Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (review)

The nine chapters of this thoughtful portrait of the Romantic period survey key transformations in European thought in the wake of the French Revolution. According to Leon Chai, the writing as well as the scientific research of the period are best understood through their explicitly articulated relationship with the process of thinking, or with a mode of reflexivity that can be associated with “theory.” However, because his paradigm is broad, Chai identifies several tendencies unique to the “revolutionary era,” writing, for example, that “the dominant topoi” of high Romantic theory include “the spatial treatment of concepts, the primacy of development over concepts, and, finally, the creation of metatheory” (xiv). These are taken as symptoms of the Romantic turn and as the defining foundations of contemporary literary and social thought. Though this is a somewhat wide-ranging claim concerning the origins of “theory,” it delineates an apt axis around which Chai’s chapters then cohere.

Making reference to Coleridge, Chai summarizes that theory “led to metatheory” (166), and this distinction—between theory and metatheory— is also taken as a description of the difference between Kant and Hegel. Some Kantians may disagree: Kant also directed the gaze toward the observing subject and can certainly be said to have spatialized concepts. In the chapter where Chai deals most closely with German ideas, he turns to the classicist F. A. Wolf, providing a detailed, well-researched study of Wolf ’s under-analyzed Prolegomena to Homer. Chai asserts that Wolf ’s major contribution was to question whether there is an “original” Homeric text insofar as Homer’s work cannot be understood as “writing” in the conventional sense, but is instead a “cumulative record of what various periods tried to make of it” (27). He thus treats Wolf ’s work as a starting point from which numerous subsequent hermeneutic endeavors followed: Goethe’s own methods are depicted as in some measure born from Wolf ’s approach, and Friedrich Schlegel is likewise seen to have drawn inspiration from Wolf. Chai’s excellent, well-informed discussion of the aftereffects of Wolf ’s ideas, especially his discussion of “the interesting” [das Interessante] in Schlegel, might, however, have benefited from expanding on relevant continuities with Kant.

Chai subsequently pairs Napoleon and Hegel as paradigmatic Romantic theorists. For Napoleon—in contrast with the calculating military theorist Carl von Clausewitz—“theory meant creation: a fusion of all the elements of eighteenth-century strategy to form an original synthesis.” Chai summarizes: “In this way, we arrive at one of the basic insights of Romantic theory: that the essence of theory, in the end, isn’t really analysis at all but rather intellectual creativity” (218–19). For him, Napoleon is significant because of his investment in “tactics”: the facts on the ground are always already secondary to the plan itself. Chai links Napoleon with Hegel by way of Hegel’s well documented praise for the former, and he there begins his nuanced reading of Hegel, one in which the thinker appears as a dragon consuming his own tail. Chai’s reading points to ways in which one might indeed see in Hegelian self-reflectivity a basis for numerous later reflections on the process of thinking, such as those that can be found in Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty.

The study then examines the French physiologist Marie François Xavier Bichat, and to the author’s credit he pursues a truly interdisciplinary perspective. Bichat’s contribution consisted of studying the performance of bodily tissues in connection with one another rather than focusing on the independence of organs. The strength of Chai’s approach is his extraordinary willingness to treat science as a discourse, one that takes place more in language than in the laboratory. He then turns his attention to the mathematician Évariste Galois, and here Chai must have been aware that his own writing goes where some will not wish to follow. Of Galois’s equations, for example, Chai reports: “it turns out...