctrine, the work of art has its ultimate origin outside the world; it is essentially indistinct from the universe as a whole. The origin and source of poetry is displaced from the
apparent mundane world to the true transcendental world. One may
assert that the artists still, as in the preromantics, creates unconsciously (out of necessity, spontaneously, impulsively, instinctively, naively,
etc.), but as the romantic artists become ecstatic media for a divine informing of the world, they in fact become less than unconscious regarding the creative process. They are no longer evident causes or origins
of the work of art. The artist becomes transmitter and conveyor of the
universe as poetry and beauty. As this universe is not created by the artist, but ultimately by God, God becomes the final origin of art.
As God unites all differences, also artas the transcendental
product of Godbecomes an indifference, a reconciliation of conscious
and unconscious. God is the immediate cause of art. Art in its actual
manifestation is only an attempt to reflect eternal and divine ideas in the
finite realm of humans. This leads to the next paragraph: 24. The
true construction of art is a presentation of its forms as forms of things
as those things are in themselves, or as they are within the absolute 50
Here, the meaning of absolute art is addressed, not the meaning of a
particular work of art. A true construction of art is a presentation of
ideal and eternal forms. These ideal forms constitute its meaning, that
which the concrete work of art is a symbol of. True art re-presents
things as they are in themselves or in the absolute. The finite artproduct is a mere symbol of the infinite, a sign for the archetypes. Art
as an actual productrepresents, but is not, Truth.
From its mystical and transcendental side, art is without boundaries. It ideally infuses everything. The artist objectifies and reflects this

32
infinitude in the finitude of the art-product. The art-product, therefore,
has no longer a rational or pragmatic purpose, such as recreating and
instructing an audience. It is beyond the audience because its sole purpose is now to render, to exhibit, and present the unchanging Truth of
the absolute and infinite.51 The audience cannot, by definition, judge the
artistic achievement, as only a few selected and privileged artists, qua
their greater insight, have access to this divine universe. Consequently,
the audience is superfluous; it is rather a pain, a vexation for the artist.
A historically unique alienation between art and audience has been established.
Schelling continues this philosophical reconstruction of the concept
of a divine and absolute art in subsequent paragraphs in the work. In paragraph 62, he returns to the thought in order to reconstruct his concept
of genius. 62. The immediately productive element or force of the
work of art . . . is the eternal concept or idea of man in God, a concept
that is one with the soul itself and is united with it.52
Here, the concept or idea of manas this concept exists in Godis
the immediately productive force of the work of art. Humans in themselves are not identical to this productive force. Gods concept of humans, which is identical to the essence of the human being (or its
soul), is the productive force.
The platonic thought that there exists, above the apparent world, a
world of ideas permeates Schellings philosophy. According to this
thought, God produces only ideas, not things; but insofar as ideas are
reflected in things, God is indirectly the producer of things, as he produces their essence and archetype. Among his ideas, God contains the
idea of the human being. The substance of this idea is unity and reconciliation of oppositions such as body and soul, action and knowledge,
activity and passivity, finitude and infinitude (the body is finite, the soul
infinite). The human being is the unity, or indifference, of these oppositions. The actual human being objectifies this idea, existing in and
originating from God. Furthermore, as the unity of passivity and activity, knowledge and action, it is an idea of productivity. God becomes the
final cause of human productivity, but only indirectly. This idea in its
absolute perfection is the idea of genius. Genius is consequently the absolute idea of the human being in God. 63. This eternal concept of
the human being in God as the immediate cause of his productions is
that which one calls genius, as it were the demon, the indwelling element of divinity in human beings.53

33
Genius is a human archetype, the eternal concept of the human
being, and as such an inherent divine element in humans. It is what
Schelling calls a piece of the absoluteness of God inhabiting humans.
Hereby, genius is not the result of accomplishment, but the divine idea
dwelling in some human beings making them more perfect because they
are closer to the original idea of God. Artists can therefore only produce
to the degree that they are united with the divine idea. Geniuses have
evidently no relation to historical time.
As Gods idea, the genius has a real and an ideal side, but genius is
the indifference and unity of the ideal and real. The real side consists of
the informing of Gods infinity into the finitude of the artistic work. The
ideal side is the reverse, here the artist takes the finitude of the world into his or her infinitude, because as ideaas Gods ideagenius is also
infinite. These considerations lead to the distinction between poesy and
art.
64. The real side of genius, or that unity that constitutes the informing of the infinite into the finite, can be called poesy in the narrower
sense; the ideal side, or that unity that constitutes the informing of the
finite into the infinite, can be called the art within art.54

Poesy is the actual work of art. It represents the informing of the divine infinitude into the finitude of the work. Qua the geniusthe highest idea of human productivitytranscendental infinitude is transformed into mundane finitude. Art is the ideal side, the ideal within the
work of art, the share which the work has in Gods perfection and essence. Art is the general and universal concept; here finitude is taken
back into infinitude.

4.4) Self-Reflection and Imagination

In the highly problematic twelfth chapter in Biographia Literaria,55
Coleridge develops the philosophical background for some of his critical notions, notably the ideas of imagination and fancy.
Also for Coleridge, the artists aim is to reconcile the objective (or
nature) and the subjective (or intelligence). Those two terms, borrowed
from Schelling, exist in an antithesis where the subject is representative
and the object represented, the subject is conscious, the object unconscious. The philosophical project is to render a principle unifying the

34
poles in this antithesis. For Coleridge, this principle becomes imagination.
From the perspective of natural science, the objective seems to be
the primary principle in this dualism, since nature and objectivity undeniably exist outside us and seem to have existed as such always. Nevertheless, nature seems to grow into intelligence, since it is recognizable
by a subject, and is a part of our immediate consciousness.56 As such,
the objective does not remain outside as something essentially different from and in opposition to the subject; it becomes a part of the subject which therefore has to be explained. Consequently, to take nature
simply as the primary ground for our knowledge is a prejudice, because
from the beginning nature exists in an antithesis to the selfa self by
which it is recognized as something outside. And in order to talk about
something outside a self (in the manner of materialistic philosophy),
one must presuppose a self. In order to suppose an object, one must
presuppose a subject. Accordingly, the self seems to be the primary
principle. Natural philosophy puts the object first, but qua the argument
above, transcendental philosophy puts the subject first.
This oscillation between subject and objectwhere, depending on
perspective, they change in hierarchy, rank, and orderhas to be resolved by asserting one principle for both. The principle unifying these
two poles is the self-assertive subject asserting its own being, the socalled I am in Schellings System des Transcendentalen Idealismus
copied by Coleridge. In his theses I to VI, Chapter 12, Coleridge, deduces this I am as the final unifying principle.
Thesis I asserts that there is no knowledge without a corresponding
reality. If we know something then there is something known by us.
This thesis is meant to refute the skeptical and relativistic view that all
knowledge is only in or dependent on the singular subject. The knowledge of the subject refers to something known, constituting an object
which the subject knows something about. Thus, there is an objectivity
outside the subject. There is, consequently, also an original duality between subject and object, a duality which is important to assert in the
idealistic project because it is what one attempts to eliminate.
Thesis II discusses the strategies and principles which are not effective or suitable in this elimination of original duality. The principle by
which this elimination might succeed has to be a principle of absolute
truth by definition. There are apparently two important kinds of truth;
truth is either mediate or immediate, dependent or independent, condi-

35
tional or unconditional. Schelling talks about bedingtes and unbedingtes truth. Coleridges thesis justifies the idea that only an unbedingtes, an immediate truth self-grounded and self-sufficient, unconditional and self-present, can constitute a principle of absolute truth unifying subject and object. If knowledge or truth is purely conditional, if all
knowledge is dependent upon something else, and there is no independent knowledge, then there would be only truth upon truth, but no independent truth. It would be like a chain without a staple, a series without a first.57 There would be no certaintywhich is, to Coleridge, unthinkable and absurd. Mankind would be like a line of blind people,
guided by a blind person, as Coleridge asserts apparently having a certain painting of Breughel in mind.
Because uncertainty is absurd, there must be a condition, a cause,
and a principle which are not conditioned by something else; a principle
which must be unconditional. This idea is reflected more consistently in
Schelling.
A knowledge which I can only attain through another knowledge, I call
a conditional knowledge. The chain of our knowledge runs from one
condition to another. Either the totality is without any halt, or one has
to conclude that it goes on infinitely, or there must exist a last point on
which the totality is attached, just as all what exist in the sphere of the
conditional.58

In the theses III, IV, and V, Coleridge discusses what such an unconditional principle of knowledge is. All conditional truths borrow
their truth from something else, they are dependent on something else.
What one must look for is a self-grounded, independent and unconditional principle: we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because
it is.59 That is, one must find a principle that exists in itself and affirms
itself, not by cause of something else. Of such a principle there can only
be one. There cannot be two or more such principles because in that
case, they would refer to one another, condition one another, and accordingly cease to be unconditional. Similarly, a first principle cannot
be a thing or an object because things and objects are conditioned. A
thing is what it is in consequence of some other thing.60 An independent thing is a contradiction in terms; to begin with, it would always relate to a subject as its antithesis.61
As subject and object support and need one another, cause one
another, condition one another, the first principle can be neither object

36
nor subject taken separately. Either there is nothing perceived without
someone to perceive it (no object without subject), or there is no perceiver where there is not something perceived (no subject without object). One must look for a principle which is or contains both, making
up the identity of both, or being the indifference of both.
Thesis VI finally establishes this principle. The discussion of what
such an absolute principle cannot be clears the path for a solution. The
unification of subject and object may be carried out by proposing a
principle containing both, something both subject and object. This is,
accordingly, something that can make itself into an object and yet remain a subject. Only a subject happens to have this ability and never an
object because the latter is fixed, immovable, passive, unconscious,
without will and freedom, dead. A subject has this ability because of its
mobility, its activity, its will, its freedom, its consciousness, and finally,
its life. A subject can remain a subject and make itself into an object
because of its inherent ability to take itself as object of its own thinking.
That is, by its self-reflection it makes itself its own object. In Coleridge
and Shelling, this principle is called self-assertion, understood literally
as the selfs assertion of itself. It is furthermore termed I amwith
this describing a performative act, and specifically the performative act
which we designate the assertion.
In this performative act of self-assertion, in this moment of pronunciation when the self pronounces its own being, the self becomes object
to itself. At this point, when the self auto-affectively gives birth to itself
as a conscious self, it becomes its own object. With this act, the self unifies subject and object, or it makes objectivity a part of itself; it makes
the other and outer world its own because this world becomes a part of
its imagination. The world comes alive as a creation of Gods because
the transcendental subject in its self-assertive I am only reflects the
absolute reconciliation of all things in God. On the lower level of (human) imagination, absolute self-consciousness only reflects the higher
level of divine imagination, the so-called infinite I AM, which as idea
and spirit infuses the world.
Theses VII, VIII, and IX discuss the consequences of this central insight. If transcendental subjectivity, also called the spiritthe indifference of subject and object in the I amis the only unconditioned,
immediate truth, then it is the principle of all knowledge: This principle is the principle of all knowledge.62 As this principle is selfrepresentative, it follows that the objects it internalizes are represented

37
as a part of itself and not as something influencing it from the outside:
it must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself.63 As every object is dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite,64 the transcendental subjectforming and
reshaping an object according to its own spiritrevitalizes the object,
originally fixed and dead.
What has ultimately happened in this idealistic project? The object
as something external has been included in the self; the object as fixed,
passive, unconscious, and dead, is ultimately brought back to life because, as imagination, it partakes in the life of the subject. It becomes a
part of the subjects will, freedom, activity, and productivity. The surrounding world of dead objects and things comes alive, becoming a part
of this particular subject, which furthermore makes itself into an object
in the very moment it asserts its own life and existence, its I am. The
transcendental objectivityaccordingly the result of the self-assertive,
self-affirmative, self-duplicative, self-reflective act of I ambecomes
objectivity infused with life; unconsciousness is replaced with consciousness, necessity with freedom, passivity with activity, fixation with
will, represented with representative, product with productivity. The
transcendental productive subject infuses first and foremost the world
with life and spirit.

5) Imaginative Language Contra Rustic Language

5.1) Imagination
Schellings idealism is the foundation for Coleridges notion of imagination. Imagination is what connects the subject to nature; it is a
form of the self-assertive I am, where subject and object are connected in absolute self-consciousness. Also, it is a reflection of, a mode
of, the so-called infinite I am, Gods ultimate self-assertive unification
of ideal and real world. It has a share in the divine.
Imagination neither belongs exclusively to the subjective nor to the
objective, neither to mind nor to matter, neither to ideal nor to real. Imagination shapes matter into an intellectual form; it reconciles nature
and self. This reconciliation can in fact occur on two different levels:
that of perception and that of art (furthermore, but of less importance in
this context, also on the level of philosophy). Consequently, Coleridge

38
distinguishes between two kinds of imagination, a primary and a secondary.
In older discussions of imagination as in the empirical tradition (as
seen in Addison, Burke, and Hume), imagination is often conceived of
as simple retention of sense impressions. Imagination is the representation of that which has been present; imagination is the present
psychological image of past impressions. In this empirical tradition,
sense-impressions consequently constitute a primary resource for the
creative self. In their creativity poets rely on their ability to recollect
(and, to some extent, reorganize) simple sense-impressions. Consequently, imagination has to be ultimately understood as perception although as recollection of earlier perceived images it is different from
immediately present sense-impressions. This difference constitutes the
core of Addisons distinction between primary and secondary pleasures
of the imagination.
In Coleridge, only the primary imagination is related to perception,
whereas the secondary results from a conscious and intentional will to
idealize and unify; it constitutes an explicitly creative imagination. Primary imagination is first and foremost a power behind or supporting
human perception; it is not simply identical to perceptual senseimpression. Primary imagination creates meaningful images out of impressions, implying that imagination is not the same as actual impressions because from these impressions the mind or the imagination
creates larger wholes and unities. Coleridge calls the primary imagination the necessary imagination; it is involuntary and spontaneous; it unifies distinct sensor data into larger units familiar to and understood by
the subject. It is perhaps not entirely askew to compare Coleridges
primary imagination to the Husserlian notion of a retentionalprotentional structure in which sense-impressions are never isolated
events, but always and necessarily experienced in the whole of immediately preceding and immediately anticipated sense-impressions.
If primary imagination is necessary, secondary imagination is a voluntary imagination. It depends on a willful and intentional subject, and
it is, therefore, associated with the creative process of the artist. The
secondary imagination creates new images and symbols; it unites the
self-conscious mind and the image of nature already created involuntarily in the primary imagination. In a crucial passage, Coleridge expresses this difference between primary and secondary imagination:

39
The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary.
The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime
Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still
as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and
dead.65

Primary imagination is a principle unifying subject and world, it is

as such an equivalent to the absolute unifying principle, which is God; it
is an echo of Gods infinite I am. Imagination, as such a unifying
principle, is both active and passive; it must receive something from
both mind and nature before it can produce a bond between these two
entities. There is a tension between the two powers, mind and nature. If
the mind dominates, humans become solipsistic. If nature dominates,
humans are merely living unconsciously in the present moment, perceiving the world as a continuous flow of impressions. One must attain
a balance between human and natureand neither end in extreme selfconcentration nor in extreme self-forgetfulness.
Secondary imagination is identical to the primary in kind, but different in degree. Also the secondary imagination is a unifying principle, but where primary imagination unifies subject and world, mind
and nature, and as such unifies something apparently separate before
the activity of the imagination, secondary imagination unifies something
it itself diffuses. Secondary imagination, therefore, necessarily has two
basic movements: first it disseminates or dissolves originally unified
material, and secondly, it synthesizes the diffused fragments into a new
order and unity (at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify).
Secondary imagination, therefore, vitalizes or revitalizes an otherwise
dead world of objects. Secondary imagination is the principle behind
artistic creation. It is, actually and positively, the active imagination,
whereas primary imagination remains a passive imagination unable to
vitalize and revitalize the surrounding dead nature effectively.
Again, artists become the heroes saving the world from its own reticence and quiescence. They give it back life, as they give it body and
voice in their work. The distinction between primary and secondary im-

40
agination becomes an important critical principle in Coleridge, and is,
for example, repeated in the distinction between copying and imitating nature. This distinction is applied as a theoretical and ideological
background when Coleridge questions Wordsworths interpretation of
his own Lyrical Ballads.
5.2) Coleridges and Wordsworths Controversy over Poetry
5.2.1) The Problem Stated. When Coleridge criticizes Wordsworth,
the object of criticism is not the quality of Wordsworths poetry. To
Coleridge, the excellence of Wordsworths poetry is indisputable. The
debate between Coleridge and Wordsworth hinges on the interpretation
of this poetry, or rather, on the interpretation of the supposed language
and object of this poetry. Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads are as such acknowledged as a product of original genius, but Coleridge criticizes
the Preface to these poems, in which Wordsworth assesses his poetical
principles and accounts for what have been his objects. Thus, Coleridge
disagrees with Wordsworths self-interpretation. The subtle problem is
thataccording to ColeridgeWordsworth is not doing what he believes he is doing. What Wordsworth believes to be the object of his
poetry is not his object; the author himself does not apprehend and
comprehend the object of his writing.
In the exposition of the discussions between Coleridge and
Wordsworth, we shall focus on three related problems: the question of
the poetic self, the question of the poetic object, and the question of
poetic language, summed up by Wordsworths three explicit questions:
What is a poet? What is the object of poetry? What kind of language is
poetical?
5.2.2) Wordsworths Low and Rustic Poetic Language. Pivotal in
the discussion between Wordsworth and Coleridge is the question of a
so-called low and rustic life as object for poetic imitation. In a crucial
passage from his Preface, Wordsworth states that low and rustic life
was the object of his poems and he attempted to adjust his poetic language to the language of the rustic.
Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition the
essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain
their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more
emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary

41
feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may
be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated;
because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more
easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that
condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature.66

Wordsworth chose common life and ordinary language as respectively the object and style in his poems. The principal object, then,
proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was
possible in a selection of language really used by men.67
In this preface, Wordsworth announces a poetical program that denounces artificial and mannered poetical language, and revives simple
and ordinary language as it is supposedly used by ordinary people, that
is by people in rural surroundingspeople with a still unspoiled proximity to nature, with simple occupations about which they communicate
without need of flamboyant decorations of speech.
In this project, Wordsworth does not intend to copy rural language
because although he selects a language really used by men, referring
to simple objects and incidents, he simultaneously wants to:
. . . throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and,
further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting
by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of
our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate
ideas in a state of excitement.68

In the program thus outlined, there appears to be three different

stages. First, there is a certain material, a certain object, to be chosen
by the poet, described as low and rustic life. Secondly, there is a certain processing of this material, a certain colouring, a labor assigned
to the imagination. Thirdly, there is an intended objective for or outcome of the processing of this material; that is, the explication or tracing of certain common human laws, especially those regarding how we
in a state of excitement associate ideas.
In this program one does not copy low and rustic life just for the
sake of copying but because one surmises that a simple life and a plain

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language speak more powerfully and eloquently about human nature. It
is the intention of Wordsworth to give a purpose back to poetry, a purpose above false refinement or arbitrary innovation,69 a purpose it appears to have lost in the sophistication of empty rhymes and constraint
images.
From such verses [false, artificial, etc.] the Poems in these volumes will
be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of
them has a worthy purpose . . . habits of meditation have, I trust, so
prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with
them a purpose.70

To restore this poetic purpose is obviously an urgent matter. That

which in this context becomes purposeful is the representation of feelings against the artificiality and inanities of verses of the neoclassical
sort. (Often Alexander Popes poetry is mentioned as the negative example of a painstakingly elaborate and polished poetic style detached
from real life.) The representation of universal human feelings is asserted as an adequate object for poetry.
It is after this emphasis on purpose that Wordsworth pronounces his
famous and much quoted sentence: For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.71 As it appears, the sentence is a
clarification and justification of the aforementioned polemic position
directed against the purposeless and inane sophistication of poetry.
(For all good = because all goodthe sentence refers to the previously said, it suggests reasons for why poetry should have a purpose;
it is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.)
The sentence is written in opposition to the artificers of poetry; it is
a polemic sentence. If their creative writing is basically wearisome
craftsmanship, good poetry should rather flow spontaneously. If they
apply to their poetry a certain fixed inventory of rhymes, images, and
metaphors, good poetry should be flowing from powerful feelings. A
good poet must be spontaneous and write from feelings. Hereby, poetry
is brought back to the creative subject, as related to the psychology of
the creative subject and not to the conventions of polite society.
However, although Wordsworth in this particular polemic context
talks about spontaneity and overflowing feelings, the creative process
which he tries to explicate, is not characterized by being spontaneous in

43
what immediately follows. On the contrary, he immediately modifies his
statement. We repeat the whole passage.
For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached
were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought
long and deeply.72

Wordsworths statement about the overflowing feelings justifies

his polemic intervention against inane and artificial poetry. However, in
a more specific context, it is instantaneously qualified. As soon as he
turns his attention from the neoclassicists to the creative process itself,
one can no longer permit arbitrary chosen subjects to flow over in a
poem, nor can one simply let oneself be directed by spontaneous sentiments. One has to think long and deeply. This famous sentence is
therefore both right and wrong. In the polemic context, it is justifiable,
but regarding the creative process, it is precipitate.
As a matter of fact, poetry is, according to Wordsworth, rendered by
an unspontaneous poet, and it is never written on just any arbitrary subject entering the poets mind. Between the feelings and the material
chosen and processed in the poem, a thought-process intervenes.
Wordsworth explains this process in further detail (we interrupt the quotation by comments): For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives
of all our past feelings . . .
Feelings are both modified and directed by the thoughts which
represent them. That is, thoughts replace feelings, presenting them in a
mediated form to the poet. This mediation enables the poets to further
contemplate these thoughts, and enables them to judge their mutual relationships in an intellectual act: . . . by contemplating the relation of
these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really
important to men . . .
This act of contemplation is like a secondary thought-process superimposed on the primary thought-process that simply finds representatives for feelings. It is a secondary thought-process that finally has to
be reiterated until it stabilizes itself in something one could describe as
poetic taste.

44
. . . so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be
connected with important subjects, till at length . . . such habits of mind
will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of these habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments,
of such a nature, and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.73

Step by step in this process, the poet moves farther and farther away
from original feelings. If poets start with certain vague feelings, they
first replace them with certain thought-representatives, which are contemplated in a repetitive process that slowly discovers and fixes the appropriate poetical objects, which finally enlighten the reader and
strengthen and purify his affections.
Thus, the so-called spontaneous overflow of feelings is actually
rendered as a peculiar dialectics between un-spontaneity and controlled
spontaneity. The flow of powerful feelings represents a production of
feelings which did not exist in the poets beforehand, but which they by
repeated contemplation are able to produceto the extent that these
feelings finally seem to exist in the poets. At the end of the essay,
Wordsworth returns to this idea.
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity
gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before
the subject or contemplation, is gradually produced.74

A tranquil recollection of feelings, a repeated contemplation of

those feelings until the tranquillity disappears and a feeling is produced
(an artificial emotion, a cold fire) that has some similarities to the feeling that was its origin.
This examination of and attempt to interpret the creative process is
repeated several times in the essay; or rather, it is begun again and
anew, for example triggered by crucial questions Wordsworth asks himself regarding his own identity as a poet: let me ask, what is meant by
the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And
what language is to be expected from him?75
Here are some of the answers he gives to his questions: a poet is a
man speaking to men, but he is a man with a more lively sensibility,

45
and a more comprehensive soul than other men. He is a man pleased
with his own passions and volitions, and especially delighted in contemplating them. Furthermore, he has a disposition to be affected more
than other men by absent things as if they were present. For example,
he is able to conjuring up in himself passions not produced by real
events, but nevertheless resembling peoples real passions better than
passions produced by real events commonly do. And he has the power
to express what he thus feels and thinks, especially if it arises in him
without immediate external excitement.76
This man speaking to men has a special command on things absent.
He is someone who does not need presence (of things, actions, discourse, etc.) in his creative activity. He is indeed more affected by
things absent than common people are by things present. This faculty
here described is evidently the faculty of the imagination.
But if it is the case that a poet lives independently of presence, and
is even more affected by the absence of affairs and things in his or her
imagination, why, then, is it necessary to imitate low and rustic life
and adopt the language communicated by common men in such rustic
surroundings? It is Coleridges essential objection, that Wordsworth
misunderstands his poetic object to consist of the simple passions and
language of men in rural surroundings instead of understanding those
passions and language to be something he himself imagines and produces.
Wordsworth has already included this objection in his exposition.
First, one must rely on low and rustic life because the faculty of imagination still does not provide even the greatest poet with a language as
authentic as the language uttered by men in real life, under the actual
pressure of those passions.77 But secondly, if a poet simply produces
this language by his own imaginative powersas Coleridge suggests a
poet ought to do instead of mechanically copying realitythen he
simply copies theby himself producedpassions mechanically, according to Wordsworth: it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and
suffering.78
In a demonstration of prudence and sense of authenticity, poet have
to seek real men and real language, and approximate their own feelings
to the feelings of those they describe. This the poet have to do to such a
degree that the poet for short spaces of time . . . let himself slip into an

46
entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with
theirs.79
Wordsworth resorts to the language of real men, to the low and
rustic, but as a supplement to his own poetic imagination. Real language is merely the background on which he adjusts his poetry, not a
genuine source of his poetry. This source is still determined as imagination, or absence of reality, passions, or discourse; an absence which
the poet for short spaces of time confuses with the real feelings of real
men.
5.2.3) Why Rustic Language Bothers Coleridge. When Coleridge
objects to the basic principles in this program of Wordsworths, his objection is related to the idealistic philosophy he adopted from Schelling.
The representational logic inherent in Coleridges poetical theory differs from that of Wordsworth. This different representational logic is
the source of his first objection, that poetic language should not attempt
to represent the life-world of the rustic but rather certain imaginative efforts of the poet.
Coleridge uses a certain leniency in Wordsworths manner of expressing his program to advance his own idealistic-theological program.
If, for example, Wordsworth asserts that the best language derives from
the rustic expressing their immediate concerns, Coleridge retorts that
there is in principle no difference between rustic language and any other
language used by men of common-sense. But the objection misinterprets Wordsworth, insofar as he never intended to argue for a difference
between rustic language and the language of common sense in general.
His intention is to argue for a difference between rustic language as a
language of common sense and languages of fashion and pretension.
Coleridge seizes the opportunity to argue the evident and indisputable
fact that rustic language is essentially no different from sensible language in general. Rustic language is, for example, like any other language consistent with laws of grammar.
If there are differences between rustic language and ordinary language in general, they consist only, as Coleridge contends, in the different ways rustic people treat the object in their language. Where the rustic tends to convey mere insulated facts, the educated person tries to
discover connections between things.
To Coleridge, acquaintance with the object is not necessary for
people to express themselves adequately about it. The rustic persons
proximity to nature is not imperative for the exercise of good language

47
because the best parts of language are not related to the acquaintance
with an object, but to the manner in which the imagination processes it,
consequently poetic language is an internal process, related to the acts
of the mind.
The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from
reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of
imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man.80

Therefore, the artificial and pretentious language of the neoclassicists never specifically opposed rustic language. In general, it opposed a
language that makes good sense.
Further, the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of
groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for
that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling.81

Coleridge objects to Wordsworths adoption of a real language of

men as encountered in low and rustic life because the exercise of this
real language is not related to a specific social group; it relies on a
good sense of psychology, logic, and grammar in the poet. Another objection of Coleridges is that when poets select a low and rustic language as their poetical object, they are never simply acting as rustics
themselves (according to their acquaintance with simple forms of life),
but according to their own judgment. The poets do not simply select
certain words, but also the order in which these words are arranged, and
the poets demonstrate, therefore, a knowledge of the organization of the
poem as a whole, which the rustic person does not demonstrate in his
fragmentary speech.
this order in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from
the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater
disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it
be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the
whole of what he is to convey.82

48
Thus, a lack of order and organization characterizes rustic language,
but this deficiency does not characterize Wordsworths poems because
they are composed as consistent wholes. For an illustration, Coleridge
quotes a few lines from Wordsworths poem The Last of the Flock, in
which the single lines anticipates the forthcoming and bind the poem
together into a whole, so that the parts of the poem mutually support
and explain each other.
In distant countries I have been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public road alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet.
Sturdy he seemd, though he was sad,
And in his arms a lamb he had.83

Distant countries are opposed to and anticipate the homely ground

of England; what the narrator has never seen is opposed to and anticipates what he sees; a healthy full-grown man is opposed to and anticipates the mans expression of weakness. These are some of the means
by which the poem obtains unity; other means are meter and rhyme.
The poem, therefore, is a well-organized whole, and it fulfills Coleridges definition of a poem as a sort of composition that coalesces into
one organic unity of parts and whole so that each part contributes to the
final unity.
A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and
from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is
compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.84

Coleridge acknowledges that Wordsworth wanted to move away

from an artificial and pretentious style of poetry, that he felt a justifiable preference for the language of nature, and of good-sense, even in its
humblest and least ornamented forms . . . a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendor which he wished to explode. 85
But in this enterprise, Wordsworth misunderstood his real object as be-

49
ing low and rustic life although it is a language attained by means of
psychological and logical insights.
Coleridges objections to Wordsworth appear sound and reasonable,
but there is a strong ideological reason for emphasizing the creative
power of the poetthat is, the poets imaginative activitycontrary to
the presupposed inherent brilliance of the language of rural people.
The poemwhich Coleridge classifies as imitative art and poetic
imitation, contrary to copyingis understood to duplicate the organizing spirit in nature. An artist who merely copies nature does not attempt
to comprehend and compete with natural creation itself. This is why it
to Coleridge appears infelicitous if Wordsworth indicates that a poet
ought to duplicate low and rustic language. Coleridge wants to save
Wordsworth from this misunderstood self-interpretation.
According to Coleridges distinction between copy and imitation, an
artist copying merely notices similarities between an object and his representation of that object. On the other hand, an artist imitating starts
out noticing a difference between his means of representation and the
final form he tries to render; from a canvas and painting he draws a
form, from words he draws a poem, etc. As such, the artists who imitates are building up something, blowing life into something which
seems lifeless, and that is why they seem closer to the organizing principle of nature itself. The copying artists only notice an already finished
(and dead) thing before them, ready to be painted or described.
By the same token, poets are not supposed to copy language they
hear spoken around them by simple and ordinary people, but they must
use other, general, principles inherent in themselves in the construction
of good poetry: By what principles [is] the poet to regulate his own
style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which
he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by
principles . . . of grammar, logic, psychology.86 And if poets are to
characterize anger or jealousy, they do not find the suitable language by
walking about in search of angry and jealous people in order to copy
their words; they use their own power of imagination to approach these
common human emotions.
Is it obtained [a suitable language] by wandering about in search of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their
words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon
the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation.87

50

But was this emphasis on imagination at any point absent from

Wordsworths poetical program in Preface?On the contrary,
Wordsworth returns to the imagination of the poet time and again in his
essay, in order to determine the function of imagination as a creative resource. If Coleridge had read Wordsworth more conscientiously, he
would have noticed what is already represented, and represented in a
form more sophisticated than in Coleridges rendition of Wordsworth.
Nevertheless, Coleridges superficial reading gives him an opportunity
to advance his own aesthetic-theological theories about poetry and to
relate the mystery of poetical creation to the divine. The mundane relationship which Wordsworth indicates by establishing a link, a connection, between poetic imagination and ordinary language bothers Coleridge in his theological approach to artistic creativity. In this theology,
genius is the archetypical human being most like Godacting like God
by creating the world only out of itself. In contrast to human beings in
general, geniuses are not only equipped with a primary imagination,
but furthermore with a secondary.
Primary imagination is equivalent to the imagination at stake in the
use of ordinary (rustic) language. This is a necessary imagination
which does not enable people to create, as it is spontaneous and involuntary. In primary imagination, one makes a plain copy of nature, whereas in the secondary imagination, one dissolves the object or affair
perceived in order to recompose new unities. One recreates the world
by thus imitating the organic process of nature itself. Thus, imitation
emerges out of the lucky fusion of two different realms, nature and spirit, in such a manner that the spirit infuses the nature or the material
with its own form. Creativity therefore is never an involuntary act performed by an unconscious subject, like the rustic, but a willful act performed by a self-conscious subject who asserts itself insofar as the subject imposes itself, or its spirit, on the dead material. Coleridges socalled self-assertive I am becomes the origin of the world in the personification of the genius, a world recreated in poetic form.
The imitating spirit makes the strange familiar by creating it in its
own picture. The spirit unifies; it is a self-consciousness destroying
the alien by transforming it into its own. In copying an object, the artist
achieves almost the reverse effect because the reviewerin perceiving
a copy of somethingstarts out noticing the similarities between copy
and original, but then only notices their differences. The object of the

51
copy therefore remains strange and alien to the reviewer; there is no
mediation or unification of nature and mind when an artist merely copies. This is what Coleridge mistakenly believes Wordsworth believes he
is doing. According to Coleridge, Wordsworth believes that he copies
rustic language; he overlooks the proximity he as a genius has to God;
he ignores that he as a poet-genius is a creator himself, a God.
Like Schelling and the other German idealists, Coleridge strives to
obtain identity and prevent difference. In his idealist-theological program, Coleridge is intimidated by the connection Wordsworth suggests
between the spirituality of the poet and the worldliness of rustic language. Coleridge consequently emphasizes the connection between spirit and nature in such a way that spirit and nature merely reflect the
same indifferent creative process. Therefore he rejects Wordsworths
understanding of his own poetical enterprise as copying and not as imitation even though Wordsworths outline of his program (exposed to a
close-reading) emphasizes the imaginative activity of the poet.
In the following interpretation of Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen, we shall see how this desire to annihilate all differences between
subject and object, between genius and God, between lover and beloved, or between art and nature is given actual form in a work of art.

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Chapter 8
________________________________________
Infantilizing People, Sentimentalizing Society
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as Example

1) Representing Romantic Reality

On the first pages of Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the reader
is introduced to a phantasmatic representation of romantic reality. This
reality is from the beginning represented as a dream, as something indistinct, obscure, and non-existent, as a higher but unattainable order.
Novalis romantic universe is, on the one hand, obscure, nebulous, shadowy, indistinguishable, ambiguous, and deep, but, on the other, it is
picturesque, artificial, synthetic, radiant, heavenly, delirious, shallow. In
its representation of this universe, the text institutes a play between
darkness and light, as if it rhetorically argues for both the depth and
height of this universe by means of light.
Certain nightly fantasies about a blue flower open the novel. It is a
flower which captivates young Heinrichs fantasies in a state between
awakening and sleep. After having heard about this blue flower, it
strangely and compulsively captures Heinrichs mind. The flower is not
simply a flower; it is a symbol of something Heinrich cannot explain. It
is perhaps a remedy or a talisman of sortsdeliberately the text does
not let us know, but it does let us know that Heinrich intuitively senses
the powers of this flower, and that this flower is not of this world.
I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower. It is perpetually in my mind,
and I can write or think of nothing else. I have never felt like this before; it seems as if I had a dream just then, or as if slumber had carried
me into another world. For in the world where I had always lived, who
ever bothered about flowers? Besides, such a strange passion for a
flower is something I never heard of before.88

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The blue flower may be understood as a metaphor for poetry. But
establishing a plain metaphorical equation (blue flower = poetry) does
not explain the complexity of this metaphor, in part because each term
in the metaphor condenses several additional characteristics. A flower
is never simply a flower, and poetry is never simply poetry. One problem is that we do not know what the blue flower represents by
representing poetry, and we do not know what poetry is because it is
in part determined by the term that represents it metaphorically, the blue
flower. If we, therefore, know that poetry is a blue flower, this
knowledge evidently does not provide us with much insight.
One way of approaching the problem is to examine the components
of the metaphor separately. By examining the denotative level of the
blue flower, and explicating its mode of functioning in the text and the
contexts in which it occurs, one avoids understanding the blue flower as
if it had one unequivocal meaning, as if the blue flower were identical
to poetry. If the function and context of the blue flower is made explicit, its significance is hereby reconstructed and apprehended. In this
strategy, one reconstructs meaning from the function and context of a
term; one does not surrender to the explicit rhetoric of the text, in which
the blue flower is represented as an inexplicable mystery.
The flowers denotative level is important in order to understand the
connotative. It is a flower, it is blue, and it carries uncommon powers. It
belongs to a nature alien to the apparent world. The flowers uncommon
blue-ness indicates a world of another beauty and intensity. Moreover,
the flower only reveals itself in nightly fantasies and in dreams, a context also indicating the alien quality of the flower, insofar as dreams are
states in which the subject withdraws from reality and where another
world is revealed. The dream is the subjects opportunity to catch a
glimpse of a different universe, a universe where cognitive categories
such as time, space, and causality seem to be applied differently. As
such, the dream-world is in general the context of the blue flower, and
thus of poetry.
In the dream one is turned inwards toward an interior imaginary
world; perception has become self-perception. This introspective activity is identical to the seclusion of the romantic poet, when he or she
turns away from society in order to apprehend an imaginary world
emerging from within, announcing itself as poetry. The general internalization of perception creates a context which fits both the blue flower
and the creative poet. Dreaming of the blue flower becomes a symbol of

54
what Novalis does while writing poetry. Content is wrapped in form:
dreaming of the blue flower is a symbol of what Novalis does while
writing about dreaming of the blue flower.
Thus, poetry is not just a poem, a piece of writing, a book in its
naked materiality. If poetry is the blue flower, and if it functions in
the same way as the blue flower, and has an identical context, then it
is related to this general internalization, in which a world of a new
splendor and radiance is discovered.
Internalization becomes a basic theme of the novel, repeated and
applied on numerous different levels. The theme obviously suggests an
escape from the material and social world. It is often represented as a
journey into darkness in order to discover truth, for example, as a descent into caves in order to learn, to hear, or to see Trutheither to see
what is hidden beneath the surface of the earth, or to hear stories about
foreign countries, past events, and exotic places told by solitary sages.
It is a basic conviction of the text that in the dark one shall see, in the
depths one shall experience the heights.
With this theme, the text is evidently probing something Freud
would later term the unconscious. Novalis text has still no theoretical
concept of unconsciousness and Novalis unconscious does not have
the form of Freuds, partly because the dark interior universe he suggests is conceived of as transcendental and divine. Still, the text may legitimately be perceived as a poetic representation of what later becomes the idea of unconsciousness.
In Heinrichs dream, he approaches and tries in vain to grasp the
blue flower. If the flower were understood literally as a metaphor for
poetry, this desire would signify nothing but the poets desire to write
poetry. However, the translation of the metaphor becomes more intricate when one takes into account the compact and dense denotative
meaning of the flower. Here, the flower signifies the non-existent, the
unattainable, the enigmatic, the transcendental. Thus, the desire to grasp
the flower does not simply mean the desire to write poetry, but indicates rather a desire to enter an imaginary world where nature is humanized and humans naturalized. The desire is rather than to write poetry,
to become poetry.
The attempt to represent this incomprehensible other reality is the
poetic objective in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. As Heinrich tries to grasp
the blue flower, Novalis tries to grasp this other reality in a poetic representation. If the blue flower is a metaphor for poetry, but more pro-

55
foundly a symbol of an imaginary, unattainable, and divine reality, then
it is the task of the poet to communicate this other reality. The poet puts
his imagination to work in this universeperceiving, experiencing, and
describing it. In this project, the rhetoric and enthusiasm of the poet is
supposed to drown the fact that this universe remains purely imaginative. It is his confused hope to bring this imaginative universe to life,
and it is his confused assumption that overheated emotions shall finally
take him where his imagination already trifles.
In this concept of poetry, a poets job is not to construct a plot anymore, or to calculate its effect on the audience, or to express contemporary social or existential problems. Poetry is not even a particular product any longer, a well-constructed whole created by and the responsibility of one particular poet. Poetry resides at the other side. The product,
the actual work is poetry only in a much more humble and limited
senseas explained through Schellings distinction between poetry and
art, where poetry merely constituted the trivial material product. Art, in
the universal sense, is something hidden from the poets, something they
try to see and render in the material poetic work. The poets become
imaginative observers, in their imaginative perception staring into the
depth of nature in order to subtract its secrets, its beauty and truth. If
poets wander about in nature they do not just see (empirical) nature. If
they stare at an old oak, they look for its truth and beauty, for its divine
essence, for the hand of God in its appearance, for its supernatural poetry. The poets perception is a gaze extracting transcendental life from
natural. The poets take empirical nature back into themselves in order
to revitalize and restore its divine essence.

2) Beyond the Poetry of the Blue Flower

In the first chapter of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, this romantic reality is represented in the dreams of Heinrich and his father. On the first
page we encounter the description of the blue flower. This flower is associated with an enigmatic desire incomprehensible to Heinrich himself.
First in Heinrichs dream, and subsequently in his fathers recounting of
a dream, this flower is described. In their dreams they both wander
about in picturesque landscapes, providing them with immense pleasure
and comfort. They find pleasure in its curves and shapes, shelter in its
caves, comfort in the sounds of chirping birds, gurgling streams, etc.

56
Nature is a friend or a beloved with whom the poet finds protection. In
certain instances of imaginative overflow, nature even comes alive.
In his dream, Heinrich is first speeding through the world and its
history. He becomes acquainted with all things: with mankind, its history, its happiness and miseries, with exotic places and animals. Most of
his dream is an observation of the history and conditions of humans, or
of the geography, the inhabitants, and animals of foreign countries.
First he dreamed of immeasurable distances and wild unfamiliar regions. He wandered over oceans with inconceivable ease; he saw
strange creatures; he lived with many kinds of people, in war, in wild
tumult, and in quiet huts. He fell into captivity and into most ignominious affliction. Every sensation within him mounted to hitherto unknown heights. He went through an infinite variety of experiences; he
dies and came to life again, loved most passionately, and was then separated from his loved one forever. Finally toward morning as daybreak appeared, his soul became calmer, and the images became clearer
and more abiding.89

He relives and incorporates the history of mankind in one night. He

becomes like an imaginative gaze sweeping through the world, absorbing all images. This at least is the idea, although it is difficult to detach
oneself from the impression that the images described have the exotic,
alien quality commonly found in etchings and drawings from picture
books popular at the time; picture books with pictures of exotic places,
of strange people, of unfamiliar animals, etc. This suggestion is not entirely random, as the importance of such bilderbcher as a source of
knowledge becomes fully explicit later in the novel. While talking about
the acquisition of absolute knowledge, Novalis seems to be browsing
through a picture book, learning about the marvels of the world.
At a point, Heinrichs dream slows down, and the pace of his drifting gaze slows down as well. He seems to have arrived. He becomes
less eye and more body. Now he does not glide over the world as an eye
glides over the pictures of a book; now he enters the world as body; he
begins to wander about in this world.
In the dream, he is now a wanderer. He is situated in a world beyond
the mundane world. It is a world of dark forests, of steep cliffs, of pastures bathed in supernatural light, and of caves leading into the depth of
earth. It is a picturesque nature. But it is also a nature alive and breathing, a nature that in a certain moment of imaginative overflow comes

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alive. As Heinrich bends down to drink from the clear water in a
stream, he imagines nature materializing itself in the semblance of
young women.
It was as though a spirit breathed through him, and he felt deeply refreshed and strengthened. An irresistible longing to bathe seized him;
he undressed and stepped down onto the basin. It seemed as if a sunset
cloud was enveloping him; a heavenly sensation flowed through his
soul; with voluptuous delight countless thoughts strove to mingle within him. New images never seen before arose and interfused and became
visible beings around him, and every wave of the lovely element clung
to him like a tender bosom. The waves appeared to be charming girls
dissolved, which momentarily embodied themselves as they touched
the youth.90

Heinrich is still dreaming, and when he gets up from the water, he

becomes drowsy and falls asleep. In his dream he begins to dream, but
is soon awakened from this dream in his dream by a vision: A kind of
sweet slumber fell upon him in which he dreamed of indescribable
events and out of which he was awakened by another illumination.91
He is still dreaming, and the following is consequently a vision in a
dream. We are removed two steps from reality. In this dream-like vision
within his dream, the world described is even more indistinct and alien,
but also a step closer to truth. Here, everything is bathed in a divine
light although the sky is dark blue, the daylight round about him was
brighter and milder than ordinary daylight, and the sky was dark blue
and wholly clear.92 In this unnaturally radiant universe Heinrich recovers the strange blue flower which captures his fantasy: But what attracted him with great force was a tall, pale blue flower, which stood
beside the spring and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. 93
Now he finally gets an opportunity to explore its secrets.
He saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed upon it long with inexpressible tenderness. Finally, when he wanted to approach the flower, it
all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening and cuddled up to the growing stem; the flower leaned towards him
and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate
face hovered.94

One does not need to apply Freud here to discern the erotic peculiarity of the description: the petals surrounding a centerobject of

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immense curiosity, the leaves that become more glisteningcuddling
up to the growing stem. The metaphor is quite coherent. The coherence
is maintained when the petalsforming a corolla around the center of
the floweropen, displaying the interior of the flower. Until the final
image, the metaphor is consistently genital. In this final image, Novalis
ends his preoccupation with the sexual organs, and replaces them with
more passable facial parts. The center of the flower displays now ein
zartes Gesichta displacement of the blunt sexual metaphor, undoubtedly helping the author to overlook what he has actually been talking
about: certainly not sex, but merely the distant reminiscence of the delicate countenance of an unknown woman.
At this point, Novalis wisely introduces Heinrichs mother to save
his dreaming alter ego from more of this dream. She enters the bedroom, and before things run out of control, she wakes him up. (Heinrich
or Novalis!)
Heinrichs father has also dreamt about this flower. In this dream,
the father has anticipated a theme to which we return. Just as Heinrich
subsequently meets a sage on his journey, also the father has met a wise
hermit in a cavern deep beneath earth. When he returns from the cavern
he enters the same alien landscape, covered with strange flowers.
Among else, it is the return of the glnzenden Blttern (glistening
leaves).
Mammoth trees with large glistening leaves cast broad shade round
about. The air was very warm and yet not oppressive. Everywhere
fountains and flowers, and among all the flowers one pleased me especially, and it seemed to me that the others leaned toward this one. 95

Although certain elements have been rearranged, the passage is a

repetition of Heinrichs dream. As Heinrich hears this story, he becomes strangely upset and electrified with excitement.
Ah, dearest father, please tell me what color it was, the lad said with
violent agitation. / I cannot remember that, although the other details
are still clearly impressed on my mind. / Was is not blue? / maybe it
was, the father continued without paying any attention to Henrys
strange vehemence.96

This excitement over the color of a flower seems puzzling in the

context. It seems dissonant in the otherwise quietly progressing story.

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But what seems incomprehensible on the surface level of the text, the
boys excitement, becomes comprehensible in light of what the flower
consistently represents, that is, the genitals or the act of copulation.
Heinrich has the hunch that he and his father dream about, or see, or
reach out for the same flower, and in his peculiar excitement/strange vehemence (seltsame Heftigkeit), he interrogates his father as to whether this flower is really the same. The secret of all secrets is here the secret of the genitals: does everybody have them, even
ones own father?probably not a question Novalis picture books answer so easily.
Evidently, this content is not rendered intentionally, it is repressed.
It only suggests itself through, 1) the overconsistency of a genital metaphor, supposedly a metaphor for something quite different fromif not
opposite togenitals, namely poetic truth, and 2) a puzzling overreaction to and disturbance caused by this metaphor.
One reason why the blue flower cannot be represented according to
the sexual fantasy producing it is that, on an intentional level, it is designed to indicate and symbolize a poetized universe, divine in its origin and hailing virtues such as delicacy, innocence, purity, and naivet.
Since the romantic universe is supposedly created by God, its sudden
association with sex has to be displaced to images of a more acceptable,
idyllic, and elevated quality.
Therefore, on an intentional level the text explains Heinrichs excitement by his astonishment in detecting a supernatural connection between his own and his fathers dream. This detection of a divine and
mysterious connection supposedly explains his excitement (although the
text itself cannot hide its surprise and still finds it peculiar/strange).
On an intentional level, the flower is a symbol of an enigmatic link between distant times and individuals. It links father and son in their
dreams because they both dream about the same flower. However, on
this explicit level, it still links them in associating the sight of the flower
with women. Heinrichs flower transforms itself into the face of a woman, while the fatherhaving seen the flowerwakes up stirred by violent love, the object of which is Heinrichs mother. Thus, on this entirely explicit level, the flower links father and son in a joint project of
longing and love. This is still acceptable, love is still permissible in
Novalis chaste romantic universe. But longing and love also
represent the perfect anticipation of the darker fantasies regarding the

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enigma of genitals, copulation, and birth. Longing and love is the legitimate and adequate euphemism for these fantasies.
In the final segment of the fathers dream, these fantasies erupt into
a surreal image. In this segment, the flower-figure is repeated as a genital metaphor but with a significant reversal and displacement of the
metaphor. The flower is, among many different significations it condenses, consistently a woman, or a feminine principle. In his dream,
the father now encounters a woman, walking towards him with a baby
in her arms. The woman is Heinrichs mother, and the baby consequently Heinrich himself. The woman is now represented as a flowerfigure: she holds the baby as beforehand the leaves held the blue
flower, and the baby reacts as beforehand the growing stem of the blue
flower did.
I saw your mother with an amiable, abashed look before me. She held a
shining (glnzendes) child in her arms and handed it to me, when all of
a sudden the child visibly grew, becoming more and more radiant and
bright (immer heller und glnzender). And finally on dazzling-white
wings it soared over us, and taking us both in its arms it flew so high
that the earth looked like a golden bowl with the neatest carving.97

The genital metaphor is repeated, but with the significant reversal

that the baby here takes the place of the penis as it finally begins to
grow into an omnipotent phallus. To disentangle all the condensations
in the image is not fully feasible, but certain relationships can be
pointed out.
That the mother first holds the child as the leaves hold the stem of
the flower appears to indicate a vagina/penis figure identical to the figure of the blue flower. Thus, the mother holds her baby as a vagina surrounding a penis; this condensation is evident, as the mother holds
him/it glnzenden between her arms/legs, and it indicates identification between child and penis. As such, the child is directly associated
with the act of copulation. By means of this association the child can
now be perceived as the product of a secret and repressed act of copulation, and as such, as a product of lust. When the mother hands the child
to the father, she acknowledges that the child belongs to the father as
well as to the mother. He is not the mothers unique possession, a pure
product of maternal care, but a figure reduced to the result of their intimacy. At this point the child starts to grow. First he grows in order to
become what his father already is, bigger and immer heller und

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glnzender. But finally, he transgresses his fathers natural limitations,
omnipotently transforming himself into a large bird, capable of carrying
both his parents under his arms, or literally, taking them under his
wings. The child becomes a caring parent as an appropriate revenge for
this unpleasant insight into sexuality and birth.
The sequence appears to display the intolerable, unromantic idea
that a child is born as a product of lust. As such, it offends the infants
narcissism, because it is not exclusively the center of divine maternal
care. The relationship between mother and child is no longer one of exclusive innocence and love. This vision is high-unromanticism; it constitutes a glimpse of (repressed) reality within the infantilized and sentimentalized universe of Novalis.
Having been introduced to these insights, Heinrich becomes more
and more gloomy. His mothers attempt to entertain him and divert his
depression becomes the purpose of the journey they begin together.
Thus, the journey, occupying the first book, starts as the mothers attempt to cheer up her son, to make up for the frustration and anguish
she caused to him by finally giving him all the undivided attention she
deprived him of in her love to his father.
She had for some time been noticing that Henry was far more quiet and
inclined to brood than formerly. She supposed he was moody or sick
and that a long journey . . . would dispel the gloomy mood of her son
and restore his former cheerful and sociable spirit.98

But why is it, at this historical time, possible (or necessary) to express such a psychological theme?The aesthetic paradigm seems to
allow and invite this possibility, first because the text is not expressing
collective models anymore but instead conveys individual visions; secondly because the text does not express consistent plots anymore but
spontaneous individual impulses and imaginary impressions; and thirdly
because the text is not obliged to interpret an ethical, political, and social world anymore but can engage itself in interpreting individual emotions. The text does no longer represent a specific plot structure or a
certain decorum, neither does it find inspiration in well-established mythological or historical material as a peoples collective interpretation of
its origin, history, and cultural background. Now, nightly visions,
dream-content, day-dreams, and fantasies are legitimate resources of
art.

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3) Descending into the Underground in Search of Truth

In Heinrich von Ofterdingen, caves lead the characters into the underground. First Heinrichs father, since Heinrich experience the depth
of the mines.
However, before Heinrich enters the mines, we are told another story about a cave. It is about a young poet living in the forests together
with his father. One day he meets and gets acquainted with the Princess
of the Kingdom. They develop a liking for each other, and during a hike
when they ran into bad weather, they seek refuge in a cave.
They both considered themselves fortunate to spy during a lightning
flash a cave near by on the steep slope of a wooded hill, where they
hoped to find a sage refuge against the dangers of the storm and a resting place for their exhausted strength. Fortune favored their wishes.
The cave was dry and overgrown with clean moss. The youth soon lit a
fire with twigs and moss whereat they could dry themselves, and the
two lovers now saw themselves withdrawn from the world in a marvelous way, saved from a dangerous condition, and alone beside each other on a warm, comfortable couch.99

Here the cave is not simply a shelter against the weather, nor simply
a sanctuary protecting the youth from the social world. It provides the
context for sexuality. The cave amid the bridal hymn of the storm and
the wedding torches of lightning, lulled them in to the sweetest intoxication that perhaps ever blessed a mortal pair.100 The cave embraces
them as man and woman, stripped of social rank. In the cave their sexual unification is possible and permissible. Nature blesses this wedding
based solely on love. What was unthinkable in Corneille, a princess
marrying below her rank, is accepted in an imaginary romantic reality
where nature acknowledges feelings as criteria for marital choice. With
this, feelings are no longer interpreted as individual irregularities one
should learn to restrain, but as individual echoes of a romanticized
world more universal than society and its arbitrary rules.
This is, however, not the most typical significance of caves
throughout the work. Caves are usually a shelter, but not for sex, for
truth and knowledge. According to this conception, truth is something
one may find beneath the surface of earth. It is represented as something hidden in the underground. The caves are entries into the secrets

63
of the earth. People working in the underground as miners are wiser
than anybody else because, in the caves, they uncover what the earth
has hidden: partly hidden treasures, such as gold, silver, and precious
stones; partly the prehistory of earth in the form of remnants from extinct species. Caves are entries to truth, one learns by descending into
the depths. A miner, explaining why he chose his profession, gives as
reason his adolescent curiosity to know the origin of the world.
From youth on he had had a great curiosity to know what might be buried in the mountains, where the water in springs came from, and where
the gold and silver and precious stone were found which so irresistibly
attract human beings. He had often contemplated these sparkling solids
on the icons and relics of the near-by monastery church and had wished
that they could talk to him and tell him about their mysterious origin.101

This extraordinary naive concept of truth, as something literally

hidden beneath the surface of the earth, also entails an idealization and
sentimentalization of the mining profession and the austere social conditions of miners at the time Novalis writes. His romantic truth-concept
is simultaneously an ideological justification of these conditions. The
miners proximity to the truth hidden in the mines is a compensation for
the current exploitation of their labor. This idea is stated explicitly, if
not in these exact words.
Sir, the old man said as he turned to Henry and wiped a few tears out
of his eyes, mining must bear Gods blessing, for there is no art which
might make its participants happier and nobler, which would do more
to arouse mens faith in a heavenly wisdom and providence, and which
would keep the innocence and childlikeness of the heart in greater purity, than mining. The miner is born poor and he dies poor. He is content
to know where the metal powers are found and to bring them to the
light of day, but their dazzling glamour has no power over his pure
heart. Uninflamed by perilous frenzy, he takes more delight in their peculiar structures and their strange origin and habitat than in their possession which promises so much. They have no charm for him any
more once they are turned into commercial articles. . . . How tranquilly
the poor, contended miner works in his deep solitude, withdrawn from
the restless tumult of the day and inspired only with desire for knowledge and love of concord. . . . His occupation teaches him tireless patience and does not permit him to distract his attention with useless
thoughts.102

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In the underground, one is closer to truth and closer to God. The

miners need not have part of the wealth they produce. They are happy
about the wonderful education they achieve in the mines, an education
which more than compensates for the wish to possess the treasures they
uncover. Knowing that one has brought precious stones to light is here a
sufficient wage, their value has no spell on a true miners purified
heart. As soon as they are turned into commodities, they lose their
worth for him.
Descending even deeper into the underground, one encounters
another representation of truth, here in the personification of the sage,
who has buried himself deep in the groundinside the earth and outside the worldin order to meditate and study. First, the father in his
dream and subsequently Heinrich encounter this sage. The images are
identical. In the fathers dream it reads:
A long while [I] came to a spacious cavern; there an old man in a flowing cloak sat at an iron table. . . . His beard had grown through the iron
table and covered his feet. He had a serious and kindly look. . . . A
bright light flooded the cave.103

This image is repeated when Heinrich visits a sage hermit in his cavern.
Soon they thought they noticed a light which grew stronger the nearer
they came. A vaulted chamber larger than the previous caverns opened
up, in the back of which they saw a human form sitting by a lamp before a stone slab on which lay a large book he appeared to be reading. .
. . It was a man whose age one could not guess. He appeared neither
young nor old; one could detect no marks of time on him except plain
silvery hair parted on his forehead.104

The cavern is an escape, a refuge from the actual world. Here the
hermit searches the dark in order to see the light of wisdom. By burying
himself, he repeats the move analyzed in the beginning, where the subject disappears from reality into a dark dream-world in order to experience an imaginative other world. In this dark underworld, with so
many analogies to the unconscious, cognitive categories such as time,
space, and causality are also different. The age of the old sage is, for
example, indeterminable, and we are supposed to believe that he has

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lived throughout centuries. He is the symbol of an immortal who
through centuries has absorbed all knowledge of world, mankind, and
history.

4) Metaphysical Ignorance and the Importance of Illegible Books

Nothing fascinates Heinrich as much as knowledge, except incomprehensible knowledge. Things fascinate by their depth and incomprehensibility, by their lack of limit, by their infinitely open horizons, or by
their opening toward vanished pasts and inaccessible depths of the human being.
Time and again, the incomprehensibly deep, the abstruse and mysterious, are emphasized as additional qualities of things. Things beyond
the human intellect are a main source of inspiration for the poet. Their
incomprehensibility indicates to the subject its limitations in an unfathomable and boundless universe, but also it assigns poets a place and a
task in this universe, as unique readers of its symbols, as its chosen interpreters.
In the story of the young poet who falls in love with and finally marries the princess of the kingdom, the princess loses a priceless jewel in
the forest during her first visit to the youngster and his father. The
young man happens to recover the gem in the grass. The stone is not
just expensive and not just priceless because of its sentimental value; it
is first and foremost an object of awe because on its backside some incomprehensible ciphers are engraved: He stopped and picked up a
dark red stone, which sparkled exceedingly on one side and on the other
had an incised inscription he could not understand.105 The two sides of
the stone are like the two sides of the romantic universe in Novalis. One
side signifies radiance, splendor, richness; the other side, abstruseness,
obscurity, profundity. The front side indicates the superficiality of the
romantic reality; it is the idyllic playground for the romantic hero. The
backside indicates its depth; it is the abyss for the romantic intellect, an
impenetrable intensity where the romantic hero, in lack of understanding, faces the divine.
Signs that cannot be understood refer to an incomprehensible other
world, in this case to a world outside the Western hemisphere, a world
with an unknown alphabet. Recovering this stone, the young poet has to

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write a poem about it, a poem explicitly dealing with the ciphers engraved on its backside.
There is engraved an enigmatic token / Full deep into the jewels glowing blood; / Of likeness to a heart may well be spoken / Which holds
the strangers image like a bud. / Around that stone a thousand rays are
broken, / Around the heart light surges in a flood. / In that, the light of
splendor now is sleeping, / Will this too have the heart of hearts in
keeping?106

Incomprehensible signs excite the young poet; they indicate to him

his fundamental ignorance regarding the constitution of the world. By
demonstrating metaphysical ignorance, he furthermore demonstrates
sensitivity. When the youth, together with his poem, hands back the jewel to the princess, he demonstrates that he acknowledges a metaphysical universe beyond them, a universe of which they have no knowledge.
In the poem, the stone is compared to the human heart, and the incomprehensible ciphers signify the incomprehensible essence of the human
being. This acknowledged incomprehensibility of the heart (the seat of
the emotions) later legitimates the consummation of their love beyond
all social barriers. The poem becomes, so to speak, the first step in a
seduction-strategy.
It seems to be analytically efficient to maintain the idea of two sides
of Novalis romantic reality. On one side, the picture books; on the other, the mystique. On one side, the glitter of the jewel; on the other, unreadable ciphers. This two-sided romantic reality is also represented by
two essentially different types of books Heinrich comes upon. In Heinrichs meeting with the sage eremite in the cave (who appears to be the
Count of Hohenzollern), one experiences the return of the picture book.
The count shows Heinrich his collection of books, and one book in particular gives Heinrich indefinite pleasure (unendlicher Lust). This
book describes the world in pictures and short poems. It preoccupies
Heinrich because it shows exotic places, exceptional events, and alien
things. Again learning is seeing, truth is the visible, and wisdom is to
have seen a lot; it is to know the world, if not by experience, then by a
picture book. As beforehand in his dream, Heinrich becomes again a
gaze drifting above the world, absorbing its visual content.
The hermit showed them his books. They were old chronicles and
poems. Henry paged in the large and beautifully illuminated books, and

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his curiosity was greatly stimulated by the short verses of the poetry, by
the headings, the single passages, and the neatly executed pictures
which appeared here and there like embodied words to underprop the
imagination of the reader. The hermit noticed his deep pleasure and explained the unusual pictures to him. The most varied scenes of life were
portrayed. Battles, funeral processions, wedding festivities, shipwrecks,
caves, and palaces; kings, heroes, priests, people young and old, people
in foreign costumes, and strange animals, appeared in different aspects
and combinations. Henry could not get his fill of looking.107

Novalis romantic reality is represented like such a book. In the

form of such lebensscenen, the world is a compilation of exotic places
and events arranged randomly. Thus, the picture book becomes in itself
a representation of the poetic principle in Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen. His journey is an experience of images, events, and stories, requisite for his poetical education. In his composition of Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, Novalis himself compiles a work of picturesque images
and stories. The novel contains the same colorful pictures as the book
he describes Heinrich is reading with innere Lust. Both represent a
scenery of caves and palaces; kings, heroes, and priests; old and young
people; men in foreign clothing; strange animals, etc. When reading his
picture books or having a dream resembling a picture book, Heinrich is
seeing what he is seeing in his travels; he is accumulating experiences
about the world and its people, about peculiar events and stories.
If Novalis work is constructed like a journey from one image to
another, from one exotic place to another, then the picture book becomes an allegory of the entire poetic principle in Novalis. It becomes
what one might term a micro-representation of the novel; it mirrors
the poetic principle of the work of which it is a part. It is a fractal repetition of the poetic structure in which it functions. As such, the picture
book replaces the plot in Novalis novel.
However, among the book-collection of the eremite, there is a book
more fascinating than the picture book, a book Heinrich cannot read (by
the way, also a picture book, but an illegible and incomprehensible
one). This book is written in a language not only incomprehensible to
Heinrich, but furthermore a language he has never seen beforeand yet
he senses he understands the book. This illegible book represents the
limits of knowledge; it is beyond the picture book; beyond the superficial universe with its picturesque nature, its foreign places and countries; beyond its kings, princesses, sages, singers, and lovers. This illeg-

68
ible book represents the mystique, the backside of the jewel. It indicates
a universe deeper than what one comprehends visually, deeper than
what one may see illustrated in a picture book. In this book, Heinrich
still perceives pictures, but in an enigmatic and inexplicable way they
appear to portray himself and his friends. They seem to render former
life-experiences and even to give hint of a dimly conceived future.
At length he came across a volume written in a foreign language which
seemed to him to have some similarity to Latin and Italian. He wished
most fervently to know the language, for the book pleased him exceedingly without his understanding a syllable of it. It had no title, but as
he looked through it, he found several pictures. They seemed wonderfully familiar to him, and as he looked more sharply, he discovered a
rather clear picture of himself among the figures. He was startled and
thought he was dreaming, but after looking at it repeatedly, he could no
longer doubt the complete similarity. He hardly trusted his senses when
soon after he discovered in another picture the cave, the hermit, and the
miner at his side. Gradually he found in other pictures Zulima, his parents, the landgrave and landgravine of Thuringia, his friend the court
chaplain, and several other acquaintances of his; yet their clothes were
altered and appeared to be those of another age.108

These are the two kinds of books in Heinrich von Ofterdingen: the
picture book, through which he attains knowledge about the world; and
the enigmatic book indicating a deeper and more obscure reality. The
latter book is without title. It does not represent a fix and explicit content, since the content of this peculiar book is alive and changing. This
book does not simply depict the past, but the instance of the now as
well, and even future prospects. The book comprises all the dimensions
of time: past, presence, and future. This book, therefore, is not representation; it is consequently not written. It defies writing by the fact that
it is representing the very instance in which it is being read. As Heinrich reads this book, he sees himself in the book reading this book.
The book seems able to incorporate the moment of its own reading
without intersecting any act of writing. The time of writing is absent.
In this book Heinrich sees himself, his former friends, and his birthplace; he sees the encounter between the old miner, himself, and the
eremite in the cavern. The idea indicates the possibility of a link between present and past; it represents the other side, the dream, the
mystique, the idealistic and transcendental universe of Novalis. Thus,
the book is a representation of an immense and inconceivable depth of

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reality. It represents the (imaginary) transgression of an actual and real
world subjected to material conditions and cognitive limitations. And
the mystique even transgresses the picturesque world which Novalis describes throughout the work.
What, then, is the result of this transgression? What happens when
one transgresses not only the loathsome contemporary world but also
the idyllic and idealistic world described in Heinrich von Ofterdingen?
What is depth? What is transgression? What does the mystical side
of romantic reality look like? What happens when the poet touches the
face of God? Now, when the rhetoric has spurred our curiosity, how is
this other side represented?Disappointingly enough, it is nothing
but repetition of the same, or rather, a fractal repetition of the same. It
is again a micro-representation of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, as it lines
up the same characters and the same places (already encountered in the
work), only in the new context of an illegible book. Thus, the illegible
book is merely a mirror of the book in which it is represented.
In this micro-representation, the mystique is rendered as repetition
of the same. In this representational logic, the strangest and most uncanny is that the other side is the same as this side, that in the final
analysis there is no difference but only identity. The old pictures of
Heinrich and his friends in different clothing evidently postulate that he
and his friends have lived at another time. Heinrich has had a double;
he has lived before; he is now reborn as the same; he is immortal; he
will be reborn again; this present life will come back to him in all eternity, and as with him so with his friends and, not least, his beloved.
Consequently, nothing changes; everything remains what it is and what
it shall be. Between different ages, there are inexplicable connections.
The past repeats itself in the present and the present in the future. This
romantic thought was brought to its end and culmination a century later
by the late Nietzsche with his intuitive idea of the eternal recurrence of
the same.
The illegible book even represents what has not happened yet, suggesting what shall happen in the future, but this it represents obscurely
and incomprehensibly. This representation of the future is out of reach
although Heinrich has a burning desire to understand also this dimension of the book.
The last pictures in the book were dark and unintelligible; still several
figures of his dream struck him with deepest ecstasy; the end of the

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book seemed to be missing. Henry was greatly distressed and wished
for nothing more fervently than to be able to read the book and to possess it altogether.109

In this illegible book, the future becomes present, and the present
becomes past. The other side becomes this side. A mirroring is going on
where it becomes indeterminable whether life mirrors book or book
mirrors life. Ludwig Tieck, in a short essay about the further plans regarding Novalis unfinished work, has precisely described this identity
and interrelationship between things.
For the poet, which has comprehended the essence of his art in the
midpoint, there is nothing contradictory or alien, for him the enigmas
are resolved; he correlates, qua the magic of fantasy, all ages and
worlds, the wonder disappears and everything transforms itself into
wonder. This is how this book is composed . . . it has annihilated all
differences by which one Age is distinguished from another, and by
which one world opposes another.110

If we have suggested an analytical distinction between two romantic

realities of Novalis, a front and a back, a picturesque and a mysterious, it is the desire of the text to reconcile these different levels of reality into one harmonious universe. Novalis wants to eradicate the difference between distinct ages and worlds, as well as differences between poetry and world, and lover and beloved. He wants to attain what
Schelling in his dialectics calls indifference. He wants the poetic imagination to transform all differences into indifference and identity.

5) The Metaphysical Task of Undoing the Death of the Beloved

When Heinrich and his mother arrive to her father in Augsburg, he
has a party, attended among others by the famous poet, Kingsohr, and
his daughter, Mathilde. During the evening, as people converse, dance,
drink, and listen to Kingsohrs songs, Heinrich and Mathilde fall in
love. Heinrich achieves everything this evening and the following days.
He is admitted as a pupil of Kingsohrs, the poet, of whose friendship
he may be prouder than of the emperors, and he becomes engaged to
the great poets daughter, Mathilde.

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When the first part, Die Erwartung, of Heinrich von Ofterdingen
ends, apparently Mathilde has died. And when the second unfinished
part, Die Erfllung, starts, we meet a much older Heinrich, still in grief
over the demise of his beloved Mathilde. Here the metaphysics introduced in the first part is brought to its culmination; differences between
life and death, between past and present, and between lover and beloved are annihilated. The text attempts to bring back Mathilde to this
idealized poetic world by resurrecting her spirit in the form of her
voiceand to reduce with this the pain and minimize the impact of her
death.
A poem introduces the second part. This poem is a prologue, and
the voice of this prologue anticipates the whole attempt to connect
present and past, dream and reality, I and world, etc. In his Bericht ber
die Fortsetzung, Tieck interprets this voice as speaking poetry itself.
The spirit, which pronounces the prologue in verse, will return after
each chapter, and this mood, this wonderful perception of things will
continue. Through this device the invisible world and the visible is
eternally bound together. This speaking spirit is Poetry itself, but at the
same time the person which is born as a result of Heinrichs and Mathildes embrace.111

The poem is supposedly pronounced by the spiritual child of Heinrich and Mathilde: Astralis, the title of the poem. The poem indicates
that the union of Heinrich and Mathilde has resulted in the birth of a
child. This child is no actual child, but (as Tieck notices) a poetic
voice. The speaking spirit of this poem is poetry itself, and at the same
time the reconciliation of Heinrich and Mathilde, lover and beloved, in
the highest spiritual principle. Their newborn child is their unified
voice, pure poetry, and justly baptized Astralis, star with the immediate association, light. As Mathilde is already dead, the voice overcomes death; by means of an immaterial voice it unifies them in the
transcendental.
The poem is divided in two major parts, and the turning point is the
birth of their childtheir voice. However, before this voice is born, it
paradoxically recounts its own coming into existence. In the first part of
the poem, it speaks of an existence before the unification of Heinrich
and Mathilde. We experience a narcissistic dream. A poetic I exists as
the midpoint of a radiant universe which it creates itselfit is described
as der Mittelpunkt, der heilge Quell of this universe. Here, everything

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begins afresh. The voice is simultaneously a narcissistic center of the
world and the author of the world; like God, it pronounces the worlds
existence through the word.
Upon one summer morning I felt young; / I sensed the quickened
pulses of my life / As neer before; and as the love in me / Passed over
into deeper ecstasies, / I wakened more and more, and ardent longing /
For deeper and a total intermingling / Grew more intense with every
passing moment. / Sweet lust is of my life the fountainhead. / I am the
midpoint and the holy spring / Whence every stormy longing dashes
forth / And whither every longing, being broken, / Returns again to
restful quietude.112

This is a moment of synthesis of spirit and reality, described as an

awakening which grows into ecstasy. The I gradually begins to sense
the world, first with regard to tactile, olfactory, and auditory perception,
and finally with regard to visual perception. An inner fount / Was I, a
gentle struggle; all things flowed / Through me and over me and lightly
raised me.113 In this narcissistic dream, only the I and the universe
exist. This is the dream which ends with the union of Heinrich and Mathilde. After this union, after the child/voice comes into existence it, paradoxically, disappears from the poem, or rather it stops referring to itself as narrator. In the first part of the poem, before the birth of Astralis, a prenatal Astralis refers to itself in frequent use of personal pronouns: I, me, or my (ich, mich, meine). Astralis seems to recount a
prenatal autobiography. After the birth of Astralis, this self-reference
disappears and is replaced by a reference to the anonymous one
(man). Before the unification, almost every second line is selfreferential, for example: An einen Sommermorgen ward ich jung /
ich [fhlt] meines eignen Lebens Puls / Erwacht ich immer mehr /
Ich bin der Mittelpunkt / Wart ich nicht Zeugen / Ich duftete /
Alles floss durch mich und ber mich / Ich quoll in meine eigne
Fluth zurck / Noch war ich blind / Ich fand mich nur von weiten /
Wollust flammen in mir schlug / Ich hob mich nun gen Himmel neugebohren.
But after this neugebohren, there is not a single self-reference. The
Ich vanishes as soon as it is born. This peculiar voice apparently only
exists before the spiritual union of Heinrich and Mathilde by which it
comes into existence. The two lines: Ich hob mich nun gen Himmel
neugebohren, / Vollendet war das irrdische Geschick constitute the

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turning point of the poem. Paradoxically, the birth of the voice indicates
the end of its worldly destiny. The seeming paradox indicates that we
are talking neither about a birth nor about a child, because here birth
means death. That is what happens to Heinrich and Mathilde after their
union. Their spirit, their child, raises itself above the earth to a world
where everything is indifference and where not even it survives as a
distinct entity.
The two worlds, before and after the turning point, represent the different levels of poet and God; they mirror each other but on these two
different levels. On the first level, the poetas a voice not yet ascended
into the realm of the divinereflects the world as ideality, immateriality, splendor, spirit, or truth. As in Schellings idealistic dialectics, the
poet is the synthesis (reconciliation or indifference) of the real and
ideal worlds. But the poet still occupies this role on a lower level than
God, also constituting a principle of synthesis or indifference of world
and ideal, matter and idea, but on an absolute and superior level. Poet
and God synthesize the same dichotomy, but on these two different dialectical levels. Without much change in actual theme and content, the
poem marks the decisive moment when we move from the lower to the
higher dialectical level, with a significant change in the voice of the narrator and its self-reference. This voice speaks about itself in the world
until its birth-death, whereupon it ascends to a truly indifferent divine
world.
From then on, the idealistic universe no longer exists as a relationship between I and world but between God and world. Although the
same indifferent poetized world is repeated, it is repeated on this
higher dialectical level, on the level which synthesizes all things in God.
In this higher world, all oppositions are neutralized; God or the spirit of
God pervades all things. Explicitly, it is a world no longer existing according to cognitive categories, such as time and space. It is, consequently, also a world indistinguishable from the dream-world, a world
where die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt.
The new world bursts upon the sight / And darkens the daystars glowing light; /. . . / And things once commonplace and dull / Appear now
strange and wonderful . . . [the passage: eins in allem . . . in der Vergangenheit (see note) is not translated in the English version] . . . / All
things must into all others flow, / each through the other thrive and
grow. / And each in all others represented /. . . / World turns to dream

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and dream to world, / belief is into being hurled /. . ./ Here death and
life, and lust and pining / In inmost sympathy are twining.114

This prologue anticipates the recurrence of Mathilde, or of her

voice, in the story. In Heinrichs most desperate moment of grief, he
asks heaven for a sign, and suddenly in his prayers, Mathilde begins to
speak, or rather sing to him: some clear little voices sang as out of a
remote subterranean deep.115 Mathilde has not only been revived but a
divine universe permeating the actual world has been confirmed.
After this encounter, Heinrichs feeling of loss and emptiness disappears; he recuperates from his grief and melancholy, and starts perceiving himself as living in a full and meaningful world.
The wild pangs of loneliness, the bitter pain of an unutterable loss, the
dark and devastating emptiness, the earthly powerlessnessthese had
fled, and the pilgrim saw himself again in a full and meaningful world.
Voice and speech awoke to life again within him, and everything now
appeared much more familiar and prophetic than formerly, so that death
appeared to him like a higher revelation of life, and he viewed his own
rapidly passing existence with a serene childlike emotion. Past and future had met in him and formed an intimate association.116

The romantic reality is restored. Another world beyond the material

and cognizant has been confirmed. The romantic project has succeeded
in a brief rhetorical instant in which the deceased beloved rejoins Heinrich as voice and song.

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Conclusion
________________________________________
Summary of the Point of View

1) Neoclassicism
In early Western art-theories and systems of human knowledge, poetry has no unique and privileged statusthis uniqueness it attains at a
much later state. During the Middle Ages and neoclassicism, poets have
to defend their poetic activity against theological convictions that poetry seduces people and misleads them in their religious quests. Poetry is
not yet a liable and self-justifiable discourse. It is not yet established as
an extra-mundane discourse, lingering in the abstract beyond human
criticism. If poetry later becomes religion, it is from the beginning a
threat to religion.
From the beginning, the defenders of poetry try to determine poetry
within a classificatory system of knowledge where each discipline has
its specific object and purpose. They try to convince their critics, that
also poetry has its object, function, and purpose; that poetry has a place.
The determination of such a place would justify poetry. First, because
it would ascertain that poetry was not simply a weaker imitation of well
established discourses, such as history and moral philosophy, but could
be classified with its own distinct object. Secondly, because poetry
would be restored within an order of knowledge which was ultimately
arranged by God. It would in consequence be rehabilitated as a trustworthy discourse.
At this point one has still difficulties in determining the validity of
the particular form of knowledge poetry conveys, difficulties which Plato, in his refutation of poetry, had been the first to expose: poetry is
without object, it is removed from truth, and it is irrational. This Platonic criticism is now inherited by the Medieval and Renaissance critics, as
it appears to be an established fact that where other disciplines have an

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objectand as such have a place in a well-arranged epistemological
orderpoetry seemingly has none.
In this God-given arrangement of things, every discipline has its
corresponding object: historians would talk about what persons have
done, grammarians about the rules of speech, rhetoricians about how to
persuade people, etc. So, whereas all other disciplines seem to have an
object and thus refer to nature, poetry, in lack of innate natural object,
merely appears to create a second nature. As the single exception,
poetry is not linked to the world through a corresponding object. Poetry
is of another order. From the beginning of Western thinking it is defined according to another general epistemology. Whereas the sciences
are bound to nature, poetry gives humans a glimpse of infinity, a
glimpse of what was later celebrated as freedom.
This is an undercurrent in all criticism since Plato up to today, and it
is this other order that cannot be conclusively thought in Western criticism. It resists coming into a final form, and it remains a permanent object for continuous interpretation. Despite the attempt to define this radically different order, poetry is from the beginning in need of justifications.
If poetry is determined as the making of a second nature, poets are
to be compared to God, as they create from themselves without being
limited by the constraints of an actual world. By their free creativity,
poets seem to imitate the creative act of God himself, poetry attains a
semi-divine status. But this determination of poetry serves both as a defense and an accusation of poetry. Do poets now offend God, and
should they be condemned; or should they, on the contrary, be praised
for their imaginativeness; is poetic creativity a benevolent gift from
God to mankind?
The typical theologian accusation is that poets are liars, they have
no object, they do not represent truth. And when the early critics defend
poetry against this accusation, their response is to admit that poetry is
not representing truth. What poets are doing is false, but because they
do not deny it is false, they are not lying. Therefore, poetry cannot be
criticized as false and deceitful, because it is fiction. It has from the beginning a certain immunity to criticism inscribed into its own definition.
In these defenses, poetry always has to be justified according to a
pragmatic rationalealways according to its utility. Poetry is therefore
determined as a teaching, an instruction, of the audience, but because
also other disciplines teach and instruct, poetry is in addition deter-

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mined as delightful teaching. This is how poetry surpasses its neighbordisciplines, history and philosophy, and how it attains its own place in
the system of knowledge. Poetry incorporates their better halves, and
amends their deficiencies. The juxtaposition can be roughly laid out as
follows: where philosophy only teaches morality, poetry also delights
by examples, and where history only delights by examples, poetry also
teaches morality. Thus, when poetry teaches with delight, it does something no other discourse does equally well. The deficiency of philosophy is that it is too abstract for common man to understand, whereas the deficiency of history is that historians are tied to the particular
events of things; their examples therefore have no necessary moral consequences. The poet rectifies these two deficiencies; on the one hand,
the poet teaches what the philosopher teaches, moral precepts
amending with this the deficiency of history; on the other hand, the poet
teaches these precepts by means of examples, where the philosopher
only gives descriptionsamending with this the deficiency of philosophy.
Finally it is accepted that the object of poetry is to create a second
nature, and with this to imitate an already existing one, and do so in
order to teach and delight. But genuine poets must not simply imitate
in the sense of copying nature. Because poetry should teach, because it
has moral obligations, one should not just be content with representing
the world as it is, but also as what it might be, and should be.
In neoclassical discussions on art, the audience occupies a central
position. There is no hope for poets unless they learn to understand the
audience. Before going public, the reception has to be internalized and
cultivated, and as a help the poet is recommended to seek advise among
critical friends. The poet has to exercise and cultivate their perception
of reception even before the work is composed, they have to learn to
fine-tune their ear to hear the receivers they address. Before they
create, they must be aware of a critical and evaluating recipient. According to this paradigm one does not express a poem, one accommodates it to fit the general decorum of the receiver.
Poets do not understand themselves as unique, as in romanticism.
The poetic self is not turning its ear inwards in order to detect traces
of its own enigma. There is a keen understanding of poetry as a language-game, that is, as a province in a linguistic world with specific
rules and a specific economy, a province which is shared by others,

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which is conventional, and which is not the unique possession of the
poet.
This attitude is significantly different from the emphasis on self in
romanticism, where the neoclassical principle of self-restraint and selfcensure is replaced with a principle of spontaneity. Or where the idea of
seeking adviseand with this, acknowledging the existence of authorities outside oneselfis replaced with an idea of Genius: the unique
subject who in own self-understanding would disqualify itself if it were
in need of outside authorities to validate its work. In romanticism one
does not fine-tune an ear directed towards world or audience. One instead fine-tunes an ear to listen to voices within a transcendental space
in oneself, a space where poetry neither emerges from, nor directs itself
to, anybody or anywhere in particular. The source of poetry is lost, because nobody prior to the poetsexpect perhaps an empty and distant
Godhas ever retained what is expressed in their poetry.
In these rational neoclassical ideals of rendering poetry, the poets
are more than anything else recommended to avoid the exorbitant and
excessive. They are recommended to show moderation. The appeal to
moderation and reason constitutes a component in the seventeenth century criticism, even more permeating than the rationalism of Descartes
with which this criticism is often associated.
In these appeals to moderation, one recommends the poets to observe a certain medium between two major opposites: nature and art.
Observance of this medium warrants a reliable and responsible poet;
someone who understands the importance of rendering and pursuing
reasonable, sound, judicious, and just ideals in his or her poetry. The
medium is like a slash between opposites, a buffer between extremes.
It is a middle point in a logic where everything is about avoiding extremes: the poets must both avoid being too primitive and crude in their
poetry, and avoid being too artificial and pretentious.
In this act of balance, the poets are always recommended to side
with the natural, rather than with the overly artful. Nature is moderate
and modest, and the poet should behave and write accordingly. Therefore, also in neoclassicism nature constitutes an ideal for poetic creativity. The neoclassicists believe in nature, and they believe their
rules to be expressions of nature.
This idea of natureunderstood as a prearranged cosmos, as an
intrinsic order of thingsdominates the paradigm, and consequently,
also the discourses on poetry. Poetry has rules, like anything else, yet

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these rules are natural, not artificial constraints. They are not conceived as dogmatic rules imposed on poetry by humans. They constitute
for example objective rules determining the different genres, as these
are established according to objects, means, and manners. The rules
have been discovered by the ancients, not devised. Therefore they are
never dogmas, and if they degenerate into doctrines, they are immediately criticized.
Therefore, the rules of the unitiesof time, place, and actionare
still nature, but methodized nature. The rules are natural laws which
nature has invented in order to confine herself, she (nature is always
feminine) shows moderation and modesty by applying these constraints
on herself. Nature does not want to be excessive and exorbitant. As
such, rules are not artificial; they are not imposed on the poetic material
mechanically.
The rules of the unities of time and place are justified as necessary
because poetry is conceived as imitation of human lifeas a portrait of
human action. However, the intention of portraying human action by
means of the rules of the unities, turns out to become, not imitation of
human action, but imitation of the theater itself. One imitates, qua the
rules, the duration of the play and the theater stage on which it is performed. One surmises that if spectators are watching a two hours long
performance, it is ideal if the duration of the performance is
represented in the duration of the action as a two hour long fictive action (as this is impossible, one instead allows oneself a twenty-four hour
long fictive action). Thus, the rule of the unity of time imitates the limited duration of the performance, the rule of the unity of place imitates the singularity of the stage. Thus, the nature which the unities imitates is neither life nor human action, but theater itself. The major inherent problems in this interpretation of the object of imitation anticipate the collapse of the neoclassical rules. When the obligation to
imitate the theater in the fictive action becomes increasingly unreasonable and unwarranted, Johnsons and Lessings later criticism of the
neoclassical rules also becomes almost irrefutable. From this point onwards, continuing to this day, the rules of the unities are inevitably ridiculed as random and artificial constraints on dramatic poetry.

2) Transition and Preromanticism

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If in neoclassicism, the rules of the theater were regarded as natural
laws regulating the drama, one begins during the Transition to perceive
rules as artificial constraints on poetry. If beforehand nature implied
that the drama was organized according to certain natural standards,
principles, and laws, one begins to understand nature as something
more chaotic and disordered. Nature is no longer the order of things and
surfacesrepeating itself as the same from work to work. If nature
previously was understood as a logic repeated and applied as the same
on various material, nature is now the opposite of logic. It is now a
disorder in much better agreement with the things, appearances, and
phenomena themselves. Nature now grows in the things themselves as
an organic quality and essence of things, not as alien and artificial manmade regulations. Gradually nature gets another definition. Nature is
not a logical order, but an inherent disorder.
Now rules of the theater are replaced with a notion of reality. The
former argument, that spectators, watching a play for only a few hours,
could not understand action extended to several weeks or months because that would be too demanding on their powers of imagination, this
argument is not valid any longer. Now, the play should refer to a reality
outside the theater, the reality of human life. In the plot-construction
one is suddenly permitted to include several plots, regarding the duration of action one is allowed to depict several years of a persons life,
and regarding the unity of place, the stage is now allowed to represent
several different locations in a play.
Now, obligation to honor rules and decorum is regarded as superficial and superfluous. Neoclassical rules are perceived as alienating.
They alienate humans from their nature, distort the representation of
humans, and misrepresent the powers of human imagination. One conceives the regulations of the stage as far less sophisticated than human
imagination itself.
The epistemological break indicating this new and different notion
of nature also manifests itself as hostility to and suspicion against writingas a generic term for laws, rules, structures, mechanics, decorum,
etc. If formerly poets were recommended to understand writing, poets
are increasingly recommended to understand the un-written, that is,
the human soul, the soul of nature, the sacred moment of divine inspiration, etc. Poets become throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
twentieth century inventors and name-givers of things and affairs which
have not yet found expression and articulation. This idealistic notion of

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the task of the poet, appears to indicate a general tendency in modern
Western criticism up to today.
Beauty is now conceived as doing something to people. It affects
humans, both as beauty in the arts and as beauty in nature. And not only
beauty becomes an aesthetic object. In general everything that affects
human imagination, including what one now begins to discuss as the
sublime, becomes an object for aesthetic judgment. The field of criticism is expanded in both depth and width. The modest enterprise of describing the requirements for making an opportune and successful
poem, the recommendations on what a poet should observe in order to
accommodate an audience, is replaced with discussions on what in general affects human imagination. According to this new agenda, art is
merely a corner of the beautiful. From being a well-defined languagegame, with its place and task within a linguistic world, a process begins
where art becomes an increasingly ill-defined language-game. It becomes an ill-defined language-game where indeed it becomes blasphemous to define art, to impose limitations on art, or to understand it
in terms of a language-game.
If art in the former sense appeared to be a medium where humans
constructed their moral principles by means of distinct and intelligible
theatrical rules, humans are now recommended to de-construct this selfunderstanding again. They begin to de-understand themselves, to undo
and overthrow the understanding they had achieved of themselves and
their art. Now relaxation or renunciation of rules and decorum is considered superior and sophisticated, and the former strictness simpleminded and ingenuous.
In the rendition of a work of art, one now tries to reflect nature in
the new and modern sense. Humans are perceived as reflecting nature
in this new sense. For example, by the sight of natures greatness humans are filled with awe and reverence, because they perceive something that apply to themselves. They perceive in natures greatness their
own lack of limitations. The great in nature strikes in the individual a
cord of greatness. Open horizons mirror their freedom. Nature becomes an enigmatic mirror: the more difficult to read, the more eagerly
interpreted. What is true in nature, is now possibly true for humans as
well. Natures unpredictability and disorder reflects the unpredictable
and baffling in the individual.
One has to see nature again, that is, one has to notice its charming
disorder again. The emphasis on sight becomes important, not as be-

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forehand the emphasis on understanding. A certain ocular-centrism
determines the new aesthetics. In Addison there are two major pleasures, both resulting from sight: a primary pleasureindicating the
pleasure of perceiving a present object, and a secondary pleasure
indicating the imaginative activity of recollecting images derived from
formerly perceived objects. Beauty is something seen in nature, and it is
the seen that soothes and relaxes a person. Increasingly, one recuperates
from the constraints of life by experiencing nature, and by experiencing
an art reflecting nature.
In the neoclassical critics, the rules of the drama were taken for
granted, as well as the possibility of an objective taste of beauty. In a
prescriptive criticism, one excelled in advises about what artists should
do and what they should avoid in order to be recognized. The principles
of criticism were presumably identical to all societies and in all Ages.
Taste seemed objective; it would be prescribed in a do thisavoid
that-criticism. This objectivity is slowly modified during the eighteenth
century. Taste develops into an ideality; from being a question of code
it develops into being a question of psychological state of mindwith
this transformation losing its former transparency.
In Hume and Burke, and later Kant, one still tries to substantiate the
idea of a uniform and objective taste, but a doubt has invaded the
project. One is now aware of differences between cultures, countries,
historical periods, and single individuals, and producing a neoclassical
list of what is pleasant and what is offensive is out of the question. Art
is no longer produced according to a universal artistic practice.
The objectivity of taste is now searched in the general psychology
of the human being. One cannot produce a list of the beautiful and the
ugly, but one surmises that human nature, mind, or sentiment follow
certain identical standards of judgment. Because humans retain impressions in identical fashions, and because one assumes the imaginative
apparatus to be the same in all human beings, they also essentially seem
to harbor the same general standards of taste. The naive confidence in
practical rules of composition and decorum warranting artistic taste,
yields to abstract discussions of certain constitutional psychological
conditions warranting uniformity of taste.
One knows that taste is chaotic and unpredictable, that it is as heterogeneous as single individuals. But nonetheless, from this basic assumption one presumes that the diversity is rather apparent than real.
One ought to be able to detect and establish a stable principle of judg-

83
ment beneath the chaos, a principle of judgment common to mankind.
One consequently perceives differences in taste as distortions of one veritable taste, distortions which would be corrected under ideal circumstances, or which could be eliminated by establishing an identical context for the judging and tasting subjects, or through continuous training
of the subjects.
When Hume tries to determine a standard of taste, he tries to determine what kind of education a person should undergo in order to
judge this standard appropriately. Judging beauty relies on how well a
person is educated in perceiving beautyalthough beauty simultaneously is regarded as something in itself existing, something objective.
Nevertheless, Hume emphasizes how humans can refine their sense of
beauty and learn to discern its pleasing qualities. Similarly in Burke, although it is assumed that beauty is an objective quality, it is discussed
how one learns to recognize and appreciate beauty, how humans arrive
at a uniform sense of beauty.
The empiricists, however, do not manage to analyze this claim to
universality. If a judgment of taste is a judgment claiming universality
(despite its apparent subjective foundation), then the judgment of taste
appears to presuppose an a priori principle, which the empiricists are
unable to determine. Beauty must have a transcendental quality. The attempt to determine how to attain a sense of beauty by means of experience appears insufficient. The determination of this transcendental
principle becomes a main task for Kant.
In the aesthetic tradition, the contemplation of a beautiful object is
repeatedly understood as a kind of pleasure. However, this pleasure is
different from sensuous pleasures, it is not by any means related to desire or to something agreeable. Beauty is from the beginning an innocent pleasure. In the contemplation of beauty, the mind must have attained a state of absolute detachment from the world, a state of disinterest. The judging subject must be without desire in relation to the
beautiful object. This neutrality, implying a lack of personal interest, also makes the judgment universal. A judgment of taste is in effect only a
pleasure of the beautiful, if the pleasure can be extended to be valid for
mankind as such. Pleasure restricted only to the individual, and for the
sake of the individual only, is from the beginning an invalid pleasure
because it is related to the agreeable. Thus, the qualitative difference
between the judgment of the agreeable and the judgment of the beautiful consists in the interest and disinterest respectively. The quantitative

84
difference is derived from this distinction. Here the agreeable is based
on a private subjective feeling, whereas the beautiful is based on a universal subjective feeling.
With these definitions of art, Kant determines art as both an extramundane and extra-social activity; it is both disinterested and universal.
Furthermore, it is without apparent purpose. Fine art is not nature, but it
has to look as if it is nature. It must be independent of rules. It must
look as if it has been produced without purpose. Although art differs
from nature by having been produced with a purposebecause it has
been produced intentionallyit conceals this purpose. The ingenious
artist avoids dependency on precepts, principles, and rules. The ingenious artist creates art with un-intentional intentionality. He/she does
bring rules to a work of art, but spontaneously and without knowing the
concepts determining these rules. Because of this lack of conceptual
knowledge, the genius does not devise rules or impose precepts concerning dramatic action or decorum on the work of art. The (unconceptual) rules imposed on the work of art are so well concealed, that
even the artists themselves are unaware of them. They are rules nobody
senses or notices. Therefore, the ingenious artists do not simply keep
their rules invisible in their work of art, they never notice any rules
themselves, they create out of nature, they create spontaneously. Genius
is ignorant about concepts and rules. Genius is inspired, and thus unable to communicate his or her creative principles.
Since one cannot conceptualize and communicate the genuine rule
for ingenious works of art, genius cannot be taught. Artistic creation has
become the opposite to imitationthe prevailing definition on artistic
creation until the eighteenth century. It has now become something natural which can neither be taught nor learned.
On several different levels one appeals in ones criticism to nature
in the new sense. Already in the beginning of the eighteenth century,
one indulges in a certain nostalgic longing towards an irretrievable past
of natural norms. An irrational nostalgia infuses Western thinking at
this point; a nostalgia that continues to dominate the next two centuries.
One looks back into the past in order to find the roots for something
more original, authentic, and natural than the alienating present. One
postulates a discrepancy between an inauthentic present societywith
its spurious politeness, its synthetic beautification, and its ostentatious
languageand an authentic past of genuine and solid norms. The di-

85
chotomy develops into an opposition between city and countryside, or
between culture and nature.
Critics are now captivated by questioning the origins of things. They
are fascinated by the idea of the first languages, the invention of speech,
of the origins of human knowledge, of poetry, music, and painting. But
they are not concerned with recorded origins, with written accounts of
facts and events, or with the known history of man. They are not interested in exemplary models to imitate in art, but in origins that cannot be
traced because they are located in a fictitious prehistoric time. They are
interested in origins located in an era before humans learned to record
their activity, before the invention of writing, therefore an era irrecoverably lost. They can only speculate about this primitive constitution of
language and society, and they do so in a language that yearns to reproduce the object it is speculating about, a language trying to revive this
object in its own style and rhetoric.
In neoclassicism one believed in sources as exemplary models, as
what one might call writingestablished works of art. Sources or origins were not a point zero located at the beginning of all things. Exactly
because neoclassical sources were understood as writing, they were
not reduced to first causes. They were produced, caused by something
else. These works of art one could imitate. One still believed in the
book, in the recorded facts, and in ones ability to copy the technique or
narrative logic of ones ancient predecessors. Now one employs a purely idealist notion of the beginning. Beginnings supposedly represent
humans as they were meant to be. Understanding the beginnings would
help to criticize and correct the alienation, degeneration, and corruption
of present society. Thus, the origins of mankind, languages, and society
represent the truth, purity, and happiness of people. At these beginnings
societies are still uncomplicated, speech still harmonious and sonorous,
feelings still pure and innocent, humans still passionate and sensuous,
etc. These origins represent the lost but happy childhood of mankind.
Compared to the lost ideals, present life, society, government, language,
poetry, and music are degenerating.
In the paradigm emerging around the concept of origin, the distinction between nature and culture develops. The speculation on origins establishes a paradigm, a grid, where natural is opposed to nonnatural, and where the domain of nature distinguishes itself by being
inherently poetical. The first languages are closer to music, song, and
poetry; people speaking in these Ages, speak more melodious, with a

86
voice more refined. There is more breath, more air, more life in the
human voice. As such, the paradigm also inaugurates an opposition between writing and voice, and between writing and life. It is the earliest
beginning of modern Hermeneutics. A critic or a poet shall no longer
merely read the text, learn from it, take over its example. One shall revive it, revitalize it, animate it with the spirit of life, doing so by undressing it of the dead characters disguising this living body, these original sounds of nature. Writing becomes an unsuccessful attempt to
represent life, breath, something radically other, something which
nevertheless is the living background, the context, or the horizon of
writing.
The interest in origins, the interest in nature, the interest in humans
as they were meant to be, is now an established theme, and it continues
in preromanticism and romanticism. It even continues into the twentieth
century. But it continues as such in new disguises, it proliferates and
fuses with new disciplines, new interests of knowledge, new sciences. It
ramifies into other recognitions, gradually modifying them into the
same epistemological root-system. It shows itself as a nostalgia for the
past, as a present sense of alienation, and as a hope for future recuperation. It defines the whole preromantic and romantic poetic theory as the
distinction between classical/vital poetry and romantic/sickly poetry, as
a distinction that only makes the drive to rejoin the healthy past the
more urgent and compelling, because the impossibility of the project
only fuels perpetual speculations on how one might returnthrough
which kinds of detours, by which strategies, or by means of which sacrifices and forfeitures.
Already this early, one and a half century before Heidegger, mankind suffers from forgetfulness of being. Humans have forgotten their
destiny and determination. But these theories contain a promise, a
promise of resurrection, recuperation, and recovery. The distinction between the happy past and the unhappy present, nature and society, original and artifact is more than a static distinction, it is dynamic, insofar
as everything in opposition to the natural is only a temporary suspension of the natural. Culture is opposed to nature, but not antagonistically, because culture shall gradually lead humans back to nature. Humans merely occupies an intermediary position in a rotating
system where the past is lost and the future has not yet arrived, where
they are temporarily alienated from their destiny and determination as
human beings, but where the promised ideal has yet to return. The truth

87
of peoples ideal past, their alienating present, and their promised future
may be expressed in this construction: mankind were in truth what they
have lost and what they in truth shall once again become.

3) Romanticism
In the romantic paradigm the task of the poet is now defined by the
desire to live in a poeticized world, and to give this poetic existence a
poetical representation. Poetry reflects this desire for unification and
fulfillment.
In the attempts to realize this existence, the receptive and sensitive
poets strive to elevate themselves into a super-natural realm of a pure
poetical life, a construction (and a postulation) where all agony and
alienation would be absent. It is the desire of the romantic poets to attain this super-natural and poetical realm where (paradoxically) all desire would terminate. The desire of the romantic is therefore ultimately
a desire for non-desire. At the peak of fulfillment desire would be suspended. Insofar as desire also marks a difference between self and
otherone desires what one does not have, what is otherromantic
desire is a desire to annihilate the differences between self and other,
such as differences between the poet and the beloved, the historical
past, the art-product, or the surrounding nature. The desire is to become
one with the All, therefore an impossible, and fundamentally narcissistic, desirea desire without actual object, a desire solely for identity,
sameness, oneness.
In this new art-ideology, where one attempts to erase the differences
between the art-product and the poeticized universe, something uniquely has happened to art: it has lost its borders, its frame. If in earlier criticism one always discussed how to create a work of artby discussing
its particular content and form, and with this its border and frameone
dissolves in romanticism all borders, all frames. Now poetry, understood as a certain poetical spirituality, overflows all areas of nature and
life. Poetry is no longer kept within certain frames, it has become spirit,
something inexpressible infusing and pervading nature and man. The
actual art-product has become merely a modest derivation of this universal poetic spirituality.
Together with this development also the source of art becomes incomprehensible. It cannot be prescribed how one should compose a

88
great work of art, as one prescribed it among the neoclassical critics.
The romantic artists are in their own self-interpretations somebody driven by forces on which they have no control. They achieve their insights in the work of art from sources unknown to themsources much
more powerful than the individual artist, sources of a divine nature.
Therefore, the art-product has merely derived from these sources, it is
not something one can expect to complete in the ideal sense. An ideal
and beautiful work of art is no longer something accomplishable. The
work of art can only be thought within the concept of approximation, it
can at best approximate the idealtherefore also the romantic acknowledgment of the fragmentary and unfinished work of art as a satisfactory artistic expression.
In this new idealistic-theological romantic art-concept, poetry is
now indistinguishable from the spiritual universe as a whole. The origin
and source of poetry is removed from an apparent mundane world to a
true transcendental world. As the artists become mere media for the
divine informing of the world, they are only in the most primitive empirical sense the immediate causes or origins of the work of art. And
still, qua the construction of genius, they are the prominent and chosen
transmitters of this spiritual universe understood as poetry and beauty.
Insofar as this universe is not created by the artist, but ultimately by a
divinity, this divine being becomes the final origin of art.
Compared to the paradigms of neoclassicism and preromanticism, a
new interpretation of the relationship between man and art is announced. In classicism and neoclassicism one typically attempted to define what rules, skills, manners, norms, and ways of reasoning an artist
had to administer and carry out. The neoclassical work of art was
created by a super-conscious artist, directing the work of art to a judging audience in an attempt to satisfy their taste. During the period of
Transition and preromanticism, this notion of this super-rational and
morally responsible artist became increasingly unfashionable. Now ingenious artists would have to create naively, that is, out of some inherent necessity, and without full conscious control. They balanced between a preconscious and conscious creative activity. However, the
artist was still the indisputable creator of the work of art, even though
preconscious moments of the creative process were accentuated. But
whenaccording to the romantic doctrinethe origin of the work of
art is situated outside the world and art is indistinguishable from a spiritual universe in general there is no longer a discernible source of poe-

89
try. The artist now creates unconsciously (spontaneously, impulsively,
instinctively)therefore without control of the creative process and
without responsibilities regarding critics or audiences.
In romanticism, the art-product no longer has a rational or pragmatic
purpose, such as recreating and instructing an audience. It is beyond the
audience because its sole purpose is to render and present the unchanging Truth of the absolute and infinite. The audience can per definition
not judge whether this is being achieved, because only a few selected
and privileged artists have, qua their greater insight, access to this universe. Consequently, the audience becomes increasingly superfluous,
and becomes rather a pain and vexation to the artist. A historically
unique alienation between art and audience is established.
Genius becomes now the archetype of the human being. Genius
represents the eternal concept of man, the divine essence of man inhabiting only a few human beings. Genius is no longer a result of accomplishment or labor, but a divine idea present in a few artists, making
them perfect examples of the species because they exemplify Gods
original idea of man. Artists can only create to the extent that providence fills them with inspiration. With this proximity to God, poets are
becoming divine Creators themselves, creating and re-creating the
world. Thanks to the creator-poet, what is dead nature, material exteriority, mute feelings becomes a world for-us, a named and comprehensible world. The artists become saviors of mankind by freeing the
world from its own reticence and quiescence, giving it back the splendor and spirituality which already infuses it. They give it back life,
when they in their work give it voice and words by which it can announce itself. They vitalizes and revitalizes an otherwise dead world of
objects.
As such, the poet preserves knowledge that would otherwise have
been destroyed, forgotten or ignored in a secular and mundane society.
A new concept and justification of the poet emerges. The poets appropriate the world by giving it names, they become the universal preservers of what otherwise would be lost. They finally become the creators
and re-creators of meaning and truth.

90

91

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Notes
1
. Meyer Abrams has, in The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971), suggested that in romanticism one begins to focus on the
artist as opposed to the focus on code and audience in neoclassicism. But
even if this may be a general tendency, we shall modify this suggestion. First
objection. We shall suggest that the artist rather than being an end, is the
starting point for analysis; that the artist is a structure of changing meanings
and logics, which it is the analytical work to further determine in specific textual contexts. With this it is perceived as a theoretical error to understand a historically changing and fluctuating idea as the artist as if this word at any time
signifies the same state of affairs. Obviously, the artist as an empirical entity,
understood as the person behind the creation of a work of art, has always existed. But if this is the most primitive definition of an artist, art-theories have
always emphasized the artist, from Plato, Horace, Boileau, and Johnson to
Schiller, Schlegel, and Wordsworthand not just Wordsworth, as Abrams emphasizes. That which distinguishes classical theories of the artist from the romantic is not their emphasis on the artist, but their different interpretations of
the artist. The artist is not simply an entity who is absent or present in different historical criticisms, but a different interpretation of artistic behavior at
different times. Second objection. In the light of what has been formerly stated,
romanticism does not seem to emphasize the artist in particular. More importantly, it emphasizes what we have called the transcendental, a universal poetic
spirituality where, on the contrary, the artistespecially as empirical being,
as individualtends to disappear? Apart from the fact that a certain egocentric
penchant for self-examination permeates the romantic artist, the conviction that
art ultimately has a transcendental origin seems indisputable. Would this transcendentalism not constitute a stronger criteria for the distinction between the
romantic view of art and the classical and neoclassical?
2
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Da man so wenig schne weibliche
Bildungen sieht, so halte ich mich an ein gewisses Bild im Geiste, welches in
meine Seele kommt. Tieck/Wackenroder:
Herzenergiessungen eines
Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, in: Wackenroder: Smtliche Schriften (Mnchen:
Rowohlt Verlag, 1968), p. 12]
3
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Er erzhlte mir, wie er von seiner
zarten Kindheit an, immer ein besondres heiliges Gefhl fr die Mutter Gottes
in sich getrages habe, so da ihm zuweilen schon beim lauten Aussprechen
ihres Namens ganz wehmtig zumute geworden sei. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 13]
4
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Die Gttlichkeit in diesem Bilde
habe ihn so berwltigt, da er in helle Trnen ausgebrochen sei.
Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder,
ibid., p. 13]

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5

. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [In der finsteren Nacht sei sein

Auge von einem hellen Schein an der Wand, seinem Lager gegenber, angezogen worden, und da er recht zugesehen, so sei er gewahr geworden, da sein
Bild der Madonna, das, noch unvollendet, an der Wand gehangen, von dem
mildesten Lichtstrahle, und ein ganz vollkommenes und wirklich lebendiges
Bild geworden sei. Die Gttlichkeit in diesem Bilde habe ihn so berwltigt,
da er in helle Trnen ausgebrochen sei . . . es sei ihm vorgekommen, als wre
dies Bild nun grade das, was er immer gesucht, obwohl er immer nur eine dunkle und verwirrte Ahndung davon gehabt. Wie er wieder eingeschlagen sei,
wisse er sich durchaus nicht zu erinnern. Am andern Morgen sei er wie neugeboren aufgestanden; der Erscheinung sei seinem Gemt und seinen Sinnen auf
ewig fest eingeprgt geblieben, und nun sei es ihm gelungen, die Mutter Gottes
immer so, wie sie seiner Seele vorgeschwebt habe, abzubilden, und er habe
immer selbst vor seinen Bildern eine gewisse Ehrfurcht gefhlt.
Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder,
ibid., p. 13-14]
6
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Was Du von mir zu wissen verlangst, kann ich Dir leider nicht sagen, nicht weil es ein Geheimnis, das ich
nicht verraten wollte . . . sondern weil es mir selber unbekannt ist . . . es ist wie
in einem angenehmen Traum vollendet, und ich habe whrend der Arbeit immer mehr an den Gegenstand gedacht, als daran, wie ich ihn vorstellen
mchte. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 24-25]
7
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Sein ganzes Wesen glhte noch
von dem geistigen Weine, der ihn berauscht hatte, und er sah alle Vorbergehende mit andern Augen an. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines
Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 91]
8
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Er dachte: du mut zeitlebens, ohne
Aufhren, in diesem schnen poetischen Taumel bleiben, und dein ganzes Leben mu eine Musik sein. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines
Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 91]
9
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Mein Vater predigt es immer, da
es die Pflicht und Bestimmung des menschen sei, sich darunter zu mischen und
Rat und Almosen zu geben, und ekelhafte Wunden zu verbinden und hliche
Krankheiten zu heilen! Und doch ruft mir wieder eine innere Stimme ganz laut
zu: Nein! nein! du bist zu einem hheren, edleren Ziel geboren!
Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder,
ibid., p. 94]
10
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Allmhlich ward er nun ganz und
gar der berzeugung, da er von Gott deshalb auf die Welt gesetz sei, um ein
recht vorzglicher Knstler in der musik zu werden; . . . es ist reine Wahrheit . .
. da er oftmals in seiner Einsamkeit . . . auf die Kniee fiel und Gott bat, er

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mchte ihn doch also fhren, da er einst ein recht herrlicher Knstler vor dem
Himmel und vor der Erde werden mchte. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 94]
11
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Wenn ich an die Trume meiner
Jugend zurckdenkewie ich in diesen Trumen so selig war! . . . Genug, ich
lebe in einer sehr unreinen Luft. Wie weit idealischer lebte ich damals, da ich
in unbefangener Jugend und stiller Einsamkeit die Kunst noch blo geno;
Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder,
ibid., p. 98 & 100]
12
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Allein das allerabscheulichste sind
noch alle die andern Verhltnisse, worin der knstler eingestrickt wird. Von allen dem ekelhaften Neid und hmischen Wesen, von allen den widrigkleinlichen Sitten und Begegnungen, von allen der Subordination der Kunst unter den
Willen des Hofes;es widersteht mir, ein Wort davon zu reden,es ist alles
so unwrdig und die menschliche Seele so erniedrigend, da ich nicht eine
Silbe davon ber die Zunge bringen kann. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 99]
13
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Er geriet auf die Idee, ein
Knstner msse nur fr sich allein, zu seiner eignen Herzenserhebung und fr
einen oder ein paar Menschen, die ihn verstehen, Knstner sein. Und ich kann
diese Ideen nicht ganz unrecht nennen. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 101]
14
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Da alle Melodieen . . . alle sich
nun auf einem einzigen, zwingenden mathematischen Gesetze grndeten! Da
ich, statt frei zu fliegen, erst lernen mute, in dem unbehlflichen Gerst und
Kfig der Kunstgrammatik herumzuklettern! Wie ich mich qulen mute, erst
mit dem gemeinen wissenschaftlichen Maschinenverstande ein regelrechtes
Ding herauszubringen. Tieck/Wackenroder: Herzenergiessungen eines
Kunstliebende Klosterbruder, ibid., p. 98]
15
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Bald ist die Tonkunst mir ganz ein
Blid unsers Lebens:eine rhrend-kurze Freude, die aus dem Nichts entsteht
und ins Nichts vergeht,die anhebt und versinkt, man wei nicht warum:
eine kleine frhliche grne Insel, mit Sonnenschein, mit Sang und Klang,die
auf dem dunkeln, unergrndlichen Ozean schwimmt. Tieck/Wackenroder:
Phantasien ber die Kunst, in: Wackenroder: Smtliche Schriften, ibid., p. 156]
16
. Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 156.
17
Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [So schlie ich meine Auge zu vor
all dem kriege der Welt,und ziehe mich still in das Land der Musik, als in
das Land des Glaubens, zurck wo alle unsre Zweifel und unsre Leiden sich in
ein tnendes Meer verlieren,wo wir alles Gekrchze der Menschen vergessen, wo kein Wort- und Sprachengeschnatter, kein Gewirr von Buchstaben und
monstrser Hieroglyphenschrift uns schwindlich macht, sondern all Angst un-

102

sers Herzens durch leise Berhrung auf einmal geheilt wird. Und wie? Werden
hier Fragen uns beantwortet? Werden Geheimnisse uns offenbart?Ach nein!
aber statt aller Antwort und Offenbarung werden uns luftige, schne Wolkengestalten gezeigt, deren Anblick uns beruhigt, wir wissen nicht wie;
Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 157]
18
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation [Unser Geist wird gesund durch das
Anschaun von Wundern, die noch weit unbegreiflicher und erhabener sind.
Dann ist dem Menschen, als mcht er sagen: Das ists, was ich meine! Nun
hab ichs gefunden! Nun bin ich heiter und froh! Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 157]
19
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation and emphasis. [Die Musik aber
halte ich fr die wunderbarste dieser Erfindungen, weil sie menschliche
Gefhle auf eine bermenschliche Art schildert, weil sie uns alle Bewegungen
unsers Gemts unkperlich, in goldne Wolken luftiger Harmonien eingekleidet
. . . weil sie eine Sprache redet, die wir im ordentlichen Leben nicht kennen,
die wir erlernt haben, wir wissen nicht wo? und wie? Tieck/Wackenroder:
Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 158-59]
20
. Music is an anology on human feelings. In the proportional relationship
between tones and single fibers of the heart there is a connection, a sympathy: Es hat sich zwischen den einzelnen mathematischen Tonverhltnissen
und den einzelnen Fibern des menschlichen Herzens eine unerklrliche Sympathie offenbart, wodurch die Tonkunst ein reichhaltiges und bildsames Maschinenwerk zur Abschilderung menschlicher Empfindungen geworden ist.
Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 168. The sympathy
between heart-fibers and tones is like a mysterious one-to-one relationship, it
is of course inexplicablethis rhetoric, by which the world is made deep, incomprehensible, and mysterious, is evident everywhere in the text. Music affects the human being because it affects its heart. Tone and word are dichotomies, they are related as a rich to a poor language. The rich language is the language of music, without meaning and words. Words are superfluous supplements, as feelings express themselves without help. Reason is a deviation
from true human nature, where feelings exists in their own presence: Hundert
und hundert Tonwerke reden Frhlichkeit und Lust, aber in jedem singt ein
andrer Genius, und einer jeden der Melodien zittern andre Fibern unsres Herzens entgegen.Was wollen sie, die zaghaften und zweifelnden Vernnfter,
die jedes der hundert und hundert Tonstcke in Worten erklrt verlangen? . . .
Streben sie die reichere Sprache nach der rmern abzumessen, und in Worte
aufzulsen, was Worte verachtet? Oder haben sie nie ohne Worte empfunden.
Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 171.
21
. Tieck/Wackenroder, my translation and emphasis. [Sie [die Tonkunst] .
. . schlgt in der dunkeln Welt bestimmte, dunkle Wunderzeichen in bestimmter Folge an,und die Saiten unsres Herzens erklingen, und wir verstehen ih-

103

ren Klang. In dem Spiegel der Tne lernt das menschliche Herz sich selber
kennen; sie sind es, wodurch wir das Gefhl fhlen lernen;
Tieck/Wackenroder: Phantasien ber die Kunst, ibid., p. 172]
22
. Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry, in: Leslie Willson, ed.: German
Romantic Criticism (New York: The German Library, 1982), ibid., p. 95. [Soll
die Kraft der Begeisterung auch in der Poesie sich immerfort einzeln versplittern und wenn sie sich mde gekmpft hat gegen das widrige Element, endlich
einsam verstummen? Soll das hchste immer namenlos und formlos bleiben, im
Dunkel dem Zufall berlassen? Friedrich Schlegel: Gesprch ber die Poesie, in: E. Behler, ed.: Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. II (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh Verlag, 1979), p. 312]
23
. F. Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry, ibid., p. 96. [Ihr vor allen mt wissen, was ich meine. Ihr habt selbst gedichtet, und Ihr mt es oft im Dichten
gefhlt haben da es euch an einem festen halt fr Euer wirken gebrach, an einem mtterlichen Boden, einem Himmel, einer lebendigen Luft. F. Schlegel:
Gesprch ber die Poesie, ibid., p. 312]
24
. F. Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry, ibid., p. 96. [Es fehlt, behaubte ich,
unsrer Poesie an einem Mittelpunkt, wie es die Mythologie fr die der Alten
war, und alles Wesentliche, worin die moderne Dichtkunst der antiken nachsteht, lt sich in die Worte zusammenfassen: Wir haben keine Mythologie. F.
Schlegel: Gesprch ber die Poesie, ibid., p. 312]
25
. F. Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry, ibid., p. 96. [Die neue Mythologie
mu im Gegenteil aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes herausgebildet werden; es
mu das knstlichste aller Kunstwerke sein, denn es soll alle andern umfassen,
ein neues Bette und Gef fr den alten ewigen Urquell der Poesie und selbst
das unendliche Gedicht, welches die Keime aller andern Gedichte verhllt. F.
Schlegel: Gesprch ber die Poesie, ibid., p. 312]
26
. F. Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry, ibid., p. 97. [Kann eine neue Mythologie sich nur aus der innersten Tiefe des Geistes wie durch sich selbst herausarbeigen, so finden wir einen sehr bedeutenden Wink und eine merkwrdige
Besttigung fr das was wir suchen in dem groen Phnomen des Zeitalters, im
Idealismus! F. Schlegel: Gesprch ber die Poesie, ibid., p. 313]
27
. Novalis, my translation [Poesie ist wahrhafter Idealismus
Betrachtung der Welt, wie Betrachtung eines groen Gemths
Selbstbewutseyn des Universums. Novalis: Fragmente, in: Novalis: Hymnen
an die Nacht & Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Mnchen: Goldmann Verlag, 1977)
p. 178]
28
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. I. Engell/Bate, eds. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 242.
29
. F. Schlegel, my translation [Diese letzte Gnze der natrlichen Bildung
der Kunst und des Geschmacks, diesen hchsten Gipfel freier Schnheit hat die
Grieshische Poesie wirklich erreicht. . . . Ich wei fr diese Hhe keinen

104

schicklicheren Namen als das hchste Schne. Nicht etwa ein Schnes, ber
welches sich nichts schneres denken liee; sondern der vollstndige Beispiel
der unerreichbaren Idee, die hier gleichsam ganz sichtbar wird: das Urbild der
Kunst und des Geschmacks. F. Schlegel: ber der Grieschishe Poesie, in: E.
Behler, ed.: Die Griechen und Rmer, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe,
vol. I (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh Verlag, 1979), p. 287-88]
30
. F. Schlegel, my translation [Die Kunst is unendlich perfektibel und ein
absolutes Maximum ist in ihrer steten Entwicklung nicht mglich: aber doch
ein bedingtes relatives Maximum, ein unbersteigliches fixes Proximum F.
Schlegel: ber der Grieschishe Poesie, ibid., p. 288]
31
. The same theme is also spelled out in the Artenum fragments: The
romantic type of poetry is still becoming; indeed its peculiar essence is that it
is always becoming and that it can never be completed. It cannot be exhausted
by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism might dare to characterize its
ideal. F. Schlegel: Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaem, in: Willson, ed.:
German Romantic Criticism, ibid., p. 127.
32
. In Ernst Behler: Friedrich Schlegel in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag, 1966).
33
. F. Schlegel quoted from Peter Szondi: Friedrich Schlegel and romantic
irony, in: Szondi: On Textual Understanding and other Essays (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 66-67. [Es gibt alte und moderne
Gedichte, die durchgngig im ganzen und berall den gttlichen Hauch der
Ironie atmen. Es lebt in ihnen eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im innern die Stimmung, welche alles bersieht, und sich ber alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch ber eigne Kunst, Tugend oder Genialitt. F. Schlegel:
ber der Grieschishe Poesie, ibid., p. 11]
34
. Peter Szondi: Friedrich Schlegel and romantic irony, ibid.
35
. Peter Szondi: Friedrich Schlegel and romantic irony, ibid., p. 67.
36
. Peter Szondi: Friedrich Schlegel and romantic irony, ibid., p. 68
37
. Peter Szondi: Friedrich Schlegel and romantic irony, ibid., p. 68
38
. G.W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, translation: J.B.Baille (New
York: Haber and Row Publishers, 1967), p. 666. [Es lebt in der Angst, die
Herrlichkeit seines Innern durch Handlung und Dasein zu beflecken; und um
die Reinheit seines Herzens zu bewahren, flieht es die Berhrung der Wirklichkeit und beharrt in der eigensinnigen Kraftlosigkeit, seinem zur letzten Abstraktion zugespitzten Selbst zu entsagen . . . Der hohle Gegenstand, den es
sich erzeugt, erfllt es daher nun mit dem Bewutsein der Leerheit; sein Tun ist
das Sehnen, das in dem Werden seiner selbst zum wesenlosen Gegenstande
sich nur verliert. Hegel: Die Phenomenologie des Geistes, in: Werke band 3
(Frankfurt: Moldenhauer/Miche, 1986), p. 483]
39
. G.W.F. Hegel: AestheticsLectures on Fine Art, translation: T.M.Knox
(Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 64. [Wenn nun bei diesen

105

ganz leeren Formen, welche aus der Absolutheit des abstrakten Ich ihren Ursprung nehmen, stehengeblieben wird, so ist nichts an und fr sich und in sich
selbst wertvoll betrachtet, sondern nur als durch die Subjektivitt des Ich hervorgebracht. Hegel: Vorlesungen ber die sthetic, in: Werke band 13 (Frankfurt: Moldenhauer/Michel, 1986), p. 93-94]
40
. G.W.F. Hegel: AestheticsLectures on Fine Art, ibid., p. 64-65. [Dann
aber kann auch das Ich Herr und Meister ber alles bleiben, und keiner Sphre
der Sittlichkeit, Rechtlichkeit, des Menschlichen und Gttlichen, Profanen und
heiligen gibt es etwas, das nicht durch Ich erst zu setzen wre und deshalb von
Ich ebensosehr knnte zunichte gemacht werden. Dadurch ist alle an und fr
sich seiende nur ein Schein, nicht seiner selbst wegen und durch sich selbst
wahrhaft und wirklich, sondern ein bloes Scheinen durch das Ich in dessen
Gewalt und Willkr es zu freien Schalten bleibt. Hegel: Vorlesungen ber die
sthetic, ibid., p. 94]
41
. Karl-Heinz Bohrer has emphasized this in his Die Kritik der Romantik
as a reactionary strategy of Hegels against the literary modern: Es zeigt sich,
da Hegels Attacke gegen die Ironie als substanzlose Subjektivitt eine
letzte, ahndungsvolle Herausstellung des klassizistischen Bndnisses von Ethik
und sthetik ist, das sich vor allem deshalb herausgefordert sieht, weil sich das
sthetische Moment in der romantischen Kunsttheorie zu verselbstndigen beginnt. Hegel versucht diesen Proze aber nicht als historisches Ereignis einer
neuen stetik zu werten, sondern ihn als Denkfehler samt moralischer Folgenlast zu denunzieren. Bohrer: Die Kritik der Romantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1989), p. 145.
42
. F.W.J. Schelling: System of Transcendental Idealism (Charlottesville,
University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 23
43
. F.W.J. Schelling: System of Transcendental Idealism, ibid., p. 23
44
. F.W.J. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, translation, D.W.Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 30. [Das organiche Werk der
Natur stellt dieselbe Indifferenz noch ungetrennt dar, welche das Kunstwerk
nach der Trennung, aber wieder als Indifferenz darstellt. F.W.J. von Schelling:
Philosophie der Kunst, in: Smmtliche Werke, Fnfter band, (Stuttgart und
Augsburg: J.W.Gottascher Verlag, 1859) p. 386]
45
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p.16-17, my emphasis. [Auch
in der Philophie der Kunst von keinem andern Princip als dem des Unendlichen ausgehen knnen, wir werden das Unendliche als das unbedingte Princip
der Kunst darthun mssen. Wie fr die Philosophie des Absolute das Urbild
der Wahrheitso fr die Kunst das Urbild der Schnheit. Wir werden daher
zeigen mssen, da Wahrheit und Schnheit nur zwei verschiedene Betrachtungsweien des einen Absoluten sind. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 370]

106
46

. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 31. [Das Universum ist in

Gott als absolutes Kunstwerk und in ewiger Schnheit gebildet. Schelling:
Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 386]
47
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 31. [Wie Gott als Urbild in
Gegenbild zur Schnheit wird, so werden die Ideen der Vernunft im Gegenbild
angeschaut, zur Schnheit. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 386]
48
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 32. [Die unmittelbare Ursache aller Kunst ist Gott. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 386]
49
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 32. [Nur in Gott sind
ursprnglich die Ideen. Nun ist aber die Kunst Darstellung der Urbilder, also
Gott selbst die unmittelbare Ursache, die lete Mglichkeit aller Kunst, er
selbst der Quell Schnheit. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 386]
50
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 32. [Die Wahre Konstruktion der Kunst ist Darstellung ihrer Formen als Formen der Dinge, wir sie an
sich, oder wie sie im Absoluten sind. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid.,
p. 386]
51
. Also Hegel, despite his many reservations against the romantic paradigmdespite his qualification of art as merely a third-ranking expressive endeavor, ranked after philosophy and religion as the least completebegins his
Vorlesungen ber die sthetik explaining why art is neither recreation nor instruction. The reason why art should not be enjoyed as simple pleasure and
recreation, is not that it has a divine origin, and consequently is eternally true,
but that it is historically true. Art cannot be regarded as recreation because in
that case it would be slave to subjective whims. Only freed from external constraints it becomes truth in itself, its destination is not first and foremost to
please but to express the truth of the historical spirit, to unlock the most profound truths of a people, their society, and religion. Hegel anticipates with this
Heideggers much later art-theories, and gives with this conception Schellings
highly speculative art-philosophy a more concrete foundation.
52
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 83. [Das unmittelbar hervorbringende des Kunstwerks . . . ist der ewige Begriff oder die Idee des Menschen in Gott der mit der Seele selbst eins und mit ihr verbunden ist. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 459]
53
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 84. [Dieer ewige Begriff
des Menschen in Gott als der unmittelbare Ursache seiner Produktionen ist das,
was man Genie, gleichsam den Genius, das inwohnende Gttliche des Menschen, nennt. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 460]
54
. Schelling: The Philosophy of Art, ibid., p. 85. [Die reale Seite des Genies oder diejenige Einheit welche Einbildung des Unendlichen ins Endliche
ist, kann in engeren Sinn die Poesie, die ideale Seite oder diejenige Einheit,
welche Einbildung des Endlichen ins Unendliche ist, kann die Kunst in der
Kunst heien. Schelling: Philosophie der Kunst, ibid., p. 461]

107
55

. In this philosophical chapter Coleridge plagiates and transcribesin

verbatim transcriptions disguised as his own philosophical meditations
Schellings System des Transcendentalen Idealismus and Vom Ich als Princip
der Philosophie.
56
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, Engell/Bate (eds) (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 259.
57
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 266.
58
. Schelling, my translation [Ein Wissen, zu dem ich nur durch ein anders
Wissen gelangen kann, heie ich ein bedingtes Wissen. Die Kette unsers Wissens geht von einem Bedingten zum andern: entweder mu nun das Ganze
keine Haltung haben, oder man mu glauben knnen, da es so ins Unendliche
fortgehe, oder es mu irgend einen lezten Punkt geben, an dem das Ganze
hngt, der aber ebendesswegen allem, was noch in die Sphre des bedingten
fllt. Schelling: Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, in: Werke 2 (Stuttgart:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), p. 87]
59
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 268.
60
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 270.
61
. Compare with Schelling: Allein, was Ding ist, ist zugleich selbst Object
des Erkennens, ist also selbst ein Glied in der Kette unsers Wissens, fllt selbst
in die Sphre der erkennbaren Objecte, und kann also nicht den Realgrund
alles Wissens und Erkennens enthalten. Um zu einem Object, als solchem, zu
gelangen, mu ich schon ein anders Object haben, um von einem Object etwas
zu wissen, mu ich schon vorher etwas wissen, und wenn das Princip alles
Wissens im Object liegt, so mu ich selbst wieder ein neues Princip haben, um
dieses Princip zu finden. Schelling: Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, ibid., p. 87.
62
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 278.
63
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 278.
64
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 279.
65
Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol I, ibid., p. 305.
66
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Quoted from Coleridge: Biographia Litteraria, vol. II, ibid., p. 43)
67
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in: Selected prose (New
York: Penguin Classics, 1988), p. 281.
68
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 282.
69
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 282.
70
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 282-283,
Wordsworths emphasis.
71
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 283.
72
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 283.
73
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 283.
74
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 297.

108
75

. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 288.

. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 288-89.
77
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 289.
78
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 289.
79
. Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ibid., p. 289.
80
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 54.
81
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 55.
82
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 58.
83
. Wordsworth quoted from Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid.,
p. 59.
84
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 13.
85
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 90.
86
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 81.
87
. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, vol. II, ibid., p. 82.
88
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen (Prospects Heights, IL: Waveland
Press, 1990), p. 15. [Die blaue Blume sehn ich mich zu erblicken. Sie liegt
mir unaufhrlich im Sinn, und ich kann nichts anders dichten und denken. So
ist mir noch nie zu Muthe gewesen: er ist, als htt ich vorhin getrumt, oder
ich wre in eine andere Welt hinbergeschlummert; denn in der Welt, in der ich
sonst lebte, wer htte da sich um Blumen bekmmert, und gar von einer so
seltsamen Leidenschaft fr eine Blume hab ich damals nie gehrt. Novalis:
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in: Hymnen an die Nacht & Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Mnchen: Goldmann Verlag, 1977), p. 39]
89
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 16. [Da trumte ihm erst von
unabsehlichen Fernen, und wilden, unbekannten Gegenden. Er wanderte ber
Meere mit unbegreiflicher Leichtigkeit; wunderliche Thiere sah er; er lebte mit
mannichfaltigen Menschen, bald im Kriege, in wildem Getmmel, in stillen
Htten. Er gerieth in Gefangenschaft und die schmhlichste Noth. Alle Empfindungen stiegen bis zu einer niegekannten Hhe in ihm. Er durchlebte ein
unendlich buntes Leben; starb und kam wieder, liebte bis zur hchsten Leidenschaft, und war dann wieder auf ewig von seiner Geliebten getrennt. Endlich
gegen Morgen, wie drauen die Dmmerung anbrach, wurde es stiller in seiner
Seele, klarer und bleibender wurden die Bilder. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 40]
90
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 17. [Es war, als durchdrnge
ihn ein geistiger Hauch, und er fhlte sich innigst gestrkt und erfrischt. Ein
unwiderstehliches Verlangen ergriff ihn sich zu baden, er entkleidete sich und
stieg in das Becken. Es dnkte ihn, als umflsse ihn eine Wolke des Abendroths; eine himmlische Empfindung berstrmte sein Inneres; mit inniger
Wollust strebten unzhlbare Gedanken in ihm sich zu vermischen; neue, niegesehene Bilder entstanden, die auch in einander flossen und zu sichtbaren Wesen um ihn wurden, und jede Welle des lieblichen Elements schmiegte sich wie
76

109

ein zarter Busen an ihn. Die Flut schien eine Auflsung reizender Mdchen, die
an dem Jnglinge sich augenblicklich verkrperten. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 40-41]
91
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 17. [Eine Art von sen
Schlummer befiel ihn, in welchem er unbeschreibliche Begebenheiten trumte,
und woraus ihn eine andere Erleuchtung weckte. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41]
92
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 17. [Das Tageslicht . . . war
heller und milder als das gewhnliche, der Himmel war schwarzblau und vllig
rein. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41]
93
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 17. [Was ihn aber mit voller
Macht anzog, war eine hohe lichtblaue Blume, die zunchst an der Quelle
stand, und ihn mit ihren breiten, glnzenden Blttern berhrte. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41]
94
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 17. [Er sah nichts als die
blaue Blume, und betrachtete sie lange mit unnennbarer Zrtlichkeit. Endlich
wollte er sich ihr nhern, als sie auf einmal sich zu bewegen und zu verndern
anfing; die Bltter wurden glnzender und schmiegten sich an den wachsenden
Stengel, die Blume neigte sich nach ihm zu, und die Blthenbltter zeigten einen blauen ausgebreiteten Kragen, in welchem ein zartes Gesicht schwebte.
Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41]
95
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 22. [Ungeheure Bume mit
groen glnzenden Blttern verbreiteten weit umher Schatten. Die Luft war
sehr hei und doch nicht drckend. berall Quellen und Blumen, und unter allen Blumen gefiel mir Eine ganz besonders, und es kam mir vor, als neigten
sich die Andern gegen sie. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 45]
96
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 22, my emphasis. [Ach! liebster Vater, sagt mir doch, welche Farbe sie hatte, rief der Sohn mit heftiger Bewegung. / Das entsinne ich mich nicht mehr, so genau ich mir auch sonst alles
eingeprgt habe. / Was sie nicht blau? / Es kann seyn, fuhr der Alte fort, ohne
auf Heinrichs seltsame Heftigkeit Achtung zu geben. Novalis: Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 45, my emphasis]
97
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 22-23. [Ich sah deine Mutter
mit freundlichem, verschmten blick vor mir; sie hielt ein glnzendes Kind in
den Armen, und reichte mir es hin, als auf einmal das Kind zusehends wuchs,
immer heller und glnzender ward, und sich endlich mit blendendweien
Flgeln ber uns erhob, und beyde in seinen Arm nahm, und so hoch mit uns
flog, da die Erde nur wie eine goldenen Schssel mit dem saubersten
Schnitzwerk aussah. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 46]
98
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 24. [Sie seit einiger Zeit
merkte, da Heinrich weit stiller und in sich gekehrter war, als sonst, Sie
glaubte, er sey mimthig oder krank, und eine weite Reise . . . wrden die

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trbe Laune ihres Sohnes vertreiben, und wieder einen so theilnehmenden und
lebensfrohen Menschen aus ihm machen, wie er sonst gewesen. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 47]
99
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 44. [Sie priesen sich beyde
glcklich, bey der Erleuchtung eines Blitzes eine nahe Hhle an dem steilen
Abhang eines waldigen Hgels zu entdecken, wo sie eine sichere Zuflucht gegen die Gefahren des Ungewitters zu finden hoften, und eine Ruhesttte fr
ihre erschpften Krfte. Das Glck begnstigte ihre Wnsche. Die Hhle war
trocken und mit reinlichem Moose bewachsen. Der jngling zndete schnell
ein Feuer von Reisern und Moos an, woran sie sich trocknen konnten, und die
beyden Liebenden sahen sich nun auf eine wunderbare Weise von der Welt entfernt, aus einem gefahrvollen Zustande gerettet, und auf einem bequemen,
warmen Lager allein nebeneinander. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 65]
100
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 45. [Wiegte sie unter dem
Brautgesange des Sturms und den Hochzeitfackeln der Blitze in den sesten
Rausch ein, der je ein sterbliches Paar beseligt haben mag. Novalis: Heinrich
von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 66]
101
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 64. [Von Jugend auf habe er
eine heftige Neugierde gehabt zu wissen, was in den Bergen verborgen seyn
msse, wo das Wasser in den Quellen herkomme, und wo das Gold und Silber
und die kstliche Steine gefunden wrden, die den Menschen so unwiderstehlich an sich zgen. Er habe in der nahen Klosterkirche oft diese festen Lichter
an den Bildern und Reliquien betrachtet, und nur gewnscht, da sie zu ihm
reden knnten, um ihm von ihrer geheimnivollen Herkunft zu erzhlen. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 83]
102
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 69-70, my emphasis. [Herr,
sagte der Alte, indem er sich zu Heinrichen wandte, und einige Thrnen aus
den Augen trocknete, der Bergbau mu von Gott gesegnet werden! denn es
giebt keine Kunst, die ihre Theilhaber glcklicher und edler machte, die mehr
den Glauben an eine himmlische Weisheit und Fgung erweckte, und die Unschuld und kindlichkeit des Herzens reiner erhielte, als der Bergbau. Arm wird
der Bergmann geboren, und arm gehet er wieder dahin. Er begngt sich zu
wissen, wo die metallischen Mchte gefunden werden, und sie zu Tage zu
frdern; aber ihr blendender Glanz vermag nichts ber sein lautres Herz. Unentzndet von gefhrlichem Wahnsinn, freut er sich mehr ber ihre wunderlichen Bildungen, und die Seltsamkeiten ihrer Herkunft und ihrer Wohnungen,
als ber ihren alles verheienden Besitz. Sie haben fr ihn keinen Reiz mehr,
wenn sie Waaren geworden sind . . . Wie ruhig arbeitet dagegen den arme
gengsame Bergmann in seinen tiefen Einden, entfernt von dem unruhigen
Tumult des Tages, und einzig von Wibegier und Liebe zur Eintracht beseelt . .
. Sein Beruf lehrt ihn unermdliche Geduld, und lt nicht zu, da sich seine

111
Aufmerksamkeit in unntze Gedanken zerstreue. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 88-89, my emphasis]
103
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 21. [Nach langer Zeit kam
ich in eine groe Hhle, da sa ein Greis in einem langen Kleide vor einem eisernen Tische . . . Sein Bart war durch den eisernen Tisch gewachsen und bedeckte seine Fe. Er sah ernst und freundlich aus . . . Ein glnzendes Licht
war in der Hhle verbreitet. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 45]
104
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41. [Bald dnkte es ihnen,
eine Hellung zu bemerken, die strker wurde, je nher sie kamen. Es that sich
eins neues Gewlpe von noch grerem Umfange, als die vorherigen, auf, in
dessen Hintergrunde sie bey einer Lampe eine menschliche Gestalt sitzen sahen, die vor sich auf einer steinernen Platte ein groes Buch liegen hatte, in
welchem sie zu lesen schien . . . Es war ein Mann, dessen Alter man nicht errathen konnte. Er sah weder alt noch jung aus, keine Spuren der Zeit bemerkte
man an ihm, als schlichte silberne Haare, die auf der Stirn gescheitelt waren.
Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 99]
105
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41. [Er bckte sich danach
und hob einen dunkelrothen Stein auf, der auf einer Seite auerordentlich funkelte, und auf der Andern eingegrabene unverstndliche Chiffern zeigte. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 62]
106
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 41. [Es ist dem Stein ein
rthselhaftes Zeichen / Tief eingegraben in sein glhend Blut, / Er ist mit einem
herzen zu vergleichen, / In dem das Bild der Unbekannten ruht. / Man sieht um
jenen tausend Funken streichen, / Um dieses woget eine lichte Flut. / In jenem
liegt des Glanzes Licht begraben, / Wird dieses auch das Herz des Herzens haben? Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 63]
107
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 90. [Der Einsiedler zeigte
ihnen seine Bcher. Es waren alte Historien und Gedichte. Heinrich bltterte in
den groen schngemahlten Schriften; die kurzen Zeilen der Verse, die berschriften, einzelne Stellen, und die saubern Bilder, die hier und da, wie
verkrperte Worte, zum Vorschein kamen, um die Einbildungskraft des Lesers
zu untersttzen, reizten mchtig seine Neugierde. Der Einsiedler bemerkte
seine innere Lust, und erklrte ihm die sonderbaren Vorstellungen. Die mannichfaltigsten Lebensscenen waren abgebildet. Kmpte, Leichenbegngnisse,
Hochzeitfeyerlichkeiten. Schiffbrche, Hhlen und Palste; Knige, Helden,
Priester, alte und junge Leute, Menschen in fremden Trachten, und seltsame
Thiere, kamen in verschiedenen Abwechselungen und Verbindungen vor. Heinrich konnte sich nicht satt sehen. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p.
108]
108
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 90-91. [Endlich fiel ihm ein
Buch in die Hnde, das in einer fremden Sprache geschrieben war, die ihm einige hnlichkeit mit der Lateinischen und Italienischen zu haben schien. Er

112

htte sehnlichst gewnscht, die Sprache zu kennen, denn das Buch gefiel ihm
vorzglich ohne da er eine Sylbe davon verstand. Es hatte keinen Titel, doch
fand er noch beym Suchen einige Bilder. Sie dnkten ihm ganz wunderbar bekannt, und wie er recht zusah entdeckte er seine eigene Gestalt ziemlich
kenntlich unter den Figuren. Er erschrack und glaubte zu trumen, aber beym
wiederhohlten Ansehn konnte er nicht mehr an der vollkommenen hnlichkeit
zweifeln. Er traute kaum seinen Sinnen, als er bald auf einem Bilde die Hhle,
den Einsiedler und den Alten neben sich entdeckte. Allmhlich fand er auf den
andern Bildern die Morgenlnderinn, seine Eltern, den Landgrafen und die
Landgrfinn von Thringen, seinen Freund den Hofkaplan, und manche Andere siener Bekannten; doch waren ihre Kleidungen verndert und schienen aus
einer andern Zeit zu seyn Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 108]
109
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 91. [Die letzten Bilder waren dunkel und unverstndlich; doch berraschten ihn einige Gestalten seines
Traumes mit dem innigsten Entzcken; der Schlu des Buches schien zu fehlen. Heinrich war sehr bekmmert, und wnschet nichts sehnlicher, als das
Buch lesen zu knnen, und vollstndig zu besitzen. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 109]
110
. Ludwig Tieck, my translation [Dem Dichter, welcher das Wesen seiner
Kunst im Mittelpunkt ergriffen hat, erscheint nichts weidersprechend und
fremd, ihm sind die Rtsel gelst, durch die Magie der Fantasie kann er alle
Zeitalter und Welten verknpfen, die Wunder verschwinden und alles verwandelt sich in Wunder: so ist dieses Buch gedichtet . . . hier sind alle Unterschiede aufgehoben, durch welche Zeitalter von ein ander getrennt erscheinen,
und eine Welt der andern als feindselig begegnet. Ludwig Tieck: Tiecks Bericht ber die Fortsetzung, in: Novalis, Hymnen an die Nacht & Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 202, my emphasis]
111
. Tieck, my translation [Der Geist, welcher den Prolog in Versen hlt,
sollte nach jedem Kapitel wiederkehren, und diese Stimmung, diese wunderbare Ansicht der Dinge fortsetzen. Durch dieses Mittel blieb die unsichtbare
Welt mit dieser sichtbaren in ewiger Verknpfung. Dieser sprechende Geist ist
die Poesie selber, aber zugleich der siderische Mensch, der mit der Umarmung
Heinrichs und Mathildes gebohren ist. Tiecks Bericht ber die Fortsetzung,
ibid., p. 202-203, my emphasis]
112
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 151. [An einen Sommermorgen ward ich jung / Da fhlt ich meines eignen Lebens Puls / Zum erstenmalund wie die Liebe sich / In tiefere Entzckungen verlohr, / Erwacht ich
immer mehr und das Verlangen / Nach innigerer gnzlicher Vermischung /
Ward dringender mit jedem Augenblick. / Wollust ist meines Daseyns Zeugungskraft. / Ich bin der Mittelpunkt, der heilge Quell, / Aus welchem jede
Sehnsucht strmisch fliet / Wohin sich jede Sehnsucht, mannichfach / Gebro-

113
chen wieder still zusammen zieht. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid.,
p. 160]
113
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 151. [Versunken lag ich
ganz in Honigkelchen. / Ich duftete, die Blume schwankte still / In goldner
Morgenluft. Ein innres Quellen / War ich, ein sanftes Ringen, alles flo / Durch
mich und ber mich und hob mich leise. / . . . / Noch war ich blind, doch
shcwankten lichte Sterne / Durch meines Wesens wunderbare Ferne. Novalis:
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 160]
114
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 152. [Es bricht die neue
Welt herein / Und verdunkelt den hellsten Sonnenschein, / Man sieht nun aus
bemooten Trmmern / Eine wunderseltsame Zukunft schimmern / Und was
vordem alltglich war / Scheint jetzo fremd und wunderbar. / <Eins in allem
und alles im Einen / Gottes Bild auf Krutern und Steinen / Gottes Geist in
Menschen und Thieren, / Dies mu man sich zu Gemthe fhren. / Keine Ordning mehr nach Raum und Zeit / Heir Zukunft in der Vergangenheit.> / . . . /
Alles mu in einander greifen / Eins durch das Andre gedeihn und reifen; /
Jedes in Allen dar sich stellt / . . . / Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt
/ Und was man geglaubt, es sey geschehn / . . . / Wehmuth und Wollust, Tod
und Leben/Sind hier in innigster Sympathie. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 161-162]
115
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 155. [Wie aus tiefer, unterirrdischer Ferne erhoben sich einige klare Stimmchen und sangen. Novalis:
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 164]
116
. Novalis: Henry von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 156. [Die wilden Qualen der
Einsamkeit, die herbe Pein eines unsgliches Verlustes, die trbe, entsezliche
Leere, die irrdische Ohnmacht war gewichen, und der Pigrimm sah sich wieder
in einer vollen, bedeutsamen Welt. Stimme und Sprache waren wieder lebendig
bey ihm geworden und es dnkte ihm nunmehr alles viel bekannter und weissagender, als ehemals, so da ihm der Tod, wie eine hhere Offenbarung des
Lebens, erschien, und er sein eignes, schnellvorbergehendes Daseyn mit kindlicher, heitrer Rhrung betrachtete. Zukunft und Vergangenkeit hatten sich in
ihm berhrt und einen innigen Verein geschlossen. Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, ibid., p. 165]

114