III
73. FORMATIVE THEORY OF NATURE. Nature must become moral. We are its educators—its moral tangents—its moral stimuli. If morality, like understanding and so on, can be objectified and organized—visible morality.
Novalis and the early German Romantics lived at the hinge of this historical shift, at the very moment when humans and the earth began looking in different directions. While there are many ways to define Romanticism, one element that binds them all together is their interpretation of alienation as fundamentally tragic. All sorts of alienation had asserted themselves by the turn of the 19th century. In England and elsewhere, the process of enclosure and privatization had alienated peasants from the common lands that had supported them for centuries; the emerging factory system, with its reliance on collective labor and private ownership, had begun alienating workers from the means of production as well as the products of their labor; the rise of machinery and rapid urbanization had alienated humans from the earth more generally in the ‘metabolic rift’; competition and the wage labor system required for the capitalist market had alienated individuals from each other; Schiller argues that the division of labor itself had alienated humans from ourselves by separating us from the acts that support our individual existence; and the social bonds of the medieval world were loosening rapidly, creating alienation from historical social relationships. One effect of this wave of alienation was the disenchantment of the world, the removal of all feeling of mystery, magic, and indeed life itself from the cosmos. Among the Frühromantik, there was perhaps no approach more interested in theorizing the reenchantment of the world than Novalis’ ‘Magical Realism.’
Novalis’ work is limited, intense, beautiful, and was produced in an extremely short period of time, much like a flower. While there exists juvenilia before this point, he did not begin to write the works associated with his legacy until after the death of his first fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, in 1797. At the end of that year, he entered the Mining Academy of Freiberg in Saxony to become qualified as a member of the staff for the salt works at Weissenfels, and began writing voluminously. By 1801, at the age of 28, Novalis was dead.
In the three years of productive writing, Novalis wrote two collections of poetry entitled Hymns to the Night and Spiritual Songs; two unfinished novels centered around the role of poetry and philosophy in the project of world peace; a collection of philosophical fragments entitled ‘Pollen’, published in the Schlegel brothers’ Athenaeum journal; a number of short essays on politics, Goethe, Fichte, and gender; as well as the beginnings of a philosophical encyclopedia provisionally entitled the Allgemeine Brouillon. In these works, Novalis embodied—perhaps more than any of the other thinkers of the post-Kantian period—both the methodological approaches of Romanticism, as well as the ontological and epistemological positions that would flourish in the land cleared by Kant’s critical philosophy. Like many of the others associated with the Frühromantik, Novalis’ work is largely fragmentary, structurally opposed to the systematic philosophies of both Kant and the Idealists that emerged around the same time; he saw the world as both supremely rational, infinitely understandable through the use of mathematics and science, and at the same time thoroughly mystical, forever obscured to the finite understanding and approachable only through the magical work of poetry.
In the Enlightenment, the Frühromantik writers saw an attempt to totally understand the world through cognition, and thereby reduce it to the contents of human consciousness. In doing so, the world was evacuated of all mystery, enchantment, and made into something all too human. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller oriented the young Romantics towards the example of the Greeks, and specifically to the time just before that of Plato. This was a period which “was an awakening of the powers of the mind,” in which
the senses and the spirit had no distinctly separated property; no division had yet torn them asunder, leading them to partition in a hostile attitude, and to mark off their limits with precision. Poetry had not yet become the adversary of wit, nor had speculation abused itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of necessity both poetry and wit could exchange parts, because they both honored truth only in their special way. However high might be the flight of reason, it drew matter in a loving spirit after it, and, while sharply and stiffly defining it, never mutilated what it touched.
He found in the pre-Socratics a worldview much like that gestured to in Kant’s third Critique, which approached the world through art and nature, poetry and living science, and saw no contradiction between moral ideals and the rules of the understanding.
Contrary to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, which attempted to understand the world through complete and systematic thought, the Romantics saw in the poetico-philosophical fragment of the pre-Socratics a form of writing that attempted to approach the absolute reality of the world without the pretension of believing it could be fully reduced to the limits of human consciousness. While the philosophical treatise attempts to communicate clearly without any extraneous information, to pare away the immaterial and get at the essence of things, the fragment is a form which is sometimes indistinguishable from a poem. Consider the example of ‘blackout’ or ‘redacted’ poetry, where through the removal of elements of a piece of prose, texts become poetic. The fragment both asserts an ever incomplete picture of the cosmos, as well as allowing more free play in language, breaking down the distinction between philosophy and poetry, science and art.
Novalis’ work on this front is perhaps best captured in the unfinished philosophical work entitled the Allgemeine Broullion, sometimes translated as the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia. The book drew on his many areas of expertise: poetry, idealist philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences that he had learned during his time as a mine inspector. Like the Enlightenment Encyclopedia compiled by Voltaire earlier in the century, it was intended to be a compendium of all human knowledge, a full and complete picture of the world. Despite the gesture towards fullness, the entries are fragmentary and incomplete, made up of notes for subjects such as “THEOSOPHY”, the “THEORY OF THE HUMAN BEING,” multiple entries on “ROMANTICISM”, “MAGIC (mystical theory of language)”, and “ENCYCLOPEDISTICS”. At the time of this death, it was left unfinished, and so despite the drive towards universal knowledge, the finitude of life itself set internal limits to what it could achieve.
This work also serves as a relatively good explanation of his theory of knowledge and metaphysical outlook more generally. In an article on his epistemology and ontology, Alison Stone argues that Novalis’ mature view is that “nature is partly intelligible, insofar as it develops organically, but partly unintelligible, insofar as it develops spontaneously.” This conception of reality aligns almost exactly with the ideas presented in Kant’s third Critique, insofar as for Novalis, nature is understood both as a free organism and a work of art. Such a view, she argues, “has a central aim of showing how we could reacquire a (presently lost) experience of natural phenomena as ‘enchanted’—meaningful, mysterious, and animated by spirit.” For Novalis, the world cannot be fully known because it has its own freedom, its own independence, its own spontaneity; at the same time, since we are a part of nature and exist as part of its own ongoing organic becoming, we can nevertheless grasp it at least in part, in our own small corner of the cosmos, in the sense that we are “the universe coming to understand itself.” “Nature,” he writes, “is the ideal,” which is “at once possible, actual, and necessary.” By recognizing the impossibility of understanding nature fully through what he calls the “element of imagination…of the one and only absolute anticipated…through the negation of everything absolute,” then every time we do come to understand some particular thing within it, that one fact becomes a symbol—a sign—that the absolute forever remains unknown. In other words, through poetic imagination we turn our limited, fragmentary grasp of nature itself into a romantic image of the absolute that always remains beyond our full conceptual grasp, but is not inaccessible to feeling. And it is not just nature that we come to know this way, but our own selves. “We will never understand ourselves entirely” either, “but we are capable of perceptions of ourselves which far surpass understanding.” This is an aesthetic intuition, a sensation of the absolute oneness of all things, the unity of morality and matter, reason and poetry, art and nature, instead of the Enlightenment attempt to approach the world purely intellectually.
For Novalis, this is not just a theoretical orientation. This feeling is not just the reception of an object of cognition that stands over and against the perceiving subject, but is also an action that he calls ‘romanticizing’. When we feel the absolute within ourselves, this is not a representation of the absolute, not a virtual copy of the absolute which exists as it were “inside of our minds.” When Enlightenment thinkers discuss our understanding of “the thing itself,” it is as if a shadowy image separate from the thing outside (a thing that is perhaps ultimately inaccessible) appears within our skull or our soul, different in substance from the real thing. For Novalis, on the other hand, the feeling of the absolute within us is the absolute within us. We, along with everything else within nature, produce the absolute through the act of poetizing and philosophizing. As a part of the absolute, as a fragment of the reality of the cosmos, our fragmentary understanding is not just an approximation of nature, but rather nature itself, producing and understanding itself. In this act of reenchanting the world, we are not simply altering our individual perception of it, but rather making it really so. We write a poem, we describe nature in mystical-philosophical language, and someone reads it, hears it, is moved by language, and the world becomes an enchanted place thereby. “At the bottom of everything,” he writes, “there is a grammatical mysticism—which was very easily able to arouse the initial amazement at language and writing.” Language, saying, thinking, and doing, acting, being-in-the-world are the same for the romantic poet. “There is no difference,” he argues, “between theory and praxis.”
This manner of philosophizing will change nature itself, according to Novalis. “Nature must become moral,” he writes, “we are its educators—its moral tangents—its moral stimuli.” It is not because we are rational that we can master and control nature, but rather because we are poetic that we can—and must—live in harmony with nature, undo the alienation that separates us from it, make it beautiful by seeing that it is so. This is not primarily a problem of geoengineering, or agronomy, or terraforming, since nature is itself already the absolute. We are its educators only insofar as we let it be. This is an action—which is to say, also a theory—that is synonymous with the reenchantment of reality and the negation of alienation. “Originally,” he writes, “knowing and doing are intertwined—then they separate, and ultimately they are to be united again, cooperating, harmonious, but not intertwined.” When two things are intertwined, they hold each other in place as separate forces. This was the conception of knowing and doing that we inherited from Aristotle. Modernity, with its abstract knowledge, undid the knot that held them in place. To romanticize is to reunite them again, this time not as threads in a weave, but as strings whose unity comes through their capacity to harmonize, to make one another sing.