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Nietzsche and Early RomanticismAuthor(s): Judith NormanSource:
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism
Judith Norman
Nietzsche was in many ways a quintessentially romantic figure, a
lonely genius with a tragic love-life, wandering endlessly (through
Italy, no less) be- fore going dramatically mad, taken by his gods
into the protection of madness (to quote Heidegger's epithet on
H61derlin, one of Nietzsche's childhood fa- vorites).' But this is
to be a romantic in an uncapitalized manner, and has noth- ing to
do with the literary movement of Romanticism, a movement from
which, as is well-known, Nietzsche distanced himself loudly and
vigorously. Nietzsche famously follows Goethe in his verdict that
Romanticism is a form of sickness and classicism a form of
strength, and commentators, for the most part, have accepted this
self-description.2 That is, they do not blithely identify Nietzsche
with that nineteenth-century artistic movement, whose proponents
include Victor Hugo, Eugene Delacroix, and Richard Wagner.3
But Romanticism is a plural phenomenon. When Goethe made his
famously dismissive remark, he was clearly not talking about Hugo
and Wagner; he meant Romanticism in an earlier incarnation.
Commentators have been less reticent about finding all sorts of
affinities between Nietzsche and some of these earlier movements.
In particular Nietzsche is frequently and positively compared to
Jena Romanticism (also known as early Romanticism), a movement
whose principal figures included August and Friedrich Schlegel,
Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, and the writings
they published in the 1790s, principally in the journal, Athenaeum.
It is this romantic movement that will be the focus of my paper.
Jena romantics, while Grecophile, had nothing to do with
Rousseauean primitivism (they were well aware that their image of
the
'1 Martin Heidegger, Schelling 's Treatise on the Essence of
Human Freedom, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio, 1985), 2.
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, tr.
John Oxenford (San Francisco, 1984), 248 (2 April 1829); Friedrich
Nietzsche, Die Fr6hliche Wissenschaft in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1968),
part 5, # 370; The Gay Science (GS), tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York,
1974).
3 See Robert Gooding-Williams, "Zarathustra's Three
Metamorphoses" in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra
ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany, 1990), and Heinrich von Staden,
"Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art," Daedalus (Winter, 1976); also
Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (New York, 1992),
140-47.
501 Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
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502 Judith Norman
Greeks reflected contemporary fantasies more than historical
reality), they had no cult of the genius, and they did not valorize
emotion above reason.4 What was central to their movement was
profound skepticism about the viability of traditional attitudes
towards truth, an intellectually rigorous theory of art that gave
particular weight to playfulness, fragmented writing, the notion of
liter- ary irony, a sense that the philosopher ought to be or
become more of an artist (though not a genius)-and, correlatively,
that philosophy is or ought to be- come more artistic. All of which
sounds decidedly Nietzschean.
Romanticizing Nietzsche
While Nietzsche himself never makes the connection, he never
explicitly distances himself from the authors of Jena romanticism
in the way he does from later romantic figures." Indeed, he barely
mentions the Jena romantics by name and probably never read
Friedrich Schlegel, the figure most closely asso- ciated with this
romantic movement.6 As such, there is certainly space for com-
mentators to argue for a close if tacit intellectual connection
between Nietzsche and Jena romanticism; indeed, one commentator
speaks of a fundamental af- finity,7 another calls Nietzsche the
last romanticist, and yet another claims that "[Nietzsche's] story
makes sense only when read in the larger context of his Romantic
predecessors' history."8
It is undeniable that Nietzsche came out of a philological
tradition inaugu- rated by the Schlegels (and developed by
Schelling) which juxtaposed the Dionysian and the Apollinian in
Greek tragedy. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, "an entire tradition
of academic philosophy (which, on his own initiative, Nietzsche had
joined) revolved around precisely this opposition."' At least
in
4Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, ed. E. Behler,
Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (Darmstadt, 1958-), II, ? 7.
The English translations of Schlegel's "Critical Fragments" CF,
"Athenaeum Fragments" AF and "Ideas" I, in Friedrich Schlegel,
Lucinde and the Fragments, tr. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis,
1971).
5 See Young, Nietzsche 's Philosophy' ofArt, 140. 6 Nietzsche
carefully considers August Schlegel's ideas on the function of the
tragic chorus
in The Birth of Tragedy-but in his capacity as a classical
philologist, not specifically as a member of Jena Romanticism.
Novalis is quoted in Human, All Too Human, 142 (but not after that)
and Friedrich Schlegel is never mentioned. Ernst Behler suggests
that Nietzsche never read Friedrich Schlegel in "Nietzsche's
Auffassung der Ironie" in Nietzsche Studien, 4 (1975), 10 as does
Adrian del Caro in Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the
Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge, 1989), 56.
7Heinrich von Staden, "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art,"
Daedalus (1976), 86; cf., M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1973),
316-18.
8 Del Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 5-6, and Azade Seyhan,
Representation and its Discontents (Berkeley, 1992), 19.
9Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Apocryphal Nietzsche," tr. Timothy
D. Bent, from The Sub- ject of Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1993), 253;
M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 503
his earlier works Nietzsche's view of the Greeks was influenced
by (if not predicated on) the scholarly research and interpretative
theories of figures as- sociated with Jena romanticism. How
profound and enduring this influence might have been is an
interesting question, but not one I will explore at present. I will
not discuss the influence of the Jena romantics in their scholarly
capacity as classical philologists, but rather focus on any impact
they may have had as philosophically minded literary critics during
the 1790s. Similarly, I will not look at The Birth of Tragedy but
rather focus on claims made concerning the romantic tendencies of
Nietzsche's later work. A body of scholarship has been building
which claims that the critical theories of Jena romanticism impor-
tantly anticipated many of the great ideas from Nietzsche's mature
philosophy, and I would like to see if this is true.'1
The basic point of contact that commentators indicate between
Nietzsche and Jena romanticism is surprisingly easy to summarize.
Both are supposedly motivated by a post-Kantian skepticism as to
the validity of traditional philoso- phy and traditional
philosophical notions of truth; that is, they believe that the
search for truth is no longer a viable project and look to literary
methods that indicate, without baldly claiming, the illusory nature
of reality. A version of this claim centers on problems posed by
language; Nietzsche and the romantics supposedly agree that we
cannot use language to indicate anything beyond language, and so
the project of representing some sort of extra-linguistic real- ity
is doomed to failure. Irony and fragmented writing in particular
are apt artistic vehicles for suggesting that truth is an illusion
and our attempt to grasp something like objective reality doomed to
failure. To be sure, this new sort of art takes up the mantle of
philosophy and thus will be different from an older, naively
unselfconscious art. It will encompass the project of philosophy
and so represents a sort of synthesis between traditional art and
traditional philoso- phy. Thus, both Nietzsche and the romantics
are pioneers of new forms of artistry or creativity specifically
appropriate for a post-philosophical age.
One critic describes this project as follows:
Like Schlegel, for whom "the absolute" [das H6chste] can only be
expressed allegorically because it is inutterable...., Nietzsche
looks beyond the categories of time, space, and causality into the
impen- etrable zone of essences only intuitable as an aesthetic
phenomenon....
(New York, 1981), 211; Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary
Theory (Cambridge, 1993), 130; and Heinrich von Staden, op. cit.,
95, n. 33; and c.f. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philoso- pher,
Psychologist, Antichrist (New York, 1974), 380, n. 27.
"0 I will be referring to the scholarship of Ernst Behler, Azade
Seyhan, Phillipe Lacoue- Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrian del Caro,
Maurice Blanchot, Richard Rorty, and Andrew Bowie.
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504 Judith Norman
Nietzsche views art as a self-conscious illusion which excites
an optic desire to look beyond appearance to the abyss where
comprehension faces total resistance and eventually comes to terms
with the tragic vision of existence. Since art is always alerted to
the non-conclusive nature of reality, it is redeemed by its
self-reflexive and ironic sensi- bility, whereas reason and logic
are trapped in what Nietzsche calls "metaphysical delusion"
[metaphysischer Wahnsinn]. The persistent irony and mobility with
which Nietzsche invests art aligns his thought unmistakably with
that of the early Romantics."
Philosophy becomes art, or at least artistic. Hence one
commentator writes: "[W]ithout doubt, after Schelling we find the
most pregnant expression of this [Romantic] aestheticization of
worldview in the philosophy of Nietzsche."l2 Similarly, in their
seminal work on the literary theories of Jena romanticism,
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write, "One sees all that Nietzsche could
have taken from romanticism..., but it is surely the theme of the
philosopher-artist that is most fundamentally romantic in his
work."" Like the romantics, Nietzsche envisions a form of
philosophy which becomes conscious artistry, creative rather than
descriptive, and oriented to aesthetic rather than epistemological
criteria. Nietzsche frequently describes himself as an artist, and
wrote in poetic or fictional form. Similarly, the romantics
conceived of and tried to raise philosophy to the level of art;
both their theoretical and properly artistic products reflect this
ambition. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Nietzsche and the romantics
have in common the fact that they would point to Plato, the great
literary philosopher -in spite of himself-as a great precursor in
this endeavor.14 Writing about Friedrich Schlegel, Adrian del Caro
says, "Poesie, unlike philosophy ... would liberate modem man from
his labyrinth of cognitive experimentation by using creativity as
its primary guiding force. Here we find ourselves directly in the
neighborhood of Nietzsche's non-traditional philosophizing."'5
Blanchot, too, credits Nietzsche and the romantics both with
raising literary form as a philosophical problem, writing:
"[L]iterature, beginning to become manifest to itself through the
romantic declaration, will from now on bear in itself this question
of discontinuity or difference as a question of form-a
" Seyhan, Representation, 19, 138. 12 Jos de Mul, Romantic
Desire in (Post)Modern Art & Philosophy (Albany, N.Y., 1999),
8,
75. 13 Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary
Absolute, tr. Philip Barnard
and Cheryl Lester (Albany, N.Y., 1988), 148, n. 25. 14
Lacoue-Labarthe, "Apocryphal Nietzsche." " Adrian Del Caro,
Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 5, and cf. Seyhan, Representation,
140,
"The understanding that joins Nietzsche with his Romantic
forebears is the realization that there is no minotaur of
dictatorial truth at the center of the labyrinth."
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 505
question and a task German romanticism, and in particular that
of the Athenaeum, not only sensed but already clearly
proposed-before consigning them to Nietzsche and, beyond Nietzsche,
to the future."'16 Even Rorty points to Nietzsche's implicit
romanticism in describing how, given the breakdown of traditional
epistemologies, truth needs to be creatively willed, in a poetic
manner-a manner, Rorty argues, which has everything to do with
irony.'7
There is some debate among those sympathetic to the Nietzsche /
Jena connection as to whether Nietzsche develops or falls short of
the insights of romanticism. Andrew Bowie, while agreeing that "it
was the work of Nietzsche ... which most obviously carried on some
of the romantic themes," argues that the romantics did a betterjob
than Nietzsche would later do. Nietzsche is a pale reflection of
romantic insights, and his propensity to question the viability of
truth reduces to certain paradoxes (fundamentally, the Cretan
Liar's paradox) that the romantics more deftly avoided.'" On the
other hand, the majority of commentators argue for a more positive
assessment ofNietzsche's romanticism, for instance: "The seeds of
the Romantic discontent about philosophical certainty come to full
fruition in Nietzsche who embodies the textual interlinkage between
early German Romanticism and late modernity."'9 This last statement
expresses another theme often found in authors making positive
comparisons between Nietzsche and the romantics: the idea that the
legacy continues into "late modernity"-in other words, primarily,
Derrida (this is evident in the quote from Blanchot above as well).
Bowie agrees that "Nietzsche's questioning has had a decisive
influence on subsequent discussions of the end of metaphysics in
contemporary literary theory," but he feels that the credit really
belongs to Nietzsche's superior romantic precursors.20 Ernst Behler
has argued at length for the three-way connection, writing that "A
self-critical awareness of our linguistic embeddedness has indeed
been a characteristic mark of modernity since the romantic age and
reached a new intensity with Nietzsche. The three authors chosen as
representatives of this discourse, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and
Derrida, thematize the self-referential implications of their irony
in their own text...."21
Efforts earlier in the century to argue for the Nietzsche / Jena
romanticism connection were vigorously opposed by Walter Kaufmann.
Despite certain superficial similarities, Kaufmann writes,
Nietzsche and the Jena romantics
16 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson
(Minneapolis, 1993), 359.
17 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge,
1989), 41. 8 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The
Philosophy of German Liter-
ary Theory (New York, 1997), 136. 19 Seyhan, Representation,
17-18. 20Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, 73. 21 Ernst
Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle, 1990), 112.
See also del
Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 199: Heidegger "stands in
relation to Nietzsche as Nietzsche stood in relation to the
romanticists."
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506 Judith Norman
"are basically quite different, and the context usually reveals
the superficiality of such parallels."22 As Kaufmann indicates, the
romantic progressive notion of history is not particularly
Nietzschean, and the characteristic romantic notion of longing is
at odds with the Nietzschean affirmation of the present.23 Kaufmann
further notes that Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel became devout
Christians, as well as the fact that Nietzsche's great hero,
Goethe, distanced himself from romanticism, and, in the 1830s,
wrote some harsh indictments of the Schlegels that Nietzsche
apparently quoted. Kaufmann thinks that the correlative romantic
rejection of Goethe confirms the romantic antipathy to the
classicism Nietzsche championed.
I think that Kaufmann is basically right in his contention that
there are no important intellectual affinities between the
philosophical and literary theories of Nietzsche and those of the
Jena romantics (although there might be with regard to their
theories on classical Greece), but that he is right for the wrong
reasons. For one thing, some of his claims seem frankly ad hominem:
the romantics were Christians and Goethe did not like them. In
fact, neither of these claims are quite true: although Schelling
and the Schlegels became rather conventional Christians, this only
happened decades after the heyday of the movement, after their
ideas had altered considerably. In general, much of Kaufmann's
evidence for un-Nietzschean remarks made by Jena romantics are
culled from sources dated well past 1800, when the movement came to
an end and many of the principal figures associated with
romanticism began changing their views considerably. In the 1790s
they were enormously irreverent: Goethe had to be called in (by
August Schlegel) to persuade Friedrich Schlegel not to publish a
sharply anti-religious, satirical poem by Schelling in the
Athenaeum. They were indeed on friendly terms with Goethe, who had
an amused and decidedly avuncular attitude towards this group of
what he regarded as brilliant young men; he felt "grateful to know
he [was] honored by them" in the words of Blanchot.24 Goethe
premiered Friedrich Schlegel's tragedy, Alarcos (and stopped the
audience from jeering). The romantics (mainly the Schlegels) were
likewise enthusiastic about Goethe and Wilhelm Meister above all
else; they wrote repeatedly that it was the pinnacle and emblematic
achievement of the age. Kaufmann is disingenuous in claiming that
they eventually decided that they wanted to supplant Goethe. The
Schlegels, at least, simply thought that there will be a new
historical age, with new emblematic achievements.
Moreover, the sickness that Goethe claimed to find in (some
strains of) romanticism is described more specifically by Nietzsche
as a form of impoverishment, a lack of will, strength or force as
opposed to a Dionysian
22 Kaufmann, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 381, n. 29.
23 Kaufmann, ibid., 321-22; and J. Hillis Miller's review of
Abrams's Natural Supernatu-
ralism, "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics (1972), 6-13. 24
Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 352.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 507
overfulness. But the arch-romantic Novalis describes some of
Friedrich Schle- gel's writings as a dithyrambic intoxication,
expressing "an over-saturated form of life."25 Although Kaufmann is
certain that attention to context will de- romanticize some of
Nietzsche's contentions (and "de-Nietzsche-cize" ro- manticism into
the bargain), he fails to provide enough of the necessary
groundwork to do so. In light of the more sophisticated, recent
literary theoretical attempts of the authors I have been discussing
(Behler, Blanchot, Lacoue- Labarthe, Seyhan, etc.) to find
affinities between Nietzsche and Jena roman- ticism, I believe such
groundwork is needed. In the remainder of this paper, I will
attempt to provide it.
Jena Romanticism
A critique of conventional philosophical treatment of the notion
of truth is common to Nietzsche and the romantics, and as
commentators indicate, this is a striking similarity. It is tied to
the theme of aestheticization, since doubts as to the continued
viability of the notion of truth lead to the idea that philosophy
ought to be replaced by art, or become itself artistic. Moreover,
both Nietzsche and the romantics employ the familiar story of the
disciples at Sais as an allegory for seeking truth: a story
portraying the search for a truth behind appearances as lifting the
veils of a goddess. Friedrich Schlegel writes "mysteries are
female; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and
discovered."26 In one of his Logological Fragments, Novalis writes,
"One person succeeded - he lifted the veil of the goddess at
Sais-But what did he see? he saw-wonder of wonders-himself."27 This
is not simply an injunction to "know thyself." Examining several
(logological) fragments from the same time suggests a more
metaphysically precise reading involving an epistemology of
reflexivity. Novalis writes "self equals nonself-the highest
principle of all learning and art" followed by the even more bald
statement. "I am You."28 This is no de- familiarizing Rimbaudian
"je est un autre" but rather its reassuring, proto- Hegelian
opposite, the other is me. This frankly endogamous relation with
the world is derived from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, which
Novalis had studied closely and written about it in detail.
According to Fichte, the I as absolute, transcendental first
principle (a successor notion to Kant's transcendental unity
25Novalis, Novalis Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim
Mahl and Gerhad Schulz (Stuttgart, 1965-68), II, III. English
translations ofNovalis's "Miscellaneous Observations" MO,
"Logological Fragments I" (LF, I), "Logological Fragments II" (LF,
II) and "Last Fragments" (LF) in Novalis: Philosophical Writings,
tr. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, N.Y., 1997); MO,
105.
26 Schlegel, I, 128 and 137. 27 Novalis, LF II, 29 28 Novalis,
LF I, 59, and Philosophical Writings, 173, n. 14.
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508 Judith Norman
of apperception) posits a not-I (world). This act is responsible
for the production of the empirical ego and the empirical world.
The I is no longer absolute, being limited by the not-I, so it then
begins the infinite task of assimilating this not-I, trying to know
itself by recognizing itself in the not-I. The structure, in short,
is that of thesis (I), antithesis (not-I), and projected synthesis
(I = not-I).
Despite the apparent success of Novalis's novice at Sais, the
romantics generally stressed the infinite and ultimately impossible
(for reasons specific to Fichte's philosophy) task of synthesis or
self-knowledge. It is the goal of an infinite striving or becoming.
For this reason, the vocabulary of becoming and growth occurs
frequently in romantic writings. In perhaps the most famous
romantic self-declaration, Friedrich Schlegel writes: "Romantic
poetry is progressive, universal poetry.... The romantic kind of
poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its
real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be
perfected...."29 Novalis expresses the notion of dynamic growth
through his frequent use of the imagery of seeds, germination, and
vegetable growth. Even his assumed name "novalis" is derived from
the Latin for one who opens up new land; and he calls some of his
fragments "pollen" (Bliiten- staub). This vegetable vocabulary
allows Novalis to suggest that even nature is implicated in this
progressive, poetical longing for the absolute.
The themes of Fichtean reflexivity and pollination are brought
(albeit somewhat awkwardly) into contact in another one of
Novalis's fragments: "We shall understand the world when we
understand ourselves, because we and it are integral halves. We are
God's children, divine seeds. One day we shall be what our Father
is."30 Here, Novalis makes it clear that recognition is the key to
knowledge, and it will be gradually (and here, as least, he
indicates eventually) attained through progressive growth. What is
perhaps most striking about this fragment, however, is the ease
with which he refers it to theological vocabulary. Schlegel does
the same in a fragment where he writes, "Every good human being is
always progressively becoming God. To become God, to be human, to
cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing.""'
Fichte's early philosophy (certainly before 1800) was not directly
or conventionally trans- latable into Christian theology, indeed,
he was somewhat scandalously expelled from his position at the
University of Jena on the accusation of atheism, and it must be
remembered that Novalis also wrote that "Spinozism is a
supersaturation with the divine," which would indicate a tendency
on his part to over- theologize.32 But Novalis is correct to point
to the genuinely theological affinities implicit in Fichte's I, a
self-causing, world-creating, ideal transcendental subject
29 Schlegel, AF, 116. 30 Schlegel, LF I, 71. 31 Schlegel, AF,
262. 32 Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, 73.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 509
in which we live and breathe, whose project of self-knowledge is
carried out through our own progressive endeavor.
Perhaps most tellingly theological is our relation to this I.
Fichte struggled for many years with the epistemological issues of
how to characterize our cognitive relation to the I. In 1795 he
admitted that the I
has no name, never occurs in consciousness, and cannot be
grasped by means of concepts.... One enters my philosophy by means
of what is absolutely incomprehensible.... Everything that is
comprehensible presupposes a higher sphere in which it is
comprehended and is therefore not the highest thing, precisely
because it is comprehensible.33
In 1800, he referred the problem away from knowledge to the
notion of "faith." Novalis was dead by 1800; but he had anticipated
Fichte's move. Novalis, it should be said was attracted primarily
by the mystical aspects of religion, and in particular the notion
of the via negativa. In his Fichte-Studien he makes clear that this
is how he believes Fichte's I should be approached, through a sort
of negative theology.34 This can be understood as a meditation on
the inability of the finite mind and its language to express the
absolute and perhaps, an attempt to craft new resources to do so.
Novalis and, in fact, the Jena romantics generally devoted
themselves to the project of doing just this, using the resources
of art.
We can note in passing that the notion of an artistic expression
of the absolute was not exclusive to romanticism during this time:
the German idealists, too, toyed with this idea, although Schelling
was the only one to stick to it. The fragmentary "Earliest
System-Program of German Idealism" of 1796, authored, ambiguously,
by Hegel, Schelling or Hdlderlin-or perhaps all three- proclaims:
"Last of all, the Idea that unites all the rest [is] the Idea of
beauty, taking the word in its higher Platonic sense. I am now
convinced that the highest act of Reason ... is an aesthetic act
... [and so] the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic
power as the poet.... The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic
philosophy."35
33 J. G. Fichtes Briefivechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
Hans Schulz (Leipzig, 1930), no. 246; translation in Early
Philosophical Writings, tr. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca,
1988), 399.
34 See Gaza von Molnir, Novalis: "Fichte Studies ": The
Foundations ofhis Aesthetics (The Hague, 1970), 26.
35 "Das ilteste Systemprogramm" in Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 9, ed.
Riidiger Bubner (Bonn, 1973), 263-65.
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510 Judith Norman
Ironic Philosophies
Friedrich Schlegel writes, "The whole history of modem poetry is
a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all
art should become science and all science art; poetry and
philosophy should be made one."36 Here we see a clear statement of
the romantic will to aestheticize philosophy. It is passages like
this that inspire commentators to see the romantics as precursors
to Nietzsche's attempts to infuse an element of artistic creativity
into the enterprise of philosophy. But what is Schlegel really
talking about? Which philosophers, and how are they to be
poeticized?
The main examples he has in mind are Plato and Fichte (although
there are allusions to the musicality of Kant).37 Plato already
represents a poetical philosophy, mainly because of his irony and
dialogical form, but the project of poeticizing Fichte had yet to
be accomplished, and the romantics enjoyed speculating about what
it might entail. "Wonderful works of art could come into being in
this way" writes Novalis, "as soon as we have learnt to Fichtecize
artistically.""38 What this means can be gleaned from both the
theoretical pronouncements of the romantics and their attempts to
combine philosophy and poetry in their own works. The
aestheticization pretty much exclusively concerns aesthetic form-so
it is not a matter of writing beautiful literature with
philosophical morals (like Rousseau, for instance, although with
Fichtean content)-but rather of formally modulating a philosophical
presentation in an aesthetically valid manner. The formal
structures that the romantics themselves thought the most
significant, which are at the same time the ones that commentators
have thought presaged Nietzsche the most strikingly, are irony and
the fragment. Both of these are prominent features of Plato's
dialogues- provided, of course, that we accept Friedrich Schlegel's
definition of a dialogue as a "chain or garland of
fragments."39
The meaning of the notion of irony in romantic thought is a much
debated issue, but for the purposes of setting up a comparison with
Nietzsche I will discuss what is generally agreed upon. Schlegel
defines irony as "logical beauty" and "transcendental
buffoonery."40 This last definition in particular is quite
suggestive; irony can be seen as a sort of playful, artistic
self-consciousness; the text reflecting on itself. We can see how
in the proper circumstances irony can effect a unity of philosophy
and art: it adds a philosophical element to a work of art (by
providing a moment of self-consciousness) or an artistic element to
a work of philosophy (fictionalizing the text by calling into
question the veracity of what is being stated).
36 Schlegel, CF, 115; see also I, 108. 37 Schlegel, AF, 220,
322. 38 Novalis, LF I, 11. 39 Schlegel, AF, 77. 40 Schlegel, CF,
42.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 511
Schlegel's definition of irony in terms of transcendental
conditions is particularly telling. By reflecting on the conditions
for the possibility of experience, Kant's transcendental philosophy
showed the (merely) phenomenal nature of the empirical world. And
by reflecting critically on the conditions for experience
themselves, Fichte's philosophy was a reflection on Kant at an even
higher level, according to the romantics. The main reason Friedrich
Schlegel thought so highly of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister was that, as
a Bildungsroman, it presented a story of one man's educational
development, and yet it simul- taneously reflects philosophically
on the conditions of educational develop- ment.41 At the same time,
it is important to bear in mind that the aspect of Fichte's
philosophy that the romantics thought so compelling was the
impossibility of achieving any ultimate ground or absolute
perspective. So although we can know experience to be merely
phenomenal (illusory, subjective), we cannot achieve some decisive,
epistemologically satisfactory standpoint. We are caught between a
reality we know as illusory and an ultimate ground which is
absolute but unknowable.
The idea of rising to ever higher levels of reflection is a
favorite theme among the romantics (remember, Novalis uses the
vocabulary of vegetable growth to express a more organic version of
this thought). In his most famous statement on the nature of
romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel writes that romantic poetry hovers
"on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection
again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless
succession of mirrors...." And irony, which Friedrich Schlegel
defines in terms of rising in- finitely, to higher and higher
levels of reflection, is a key ingredient in this project.42
We can now understand the basic philosophical context of
romantic irony. It is a way in which a text indicates its illusory,
provisional, limited character, while gesturing towards an
unreachable, higher ground. As such, and appealing to the
theological character of this argument that I discussed earlier, it
is related to a sort of negative theology.43 Aquinas's via negativa
is an attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of God, not by
attributing positive qualities to him, but rather by systematically
denying that any such attribution could ever convey the
transcendent nature of the divine. Another useful way of
understanding romantic irony is as a form of dialectics; even Hegel
remarks on the similarity: irony negates one concept for the sake
of pointing to a more adequate successor, although it can do no
more than point.4 Friedrich Schlegel brings some of these themes
together in his Dialogue on Poetry where he writes:
41Friedrich Schlegel,"Gespriich iiber die Poesie," Kritische
Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, II. 42 Schlegel, CF, 42. 43 See
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 84. 44 Hegel,
Vorlesungen iiber die Geschichte der Philosophie in
Jubildumsausgabe, XVIII,
62; "Alle Dialektik lii3t das gelten, was gelten soil, als ob es
gelte, lii8t die innere Zerst6rung selbst sich daran
entwickeln,-allgemeine Ironie der Welt."
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512 Judith Norman
Antonio:... Every poem should be genuinely romantic, and every
[poem] should be didactic in that broader sense of the word that
designates the tendency toward a deep and infinite meaning.
Additionally, we make this demand everywhere, without necessarily
using this name. Even in very popular genres-the theater, for
example-we demand irony; we demand that the events, the people, in
short, the whole game of life be taken up and presented as really a
game. This seems to us to be the most essential point and doesn't
everything depend on it? We are only concerned with the meaning of
the whole; anything that individually stirs, touches, engages or
delights the senses, the heart, the understanding or the
imagination seems to us to be only a sign, way of intuiting the
whole, at the moment when we raise ourselves to it. Lothario: All
the sacred games of art are only distant imitations of the infinite
game of the world, the work of art that eternally produces itself.
Ludovico: In other words: all beauty is allegory. Precisely because
it is inexpressible, the highest can only be expressed
allegorically.45
This passage neatly expresses a number of the characteristic
romantic ideas. For one thing, remember that Friedrich Schlegel
defined a dialogue as a "chain or garland of fragments"-like irony,
the fragment is an aesthetic form that self-consciously proclaims
its own partiality, thus obliquely indicating an (absent) totality
and is therefore itself a form of negative theology, as
commentators have pointed out.46 The passage indicates that beauty
and art with its "holy games" (presumably irony-but allegory is
also cited) are significant as means of indicating in some way the
whole, the "highest" or, as Lothario says, "the world." As de Man
argues in his famous discussion of allegory and irony, both are
literary figures which hover between the inauthenticity of the
empirical and the impossibility of presenting some transcendental
foundation.47 And so, as in the case in the passage from the
dialogue, irony and allegory call into question the reality of what
is presented empirically and refer it to some infinitely delayed
point of closure. Schlegel's dialogue goes on to tie these themes
explicitly to mysticism and the theosophy of the (negative)
theologian, Jacob Bdhme, as well as to Plato (viewed in this
context as a mystic-and whose discussion of beauty in the Symposium
must be one of the inspirations behind Ludovico's remark), and even
Spinoza.
45 Friedrich Schlegel, "Gesprich iiber die Poesie." The dialogue
is a purely fictional work written by Friedrich Schlegel; Antonio
is Friedrich Schlegel, Ludovico is Schelling, and Lothario is
Novalis (see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute,
89).
46 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 47. 47 Paul
de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rheto-
ric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, Minn., 1983),
222.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 513
Nietzsche contra Jena
The final, and what for my purposes is perhaps the most striking
aspect of the passage from the Dialogue is that Lothario's
statement, the world is a "work of art that eternally produces
itself" (ewig sich selbst bildenden Kunstwerk) has an almost direct
correlate in Nietzsche's Nachlass. In a note (fragment?) from
1885-85, Nietzsche writes, "The world as a work of art that gives
birth to itself."48 This remarkable convergence raises the question
more urgently; how much was Nietzsche influenced by romantic
thought? Or more generally (without implying direct influence), to
what extent is his project in sympathy with theirs? There are
important prima facie reasons for thinking that the tendency of
Nietzsche's thought is fundamentally hostile to that of Jena
romanticism. Romanticism derived its principle philosophical
inspiration from Fichte's idealism, as I have shown, and from the
notions of transcendental subjectivity and the productive
imagination in Kant's first critique. Accordingly, art functioned
within an essentially idealist epistemological project of rep-
resenting or somehow indicating a transcendental ground. Of course,
this philosophical project provided no more than a general and
sometimes quite loose framework in which the romantics developed a
rich and variegated set of aesthetic theories and techniques. All
the same this project lies at the heart of Jena romanticism and its
signature technique of irony.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, comes out of a different line of
descent from Kant, one that went through Schopenhauer rather than
Fichte. Rather than focusing on the idealist problem of
transcendental subjectivity, Schopenhauer was much more interested
in things-in-themselves, namely, the will as an immanent, energetic
ground and was little bothered (or at least unimpeded) by
epistemological questions of access to this will. Nietzsche
modified the Schopenhauerian lineage further away from Fichte, he
subjected both the notion of subjectivity and the project of
epistemology to devastating critique. Nietzsche's conception of the
self is naturalistic and desubjectivized, writing: "the body and
physiology [are] the starting point."49 Although both Nietzsche and
Fichte critiqued the notion that the ego is a doer rather than a
deed, it was for almost opposite reasons. Fichte thought that
substantiating the I would imply that it is enmeshed in the
empirical realm; that is, it would fail to do justice to the
transcendent, originary quality of the I. On the other hand,
Nietzsche thought that positing a substantial doer (behind the
deed) would wrongly imply that there is an ego at some metaphysical
remove from the material world of material forces-that is, it would
fail to do justice to the immanent nature of the body and the will.
Finally, in his discussions of art Nietzsche concentrates
primarily
48 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York, 1968) # 796.
49 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 492.
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514 Judith Norman
on the expressive or affective aspects of art, its effect on the
body, rather than its representational or allegorical capacity
(which, given his critique of the efficacy of consciousness, would
hardly be of any significance for him).5"
These differences are brought strongly into focus when we
compare the romantic treatment of the story of the disciples at
Sais with that of Nietzsche in the Gay Science, a passage that he
liked well enough to import into Nietzsche contra Wagner:
... one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian
youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by
all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever
is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will
to truth, to truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love
of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too
experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no
longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are
withdrawn....
The passage ends with Nietzsche's famous manifesto:
What is required ... is to stop courageously at the surface, the
fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones,
words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. And is not this
precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the
spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of
present thought and looked around from up there-we who have looked
down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks?
Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore cartists?51
Probably the most important difference between Nietzsche's
treatment of the story and that of the romantics is not what they
think lies behind the veil but rather what they take to be the
interest of the story. Novalis identifies with the disciple
approaching the goddess and wanting to push back the veil; for him,
the disciple's motives require no explanation-who wouldn't want a
peek? Nietzsche on the other hand, does not particularly care about
the goddess; the epistemological striptease has lost its charm for
him, and he has more refined interests. In the famous preface to
Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche discusses the attitude of
philosophers to the coy, feminized figure of truth, he directs his
analysis at the philosopher, which is to say the disciple himself.
That is, Nietzsche makes clear from the very start that it is not
the truth but rather the will to truth that interests him. In the
passage quoted above from the
50 See Young, Nietzsche 's Philosophy ofArt, 145. 51 GS;
Preface, #4.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 515
Gay Science, by contrast, he is more interested in diagnosing
his own artistic will to appearances. Truth for Nietzsche is not
itself the object of analysis; rather, he is interested in the
precise nature of our increasingly refined attitude (or will) to
the truth, and how it finally overcomes itself and becomes a will
to artistic appearance.
It is interesting to note that, as in the first paragraph quoted
above, the notion of immaturity often arises on those occasions
when Nietzsche mentions the figures of Jena romanticism. He called
Schelling youthful in Beyond Good and Evil (11) and Novalis naive
in Human, All Too Human (142). Nietzsche believes that thinkers
(like the romantics) are immature because they represent a naive
phase of the will to truth; that is, they still took it quite
seriously even if like the romantics, they thought that the truth
was ultimately unachievable. Nietzsche is more mature because he
has reached the stage where the will to truth overcomes itself, and
so he finds it more interesting to pose the question: why not
untruth instead? Which is to say, although perhaps not this
directly, why not art? This points to the crux of the difference:
for Nietzsche, the ascendancy of art is the result of the
irrelevance of truth-it has overcome itself-while for the
romantics, art develops as an expression of and com- pensation for
the inaccessibility of truth-it has withdrawn.
This difference is crucial, because the resulting philosophical
art will be fundamentally different, even when it occasionally
sounds the same. The philosophical burden of romantic art will be
to somehow indicate transcendence, while Nietzsche will use
artistic devises to emphasize a philosophy that embraces full
immanence. In other words romantic art functions within the terms
of a sort of negative theology, and Nietzsche is no sort of
theologian. I will elaborate this point with two examples,
Nietzsche's Wagner critique and Nietzsche's alleged use of
irony.
Nietzsche's Wagner Critique
Nietzsche is often compared to the romantics on a different but
related issue: both were favorable to a renewed effort at
myth-making. But Wagner tried to revivify mythology, too, and
Nietzsche shied away from Wagner's mythological music-dramas;
indeed, we see in several elements of Nietzsche's critique of
Wagner an implicit critique of the sort of artistic vision
championed by the Jena Romantics. I have been arguing that the
philosophy of the German idealists was expressed artistically by
the Jena romantics; Nietzsche, on the other hand, thinks that
Wagner provided an artistic rendering of idealistic philosophy.
Wagner, he writes, "merely applied [Hegel and Schelling] to music-
he invented a style for himself charged with 'infinite meaning'-he
became the heir ofHegel."52 Wagner uses both musical syntax and
operatic semantics
52 The Case of Wagner (CW), tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967)
#10.
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516 Judith Norman
to suggest this quasi-Hegelian notion of infinite meaning.
Syntactically, he uses the devise of the "infinite melody," a
musical line which fails to resolve but rather stretches endlessly
on, modulating so as to avoid resolution, "harang[ing] the
infinite" as Nietzsche says.53 It is odd to see Nietzsche
associating this musical device with Hegel rather than with
Schopenhauer-Wagner used the devise of the infinite melody to
greatest and most sustained effect in Tristan und Isolde, where it
apparently serves to suggest a Schopenhauerian will.54 But
Nietzsche's association is entirely appropriate; he thinks that
Wagner has an affinity with the transcendent aspects of Hegel's
metaphysics, the fact that the dialectic has an infinite
destination in the Absolute. For Schopenhauer both music and the
will are strictly immanent: "we might just as well call the world
embodied music as embodied will," Schopenhauer states. For the
Hegelian Wagner, however, music suggests something beyond itself.
Wagner's music does not serve to portray an infinite drive so much
as in infinite idea, heavy with inexpressible meaning.
There is an operatically semantic aspect to Wagner's "infinite
meaning" as well. Theodor Adorno points to the crux of what
Nietzsche found offensive here when he writes that "in Wagner
everything, every sentence, every gesture, every motif and the
overall interconnections-all are charged with meaning" which is to
say, overburdened by deep significance." Nietzsche objects to the
omnipresence of the symbol in Wagner; Wagner's music is never mere
music, Nietzsche says and adds "no musician would think that way"
which is to say no musician would give music this inferior role.56
It is not just the subordinate role of music in the Gesamtkunstwerk
that Nietzsche objects to (his objection applies even to Tristan,
which elevates the role of music above drama); rather, it is the
symbolic character that each musical figure must assume; they are
not free to be a beautiful presence but, like the infinite melody,
always point outside the work itself to some ultimate point of
signification.
Although many aspects of Nietzsche's Wagner critique cannot be
applied to the romantics, Nietzsche's objection to the idealist
notion of infinite meaning can be. Nietzsche's description of "the
enigmatic character of his [Wagner's] art, its playing
hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols ..." can be said just as
well about the works of the Jena romantics."57 Again, the
distinction between transcendence and immanence is key; one of the
principle reasons why Nietzsche objected to Wagner was that, in
pointing to a meaning beyond itself, music loses its attraction as
a beautiful surface, an affirmation of the immanent here
53 CW, #6. 54 For an excellent discussion of this see Brian
Magee, "Schopenhauer and Wagner" in The
Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York, 1983). 55 "Fantasia sopra
Carmen" in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, tr. R.
Livingstone (London, 1994), 62. 56CW, #10. 57CW, #10.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 517
and now. So Nietzsche compares this conception of art
(unfavorably) to the opera Carmen; Bizet himself called the opera
"all clarity and vivacity."5" Carmen has none of the Olympian
significance of Wagnerian destiny, but rather has the blithe
irresponsibility of a burlesque refrain. Adorno elucidates the
funda- mentally Nietzschean point:
In Bizet the inhumanity and hardness, even the violence of the
form, has been used to obliterate the last token of meaning, so as
to forestall any illusion that anything in life could have any
meaning over and above its obvious one.59
Artistically (and not just on the level of the plot), Carmen
embraces full immanence. This is why Nietzsche is concerned to
champion this type of art over the apparently more substantial and
profound music dramas of Wagner, or indeed over any art, such as
that of the Jena romantics, that is not content to be art but tries
to point beyond itself to some ulterior meaning. Carmen, on the
other hand, does not use its musical surface to indicate some
unspoken depth. Its profundity lies in the fact that it remains a
beautiful surface.
We artists...
Nietzsche's idea that something might be superficial out of
profundity is attractively paradoxical. But is it ironic? Naturally
it depends on what we take irony to mean. As I have argued, there
is no connection to the specific and famous notion of romantic
irony, since Nietzsche is not trying to get art to indicate higher
and inexpressible meanings-he is not using the surface to point to
some unspeakable depth. But can we look past the technical notion
of romantic irony and attribute any sort of irony to Nietzsche?
Perhaps the thought that there is no meaning beyond the surface is
itself ironic ("What gods will rescue us from all these ironies?"
Friedrich Schlegel once asked).60 It is becoming increasingly
fashionable to attribute this type of irony to Nietzsche. Babich,
for instance, writes, "The ironic trope is nothing less than what
Nietzsche named the artistic truth of illusion in its subsistent
unsaying of what it says."61 Behler and Pippin make substantially
the same claim, with Behler arguing that it is ultimately derived
from romanticism.62 In a nutshell, irony is the way Nietzsche
58 Quoted in Lesley Wright, "A Musical Commentary," Carmen:
Opera Guide (London, 1982), 19.
59 Adorno, "Fantasia sopra Carmen," 62. 60 Schlegel, "On
Incomprehensibility," Lucinde and the Fragments, 267. 61 Babich,
"Post-Nietzschean Postmodernism," Nietzsche as Postmodernist, ed.
Koelb, 253. 62 Pippin, "Irony and Affirmation" in Nietzsche 's New
Seas: Explorations in Philosophy,
Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B.
Strong (London, 1988), 56-57, 65; also Behler, "Nietzsche's
Auffassung der Ironie," 11.
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518 Judith Norman
allows his apparently paradoxical truth-claims to
self-consciously signify their illusory (or, linguistic,
perspectival, historically situated, non-ultimate) status, and deny
that there is anything more solid on which they can be founded.
Although within the scope of this paper I will not have time to
engage to any great extent in the heated debate about rhetorical
strategies in Nietzsche, I will indicate briefly why in general,
irony is not a proper way of understanding Nietzsche's texts.
Nietzsche never called the playfulness of his style "irony," nor
did he evince any discomfort with the potential paradoxes resulting
from his challenge to the traditional philosophical notion of truth
despite the fact that he hardly shied from discussing either his
style or his various discomforts. Despite Behler's contention that
"Nietzsche seems to have avoided the term because of its
connotations of 'romantic subjectivity,' "63 Nietzsche appears to
associate irony mostly with Socrates. 64 In contrast to his
characterization of the Jena Romantics as young and naive, he
thinks that irony belongs to a decadent thought that has grown
weary and cynical.65 Certainly, the man who wrote Ecce Homo had no
sympathy for the excessive modesty that Socratic irony was made to
serve; indeed, in Beyond Good and Evil (212), Nietzsche diagnoses
Socratic irony as a form of ressentiment.
Most significantly, the dialectical quality of irony, the fact
that, as Babich points out, it unsays what it says while saying it,
seems quite out of keeping with the general tenor of Nietzsche's
thought. Nietzsche thinks that the philosophical concern for truth
has been overcome, but operating in a post- truth environment is
not simply a matter of saying and unsaying each statement. Indeed,
far from overcoming the problem of truth in any meaningful way,
this shows an abiding, almost obsessional concern with that very
problem, with the absence of any Truth. And we do not find this
sort of concern in Nietzsche, who, unlike the romantics, thinks
that truth is irrelevant rather than missing (in theological terms
dead rather than hidden). Accordingly, Nietzsche wants philosophy
to move on to something else, and one of the things he suggests it
should move on to is art. But if we see art as simply a set of
rhetorical strategies for dwelling on the simultaneously
insurmountable and unavoidable problem of truth, then this hardly
counts as moving on.66
Nietzsche cannot be relied upon to cite the various sources and
influences for his texts. He was notoriously under-appreciative of
not only the enormous positive roles Schopenhauer and Wagner would
play all his life but also of less Oedipally invested figures:
Spinoza, Lange, Emerson, for instance, are
63 Behler, "Nietzsche's Auffassung der Ironie," 5 64 See, for
instance, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, # 212, trans. J. Norman
(Cambridge,
2002). 65 Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life, # 7, trans. Peter
Preuss (Indianapolis, Ind., 1988). 66 See for instance Clayton
Koelb's "Reading as a Philosophical Strategy," Nietzsche as
Postmodernist, ed. Koelb, 144-45.
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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 519
mentioned with disproportionate infrequency, given their
enormous influence. But, as I have argued, Nietzsche's relation to
German romanticism cannot be put into the category of the repressed
or occluded (or intellectually dishonest, if we believe Bowie). In
this case at least the influence simply is not there. If he did
adopt phrases and ideas current in romanticism (itself not evidence
of influence, since these ideas might have had some third source),
he altered them so considerably, put them to work in such a
different context, that they can hardly be considered the same. The
Jena romantics were in intellectual proximity to German idealism,
and their ideas are fundamentally anchored in the project of
exploring or giving expression to an a priori transcendental ground
of all knowing and being. They do so in an interesting and
intellectually provocative fashion, and one with considerable
significance for contemporary thought; in particularly, they can be
(and have often been) inserted into a historical lineage that
culminates in Heidegger or deconstruction.67 This is appropriate
since both Heideggerians and deconstructionists concern themselves
with the residually idealist problem of ontological or
transcendental difference.
But Nietzsche does not belong to this historical lineage. The
idea of an a priori transcendental ground is foreign to him, as is
(a fortiori) any epistemo- logical concern of how to access it for
thought, or interest (no matter how playful) in the fact of its
absence or inaccessibility. This is why he gives little mention to
Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling or Fichte, and rarely engages with
their ideas. His history (and future) lie elsewhere.
Trinity University.
67 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's The Literary Absolute, as
well as David Farrell Krells's works.
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Article Contentsp. 501p. 502p. 503p. 504p. 505p. 506p. 507p.
508p. 509p. 510p. 511p. 512p. 513p. 514p. 515p. 516p. 517p. 518p.
519
Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63,
No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 371-553Front MatterHow the "New Science" of
Cannons Shook up the Aristotelian Cosmos [pp.
371-397]Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic
Painting [pp. 399-424]Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina [pp. 425-446]Virtue, Reason,
and Cultural Exchange: Leibniz's Praise of Chinese Morality [pp.
447-464]The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam
Smith's "Wealth of Nations" [pp. 465-481]Greek Origins and Organic
Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in Neohumanist Germany from
Winckelmann to Curtius [pp. 483-500]Nietzsche and Early Romanticism
[pp. 501-519]Two Routes "To Concreteness" in the Work of the
Bakhtin Circle [pp. 521-537]ReviewReview: Lewis White Beck on
Reasons and Causes [pp. 539-545]
Notices [p. 547]Books Received [pp. 549-553]Back Matter [pp.
548-548]