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

Dalia Nassar’s The Romantic Absolute proposes a major shift in the way we view the movement known as Early German Romanticism, a shift contained in the book’s title: the conception of the “absolute” is at the center of the widely varying strands of metaphysical, epistemological, and literary work of the central figures in Jena. Nassar is seeking to overcome a division between those who emphasize epistemology (especially Manfred Frank) and those who emphasize ontology (especially Frederick Beiser). The claim, reinforced with compelling evidence throughout this finely argued book, is that the “absolute” is conceived as both, and that this combination of being and thinking instantiates itself in such a way that the cognizer participates in, and can even change, the nature she cognizes. The “absolute” is therefore a singular contribution of what Nassar classes as “Romantic”—it differs from the theories of Kant and Fichte, but also, pace Beiser, significantly from that of Hegel. In a sense, this Romanticism is Spinozan, but that is only one of the surprising and fascinating results of this study.

The three parts of the book address Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. The latter is often counted as an “Idealist,” but Nassar makes a strong case for his inclusion in the project of Romantic philosophy. All three fashion the absolute as beyond the distinction between thought and being, and yet immanent to the world. And all three share an interest in the figure of “intellectual intuition,” as well as a strong relationship to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Intellectual intuition [intellektuelle Anschauung] was formulated by Kant as an impossible kind of infinite knowing that displays a necessary relation between the sensible contents of perception and the intellectual forms of cognition. As Nassar details, Fichte used this figure to describe the basis of self-identification. But the Romantics took it in a different direction, starting with Hölderlin (whose work is not explored here) and Novalis. Nassar explores their varied takes on this figure, which threatens to reawaken metaphysics after Kant’s proscriptions, in what is probably the most detailed and illuminating investigation of this topic to date. The book consistently sets this Idealist figure into dialogue with Goethe’s natural-scientific methods, as well as with recent work (especially that of Eckart Förster) on this topic. What emerges is a deep historical account of the emergence of Romantic metaphysics, juxtaposing Goethe and Idealism and finding between them a Romantic philosophical voice all its own. The “absolute” is both intellectual intuition and metamorphosis, a combination of being and knowing in expressive development.

The chapters on Novalis reconstruct the development of his philosophical thought beyond the early Fichte Studies, which have received much attention. Nassar points to the centrality of Novalis’s 1798 turn to Hemsterhuis and Kant, during which he conceives of the crux of his later thought, an absolute that transcends antinomies and is immanent to the world. Novalis’s concern for building a “moral organ” and his attempt to write a Romantic encyclopedia find their complement in the section on Friedrich Schlegel, a truly interdisciplinary study in which we find Nassar deftly moving between Schlegel’s understudied and extraordinarily hermetic philosophical writings (her account of the Lectures on Transcendental Idealism of 1800 is a major contribution to English-language scholarship on Schlegel) and his genre-projects (not only an encyclopedia, but also the “new Bible”). The suggestion that the famous “Wechselerweis” is not only an epistemological tool but also an ontological structure (122) will surely provoke debate. The section ends in one of the highlights of the book, a reading of Schlegel’s Lucinde that explores the complexity of his notion of the novel as a “plant” that remains true to the conception of the absolute. This reading will surely be of great interest to literary scholars.

In the masterful Schelling chapters, Nassar succeeds in showing that Schelling’s systems...