“Gott ist bald 1 · ∞ – bald 1/∞ – bald 0”: The Mathematical Infinite and the Absolute in Novalis

Romanticism, if it can be said to definitively stand for anything, insists on being intensely involved with, yet transcending, what is current. In its emphasis on the intensification of whatever is most new, it embraces the future, but in its attempts to identify and follow timeless precedents, it leans backwards towards the past. It is particularly suited for periods of rapid change and disorientation, especially when this occurs underneath the surface, or in several directions at once, politically, socially, and scientifically. And it is expert at coming up with analogies that bring together the seemingly disparate discourses that characterize modern society. With its flexibility in constructing alternatives based on the materials at hand, its immersion in the present and openness to other dimensions, it is no accident that it is constantly in a state of returning. A constant trope in writing about Romanticism is the difficulty of defining it, in part because of its basic nature: it never states one point of view without another. Romanticism is about finding ever wider contexts, turning statements into their opposites. It is perhaps consistent only in its inconsistency. Hence, part of Romanticism is the struggle for its own soul, as it must open its own space, posit itself, as it were, like a Fichtean ich, and a recycled Romanticism is one that is necessarily selective (though, if faithful to the spirit of Romanticism, spreading out in its own directions). One Romanticism that is returning now, in these times of limitless information and apocalyptic visions, and in an unlikely place, is Early German Romanticism, with its intense dialogue both inside and outside philosophy and the sciences.

I am referring to what has been called the “revival” of Early Romanticism (defined, more or less, as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel) within or in dialogue with English-language analytic philosophy. After the Second World War, the Early Romantics began to be taken seriously as philosophers in Germany, and the work especially of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank attempted to link up the legacy of the Romantics with contemporary analytic philosophy in an attempt to reunite long-separate philosophical traditions. Books such as Frederick Beiser’s The Romantic Imperative (2003) and collections such as Nikolas Kompridis’s Philosophical Romanticism (2006) are the most recent reincarnations of the perennial argument for a new contemporary relevance of Romantic thought (an outline of the earlier contributions, authored by one of the participants in the “revival,” can be found in Millàn-Zaibert). Beiser’s book, for example, is aimed against the postmodern, theory-driven interpretation of Romanticism and its tendency to see Romanticism primarily as a literary movement anticipating recent thought; rather, he argues, Romanticism has much to contribute in its own terms to current mainstream debates in fields as disparate as philosophy of mind and political philosophy, if not in its settled positions, then in questions and aims that deserve serious hearing (2). Kompridis defines Romanticism as a “critical response to the Enlightenment interpretation of modernity” (3), especially valuable at a cultural moment when the “human” itself is at stake, and whose purposes include “enlarg[ing] the cultural conditions of intelligibility and possibility, and thereby open[ing] the horizon of the future” and “reclaim[ing] the everyday” (4–5). Especially important for these and other authors is to counter interpretations of Romanticism as a movement that fosters the irrational, both in thought and in social consequences, and to make it into a movement that deserves careful consideration and analysis. Early German Romanticism is seen to share enough significant commitments with certain strands of recent philosophy (its anti-foundationalism, for example) to be relevant, but to be free enough of certain other commitments to open up new ways of thinking that go beyond the limitations of our ordinary assumptions and could help make philosophy relevant again beyond the academy.

One prominent context for Romanticism that makes it especially interesting today for philosophers in the analytic tradition is its investigation of, but careful distance from, natural science. Thus, Kompridis sees philosophical Romanticism as more attuned to the discourse of...