Georg Phillip Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better
known by his pen name Novalis, was one of the founders of the German Romantic
literary movement, and despite his death at a very early age, remained its
spiritual center. He believed that the
Romantics were destined to issue in a new golden age, where science, religion,
art, philosophy, politics, and economics would all be united through the alchemy
of poetry. Die Welt muss romantisiert warden (The world must be romanticized),
Novalis wrote (“Fragmente des Jahres 1798,” No. 807, Gesammelte Werke, vol.
III, p. 22). The Romantics saw
themselves at the forefront of a movement that had the potential to change not
only literature, but learning, society, and the individual forever.
At the heart of the early
Romantic movement was a rejection of the stereotyped forms and concepts of
Neoclassicism in favor of an art that would draw its inspiration from nature,
imagination, and feeling. In his novel
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis explored the idea that the poet is not a
person with a special occupation, but one who sees the world in a certain
way. He believed that this way of seeing
was open to all, and that poetry itself was a kind of “key” to this new vision
of the world.
Under the influence of the
philosopher Johann Gottleib Fichte, who is today seen as one of the founders of
the philosophical school called “German Idealism,” Novalis began to explore the
idea of the artist as one who projects his subjective self into the world through
the process of creating. He was unable
to accept Fichte’s extreme idealism—the proposal that the world around us is
nothing but our idea of it, that there is no noumenal universe. Novalis had been raised in a deeply pietistic
environment and would filter the new intellectual ferment surrounding him
through his own intense Christian faith.
This would lead him to form a unique philosophical understanding of the
relationship between personal consciousness and the world at large. He accepted the idea that our subjective view
of the world shapes the way we perceive reality; hence his belief that the poet
actually experiences a different world than the pure scientist or the pure
economist, for example. Die Welt ist ein
Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben (The world is a
universal trope of the spirit, a symbolic picture of it) (“Fragmente un Studien
1797-1798 [Teplitzer Fragmente],” No. 76, Novalis Werke, p. 403). But he also believed that this did not
necessarily mean the world does not have its own independent reality. In fact, he extended Fichte’s concept of
self-consciousness as a social phenomenon, his foundational intersubjectivity,
to nature itself, giving nature an existence independent of human subjective
consciousness precisely because it (nature) possesses certain constituent
elements analogous to self-consciousness.
He believed that one could only bridge the gap between our consciousness
and the consciousness of others (including nature) through love, that power
which allows us to understand “the other” as deeply as we understand
ourselves. Since we can only truly
“know” others and nature in this way, he saw poetry, the artist’s attempt to
bridge this gap, as founded on the faculty of love. This love was not sentiment but a
philosophical viewpoint. He called his
philosophy “Magical Idealism,” to reflect his belief that subjectivity (as
opposed to empiricism) held the key to understanding and actually had the power
to alter our relationships with the material universe surrounding us.
A number of scholarly
articles have recently appeared on Novalis’ Magical Idealism, and specifically
on its usefulness in helping us to rethink our relationship to nature in the
context of the current environmental crisis.
“Being, Knowledge and Nature in Novalis,” by Allison Stone in the
Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 1 (2008), and “Nature as a
You: Novalis’ Philosophical Thought and the Modern Ecological Crisis,” by
Christian Becker and Reiner Manstetten in Environmental Values, vol. 13, no. 1
(2004) are two examples. Rather than try
and duplicate or somehow summarize those efforts by professional
philosophers—something I am not—I simply wish to explore one small aspect of
Novalis’ Magical Idealism: its implications for how the lyric poet views
nature.
Novalis, in his fiction,
fragments, and aphorisms, and in his Das Allgemeine Brouillon, translated into
English as by David W. Wood as Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (2007),
states the belief that we know others and nature by connecting our subjective
awareness (the Ich) with their autonomous person (the Du) through the faculty of love. It is easy to understand how this might be
true in the case of other people (anyone who has ever been in love has
experienced that moment when another’s subjective self is revealed to the
lover). But can we say that nature has a
self-consciousness? Without resorting to
anthropomorphism, as some French Romantic writers did, or pantheism, as some
German Idealists would later do, Novalis recognized in nature certain elements,
certain activities, analogous to those carried out by the subjective mind. It was in this analogy to the human persona
that he found a revelation of nature’s “personal-ity.” Nature actualizes itself according to
patterns, sustains itself through a certain order, and perpetuates and expands
on itself through spontaneous creativity.
For Novalis, the most self-conscious of these activities is nature’s
creativity. Just as the artist projects
his or her personal consciousness into reality through creative activity, so,
too, does nature. Just as the artist
does not simply “imitate” nature; so, too, nature is capable of spontaneously
creating and remaking itself without the artist. Ein blühendes Land ist doch wohl ein
königlicheres Kunstwerk, als ein Park (A flowering countryside is probably a
more royal work of art than a park) (“Glauben und Liebe oder der König und die
Königin,” No. 7, Novalis Werke, p. 354).
In a discussion of
Shakespeare’s awareness of nature in his art, Novalis speaks of gleichsam die
sich selbst beschauende, sich selbst nachahmende, sich selbst bildende Natur
ist (as it were, self-inspecting, self-copying and self-screening Nature)
(“Fragmente und Studien [Vermischte Fragmente und Studien],” No. 92, Novalis
Werke, p. 533). We may attempt to impose
our will on nature, but nature also has a will of its own. We cannot will a hurricane, nor can we even
guarantee that a tree will survive the winter.
The true artist, or as Novalis would say, the true poet, recognizes this
autonomous capacity in nature. The poet
produces art out of his or her own subjectivity, but in his or her depiction of
nature, he or she cannot deny nature’s own spontaneous creativity.
In Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, a
novel fragment, Novalis proposes that true knowledge of nature can only be the
result of a spiritual, poetic approach to its mysteries. The novices of Sais attempt to study nature
scientifically, becoming obsessed with comparing, classifying, and categorizing
natural objects. (It is important to
note that Novalis received his formal education as a scientist and saw his
mental maturity as a personal journey from scientist poet to poet
scientist.) The wise master under whose
tutelage the novices receive their training gently leads them from a study of
the singularity of natural objects to an understanding of their natural unity,
their poetic unity. When the novices are
sent out to gather specimens of rocks and leaves and other natural objects, a
simple-minded but lovable child among them seldom finds anything. One day he returns with an ordinary-looking
stone, and the master places it in the midst of all the others that have been
gathered for study, acting as if it is a final puzzle piece. Der Lehrer nahm es in die Hand, und küßte ihn
lange, dann sah er uns mit nassen Augen an und legte dieses Steinchen auf einen
leeren Platz, der mitten unter andern Steinen lag, gerade wo wie Strahlen viele
Reihen sich berührten. Ich werde dieser
Augenblicke nie fortan vergessen. Uns war, als hätten wir im Vorübergehn eine
helle Ahndung dieser wunderbaren Welt in unsern Seelen gehabt (The teacher took
it into his hand, and kissed him for a long time, and then he regarded us with
wet eyes and put this stone on an empty place in the midst of the other stones, exactly where many rows of them met together in a radial pattern. I will never forget that instant. It was as if we had an unbearably bright
glimpse, in our very souls, of a marvelous and previously unseen world) (“Die
Lehrlinge zu Sais,” Novalis Werke, p. 97).
The child’s pebble, a symbol
for both love and poetry—and the agent of the kairos for which the disciples
have been waiting—allows the pattern of stones to represent other forms which
the master cherishes: the sun, stars, snowflakes, crystals. By introducing the concept of metaphor, the
master initiates the novices into poetry.
By demonstrating to the novices that each object in nature must be
valued as much as any other, since all are connected in patterns and forms, and
all belong to God’s creation, he teaches them the mystery of unity that is
love. In his book To Live is to Love,
Ernesto Cardenal celebrates this unity:
All beings love each
other…All beings that are alive are in communion with each other. All plants, all animals, all beings are
fraternally united by the phenomenon of mimesis…Everything in nature is
incomplete, and everything therefore is self-giving and embrace… (To Live is to
Love, p. 21).
This is Dante’s l'amor che
move il sole e l'altre stelle, the arrival at communio, the intersection at the
center of the radius.
The spirit of poetry and an
understanding of nature must both derive from the same source, the template of
unity. For Novalis, unity is a
fundamental law of the universe. Unity
has the ability to abolish the distance between subject and object, and as such, it is another word for love.
Poetry is the attempt to
portray nature in a manner neither completely objective nor completely
subjective. Poetry must be a synthesis
of both; with the poet’s subjective creativity meeting nature’s spontaneous
creativity in the only way possible—through that union of our own
self-knowledge with knowledge of nature as the autonomous other (with all the
independence, the alterity, which belongs to that “otherness”). This experience can only be uttered as a
celebration of love and unity: nature revealing itself to the poet and the poet
manifesting that revelation—his or her own unique experience of that
revelation—through the inspired act of poetry.
Bibliography
Becker, Christian and Reiner Manstetten, “Nature as a You: Novalis’
Philosophical Thought and the Modern Ecological Crisis,” Environmental Values
vol. 13, no. 1 (2004).
Cardenal, Ernesto, To Live is to Love, trans. Kurt Reinhardt. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Novalis, Gesammelte Werke.
Zurich: Bühl-Verlag, 1946. V vols.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, trans. and ed. David W.
Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Novalis, Novalis Werke, Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Gerhard
Schulz. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1969.
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