World, Universe, and Heterocosm in the Early German Romantic Project of Universal Poetry (1795–1802)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the poetic practices and critical discourses of the early German Romantic project of progressive universal poetry through the works of Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Novalis. I frame the project of Romantic universal poetry as a response to the representational challenges brought forward by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which attempted to secure an Absolute for Idealist philosophy in the phrase Ich=Ich. As I argue, the Romantic idea of universal poetry is inspired by the form of Fichte’s phrase, which, though failing to represent the Absolute as a completely unconditioned principle, provides the impetus for a Romantic theory of universal reflexivity. Romantic reflection does not coincide with or attain the Absolute, but its dynamic, oppositional movements represent the self’s attraction to the unattainable ground of its existence.

One of the most important but under-analyzed modes in which universal reflection appears in early German Romanticism is through the idea of a multiplication of different worlds or world views. The concept of world becomes productive for the early Romantics as a mode of representing the relationships between works of art or even the sciences and reality, between different views conceived as worlds, between critical texts and works of art. Views become works, works become worlds, and worlds become mere views once again in escalating movements of reflective transformation that challenge the distinction between representational perspectives and the realities they designate. Within this constellation, the heterocosm (an inverted world such as a fairy tale world) serves as a means of representing reflective worldmaking as not only imitation or correspondence, but simultaneously as the production of reversals, illusions, and even oppositions. As I show, these mind-bendingly diverse reflections among different Romantic worlds and worldviews serve as means of simultaneously suggesting the idea of an underlying reality or order (a universe, even) in which all worlds might be connected to one another, and of maintaining the irreducibility of reflection to a homogenizing higher principle. It is precisely through their simultaneous suggestion and suspension of the idea of a higher order that the Romantics are able to maintain a sense of dynamic mobility among different worldviews, a universality purely on the level of reflexivity. As a result of this intentional ambiguity, reflection however also never moves past the modality of suggestive correspondence and becomes an explicit technique of poesis. The Romantics’ conception of universal reflexivity becomes a tool for diverse aspects of Romantic poetic theory and practice. It influences the development of new forms of artistic and literary criticism that reflect on the role of the critic in “remaking” works of art and in influencing different modes of cultural consumption; it contributes to the development of a specifically Romantic rhetoric and poetics, which questions the relationship between the desire for an pre-reflective origin and the illusory sense of immediacy that can be produced in reflection; and finally, it contributes to a critique of the Enlightenment’s scientific optimism through constant perspectival juxtapositions that call into question the solidity of scientific first principles.