Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg)

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801)

Novalis (the name is a pseudonym adopted for his published writings) was, together with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading philosophical thinker of `early German Romanticism'. Until recently Novalis was regarded primarily as a poet and as the author of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who wrote some philosophical work in conjunction with his writings on natural science and on the political matters of his day. In the wake of the renewed philosophical interest in the philosophy of J.G. Fichte and other German idealist thinkers, there has been a reassessment of the writings of both Schlegel and Novalis. It is now apparent that, far from being, as most commentators present them, defenders of Fichte's `subjective idealism', Novalis and Schlegel arrived at significant criticisms of Fichte's idealism and initiated an anti-foundationalist tendency in modern philosophy which still has significant resonances today.

Novalis was born in Oberwiederstedt on 2 May 1772. He began to study law in Jena in 1790, at which time he became interested in philosophy via his contact with Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Friedrich Schiller. In 1792 he registered at the university in Leipzig to study maths, law and philosophy, and here he began his lifelong friendship with Friedrich Schlegel. In 1795 he met Fichte and Hölderlin in Jena, and began a study of Fichte's philosophy which is documented in his Fichte-Studies. In 1797 he studied geology at the mining academy in Freiburg, while also writing on the other natural sciences, with the aim of producing an encyclopaedic work linking the sciences. At this time he showed the first signs of tuberculosis. He continued work on both literary and philosophical texts until his death from tuberculosis in 1801 in Weissenfels.

The central philosophical concern of the decade from 1790 to 1800 in Germany was the reaction to the critical philosophy of Kant. Reinhold had popularized Kant's ideas after the appearance of the first Critique, arguing that what was required to ground Kant's system was a point of Cartesian certainty, the `fact of consciousness', which must be expressed in a proposition that requires no further justifying propositions (see Descartes, R. §§4,5). Fichte rejected the idea that the foundation of knowledge of reality is a `fact', and argued that the foundation must be the activity of the subject. Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves he also rejected, on the grounds that an objective, deterministic natural world could never be the source of subjectivity. The split between subject and object which gives rise to a world that is manifest to consciousness and changeable by human action must therefore take place within an `absolute I'. Novalis's objection to Fichte is not that Fichte links mind and nature together, refusing to see them as wholly separable, nor that he stresses the productive nature of subjectivity, but that he `has, as it were, chosen the logical schema of science as the pattern of a real construction of humankind and the world' (Novalis 1978, vol. 2: 684), thus reducing being to structures via which the subject thinks about it. Novalis consequently comes to reject the idea that the I can function as the foundation of philosophy.

Novalis's questioning of Fichte's foundationalism leads him to the idea that the absolute is no longer something which can be made positively accessible to philosophy. As Hölderlin also argued at the same time, the notion of an absolute I is contradictory: something can only be an `I' by being relative to something else. Philosophy, for Novalis, becomes a `striving' to think an absolute `basis' (Grund) that would enable it to be complete. However, `If this [basis] were not given, if this concept contained an impossibility – then the drive to philosophise would be an endless activity' (Novalis 1978, vol. 2: 180) that relies on a regulative idea of completion. This feeling of inherent incompleteness leads Novalis to introduce a very modern sense of temporality into his thinking: `Time can never stop – we cannot think away time – for time is the condition of the thinking being – time only stops with thinking' (p. 180). Prefiguring Nietzsche, he ponders the `conviction ... that precisely the old lament that everything is transient can become the most joyful of all thoughts' (p. 433), rather than be an occasion of despair. His philosophical position is summed up in the claim that: `The absolute which is given to us can only be recognised negatively by acting and finding that what we are seeking is not reached by any action' (p. 181); in short, `We everywhere seek the unconditioned (das Unbedingte), and always only find things (Dinge)' (p. 226). Novalis relies on the paradoxical principle, which later influenced Adorno, that philosophy `must be systemlessness brought into a system' (p. 200).

Novalis makes a further influential move, in which art becomes a more positive philosophical means than theoretical philosophy for responding both to the inaccessibility of the absolute and to the feeling that we cannot do without the absolute. Art `represents the unrepresentable' (Novalis 1978, vol. 2: 840). The experience of a work of art involves a failure finally to grasp what the work is saying, but this is precisely what can give us pleasure. The work can continually reveal more, without being exhausted by what we think of it. The finitude we feel in relation to art therefore points towards what is infinite. Novalis's contentions about art are linked to his account of self-consciousness as `a being outside being in being', and as `an image of being in being' (p. 10). Instead of the absolute I being the ultimate being, as it is in Fichte, Novalis's I depends on a being which is not transparent to it and which is not in its control: `I is basically nothing – Everything has to be given to it – But it is to it alone that something can be given and the given only becomes something via the I' (p. 185). This both gives the I a status relative to what is given to it, and at the same time differentiates the I from anything objective that can be `schematised' and subsumed under a concept: `Can I look for a schema for myself, if I am that which schematises?' (p. 162). His account of self-consciousness forms part of an often ignored tradition of thinking about subjectivity which does not regard the subject as the foundation of philosophy, but which also refuses to make the subject wholly dependent on something else.

The interpretation of Novalis's more political texts, such as Belief and Love and Christianity or Europe remains contentious. They are in some ways quite reactionary, but their irony is such that it is often unclear what Novalis really means. His intriguing work on the natural sciences may no longer be plausible in empirical scientific terms, but it does offer many insights into how the imagination plays a decisive role in scientific thinking. His aim is for the modern period to connect the increasingly disparate spheres of human intellectual activity in the form of a kind of encyclopedia. In trying to show how this might be done he underlines the importance of what can be learned from aesthetic production and reception, even in the natural sciences. The resulting reflections on the world-disclosive nature of language and on the workings of the imagination have gained new contemporary relevance in relation to thinkers, such as Richard Rorty, who see philosophy as a `kind of literature', rather than as the attempt at a definitive metaphysics.