The Anti-Romantic Also available from Bloomsbury German Romantic Criticism: Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and others, edited by A. Leslie Willson Idealism and Existentialism, Jon Stewart The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards The Anti-Romantic Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism Jeffrey Reid LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Jeffrey Reid, 2014 Jeffrey Reid has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. 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To my loved ones Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 1 Friedrich Schlegel 9 Sophistry and seduction 11 Pretensions of the artistic “Virtuoso” 22 Pleasure and vanity 39 Intermezzo 1: Words and things 51 Scientific objectivity and discourse 51 True content: The “Name” and the “Word” 54 Scientific grammar: From predication to syllogism 57 The real words of objective spirit 60 The actuality of Science 62 Ironic discourse and the Vereitelung of true objectivity 62 2 Novalis 65 The Novalis distinction 65 Pathological irony 73 The beautiful soul and unhappy consciousness 83 Intermezzo 2: Irony and barbarities 91 The language of barbarity 93 Relation to objectivity: Empiricism and skepticism 95 3 Schleiermacher 97 Intuition and feeling 98 History of the understanding and the actuality of irony 108 Conclusion 115 Coda 1: Galvanism and excitability in Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of the fragment 121 Coda 2: Reflections on Novalis’s Logological Fragments 133 Notes 140 Bibliography 185 Index 191 Acknowledgments This book is a new, revised, augmented, translated edition of my L’ anti- romantique: Hegel contre le romantisme ironique (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007, with the support of the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes). Versions of Intermezzo 1 have appeared in Jere Surber (ed.), Hegel and Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), and in my Real Words: Language and System in Hegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Coda 1, “Galvanism and Excitability in Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of the Fragment,” appeared in Clio 38.1 (Fall 2008). I would like to thank Jean-François Marquet for his philosophical inspiration. I would also like to thank John Burbidge, Stephen Houlgate, Simon Lumsden, and Jere Surber for their helpful comments on this book. Introduction It is safe to say that, in this book, more will be learned about Hegel than will be learned about those representatives of Early German Romanticism that I am dealing with: Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher. My intention is not to compare Hegel’s thought with the Romantics’—attempting to present each in a neutral way, bringing them together in a philosophical confrontation that might be observed objectively, in order to declare a winner or perhaps a draw, maybe even concluding with a fair-minded synthesis showing that Hegel is romantic and the Romantics are Hegelian. Such a confrontation, according to my way of proceeding, could only take place if it were textually based, and while it is clear that Hegel has much to say about Early German (or Jena) Romanticism, the latter, which blossoms before Hegelian philosophy finds its wings, remains mute with regard to him. Our question is, consequently, the following: how does Hegel understand the Early Romantic movement and its main protagonists? I will not attempt to prove or demonstrate how his interpretation is or is not faithful. Let it be said right away that Hegel’s interpretation is unfaithful, to the extent that it is strongly critical and even polemical. As such, the Hegelian interpretation is far from demonstrating or presenting a comprehensive knowledge of the theories and works of the Jena Romantics, but rather shows itself to be highly selective regarding them. Hegel hardly ever refers directly to the actual works of the Romantics. When he does highlight a key expression in their writings, in order to make it the pivotal point of his critical enterprise, we notice, looking closely at the texts that Hegel might have been familiar with, that the expression often only appears in a marginal fashion and in a context alien to the one evoked in the Hegelian critique. Although it would be impossible to adequately present here an intellectual movement as rich and multidimensional as the one found in Jena Romanticism, I will quote, in endnotes, passages from the thinkers that Hegel deals with, in order to provide some insight into their own thoughts. In giving them voice, we may better appreciate their differences (or similarities) with regard to Hegel’s critique. In the same vein, I have added two short chapters, in appendix, where I attempt to faithfully present Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of irony and the literary fragment, as well as Novalis’s Logological Fragments, divorced from any