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  • Night in Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel
  • Li Sui Gwee (bio)
Li Sui Gwee
National University of Singapore
Li Sui Gwee

Li Sui Gwee specializes in the long eighteenth century and has previously taught at the National University of Singapore. He is also a published poet and graphic artist and was a recent writer-in-residence at Toji Cultural Center, South Korea. He has written on the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the history of science, Protestant theology, and critical theory. He has also edited a number of books on modern Singaporean and Malaysian literature.

Footnotes

1. Käte Hamburger, Novalis und die Mathematik. Eine Studie zur Erkenntnistheorie der Romantik (Halle and Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1929). Martin Dyck, Novalis and Mathematics: A Study of Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Fragments on Mathematics, and its Relation to Magic, Music, Religion, Philosophy, Language, and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

2. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished, 3 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), 1:59–73. The publication of “State of German Literature” in the Edinburgh Review in 1827 established Carlyle’s reputation as a skillful exponent of German culture. His brief thoughts on Novalis here were expanded later into a full-length article in the Foreign Review, where he would maintain that the poet in his craft was still “no less Idealistic than as a Philosopher” (Essays, 1:444).

3. Novalis, Novalis Schriften, 6 vols., ed. Paul Kluckhohn, et al. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960–1999), 1:158.

4. Glyn Tegai Hughes, Romantic German Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 71.

5. The first German translation of Night Thoughts was undertaken in prose by Johann Arnold Ebert and published as D. Edouard Youngs Klagen, oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit [Edward Young’s Complaints, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality] in 1751. It stands with Christian Bernhard Kayser’s hexametric version, completed in 1763, as arguably the poem’s most significant early reworking.

6. David Gascoyne, “Novalis and the Night,” in Hymns to the Night, trans. Jeremy Reed (Hampshire: Enitharmon. 1989), 10.

7. Friedrich Hiebei, Novalis: German Poet—European Thinker—Christian Mystic, 2nd ed. (New York: AMS, 1969), 68.

8. Novalis, Schriften, 4:533.

9. Novalis, Schriften, 4:242.

10. Kathleen Komar, “Fichte and the Structure of Novalis’ ‘Hymnen an die Nacht,’ ” The Germanic Review 54 (1979): 139.

11. Géza von Molnár, Novalis’ “Fichte Studies”: The Foundations of his Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970).

12. Novalis, Schriften, 4:42.

13. Novalis, Schriften, 4:230.

14. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 28.

15. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 42.

16. Novalis, Schriften, 1:131. Of the two versions available to modern scholars, I take my text from the form officially published in Athenaeum; the other form is an initial handwritten manuscript arranged wholly in verse. See Novalis, Schriften, 1:130–58. For the sake of the instances where precision does matter, I have attempted my own translation here and elsewhere in the article.

17. Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 169.

18. Novalis, Schriften, 1:131.

19. Novalis, Schriften, 1:145.

20. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and trans. David Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 8.

21. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 60.

22. Novalis, Schriften, 4:261.

23. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 111.

24. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 9.

25. Quoted in Karl Jaspers, Schelling: Größe und Verhängnis (Munich: Piper, 1955), 302.

26. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clarke Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 80.

27. Jason M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 12–23.

28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trails. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and Francis H. Simson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892–1896), 3:510. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and Francis H. Simson...

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