Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era

• Epilogue
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 221-233
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Epilogue

From history it’s only natural we should turn to the present. Which is to say: from Romantic theory in its own time to its relation to contemporary theory. And rather than give what would at best amount to a brief, inadequate survey, it seemed to me better to treat the topic very selectively. Specifically, I want to look at how a few contemporary theorists have chosen to respond to Hegel. If Hegel was in many ways exemplary of what Romantic theory tried to be, his presence in the contemporary theory scene might shed suggestive light on the larger issue. My sense was that if we traced the response of contemporary theory to Hegel over the past thirty years, we’d find it has a story to tell. Briefly, the story would be about an attempt to undermine the Hegelian system, followed by an impulse to question it, and finally by a move to return to it. And the moral of this story, I suggest, is that Hegel (and by implication Romantic theory) isn’t just our past but, more important, a possibility for our future.

I want to begin with the work of Jacques Derrida. Although we could go back even earlier, Derrida seems especially appropriate because of the way he framed the whole question of theory. In particular, he was perhaps the first to ask whether theory could really be adequately expressed in terms of some metalevel discourse such as philosophy, and whether we could ever hope to arrive at a full awareness of our own thought processes by means of theory. And even if he wasn’t the first to posit a lack of such self-awareness (Heidegger’s Nietzsche comes to mind here), he was perhaps the first to suggest we might want to rethink our relation to theory, on a level other than that of theory itself.

Given his impulse to question theory in a radical way, it was easy to see that at some point Derrida would most likely wish to confront the figure who, of all his predecessors, had made the largest claims for theoretical self-awareness: Hegel. Hence the rationale for Glas, which we might describe as an attempt to sound the final knell for philosophy, by means of a commentary on Hegel. Glas presents itself, quite simply and succinctly, as a discourse on the law of the family. Specifically, it wants to be a discussion of Hegel’s family, of the family in Hegel, and of the concept of family according to Hegel (p. 4). Here we apparently have an upward progression or ascent toward conceptual awareness, which is exactly what you’d expect in a commentary on Hegel or, more broadly, German idealism. So we might find it normal to begin with the biographical circumstances of Hegel’s family. From there we’d move on to the family in Hegel, a kind of middle ground where those biographical circumstances get assimilated into a consciousness of family, a sense of the family as a theme in Hegel. And from there we’d finally arrive at a concept of the family, as the point where all our efforts to impose a kind of structure on family achieve their highest form of theoretical awareness.

Ironically, what we get in Glas turns out to be exactly the reverse: from the concept of family according to Hegel, Derrida wants to work outward to the much larger sphere of all the ways family might be conceptually structured in Hegel, and from there onto the even larger sphere occupied by Hegel’s actual family, whose complex relationships go far beyond what we can apprehend by means of theory. Or, as Derrida himself puts it: “If the living relation of father to son is life as a nonconceptual unity, every conceptual unity presupposes that relation, implies that nonconcept as the concept’s production, the concept’s non-conceptual conception” (p. 80). For Derrida, then, the commentary on Hegel is a way to trace his concept of the family to the larger conceptual matrix out of which it presumably arose. But if Glas is thus about the conceptual matrix to which we can trace the Hegelian concept of the family, the point isn’t simply to give a history of its genesis but rather to expose the “displacements or the disimplications of which it will be the object,” displacements that “would not know how to have a simply local character” (p. 5) because of the deep significance of this family concept for the whole Hegelian project. In other words, displacements that would ultimately destabilize the entire Hegelian system.

For Derrida, I would argue, the point at which such displacement or destabilization comes about can be found in the story of Hegel’s family, which we glean from the letters that pass between Hegel and those of his intimate circle. Nor is it an accident, I suspect, that immediately after it reproduces some of these letters Glas goes on to say: “And what if what cannot be assimilated, the absolute indigestible, played a fundamental role in the system, an abyssal role rather, the abyss playing an almost transcendental role and allowing to be formed above it, as a kind of effluvium, a dream of appeasement? Isn’t there always an element excluded from the system that assures the system’s space of possibility? The transcendental has always been, strictly, a transcategorial, what could be received, formed, terminated in none of the categories intrinsic to the system.… And what if the sister, the brother/sister relation represented here the transcendental position, ex-position?” (pp. 151, 162). Because it’s based on sexual difference without desire, the brother/sister relation is the only one that doesn’t fit into the Hegelian concept of the family. And yet, as Hegel’s letters attest, it’s part of his own family. So we get a displacement of the Hegelian family concept by the one element it can’t really assimilate, but can’t reject.

But if what Derrida hoped to achieve in Glas was an extension of the Hegelian text until it ran into contradiction and ultimately into spaces it couldn’t cover (such as the real), that hope was bound to fail. And the reason it was bound to fail lay in the inherent capacity of the Hegelian system for endless reflexivity. Clearly the aim of Glas was to begin with the Hegelian text and, by a proliferation of commentary that attempted to reproduce the thought-mode of the text, to bring about an expansion or development of the Hegelian system that would eventually produce gaps or lacunae, places where it couldn’t properly connect to itself. The existence of such places would point in turn to the unrepresentability of some circumstances by Hegelian theory, or by any form of theory. And that would suggest that what was unrepresentable might in fact form the base or ground of theory, the condition of its possibility. What Derrida failed to take into account, however, was the way Hegelian theory could absorb all these gaps or lacunae, and even any supposedly unrepresentable actuality, by acts of reflexivity in which it would simply subsume these into the process of its own formation. Because it wasn’t the kind of system whose concepts are all at the same level, it could just take what couldn’t be represented at one level to the next higher level, through a Romantic reflexivity by which it simply rethought or redefined its own concept of itself. As a result, the Derridean maneuver would not only fail to dislodge or displace Hegelian theory but could, arguably, be easily subsumed into it.

More than a decade later, we get a different kind of take on Hegel from Judith Butler. Unlike Derrida, she didn’t try to undermine the Hegelian system. Instead, she merely questioned it. Specifically, Subjects of Desire put forward a critique of the Hegelian subject. From Julia Kristeva, Butler adopted a notion of the body as a heterogeneous assemblage of drives. Like Kristeva, Butler urged we should replace the Hegelian subject by the body. And from Michel Foucault, Butler took over the argument that instead of an analysis of desire we should have a history of bodies, one that would investigate how the desiring subject was produced. For Butler, this critique of the Hegelian subject and the proposal to replace it by a history of bodies offers “a major conceptual reorientation which, if successful, would signal the definitive closure of Hegel’s narrative of desire” (p. 235). As Foucault saw it, the way to arrive at that history was by a genealogical inquiry into how subjects of desire emerge out of power relations at a given moment. From his perspective, genealogical inquiry would reveal that the “truth” of desire as the essence of the subject was in fact a fiction, produced by other forces. What exposed it as fiction was the fact that both the “self” and its “truth” were “immanently locatable within the reflexive circle of thinking.” As a result, Butler can ask: “What if Foucault were right, that the conceit of an immanently philosophical desire grounded the further conceits of the subject and its truth? Then Hegel’s narrative would have entered fully the domain of the fantastic, and the phenomenology would require a genealogical account of the hidden historical conditions of its own structure” (p. 236).

Nonetheless, questions arise for Butler about the Foucauldian genealogy, that have to do with its tendency to simplify historically. For example, she notices the way Foucault will from time to time rely on a naturalistic vocabulary (e.g., the strength versus weakness of an instinct). The upshot is that the body “is always the occasion for a play of dominations and regulations” (p. 236). From that Butler goes on to say: “Here we can see that Foucault has elevated the scene of bodily conflict to an invariant feature of historical change, and it makes sense to ask whether war itself has not become romanticized and reified through this theoretical move” (p. 237). Finally, then, Butler has to question Foucault: “Why does Foucault appear to eschew the analysis of concrete bodies in complex historical situations in favor of a single history in which all culture requires the subjection of the body?”

Perhaps the most important consequence of Butler’s impulse to question Foucault is that the Hegelian narrative reappears, as a way to enhance the story we get from Foucault. Because Foucault doesn’t really specify how abstraction from the body occurs within a concrete social scene, we need on that point to look elsewhere. Hence the reappearance of Hegel, since for Butler “it is Hegel’s account of lordship and bondage that … appears a more promising framework within which to answer such a question” (p. 238). If Foucault is all about how a “subject” is generated, what he can’t say is which subjects get generated, and at whose expense. And the reason he can’t say, Butler seems to suggest, is because he isn’t able to give an account of relationships that can offer a rationale for two of their indispensable aspects: reflexivity and intersubjectivity. To explain either of these, we need, obviously, a theory of some kind, and since both involve process, that theory will have to take the form of narrative. Thus Butler has to conclude: “If the history of desire must be told in terms of a history of bodies … and if it is not a hermeneutics of the self that is required, then perhaps it is the narrative of a certain philosophically instructive comedy of errors” (p. 238). So, at the end, we return to Hegel.

If we now turn to Slavoj Žižek on Tarrying with the Negative, almost twenty years after Glas, we can see how much the relation of contemporary theory to Romantic theory has changed. Derrida had felt the best way to think about theory ought to involve an analysis of Hegel that would focus on the places where his system couldn’t connect to itself, places that would in turn lead to a displacement of the entire system by what it couldn’t represent, by the reality that in fact formed its base. In this fashion, he hoped to raise the question of whether theory could ever arrive at an adequate awareness of itself. For Žižek, such a question no longer seems to have the same urgency. Instead, we might say that for him theory is the only way we can hope to arrive at an adequate self-awareness. Nor does he even have the same sense of how we ought to define theory. To Derrida, theory presupposed some sort of consistency. In order to produce a displacement of the Hegelian system, he had to be able to expose its inconsistency on some level. By contrast, Žižek doesn’t see inconsistency as a big issue. From his perspective, different forms of theory can even come together in a fruitful way. His eclecticism marks what we might term a late phase in the development of theory. But for precisely that reason it’s all the more remarkable that what he should advocate is a return to Kant and Hegel.

Likewise, I find it equally significant that at the outset of his discussion of Hegel, Žižek urges us to go back to Kant. Specifically, Žižek says we need to forget all the standard textbook stuff on Hegelian idealism, by which the Concept manages to generate all its content out of itself and so is able to dispense with any external agency. Instead, Žižek avers we should “return to the Kantian duality of the transcendental network of categories and of Things-in-themselves” (p. 19). If we do that, we then discover exactly what Kant discovered: that the sum total of all the affects we experience isn’t enough to give us access to the things-in-themselves or noumena. But here’s where Hegel comes in: as Žižek sees it, what Hegel’s critique of Kant points out isn’t the insufficiency of the affects we receive but rather the abstract character of thought itself. In other words, our very need for affects becomes an index of the insufficiency of thought. From there, Žižek can go on to propose a new way to see the Hegelian process of Substance ⇒ Subject. For Žižek, this is a process that never quite becomes complete: for him, the subjectivization of substance remains incomplete. And the remainder or leftover is what we might call the real, the very being of the subject.

The fact that we never quite get to the real produces in turn a situation where we become very dependent on any epistemic markers we can come by. Hence in his treatment of Hegel on identity Žižek is careful to emphasize the crucial role played by differences. From an epistemological perspective, if we try to grasp a thing irrespective of its relationship to everything else or as it is “in itself,” we find we don’t get anywhere. As Žižek puts it, “identity hinges upon what makes a difference” (p. 130). Yet if differences are in fact crucial from an epistemological perspective, what’s perhaps equally significant here is the move by which Žižek attempts to pass from the epistemological to the ontological. Epistemologically, a subject is bound to be empty or void in itself, given that we can’t ascertain what it is without some differences to act as epistemic markers. Žižek, however, wants to maintain it’s empty or void in an ontological sense as well. To make his claim, he has to assert that the subject in Hegel is purely empty or void in itself, that it exists only from the standpoint of what it is “for others.” Yet Hegel himself, in a passage quoted by Žižek, had said “The father also has an existence of his own apart from the son-relationship” so that opposites are either “negatively related to one another or sublate each other and are indifferent to one another” (p. 131). But to be indifferent to another, a subject clearly has to exist in itself.

What Žižek has to say about the void of the subject “in itself” displays its radical consequences when he comes to his discussion of the Hegelian movement from “in-itself” to “for-itself.” For Žižek, there simply isn’t any such movement: we don’t go from “in-itself” to “for-itself” because the two perspectives are in fact one and the same. They’re the same because “in-itself” in opposition to “for-itself” means (1) what exists only potentially, as an inner possibility, versus the actual, and (2) actuality itself in the sense of an external, immediate objectivity that hasn’t yet been internalized and so hasn’t yet arrived at its Concept or Notion (p. 141). For Žižek, then, the two conditions exist simultaneously: in-itself potentiality is only possible if we have the external perspective of the actual for which it hasn’t yet fully realized itself, and vice versa. On that basis, Žižek can say: “We can see, now, why Hegel is as far as possible from the evolutionist notion of the progressive development of in-itself into for-itself: the category of ‘in itself’ is strictly correlative to ‘for us,’ i.e., for some consciousness external to the thing-in-itself” (p. 142). Yet Hegel himself, as we’ve seen, had affirmed in his Phenomenology Preface that “this being-in-and-for-itself is at first only for us, or in itself.… It must also be this for itself” Contrary to Žižek, then, there appears to be a development of some kind after all.

By his resistance to any movement from “in-itself” to “for-itself” in Hegel, Žižek offers a clue to the current impasse in theory. Ultimately, I would argue, his refusal to accept such a move is based on his belief that to understand Hegel we need to go back to Kant. In other words, our perspective on theory finally has to be epistemological. Because that, in the last analysis, was what Kant was all about: the notion that we don’t in the end have access to things as they are, and that the task for theory must then be how best to make sense of our epistemological situation. Yet for Hegel and others who helped to define what I’ve described as Romantic theory, there had been another option: instead of an epistemological framework in which we never quite manage to resolve the issues that matter most, we might try to address these from a radically different perspective, that of pure theory. By that I mean a perspective by which we try to reframe questions we can’t answer at a level where we can think more abstractly about what their solution would have to involve. Which is to say: that we move from theory to metatheory.

In recent years, theory seems to have entered a kind of twilight phase. For the past decade, at least, no new forms of theory have emerged. Thus, what began more than thirty years ago with the advent of structuralism appears to have come to an end. But if the era of theory is in fact over, it seems only natural to ask what brought about its demise. Of course, questions about the end or demise of theory inevitably lead to questions about its origin. Specifically, we wonder whether the way a movement will end can invariably be discerned from the way it began. But the question of how theory began is obviously a complicated one. Because it isn’t just a matter of when it took shape explicitly. Instead, the real moment of origin for every theory lies in its premises. Yet in most instances those premises don’t originate from that theory itself. Thus, to pinpoint its real origin, we need to go back to its sources. As I thought about all this in the course of my work on the Romantic period, I couldn’t help but feel how relevant Romantic theory really was to the current theory scene. After all, most of the present forms of theory could easily be traced back to the Romantic era. And that in turn suggested that a study of Romantic theory might shed some light on the fate of contemporary theory.

At the same time, I had to acknowledge the distance between present-day theory and that of the Romantic period. Obviously, we don’t do theory in quite the same way anymore. But maybe it wasn’t just a question of style. Heidegger says somewhere that metaphysics has never been the same since the death of Hegel in 1831. For me, such a remark carried a sort of poignancy. I knew that Heidegger himself had frequently lectured on Hegel. In addition, his published oeuvre offered a careful, detailed commentary on the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology. And I knew he considered Identity and Difference, in which a commentary on Hegel’s Logic plays a crucial role, the most important work of his own later period. To him, then, the history of theory wasn’t simply a story of continuous advancement. Evidently there were losses as well. Moreover, some of these even seemed to outweigh any advances. What all this pointed to was that our advances were inextricably connected to our losses. Because we had gotten committed to particular forms of theory believed to mark advances of some kind, we had unavoidably sacrificed other advantages we weren’t fully aware of, inherent in earlier forms of theory. Thus the advances defined by forms of post-Romantic theory to which we adhered were precisely what had brought theory to its present position.

But even if all that were true, I wondered whether an effort to revisit Romantic theory might not allow us to recover some of those sources of possibility we had apparently lost. No doubt a few aspects of Romantic theory pertained largely to its particular period. This seemed especially true of some forms of theory in the sciences, several of which were then still in their infancy. In other ways, nevertheless, Romantic theory distinctly looked beyond its own era. As I studied the forms theory assumed in the period, I became increasingly aware of how many of these had come to think not only about the particular field they sought to understand but about theory itself. Here, then, was the crucial insight of Romantic theory, the ultimate source of all its possibility: the perception that in order to arrive at a meaningful analysis of theory, you couldn’t just think about it in relation to a particular field. Instead, you had to think about theory on a more general level, regardless of field, so as to be able to say what would hold true for any given form of theory. Of course, the Romantic period had applied this insight primarily to those forms of theory that dominated its own era. Nonetheless, an awareness of the larger scope of its insight was constantly present. Its relevance to contemporary theory becomes apparent if we look at the Romantic position on theory in terms of what it had to say about theory itself, rather than theory in a particular field.

Significantly, many forms of Romantic theory resisted anything that resembled an elaborate formal definition of their concepts. On that point, their posture was clearly minimalist. In the sciences, researchers like Davy and Bichat preferred to immerse concepts in pure materiality: Bichat’s vital properties reflect a strictly observational perspective, while Davy chose to think in terms of chemical elements rather than concepts based on the nature of substances. In other fields, meanwhile, Romantic theory showed itself equally resistant to any formal definition of concepts. Fichte, for example, left the basic concepts of his Wissenschaftslehre completely undefined. To a slightly lesser extent, so did Hegel in the Phenomenology. Or, at best, a concept is defined only to have its definition overturned by a subsequent one that contradicts the first. From a Romantic standpoint, excessive emphasis on the definition of concepts only made a system or theory top-heavy. For Romantic theory, definition implied fixation: once defined, a concept no longer offered the same kind of latitude as before. In that respect, you might say, Romantic theory inclined to distinctly different criteria from those of contemporary theory: above all, it looked for lightness, flexibility. Specifically, Romantic theorists felt concepts ought to be as lightly defined as possible, so as to allow for maximal flexibility in their use. What mattered most to Romantic theory was what you did with your concepts. For that reason, it was never impressed merely by the way concepts got defined. To its eye, all definition was just preliminary. Invariably, it looked to what lay beyond that.

What Romantic theory came to realize as it worked out its position on concepts was that theory is all about trade-offs. What you give to one, you take from somewhere else. And that meant you had to decide where you wanted the thought content of theory to be. Faced with a number of choices, Romantic theory refused to put all its stuff into concepts. It knew that when you did that, they became increasingly difficult to apply. In effect, the more you put into a concept, the more you had to worry about it. After all, concepts could be raided, by the equivalent of a corporate takeover. Consequently, they had to be rendered foolproof against appropriation by others. But that necessitated more and more specificity. Ultimately, the quest for specificity takes on a life of its own. Against rival approaches, it seems clear that the one most elaborately defined (and hence most resistant to appropriation) will win out. As a result, conceptual specificity itself becomes the goal. People start to worry about the limits of a definition, about how much you can pack into a concept. From now on, the most sophisticated form of theory is the one that hasn’t left anything out. The only problem with all this is that, precisely because of their own extreme specificity, concepts so defined become almost impossible to apply. Because of their specificity, they possess the same sort of uniqueness as any other individual existences. And that wasn’t at all what Romantic theory wanted. What it wanted, as Hegel said of Napoleon, was to reach out over the world and master it. For that, however, it would need a different kind of theory.

What made Romantic theory essentially different from other approaches to theory was the primacy it gave to development over concepts. On some level, it seems to have felt that the very fact that theory produces concepts is more important than any individual concepts it produces. Because the work of theory invariably goes on. We supersede our present concepts by the creation of new concepts. Inevitably, since that’s precisely what theory is all about. But if our concepts are necessarily transient, it seems only natural to suppose theory should put its commitment elsewhere. What remains inescapable is the development of concepts, the fact that they come to be. Hence the rationale for the Romantic belief that development itself, rather than what it produces, should define theory. As a result, the form theory takes in the Romantic period is simply that of pure development. Development pointed to the notion of a larger whole, a totality. Yes, concepts might enable the mind to fix some vital perception or insight. But any insight, no matter how good in itself, became more meaningful only in the context of a larger totality. At the same time, development also hinted at the possibility of a narrative. Unlike any concept or set of concepts, a narrative allowed us to make sense of an entire field, whose story we could then tell. But if concepts became meaningful by the role they played within a narrative, pure development clearly offered the most comprehensive framework.

By means of a framework of development, Romantic theory hoped to find a way to talk about the process by which we come to be. The ultimate task for any theory, of course, is to be able to talk about our human condition. But our condition isn’t a static one. That was what the Romantic era discovered. The advent of the life sciences especially had made this very apparent. Collectively, they showed that the most important fact about our condition is that we don’t simply exist: rather, we become what we are. So the existential or ontological perspective has to be assimilated into one of development. What we perceive as existential/ontological, in other words, is simply a photographic still from a film reel: the glimpse of a moment without its temporal quality. If even the existential/ontological is just an aspect of development, however, any theory that wanted to explore our condition fully would have to acknowledge how basic its temporal element really is. Hence the argument for a framework of development. Development can assimilate the existential/ontological without any problem about its relation to the process by which we come to be. And the reason it can do that is because the process of our development is the same as that of theory itself. To understand what was essential about our condition, then, all theory had to do was to think about how it had come to be.

Because its framework was one of development rather than reason, Romantic theory could look at rationality from a new perspective. The crucial requirement for any theory is this: that its thought movement have about it an element of necessity. Rationality tried to get there by means of logical inferences. From its standpoint, the move from particular premises to particular conclusions seemed logically irrefutable. Through a sequence of such moves, it hoped to construct a theory for a given field. Unlike rationality, Romantic theory didn’t care about inferences. More broadly, it wasn’t rational in terms of its thought movement because it knew it didn’t have to be. Essentially, Romantic theory didn’t worry about whether it was logical or not because it felt it could always count on a deeper, more basic kind of necessity. This deeper necessity was that by which persons or objects came to be. For Romantic theory, the necessity by which something came to be was of a different kind: since it existed, you simply couldn’t deny its genesis. But the same sort of necessity applied equally to thought: like people or objects, thought, too, came to be. Thus, if you could trace the movement by which thought had come to be, you would presumably have arrived at the ultimate goal of theory: the discovery of that to which we could ascribe the quality of absolute necessity.

For Romantic theory, the perception of development, or how something came to be, necessitated reflexivity. Every theory has to have some source or ground, some principle that has the capacity to generate theory. In Romantic theory, reflexivity plays that role. People and objects come to be. We perceive a necessity in the fact that they do so. But our perception of that necessity doesn’t grow out of our knowledge of either people or objects. It grows out of our perception of the simple fact that they come to be. The reason we recognize an element of necessity here is that we’ve seen it elsewhere: in the genesis of thought. Our perception of necessity in the genesis of thought is based, in turn, on reflexivity, or the capacity of thought for awareness of its own movement. Because we feel our own capacity for thought, where thought follows our will or desire to think, we find in the movement of thought a kind of necessity that comes from a perception of its source in our own capacity. But the way we arrive at that perception is by means of reflexivity. Thus reflexivity is the way we come to a perception of necessity. And if this description is in fact true, it points to how reflexivity could function for Romantic theory as the source of theory, which began as an effort to explain what lay behind that necessity. Yet if reflexivity could help Romantic theory to explain how we perceive necessity in the way thought comes to be, it could also shed light on a great deal more. As it turned its focus on the very movement of thought, it introduced the possibility of an analysis of theory. In that way, it offered Romantic theory its first glimpse of metatheory.

By its use of a spatial perspective in the analysis of concepts, Romantic theory opened up a whole new world. In effect, the use of a spatial perspective in the analysis of concepts showed that there was another dimension to theory, one that had absolutely no relation to the content of concepts. You might compare it to a formal compositional principle that looms over the structure of some musical work, completely unaffected by the expressive value of that work. Of course, it’s possible to listen to the work without any awareness of the principle by which its structure is determined. Likewise, one might study theory without any sense of how it possessed another dimension. And yet, on some level, that unseen dimension dictated the form assumed by theory. Thus the fact that a concept gets externalized because of a need to posit itself meant for Hegel that there had to be at some point a movement of return. To infer the necessity for a movement of return, however, didn’t require any knowledge of the particular concept involved. Instead, the logic was purely spatial: if the concept had in its effort to posit itself become external to what it originally was, it would have to return to itself. But that implied we could know all we wanted about any concept within a theory solely from its spatial aspect. Even now, to some extent, we still haven’t fully appreciated what this might mean for theory. Simply put, it seems to say that an aspect of metatheory can tell us all we want to know about the conceptual elements of any given theory.

Besides its use of spatial perspective, Romantic theory also introduced a new kind of abstraction into theory. Earlier forms of theory had of course been familiar with the sort of abstraction that involved external objects. But the kind of abstraction Romantic theory introduced was different. Rather than objects, it abstracted from concepts. As a result, concepts could be treated in a purely formal way. The consequence of all this was to reveal a great deal of structure no one had previously even suspected. Normally, we associate generality with a loss of structure: as a field comes under survey at a higher level of generality, it tends to lose structure. What Romantic theory showed, however, was that, contrary to expectation, an increase in generality actually led to a greater amount of structure for theory. And since the forms of theory I speak of had abstracted from the specificity of particular concepts, all this structure had to be inherent in theory itself. Here Galois theory comes especially to mind, with its multiple levels of generality (subfields that embrace other subfields of an extension K, subgroups that include subgroups of the automorphism group G(K,F)). Yet it would be just as easy to cite other, equally relevant instances. What it all meant was that any move to a higher level of generality would offer a glimpse of the inherent structure of theory, and so reveal how any given form of theory was ultimately determined.

In a sense, what every theory wants is to be the final word on theory. Ever since Kant, with his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, the ambition of each new attempt at theory had been to create the framework by which all its successors would be defined. But the dawn of the Romantic era had seen the ante raised to an even higher level. From now on, it no longer seemed enough just to supersede all previous forms of theory. To be the final or definitive word, theory now had to meet a new requirement: rather than just expose the inadequacy of earlier efforts, it had to show how all its predecessors had figured in a development that culminated in itself. To be the definitive form of theory, in other words, you couldn’t simply critique all earlier forms of theory. Instead, you had to explain everybody else, demonstrate that you had fully understood what they wanted to achieve and why they had fallen short of their goal. Only then could a theory qualify as the final word, by which the history of theory comes to an end. So Hegel had implied in his Phenomenology. But if the final word on theory had to explain all earlier forms of theory, the only form of theory able to do that would have to involve metatheory, or theory about theory. By means of metatheory, theory might hope to show why a form of theory whose subject is theory rather than any external field has to be the last word about theory. And its explanation would suggest that if theory, as the Romantic period believed, possesses a distinct autonomy, its ultimate goal should then be to arrive at some insight into the nature of theory itself.