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SUNY Series: Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism
Often portrayed as a movement of poets lost in swells of passion, early German Romanticism has been generally overlooked by scholars in favor of the great system-builders of the post-Kantian period, Schelling and Hegel. In the twelve lectures collected here, Manfred Frank redresses this oversight, offering an in-depth exploration of the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism. Arguing that the early German Romantics initiated an original movement away from idealism, Frank brings the leading figures of the movement, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), into concert with contemporary philosophical developments, and explores the role that Friedrich Hölderlin and other members of the Homburg Circle had upon the development of early German Romantic philosophy.
Hardcover
First published December 11, 2003
About the author
Manfred Frank
85 books9 followersManfred Frank is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His prolific work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung, has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy."
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April 25, 2026
Definitely not something I'd ever see myself reading, but reading an interesting paper about Schlegel's skepticism about logic made me want to dive into anything metaphilosophical in the German romantics to see what else I could find.
This is a series of twelve conferences about the background and development of three romantic authors -- Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel -- and explains the commitments and theses that unites them together as a distinct philosophical tradition. Because they're conferences, the content gets quite repetitive sometimes, though with little pieces of additions as the series progresses.
So, according to Frank, it is a crude prejudice to understand the romantics as followers of the post-kantian German idealists (Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling being the focus). If I understand him correctly, it is because of three major contentions one side holds and the other rejects.
First, though, it's important to understand that both sides are in agreement with one point deriving from both Spinoza and Kant: there seems to be a gap between mind and world, between the world appears to us and how it is in itself, and how we can know that our experience corresponds to this outside world (Kant); the answer is partially that both representation and object are in reality a single substance viewed from different perspectives (Spinoza). This substance which unites the subjective and the objective is called the "Absolute", or "infinite, or "Being". So, both idealists and romantics are in agreement that the correct ontology that would ground our knowledge of the world is some version of dual-aspect monism.
The German idealists hold the following:
i) There is a self-evident assertive proposition (or "judgement"), knowledge of which is not derived from any other item, that lies in our self-consciousness: "I am I".
ii) Accordingly, all of the conditions for our experiences (including the possibility of self-consciousness) can be deduced from this single fact (or act) of consciousness without reference to a thing-in-itself. Consciousness has primacy over Being.
iii) If this is correct, then philosophy is feasible as a system of knowledge derived from a single self-evident first principle. All our knowledge is justified.
By contrast, the German romantics hold that:
i) "I am I" cannot be a self-evident first principle because of its very nature as an assertive proposition. It also cannot explain the possibility of self-consciousness.
ii) The conditions of our experience and of the very fact of our self-consciousness can only be explained by presupposing something external to (and independent of) consciousness that grounds those very facts. Being has primacy over consciousness.
iii) That presupposition does not amount to knowledge -- at best, it is only a regulative ideal to which we can approach but never reach. Therefore, philosophy as the search for first principles is an enterprise that's doomed to fail.
In other words, the romantics were deeply skeptical realists: they think that there is in fact something external to consciousness that exists independently of it, but this thing (they call it "Absolute", "infinite", "Being", etc.) can never be accessed by our cognitive means. This leads them to challenge the prevailing metaphilosophy held by the idealists: that philosophical knowledge can be acquired via deduction from a single proposition. Although each romantic works out this idea in his own way and with slightly different implications and recommendations, these points are essentially shared by all three of them.
So, what's the argument the romantics make use of to attack the idealists?
I'll attempt to sketch a basic argument that abstracts from each romantic's particular criticism. I'll run the risk of being reductive, but I hope this serves as a propaedeutic of sorts to their thought. It runs like this:
P1 If S judges that A is B, S negates that A falls under other predicates.
P2 The Absolute, by definition, is the whole of all predicates.
P3 Knowledge can only come in the form of judgement.
C S cannot know the Absolute.
(P1) is a thesis on predication that the romantics (but also idealists like Fichte and Schelling) inherited from Kant, and was accepted by more recent philosophers such as Sartre and P. F. Strawson. For example, when one asserts that the predicate "is a monochrome red table" applies to A, one is also negating that the predicate "is a blue table" applies as well. Thus, every predication is a form of delimitation through negation. But if that's the case, we cannot specify what the Absolute is like since that would involve excluding the application some predicate when in truth it's supposed to be that which encompasses every single predicate. And since being merely aware that x exists amounts to no knowledge to figures such as Novalis, then we don't really know the Absolute.
This argument can be applied to any principle stated in the form of a relational proposition; thus "I am I" does not confer knowledge of the absolute because in self-consciousness I (qua subject) must represent myself (qua object) and this can only be done by a process of differentiating them. But the Absolute is that which encompasses and unites both subject and object -- therefore, this proposition cannot describe it. In fact, Hölderlin argued (in his short text Being and Judgement) that "I am I" cannot even account for self-consciousness insofar as conceptualization involves differentiation, because in self-consciousness I am aware that the subject and object of my consciousness (i.e., myself) are identical -- therefore, "I am I" fails to capture the correct structure of reflexive judgements. Because of this, the romantics are in agreement that the goal of reaching philosophical knowledge by means of first principles must be rejected, because that is simply not possible.
Of course, they don't stop there. Although the romantics reject the possibility of coming to know the Absolute, they do believe that one can "intuit" or "feel" it. Whether this means feeling it as the non-conceptualizable phenomenon of self-consciousness (in the case of Hölderlin) or something broader (i.e., the all-encompassing whole of causal relations between things in the universe) is up to interpretation. This is something they inherit not from Kant or Spinoza, but from F. H. Jacobi, who resorted to "feeling" or "faith" as a kind of mental state of non-justifiable certainty in order to counter the problem of infinite regress in justification against first principles-oriented philosophy. The problem in question is that in order to acquire knowledge, we need to know a thing's cause or conditions; therefore, if we affirm a principle, we can only know it by knowing its cause -- but then, it wouldn't be a first principle! So we run the risk of infinitely justifying our beliefs without stopping at anything that could ground our knowledge. Jacobi's solution was to revise our conception of knowledge: there must be at the end of justification a premise whose truth we have no means of justifying, yet we take ourselves to be certain of it on the basis of a feeling -- he calls this "belief" or "faith" (Glaube). Thus, we feel that there are things really existing out there, although we cannot prove that by means of argument; nevertheless, this feeling is an appropriate source of certainty and knowledge.
However, the romantics reject Jacobi's solution as a mysticist brand of subjectivism (this already corrects the stereotype that romantics are wannabe mystics themselves). Instead of inferring certainty about the Absolute from feeling as Jacobi did, they only infer that an Absolute must be postulated as something that grounds our intuition or feeling of it and as something we must strive to apprehend although we never will. It's fundamentally a transcendental argument, which indicates its Kantian roots:
P1 We can intuit or feel that there is a whole/unity that encompasses all of the causal relations between things.
P2 If (P1), then the existence of the Absolute (this whole/unity) is assumed throughout our inquiries as a regulative idea.
C The existence of the Absolute (this whole/unity) is assumed throughout our inquiries as a regulative idea.
Because we must assume that there is an Absolute that cannot be known (and Novalis in particular even concedes that this Absolute can be pure fiction or "non-sense"), the romantics stress that philosophy can only succeed as infinite approximation -- that is, we can only come to know a finite number of propositions that are encompassed by the whole, but this endeavor will never result in true knowledge about the whole itself. Yet we must -- as a matter of this regulative ideal -- strive to reach it infinitely. Philosophy is no longer a matter of reaching certainty but becomes a matter of probability (for Novalis and Schlegel). Probability, in turn, is understood as coherence or harmony in our body of knowledge, which is the measure of proximity to the Absolute. So not only are the romantics deeply anti-foundationalist, they were also likely the first to propose a coherentist conception of philosophical inquiry.
This is especially radicalized in Schlegel, who proposed that philosophical justification must occur under the form of Wechselerweis (alternating or reciprocate proof). I can only be brief and incomplete in my sketch here. For Schlegel, philosophy can only arbitrarily start from any number of propositions, and what's going to ultimately count in favor of thinking that we are reaching the Absolute is that these propositions reach coherence or harmony. That we have this sense of the Absolute is conveyed by our aesthetic experiences (Schlegel's favorite example is natural landscapes, where despite a multitude of complex particulars we intuit a unity encompassing them, such as in the case of experiencing nature in spring). Thus art is committed to truth for him just as the sciences and philosophy. However, as Schlegel realizes, this is impossible because (1) many of these propositions are going to contradict each other; (2) even if we reach the sum of propositions, we still have the problem that we can't really describe the whole propositionally, as that would involve negation. This leads him to adopt an attitude of irony towards our own epistemic situation. We must strive to seek new attempts at systematizing and fail to reach that goal, yet this discloses the unknowability of the Absolute as much as its existence and goal of being approximated through ever more chaotic but encompassing systems of propositions (and art, he thinks, does exactly the same). In fact, Schlegel sees no reason to think that reality must be free of contradiction (he's a skeptic about logical principles), so this ever-growing chaotic system might just be a coherent approximation after all. At the same time, irony seems to me to be a kind of doxastic attitude -- of letting yourself be free to explore different approaches to problems, but not being attached to them as to become a dogmatist nor being too unattached as to think the endeavor is sophistical or futile. Schlegel is very much a defender of philosophy as the search for truth.
I can't do enough justice to the romantics' philosophical and metaphilosophical thoughts, so I'll stop here. I also can't do justice to the entirety of the book's content, which goes deep into other authors related to German idealism and romanticism (Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Niethammer, Sinclair, Zwilling, et al.). As a final verdict, I can say Frank's exposition is a great introduction to the philosophy of German romanticism, and it's a clear argument against the prejudice that "romantic philosophy" is an oxymoron and that they were mystical idealists. If you're also interested in criticism of early German idealists, I also highly recommend it.
This is a series of twelve conferences about the background and development of three romantic authors -- Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel -- and explains the commitments and theses that unites them together as a distinct philosophical tradition. Because they're conferences, the content gets quite repetitive sometimes, though with little pieces of additions as the series progresses.
So, according to Frank, it is a crude prejudice to understand the romantics as followers of the post-kantian German idealists (Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling being the focus). If I understand him correctly, it is because of three major contentions one side holds and the other rejects.
First, though, it's important to understand that both sides are in agreement with one point deriving from both Spinoza and Kant: there seems to be a gap between mind and world, between the world appears to us and how it is in itself, and how we can know that our experience corresponds to this outside world (Kant); the answer is partially that both representation and object are in reality a single substance viewed from different perspectives (Spinoza). This substance which unites the subjective and the objective is called the "Absolute", or "infinite, or "Being". So, both idealists and romantics are in agreement that the correct ontology that would ground our knowledge of the world is some version of dual-aspect monism.
The German idealists hold the following:
i) There is a self-evident assertive proposition (or "judgement"), knowledge of which is not derived from any other item, that lies in our self-consciousness: "I am I".
ii) Accordingly, all of the conditions for our experiences (including the possibility of self-consciousness) can be deduced from this single fact (or act) of consciousness without reference to a thing-in-itself. Consciousness has primacy over Being.
iii) If this is correct, then philosophy is feasible as a system of knowledge derived from a single self-evident first principle. All our knowledge is justified.
By contrast, the German romantics hold that:
i) "I am I" cannot be a self-evident first principle because of its very nature as an assertive proposition. It also cannot explain the possibility of self-consciousness.
ii) The conditions of our experience and of the very fact of our self-consciousness can only be explained by presupposing something external to (and independent of) consciousness that grounds those very facts. Being has primacy over consciousness.
iii) That presupposition does not amount to knowledge -- at best, it is only a regulative ideal to which we can approach but never reach. Therefore, philosophy as the search for first principles is an enterprise that's doomed to fail.
In other words, the romantics were deeply skeptical realists: they think that there is in fact something external to consciousness that exists independently of it, but this thing (they call it "Absolute", "infinite", "Being", etc.) can never be accessed by our cognitive means. This leads them to challenge the prevailing metaphilosophy held by the idealists: that philosophical knowledge can be acquired via deduction from a single proposition. Although each romantic works out this idea in his own way and with slightly different implications and recommendations, these points are essentially shared by all three of them.
So, what's the argument the romantics make use of to attack the idealists?
I'll attempt to sketch a basic argument that abstracts from each romantic's particular criticism. I'll run the risk of being reductive, but I hope this serves as a propaedeutic of sorts to their thought. It runs like this:
P1 If S judges that A is B, S negates that A falls under other predicates.
P2 The Absolute, by definition, is the whole of all predicates.
P3 Knowledge can only come in the form of judgement.
C S cannot know the Absolute.
(P1) is a thesis on predication that the romantics (but also idealists like Fichte and Schelling) inherited from Kant, and was accepted by more recent philosophers such as Sartre and P. F. Strawson. For example, when one asserts that the predicate "is a monochrome red table" applies to A, one is also negating that the predicate "is a blue table" applies as well. Thus, every predication is a form of delimitation through negation. But if that's the case, we cannot specify what the Absolute is like since that would involve excluding the application some predicate when in truth it's supposed to be that which encompasses every single predicate. And since being merely aware that x exists amounts to no knowledge to figures such as Novalis, then we don't really know the Absolute.
This argument can be applied to any principle stated in the form of a relational proposition; thus "I am I" does not confer knowledge of the absolute because in self-consciousness I (qua subject) must represent myself (qua object) and this can only be done by a process of differentiating them. But the Absolute is that which encompasses and unites both subject and object -- therefore, this proposition cannot describe it. In fact, Hölderlin argued (in his short text Being and Judgement) that "I am I" cannot even account for self-consciousness insofar as conceptualization involves differentiation, because in self-consciousness I am aware that the subject and object of my consciousness (i.e., myself) are identical -- therefore, "I am I" fails to capture the correct structure of reflexive judgements. Because of this, the romantics are in agreement that the goal of reaching philosophical knowledge by means of first principles must be rejected, because that is simply not possible.
Of course, they don't stop there. Although the romantics reject the possibility of coming to know the Absolute, they do believe that one can "intuit" or "feel" it. Whether this means feeling it as the non-conceptualizable phenomenon of self-consciousness (in the case of Hölderlin) or something broader (i.e., the all-encompassing whole of causal relations between things in the universe) is up to interpretation. This is something they inherit not from Kant or Spinoza, but from F. H. Jacobi, who resorted to "feeling" or "faith" as a kind of mental state of non-justifiable certainty in order to counter the problem of infinite regress in justification against first principles-oriented philosophy. The problem in question is that in order to acquire knowledge, we need to know a thing's cause or conditions; therefore, if we affirm a principle, we can only know it by knowing its cause -- but then, it wouldn't be a first principle! So we run the risk of infinitely justifying our beliefs without stopping at anything that could ground our knowledge. Jacobi's solution was to revise our conception of knowledge: there must be at the end of justification a premise whose truth we have no means of justifying, yet we take ourselves to be certain of it on the basis of a feeling -- he calls this "belief" or "faith" (Glaube). Thus, we feel that there are things really existing out there, although we cannot prove that by means of argument; nevertheless, this feeling is an appropriate source of certainty and knowledge.
However, the romantics reject Jacobi's solution as a mysticist brand of subjectivism (this already corrects the stereotype that romantics are wannabe mystics themselves). Instead of inferring certainty about the Absolute from feeling as Jacobi did, they only infer that an Absolute must be postulated as something that grounds our intuition or feeling of it and as something we must strive to apprehend although we never will. It's fundamentally a transcendental argument, which indicates its Kantian roots:
P1 We can intuit or feel that there is a whole/unity that encompasses all of the causal relations between things.
P2 If (P1), then the existence of the Absolute (this whole/unity) is assumed throughout our inquiries as a regulative idea.
C The existence of the Absolute (this whole/unity) is assumed throughout our inquiries as a regulative idea.
Because we must assume that there is an Absolute that cannot be known (and Novalis in particular even concedes that this Absolute can be pure fiction or "non-sense"), the romantics stress that philosophy can only succeed as infinite approximation -- that is, we can only come to know a finite number of propositions that are encompassed by the whole, but this endeavor will never result in true knowledge about the whole itself. Yet we must -- as a matter of this regulative ideal -- strive to reach it infinitely. Philosophy is no longer a matter of reaching certainty but becomes a matter of probability (for Novalis and Schlegel). Probability, in turn, is understood as coherence or harmony in our body of knowledge, which is the measure of proximity to the Absolute. So not only are the romantics deeply anti-foundationalist, they were also likely the first to propose a coherentist conception of philosophical inquiry.
This is especially radicalized in Schlegel, who proposed that philosophical justification must occur under the form of Wechselerweis (alternating or reciprocate proof). I can only be brief and incomplete in my sketch here. For Schlegel, philosophy can only arbitrarily start from any number of propositions, and what's going to ultimately count in favor of thinking that we are reaching the Absolute is that these propositions reach coherence or harmony. That we have this sense of the Absolute is conveyed by our aesthetic experiences (Schlegel's favorite example is natural landscapes, where despite a multitude of complex particulars we intuit a unity encompassing them, such as in the case of experiencing nature in spring). Thus art is committed to truth for him just as the sciences and philosophy. However, as Schlegel realizes, this is impossible because (1) many of these propositions are going to contradict each other; (2) even if we reach the sum of propositions, we still have the problem that we can't really describe the whole propositionally, as that would involve negation. This leads him to adopt an attitude of irony towards our own epistemic situation. We must strive to seek new attempts at systematizing and fail to reach that goal, yet this discloses the unknowability of the Absolute as much as its existence and goal of being approximated through ever more chaotic but encompassing systems of propositions (and art, he thinks, does exactly the same). In fact, Schlegel sees no reason to think that reality must be free of contradiction (he's a skeptic about logical principles), so this ever-growing chaotic system might just be a coherent approximation after all. At the same time, irony seems to me to be a kind of doxastic attitude -- of letting yourself be free to explore different approaches to problems, but not being attached to them as to become a dogmatist nor being too unattached as to think the endeavor is sophistical or futile. Schlegel is very much a defender of philosophy as the search for truth.
I can't do enough justice to the romantics' philosophical and metaphilosophical thoughts, so I'll stop here. I also can't do justice to the entirety of the book's content, which goes deep into other authors related to German idealism and romanticism (Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Niethammer, Sinclair, Zwilling, et al.). As a final verdict, I can say Frank's exposition is a great introduction to the philosophy of German romanticism, and it's a clear argument against the prejudice that "romantic philosophy" is an oxymoron and that they were mystical idealists. If you're also interested in criticism of early German idealists, I also highly recommend it.
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