German Romantic Literary Theory

Ernst Behler.  German Romantic Literary Theory.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993

In German Romantic Literary Theory, Ernst Behler sets out to correct the "common view" of German Romanticism as a mere continuation of Weimar classicism, or simply as an "extravagant offshoot" (Hegel) of transcendental idealism.  Behler's thesis is that the quasar-intense literary and philosophical productivity of the Romantiker during the brief period in Jena (1794-1800) warrants recognition as an independent cultural event in intellectual history: Describing early German romanticism as a mere footnote to Goethe's and Schiller's classicism, or as a afterthought of Fichte's and Schelling's idealist philosophy blurs Romanticism's outlines and thus obscures the valuable contribution it has made to our modern understanding of literature, philosophy, history, the subject, and understanding itself.

In chapter one, Behler isolates the pearl of wisdom the romantics bequeathed modernity; Friedrich Schlegel's famous Athenaeum Fragment 116 captures the thought: "The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming, and that is, in fact, its real essence: that it should forever be becoming, and that is, in fact, its real essence, that it should forever be becoming and never perfected” (29).  In opposition to any classicist aesthetic which fosters the imitation of the paradigmatic examples of classic Greek texts by Homer, Aeschylus, or Sophocles, which strives to match the ideal closure, balance, and unity of form and content of their texts, and in contrast with idealist philosophy which argues for the perfect completion of a self-actualized free-standing human subject, the Romantic embraces “infinite [i.e. never achievable] perfectibility,” rejects imitation of the Greeks, preferring instead to compete with and overcome classical prototypes, and favors the fragment--a form which is shattered in every attempt to present an (unpresentable) content: the Absolute Idea of the subject.

In each of the remaining chapters, Behler meticulously demonstrates how the Romantics gradually broke free of their inherited principles of art and philosophy.  For example, Behler explores the Schlegel brothers' interaction with and final rejection of Kant's notion of the imagination as he describes it in his Third Critique.  Initially they approve of the power he ascribes to this faculty as it mediates between the categories of understanding and the manifold of the intuition, but in the end they reject this concept because, even in its "free play", Kant's imagination remains yoked to the determining force of reason and so "never emerges in its [proper] autonomy".  Friedrich Schlegel  thus grants his reconceived imagination plenary powers, free reign within the mind; for him, the imagination is now "the primary faculty in our encounter with the world, and. . . reason begins to operate only after we have established a poetic relationship with our environment" (78).

Chapter three also showcases Friedrch Schlegel, this time as a squares off against Fichte.  Schlegel studied his philosophy closely and then went on to modify radically Fichte's doctrines concering the subject: Fichte's attention in his philosophy is impaled on the lone subject, on the knowledge of knowledge, the "consciousness of consciousness; consequently, poetry and its special purchase on the represented world(object) play no role in his Wissenschaftslehre. Schlegel divides Fichte's monology between subject--which expresses itself in (pure, idealist) philosophy, and object--which recommends itself to the subject through poetry.  Thus, through this diremption, Schlegels generated a romantic hybrid of poetry and philosophy Schegel titles "transcendental poetry", or, more commonly, "irony" (139).

The remaining three chapters of the book further explain how the Romantics stamped on either Classicist or Idealist thinking their own recognizably romantic imprimatur.  In chapter four, Novalis pairs off once again, with Fichte and Schelling in his Fichte Studies to produce the philosophical aesthetic "absolute idealism” which, like Schlegel's irony, departs from idealism's egoism and negotiates instead a "hovering" (schweben) in between subject and object.  In chapter five, Behler shows how Ludwig Tieck and W.H. Wackenroder overwhelm Winkelmann's ("typical" Enlightenment/ Classicist) studied preference for the  "calm and quietness" of the art of Periclean Athens with their one unbridled enthusiasm for a charged emotional response to  the "divine presence which infuses the great art of all periods, ancient, medieval and modern.”  The final chapter entitled "Language, Hermeneutics, and Encylclopaedists" opens with summaries of the theories of language and understanding of Herder, Fichte, and Schleiermacher; by demonstrating that each of these three subscribes to the notion of a prelinguistic subject, Behler demonstrates that none of them "really represent[s] the early Romantic theory of understanding and interpretation but a position of idealistic philosophy" (281).Behler returns again to Friedrich Schlegel for the authentic Romantic perspective on these issues; he cites Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragment  401 which, in its theme of infinite never achievable perfectibility captures both Schegel's hermeneutic theory and as well Behler's concept of what romanticism bequeathed to modern thought.  “In order to understand someone who only partially understand himself, you first have to understand him completely and better than he himself does, but only partially and precisely as much as he does himself" (279).