Laure Cahen-Maurel

Avec les contributions de Joseph Leo Koerner, Michael Fried, Manfred Frank, Julie Ramos, David W. Wood, Augustin Dumont, Isis von Plato, Maria Teresa Caracciolo, Lionel Richard, Olivier Schefer et Laure Cahen-Maurel. ---- Le peintre romantique Caspar David Friedrich fait aujourd'hui partie de nos classiques dans le champ de l'art. Ce livre propose les réflexions d'éminents spécialistes du romantisme allemand et de l'oeuvre du peintre, qui portent sur la manière de regarder et de percer un peu le prestige mystérieux d'une peinture connue pour être énigmatique. En un parcours à travers l'histoire de l'art et de la civilisation allemande, la philosophie, la politique, la religion et la littérature, il interroge le lien de Friedrich au romantisme. Ce faisant, il fournit une approche renouvelée de quelques-uns des enjeux fondamentaux d'un mouvement artistique en quête d'harmonie entre le monde extérieur et l'imagination qui le dépasse si facilement, en plongeant ses racines dans la pure intériorité seulement accessible à "l'oeil de l'esprit".

This second issue of SYMPHILOSOPHIE is devoted to the women writers of philosophical romanticism. This issue also contains an 80 page translation anthology of texts by Rahel Varnhagen, Sophie Mereau, Caroline Michaelis-Schlegel, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Karoline von Günderrode and Bettina Brentano-von Arnim. In addition, there are miscellaneous articles, review essays, book reviews, and a notices section with the latest publications, conferences and calls for papers for events relating to German romantic philosophy.

Avec les contributions de Francoise Dastur, André Stanguennec, Olivier Schefer, Corinne Bayle, José-Luis Diaz, Victoire Feuillebois, Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne, Emilie Pézard, Dagmar Wieser, Serge Zenkin et Laure Cahen-Maurel. ---- En croisant philosophie, arts et littérature, ce volume propose d’interroger la façon dont le romantisme transforme radicalement les rapports entre la sphère de la création et ce qui lui est extérieur en « poétisant » la vie. Profondément réflexives, les œuvres romantiques reflètent tant les conditions de leur action que leur réception éventuelle et pensent ainsi leur propre capacité de poétisation. S’interroger sur les « formes romantiques de la vie » permet de montrer comment s’imposent l’invention de nouvelles formes, mais aussi une nouvelle ambition pour celles-ci, qui leur confère un statut sublime, autonome et un pouvoir d’action renforcé sur l’existence. Entre théorie et pratique, représentations et usages de ces représentations, ces formes romantiques de la vie contribuent à cerner l’esthétique du romantisme dans sa complexité.

This article offers a comprehensive and systematic reconstruction of Schiller’s philosophy of history, situating its fundamental issues in a more accurate historical context by relating it to the contemporary philosophies of the time of I. Kant, K.L. Reinhold, and J.G. Fichte. It defends the following idea: for Friedrich Schiller, the philosophy of history is the intermediate ground of both philosophy and poetry (or art in the broader sense). I argue against the widely-held view in the scholarship that Schiller conflated the fields of ethics and aesthetics. I reconstruct Schiller’s theory of history in three phases. The first phase (1787-1792) is inspired by the Kantian “tribunal” of a moral understanding of the historical future. Nevertheless, Schiller underscores more than Kant the possibility of comprehending philosophically the actual history of the present time. The excesses of Terror in revolutionary France in the year 1793, however, radically changed Schiller’s thought on the telos of history. The second phase (1792/93-1794/95) sublimely demystifies the specter of a global historical coherence. Schiller’s focus is now on the tragic and tragedy, the field of art and no longer of philosophy. This reflection permits the transition to the third and most mature phase of Schiller’s philosophy of history: a philosophy outlined in the _Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Being_ (1795) and the essay _Naive and Sentimental Poetry_ (1795/96). Here Schiller’s philosophy of history comes into its own ground: it is the territory in which beauty is the “governor” (_Statthalter_) of reason in the sensible world, a decisive image that is much less known than the famous image of the tribunal of history. Beauty is therefore recast as the element reconciling the sensible and the rational in their very opposition. It forms the intersection point of the empirical and the transcendental, and is the new guiding principle of history as the 'good' culture of all the faculties of our human mind. This culture is free and unconstrained, but a dynamism emerges, in which the concept of rational (moral) freedom, which to begin with is merely formal and abstract, now finds itself in the real world, which in principle is foreign to it.

After Hegel’s famous philosophical dismissal of the sublime for its inadequacy, and in a postmodern age deprived of theological doctrines, there is increasing evidence for the relevance of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscape painting for contemporary artists who seek to continue the tradition of the sublime. However, before inquiring into the problem of the current relevance of romanticism, this paper asks an apparently simpler question: Is there such a thing as a Friedrichian sublime, and if yes, what exactly is it? The first difficulty faced by commentators when dealing with his painting is to distinguish the sublime in Friedrich from the Kantian sublime without eliminating the category altogether. In order to answer this question the essay investigates the role assigned to the sublime by Friedrich himself as stated in his principal text and in relation to his paintings. It then makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Caspar David Friedrich's painterly relationship to the sublime by examining the British artist Anish Kapoor's reimagining of Friedrich’s _Sea of Ice_ (1824) in a monumental installation entitled _Svayambh_ (2007).

Der Aufsatz untersucht Hegels ästhetisches Urteil über den deutschen Maler der Romantik Caspar David Friedrich, das erstmals mit der Veröffentlichung der Ascheberg-Nachschrift von Hegels erster Vorlesung über Ästhetik an der Universität Berlin im Wintersemester 1820/21 zugänglich wurde. Zuerst wird der aktuelle Stand der Forschung zum Verhältnis zwischen Hegel und Caspar David Friedrich kurz betrachtet, wobei auffällt, wie wenig Resonanz Hegels Urteil über Friedrich bislang in der Sekundärliteratur gefunden hat. Über einige eher spekulative Resultate der bisherigen Forschung hinausgehend, wird dann gezeigt, dass man durch die Berücksichtigung bisher übergangener Originalquellen und Dokumente aus den Jahren 1820/21 präzise bestimmen kann, welche Gemälde Caspar David Friedrichs Hegel bekannt gewesen sein konnten bzw. welche er sogar persönlich angeschaut hat. Hegels in der Ascheberg-Nachschrift überlieferte Kritik wird sodann auf genau diese Gemälde Friedrichs angewendet und schließlich in den größeren Zusammenhang von Hegels Überlegungen zu Stil sowie zum Geheimnis in der Malerei gestellt. Dadurch wird deutlich, dass aus den beiden wichtigsten Vorwürfen des Philosophen an Friedrich, der Strenge und Affektation, eine Reihe von Konsequenzen folgen, die sowohl für die Hegel- als auch für die Caspar-David-Friedrich-Forschung von Bedeutung sind.

Novalis’s 1799 essay _Christianity or Europe_ is usually criticized for its apparent nostalgic longing for a return to the medieval political embodiment of religion at the expense of art and culture, and where the Middles Ages is equated with a Golden Age. I put forward a new reading of Novalis’s essay, arguing that it has its origin in a philosophical engagement with and transformation of the ideas of two earlier texts: Friedrich Schiller’s Kantian-inspired inaugural lecture at the University of Jena on universal history from 1789, and Frans Hemsterhuis’s dialogue _Alexis, or on The Golden Age_ (1787). By means of an analysis of Novalis’s original use of the theme of a Golden Age on the one hand, and his philosophical understanding of history on the other, the aim of this paper is to provide an explanation for the controversial intersection of myth and history at work in his essay. Far from being in accordance with the utopian, irrational and regressive image that has long been attached to this text, I show that Novalis’s discourse on Europe is based on the key romantic notion of _Bildung_ as completion in its unitary and totalizing sense. Here the Golden Age is not merely conceived as an eternally lost paradise of the past, but history itself becomes the driving force for a new future Golden Age, understood as a consciously elevated and actively constructed harmony and unity.

This article takes a new and decisive position in the ongoing debate as to how to determine the scientific scope, nature, and heritage of philosophical romanticism. It proposes a fresh reading of the German poet-philosopher Novalis’s idea of a scientific encyclopaedia based on a study of the so-called _Allgemeines Brouillon_ project (1798/99). Many specialists consider Novalis’s encyclopaedia to be illogical, fragmented and chaotic, i.e. a “chaology” in the spirit of Leibnizian combinatorics, as an art of infinite variations, permutations and transformations. My article opposes this dominant interpretation by critically examining the specific name and genre of Novalis’s enterprise: “encyclopaedistics”. According to Novalis, this term designates a very precise method for not only organising scientific knowledge but of further completing it by approaching the various arts, sciences and intellectual disciplines from an interdisciplinary perspective. I acknowledge the role of combinatorial analysis in the complex functioning of the Novalisian encyclopaedistics (the aspect that has generated the most commentaries), yet shed new light on this enterprise by also tracing the precise philosophical traditions onto which Novalis linked. I claim that the central philosophical foundation of Novalis’s “encyclopaedistics” is the principle of _Wechselwirkung_ (reciprocal action versus unilaterality), whose determination lies in the transcendental tradition of Kant, Fichte, and Schiller. I maintain that Novalis’s _Allgemeines Brouillon_ puts forward a pluralization of knowledge, one admittedly fraught with theoretical tensions, yet placed in a horizon of recomposition and harmony, since unity and totality are for Novalis the foundation and end of all scientific cognition. And it is in the wake of the Kantian critical philosophy that Novalis sets out this recomposition – the articulation of the opposite spheres of nature and spirit – in the dynamic terms of mediation.

The following text looks at certain philosophical points of convergence and divergence between Novalis and Fichte with respect to their theories of nature. Somewhat notoriously, Fichte places nature in opposition to the I (Ich) of the human being, designating the natural world using the abstract formula 'Not-I'. Yet Fichte also insists that this abstraction should be made concrete and particular, as both an 'it' and as a 'you'. This chapter argues that Novalis did not reject Fichte’s theory of nature as a Not-I—as is often claimed in the research. Rather, the inverse is actually the case: Novalis positively adopted and expanded on the Fichtean conception of nature as a 'you'.

This article presents a reading of the famous fragment 16 of Novalis’s "Pollen" vis-à-vis Kant’s "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View", two writings published in the same year of 1798. It aims to show that fragment 16 of "Pollen" is in nuce a reformulation of the traditional question of anthropology, which Kant viewed during the same period as reuniting the whole field of philosophy. Kant’s philosophical anthropology remains essentially empirical at base and understands the pragmatic element from the external point of view in relation to the collective existence of human beings. In contrast, Novalis’s philosophical anthropology proposes a transcendental extension of anthropology in which poetry constitutes a legitimate instrument. In short: in both thinkers we are dealing with forms of pragmatic philosophical anthropology, but the path taken by Kant follows a more empirical direction, compared to the new path of Novalis’s anthropology that underscores more the transcendental pole.

This special volume 6 of "Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" celebrates and engages with Immanuel Kant’s legacy and indelible influence on the romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recognition of Kant’s enduring importance, we have invited authors to mark his 300th birth year with articles, translations, and reviews that take up Kantian themes present in romantic thinkers. Despite the contrast in styles between Kant and the romantics, the importance of Kant’s critical system for the core ideas of romanticism is undeniable and inex- tricable. This year’s issue 6 of Symphilosophie therefore examines the crucial residual influence of Kant on romantic philosophy.

While it is now accepted in the secondary literature to treat Frühromantik - early German Romanticism - as a philosophical movement in its own right, the exact determination of the philosophical nature of this movement still remains one of the central stumbling blocks faced by interpreters. At the heart of this debate is the question of the relationship between the early romantics and Fichtean idealism. One point of rupture with Fichte and his theory of nature seems particularly obvious at first glance: Novalis's substitution of the pronoun "you" for the Fichtean "Not-I". This occurs in one of Novalis’s most famous expressions: "(You). Instead of the Not-I – You.” ((Du). Statt Nicht-Ich – Du). For most commentators, when analyzing the romantic relationship between the human being and nature, this substitution becomes the clearest expression that Novalis rejects the supposed subjectivism of Fichte's philosophy. Here the Nicht-Ich, the Not-I, - i.e. nature – is often read in Fichte as something negative, as an abstract antithesis of the I - as everything that is not human or the subject. - Whereas Novalis, on the other hand, reinjects the human element, the "you", back into nature. It is furthermore argued by these commentators that this radical substitution is motivated by the romantic call to realize not only the inseparability of the human being and nature, but to recognize their equal value. It indicates a necessary departure from transcendental idealism in favor of a rapprochement with Schelling's philosophy of nature. However, could such an interpretation be based on a preconception, or even on a prejudice? I argue that it is; and that it is based on the assumption that Novalis breaks with Fichte’s philosophy. In contrast, I defend the view that the idea of Nature as a “You” is already to be found implicitly in Fichte and that Novalis’s above well-known expression should be read as in continuity with Fichte’s transcendental epistemology and as an original dialogical extension of it. To see this, one needs to retrace the context and the philosophical chain of events from Novalis back to Fichte, and from Fichte back to Jacobi.

This article focuses on the apparently paradoxical remarks of Novalis on landscape, which followed the famous “Romantikertreffen” of August 1798: that decisive meeting of the “early German romantics” on the occasion of a communal visit to the painting and sculpture galleries in Dresden. We analyze how Novalis surpasses the phenomenological conception of landscape painting proposed by August Wilhelm Schlegel by resorting to the "incorrect" categories of sculpture and haptic sense to talk about the feeling for nature that governs landscape painting. This is the aesthetics of Herder – his reflections in the treatise “Sculpture” (1778) on the actual concrete and tangible force of the beautiful and the central importance it accords to the experience of one’s own body (a highly modern conception) – which is diverted here in a typical Novalisian gesture that we will show is consistent with his philosophy. The reception of Herder has contributed to the development in Novalis of a Pygmalionic aesthetics of contact with things that casts a different light on early romanticism: it is not only the exclusive exercise of a critical reflexivity that assumes distance, but also of a sensibility that seeks a tactile meeting point as it were between what is separated.

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

This article argues for a much more profound interconnection between philosophical romanticism and Walter Benjamin’s theses "On The Concept of History" than has been acknowledged up to now. It particularly reveals a number of parallels between Benjamin’s historical approach and the philosophy of history of the two principal thinkers of Early German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who had already formed the object of Benjamin’s doctoral thesis. It examines Benjamin’s final philosophical work in the light of three central topics inherited from Early German Romanticism, which have been less explored in romanticism studies and Benjamin scholarship, yet are decisive for helping clarify what is at stake in Benjamin’s text: the relation to prophecy; the question of messianism; and the heliotropism of the past. _____________ Cet article défend l’idée d’un lien entre la philosophie romantique et les thèses de Walter Benjamin Sur le concept d’histoire bien plus profond qu’on ne l’a admis jusqu’à présent. Il met plus particulièrement en lumière des parallèles entre la démarche historique de Benjamin et la philosophie de l’histoire des deux principaux penseurs du premier romantisme allemand, Friedrich Schlegel et Novalis, auxquels Benjamin avait déjà consacré sa thèse de doctorat. L’article examine le dernier écrit majeur de Benjamin à la lumière de trois thématiques centrales héritées du romantisme, qui ont été peu approfondies tant dans les études romantiques que dans le commentaire benjaminien et qui sont pourtant décisives pour éclaircir ce qui est en jeu dans ce texte : le rapport à la prophétie ; la question du messianisme ; et l’héliotropisme du passé.

Cet ouvrage oriente la réflexion philosophique sur le romantisme allemand dans une voie nouvelle ayant pour point de départ la singularité des paysages peints par Caspar David Friedrich, et pour concept opératoire majeur la romantisation du monde, dont Novalis a fait le programme d’une philosophie spécifique. Analyser la critique par Hegel du style de Friedrich ; étudier l’invention par Novalis, dans le prolongement de Herder, de quelque chose comme un paysage-corps ; suivre au-delà de Kant le destin du concept de sublime : tels sont les moments principaux d’un parcours qui permet de mettre au jour les liens existant entre la peinture de Friedrich et la problématique de la « révélation » énoncée par Novalis dans ses fragments sur la philosophie romantique.

This article argues that Novalis's philosophy of magical idealism essentially consists of three central elements: a theory of the creative or productive imagination, a conception of love, and a doctrine of transcendental medicine. In this regard, it synthesizes two adjacent, but divergent contemporary philosophical sources - J. G. Fichte's idealism and Friedrich Schiller's classicism - into a new and original philosophy. It demonstrates that Novalis's views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now.

This article presents a new interpretation of the notorious "Horen" dispute between Schiller and Fichte by examining the text that was the catalyst for it, Fichte’s "On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy" (1795-1800), from the overlooked perspective of Schiller’s 1793 essay "On Grace and Dignity". It demonstrates that the Horen dispute is based on a theoretical misunderstanding rather than an irreconcilable opposition, arguing that Schiller’s notion of grace as beauty in movement provides the idealism and aesthetics of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre with a powerful conceptual tool that was lacking in Kant’s critical philosophy.