The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 by Dalia Nassar (review)

In this rich and groundbreaking study, which ought to be considered one of the most important and formidable recent contributions to scholarship on early German Romanticism, Dalia Nassar sets out to rethink the category of the absolute in texts by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. Nassar’s historically informed and textually sensitive account of these thinkers reframes their various attempts to grasp or conceptualize the absolute as an inherently relational, differential, and dynamic engagement with reality.

The notion of a relational absolute seems, at first glance, counterintuitive or contradictory. The absolute, as that which is without limit and thus irreducible to things or conditions, has traditionally been understood to exclude differentiation and thus to be incompatible with relationality. And yet, Nassar shows with considerable conviction, clarity, and attention to detail that Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling—albeit each in different ways and with different emphases—gravitated toward the absolute as a figure of thought that helped them think relationally and thus reconcile oppositions between the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, or the differentiation of knowledge and the unity of being.

As Nassar points out in her introduction, scholars of early German Romanticism have dramatically different ways of approaching the concept of the absolute. Some, such as Frederick Beiser, understand the Romantics to be Idealists, or philosophers who endow the absolute with some form of metaphysical and ontological reality. The other dominant interpretive paradigm for understanding the philosophical discourse of early German Romanticism has been articulated by Manfred Frank, who portrays the Romantics as skeptical thinkers. According to Frank, the Romantics view the absolute as a Kantian regulative idea: something that must be presupposed as that which makes experience possible but can never be conceptually grasped or exhaustively articulated.

Nassar aligns herself more with Beiser’s account, although she differentiates herself from his tendency to see the Romantics as prioritizing Spinoza’s metaphysics over Fichtean self-positing. For Nassar, the Romantics remain invested in the “active and constructive nature of the self” (11) and are committed to the agency of Romantic creativity. In general, however, she steers a middle course between Beiser and Frank, or between scholars who conceptualize the absolute as a metaphysical ontology and those who see the absolute as a mere regulative idea. Nassar writes, “the romantics were concerned with the nature of reality—with the ‘absolute’ ground of being and knowing—and with our cognitive relation to it” (12). She therefore draws attention to an ambiguity in the Romantic discourse of the absolute: the absolute is at once ontological ground and epistemological relation. Indeed, in certain cases, most notably for Novalis, the absolute is explicitly described as a relational oscillation rather than as a ground of pure identity or a domain of indifferentiation.

More importantly, Nassar’s account contests interpretations of the Romantics that portray them as postmodernists or poststructuralists avant la lettre. In so doing, she paves the way for a critical engagement with the Romantics that values both their alterity and their familiarity. Nassar suggests that one may historicize the Romantics and take them seriously as philosophers in their own right. In an academic climate that seems to be growing weary of postmodern skepticism, Nassar’s monograph appears at an opportune moment and ought to spur scholars to rethink the legacy of early German Romanticism.

Within this broader gesture that simultaneously historicizes the Romantics and takes them seriously as philosophers, Nassar’s insights into the individual thinkers are no less valuable. The book is divided into three sections (each with four chapters), which focus respectively on Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling. The chapters on Novalis are noteworthy for drawing attention to his later philosophical writings—above all, his studies on Kant and Franz Hemsterhuis. In these works, Novalis claims that the absolute is not something merely given but a task to be realized: the absolute is the unfolding of creative and free activity...