Paul Klee and Magical Idealism

I’ve been thinking about Novalis’ Magical Idealism lately, and I thought of writing something about the “Zoë stories” and their relationship to Magical Idealism.  Certainly, none of them were written explicitly with Magical Idealism in mind—it was only after thinking about it that I came to the conclusion that Zoë’s world is not “magical,” as much as “Magical Idealist.”  I need to think about that a lot more before I can write about it, so I thought, instead, of writing about the work of the Swiss artist Paul Klee in relation to Magical Idealism. 

     I want to start by saying that I am not a philosopher (though I am the son of one), nor am I a disciple of “hard” philosophical idealism.  I actually wish that Novalis had used the term “Poetic Realism,” which I feel is a better description of his worldview.  But, alas, he was born into the ferment of early Idealism, so that is the lamp that he sees by. 

     So, what is “Magical Idealism” anyway?  For many years, especially in the English-speaking world, I think that the answer to that question was, “Novalis was a disciple of Fichte, and he believed that the world was nothing more than a construct of our mind, so we can discipline our imagination to change that world at will.”  Today, those who have studied Novalis in depth pretty universally reject that interpretation.  I discuss this a little here, but Frederick Beiser, in his book German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Harvard University Press, 2008), says it well:

    These Kantian and Fichtean elements of magical idealism have been one of the chief reasons for the Fichtean interpretation of Novalis’ philosophy.  It is important to see, however, that they do not exhaust the meaning of magical idealism, but express only one of its aspects, more specifically its subjective or idealist side.  For, true to Novalis’ attempt to find a system that would unify Spinoza and Fichte, there is also an objective or realistic side to magical idealism.  The purpose of magical idealism is to give us power over ourselves and nature, to be sure, but that power does not consist simply in being active, in creating nature and making it conform to our will.  Rather, it also consists in being passive, in learning how to integrate ourselves with nature and receive her stimuli…Control over our bodies means making them not only instruments to change the world, but also more sensitive organs to perceive it.  Novalis further explains that his ideal is where our inner and outer sense enjoy an interplay with one another, so that they work in perfect harmony.

    For Novalis, Magical Idealism does not simply mean conforming the outer world to our imagination, but perceiving the world more richly and deeply through imagination.  Novalis is not interested in denying nature, but understanding the richness of nature through the deepest aesthetic faculties we possess.  In this way reality is changed, but not into unreality.  Instead, it is enhanced and illumined, and hidden dimensions and qualities, including those that can be called magical because they are “occult” (that is, hidden), are revealed.  Just as the master enlightens the apprentices in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais by using a common pebble, the humblest artifacts of the world around us can reveal the magical nature of life through the alchemy of poetry.  This is the meaning of Magical Idealism, which I also call Poetic Realism.

     Now, to Paul Klee.  It is said that Hermann Hesse never met Paul Klee, but that they mutually admired each other’s work.  How fitting, then, that Hermann Hesse numbered Klee among his League of Journeyers to the East in Die Morgenlandfahrt.  If the journey to the East gave one the power to “experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange the inward and outward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre,” to use the words of Hilda Rosner’s translation of Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East, Picador, 2003), then Klee was most certainly a member of that journey.  Every time I have viewed Klee’s work it has had the same effect on me, an effect that is a marvelous example of Magical Idealism.  After viewing Klee’s work, the world is different; I perceive common things--houses, mountains, buildings, leaves, birds, the sun (I could go on and on) differently.  Everything takes on a freshness, a wonder that must be akin to what a baby feels upon seeing the world for the first time.  I have had this experience after other artistic (and literary) encounters, but rarely has it been as evident and powerful as it is with Paul Klee’s work.  I would like to mention, in closing, that I have always thought it very fitting that the Archipelago Books translation of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Novices of Sais, Novalis, tr. Ralph Manheim, 2005) is illustrated with drawings by Paul Klee, as it brings the theorist of Magical Idealism and an artist whose work embodies it together in a wonderful harmony.