I.1 German Romanticism and the Dethroned Self

Over the past fifty years, much philosophical-political reflection has been devoted to the concept of the ‘subject’, highlighting the logic of power it implies. What has been overlooked, unfortunately, is that one of the most interesting chapters in the history of a political interpretation of the ‘self’ is represented by Early German Romanticism. Indeed, through their original elaboration of Leibniz’s, Spinoza’s, Herder’s, and Goethe’s philosophy (and their conception of nature), the German Romantics were able to elaborate a philosophical-political framework where the subjectivity is not the sovereign in a power relationship with nature and others: they were part of a tradition that narrates a different story from that focused on the genealogy of what is commonly called the ‘modern subject’. Because of the Romantic idea of a subjectivity as radically and originally entangled to (and even as constituted by) relationships, the self is not crowned with the modern idea of autonomy.

The thesis underlying this book is that German Romanticism presents an idea of self that does not correspond to the modern sovereign subject. The self flourishes in a natural, historical, and social context, within a mesh of relationships and natural forces that constitute her and on which she depends and cannot impose her own categories or will. Nevertheless, she can establish a cognitive relationship to the outside world and negotiate a space for freedom. This is what in this book will be called the ‘Romantic Self’. As hinted at by this Introduction’s epigraph, that subject may be defective, but it is precisely for her imperfection that we can pin on her our hopes for a more harmonious relationship with nature, avoiding passivity and resignation in the face of social and environmental upheavals.

The relational and dependent essence of the subjectivity in Romanticism is strongly connected to the Romantics’ philosophy of nature and to the place they think the human being plays in it: not the master of the natural realm but rather an integral part of it, the human self is not defined by a radical difference that distinguishes her from the other creatures. For the Romantics, the human being is part of nature and not its sovereign.

The refusal of a strong autonomy (in the sense of a self-legislation that pretends to be independent from any external factor and influence) underlying the Romantic conception of the human/nature relationship does not only lead to a specific anthropology or psychology but also to a peculiar political philosophy, where the relationships have a key role in the definition of the individuality, the plurality of institutions counteracts against the centralisation of the state, and freedom is seen as a creative force rather than the capacity of self-legislation. And despite the deep inter-dependency proper to the subjectivity that makes it impossible to think of history and society as the stage where the self imposes her will and categories, it is still possible for the human being to imagine a better future and to have an agency that will improve her social conditions.

This book will show that Romanticism is a chapter in a political-philosophical tradition that contests the idea of the subject as autonomous and sovereign over nature and history. But that critique is not launched in an attempt to eliminate the subject tout court. What this tradition questions is the claim to sovereignty on the subject’s behalf. What remains of the concept of the subject after the elimination of sovereignty will be shown in the following sections and chapters.

I.2 The Subject, Nature, and Power

Kant’s Copernican Revolution was a result of the modern conception of the self, and autonomy was its banner. Capable of imposing the laws of her own practical reason on herself without external influence, the Kantian subject is autonomous and her own sovereign. Autonomy is manifested in ethics and politics, so that pure reason can operate in the practical sphere, independent of external influences such as inclinations and desires.Footnote ¹ Any entity unable to strive towards such autonomy is nothing more than a merely material entity (Ak. VI: 223).

This modern subject is therefore an I whose particularities correspond to those of modern sovereignty and its self-reflective movement.Footnote ² She is able to give herself her own laws of behaviour, but she is also the basis of knowledge and certainty. The subject, certain of herself, is the custodian of the categories that determine the true, the just, and the good.

By making the self the result of relationships that precede her distance from the object, the Romantics delegitimise the modern pretention to call her sovereign. This shift from the theory of knowledge to political thought should not surprise us: as environmental philosophy since the 1980s has also demonstrated, a power relationship is embedded in the cognitive bond between subject and object.Footnote ³

The critique of this power relationship has the underlying anthropological assumption that subjectivity is not opposed to nature. For the Romantics, indeed, the self is part of it and any claim of mastery on it is destined to fail. The individuality itself is for the Romantics the result of natural forces. And because of this specific relationship with nature, one of the key concepts in the modern political thought should be reformulated: freedom.

The freedom–autonomy couple that is knotted and gathered within the concept of the sovereign subject makes it insurmountably different from the object, which – not enjoying the reflexive structure of the subject – cannot be deemed free. Freedom, understood as self-founding rational autonomy, is conceived in opposition to nature.Footnote ⁴ This opposition entails a view of nature as the object of exertion of human freedom, which is exercised as much in the shaping of the self as in the manipulation of reality external to her.

It was to be a Kant disciple, namely Fichte, who would formulate this relationship between subject and nature most clearly, portraying the dominion of the self-founding subject over the object determined by necessary laws.Footnote ⁵ Paragraph 11 of the third lecture of The Vocation of the Scholar is particularly explicit:

The Romantic distance from the modern idea of freedom that derives from the Romantics’ philosophy of nature also explains the role played by the self in history in the Romantic conception. The French Revolution, and above all the modern natural law theories that were used to justify and encourage it, affirmed the need to establish a new social and political order based on the rationality present in every human being. For modern jus naturale, the societal order does not flow from the norms transmitted by custom or from laws dictated to a king by God but rather from the rationality that each subject possesses. This can (and must) impose on history a (more or less sudden) transformation that progressively realises the rational laws that the subject finds in herself. And on this basis, the revolutionary transformation gets its legitimisation: the imposition on historical reality of the rational order that the subject derives autonomously – that is, solely on the basis of her own reason and not yielding to influences by history – is considered justified. The grounds for this justification lie in every human being, in every consciousness: the imposition of the rationality of the natural law on society and the state corresponds to the affirmation of the self – the subject – as sovereign.Footnote ⁶ This subject imposes herself on history, and traditions that shape the community in the same way she imposes herself on nature.

The deep influence of nature and society on the subjectivity becomes particularly evident when it comes to the concept of Geschlecht (‘sex’ or ‘gender’). It is here, indeed, that the Romantic philosophers ask themselves how nature and society determine individuality. Moreover, because of this conception of the self, the Romantic philosophy can shed light on those subjectivities who particularly suffered from the influence of societal impositions. Through the words of the women philosophers of German Romanticism dedicated to the concept of the self and in particular on the peculiarities of women’s subjectivity, a mild form of autonomy that allows an agency of the individual emerges: despite the mesh of relations and influences in which the self is entangled, the women Romantic philosophers think a (mild) form of autonomy is still possible. The discrepancy between what the male authors of Romanticism wrote about women and their role within society, nature, and philosophy, on the one hand, and what women themselves wrote about subjectivity will then be considered.Footnote ⁷

I.3 Subjectivity and Politics in Romanticism: Differing Interpretations

German Romanticism emerged shortly after the French Revolution and the publication of Kant’s three Critiques, and it was not immune to the radical transformation that shook European thought as it affirmed the modern sovereign subject. The interpreters of Romanticism did not take long to recognise this. Yet the analyses of ‘the subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ in German Romanticism, important as they were, focused heavily on gnoseological aspects and left out the political dimension of these concepts. Over time, the most disparate political positions have been attributed to Romanticism, while some thinkers have argued that the Romantic subject has no relation to politics whatsoever. Let us consider in turn three groups that can be discerned among these interpretations.

(1) Dieter Henrich, one of the founders of the Heidelberg School, which investigated the structures of self-consciousness, unsurprisingly based his hypothesis of the revaluation of subjectivity (following Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s anti-subjectivism) on Fichte’s and Hölderlin’s philosophies.Footnote ⁸ Manfred Frank, another member of the school, has become one of the leading experts on German Romanticism.Footnote ⁹ His writings echo the view already held by Henrich whereby consciousness does not arise out of a reflective moment; on the contrary, the reflexive inwards turn presupposes consciousness.Footnote ¹⁰ For Frank, however, another figure from the Romantic era becomes central, namely Novalis. It was on Novalis’ Fichte Studies that Frank drew in developing his own conception of the subject and self-consciousness in order to show the necessary openness and inclination of the I to Being and the Absolute.Footnote ¹¹

Frank’s construal of the relationship between the subject and the Absolute was the target of one of the most significant criticisms of his reading of Romanticism, namely that put forward by Frederick C. Beiser.Footnote ¹² Beiser rejects the idea that ‘the Absolute is pure being, a ground of consciousness transcending all consciousness’ (Reference Beiser2002: 354). For the Romantics, he says, the Absolute is an organism and the subject is an integral part of it – she is conditioned by it and conditions it in turn. She can acquire knowledge of it – non-discursive knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless – through aesthetic experience (373).Footnote ¹³

Insofar as he focuses on epistemology and gnoseology, there is one aspect of Romantic philosophy that Frank overlooks: its political nature. On the contrary, Beiser writes that Romantic ideals are primarily ethical and political (Reference Beiser2006: 24).Footnote ¹⁴ As the present book will show, the Romantic gnoseology goes hand in hand with a specific political idea of the subject.Footnote ¹⁵

(2) Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, there have been multiple readings of the relationship between Romanticism and politics. The most diverse political positions and thinkers have been associated with Romanticism, often with little historical-conceptual precision: liberalism;Footnote ¹⁶ conservatism;Footnote ¹⁷ revolutionariesFootnote ¹⁸ and republicansFootnote ¹⁹; and finally the ideology that in the twentieth century was crystallised in National Socialism.Footnote ²⁰ This seems to be partly a result of the inherent vagueness of the notion of Romanticism.Footnote ²¹ In a single study, Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (Reference Löwy and Sayre2001) group together thinkers as different as Rosa Luxemburg and Ferdinand Tönnies under the Romantic umbrella. Ironically, in these reconstructions, a detailed consideration of the authors who coined the term ‘Romanticism’ is conspicuously absent.

(3) Among the many lines of interpretation of Romantic political philosophy offered over the years, one in particular reckons with the issue of subjectivity, ascribing it special relevance for the comprehension of Romanticism. It was inaugurated by HegelFootnote ²² and later developed by Carl Schmitt (in his Political Romanticism, 1919),Footnote ²³ with important repercussions for the reception of Romanticism in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Schmitt’s interpretation, in particular, pivots around a paradox whereby the political character of Romanticism consists in the apolitical nature of the subjectivity it conceived.

It has already been shown in recent years that the real polemical target of Schmitt’s Politische Romantik was not the Romantics but certain political scientists among Schmitt’s contemporaries, both liberal and conservative, whom he wanted to discredit to emphasise his own National Socialist position.Footnote ²⁴ Insisting on a cultural affinity between those thinkers and Romanticism – the movement Hegel had proclaimed apolitical already a century priorFootnote ²⁵ – was a swift way to achieve his aim.

Hegel certainly deserves credit for recognising the centrality of subjectivity to Romanticism – in particular, he saw in the Romantic that moment of formal subjectivity so crucial to the modern era. But he identified the Romantic subject with the ironist, a figure of pure negativity and subjectivity.Footnote ²⁶ In Hegel’s words, Romanticism is a ‘subjectivity which knows itself as supreme’ (GW XIV/1: 132, §140 / EPhR 180) – a merely abstract self-determination and free will; a dissolution of determinations and objectivity (HW XIII: 96–98).Footnote ²⁷ Hegel does not discern the signs that the Romantic subject has access to the sphere of law and institutions.Footnote ²⁸ The present book will shed light on that dimension.

I.4 The Romantic Self

Despite Henrich’s and Frank’s research on Romantic subjectivity, there is currently no study that challenges the idea that the Romantic concept of the subject can have no political relevance. The legacy of Hegel and Schmitt still reverberates today. In addition, the extensive reconstructions of the history of the notion of the subject and its immediate and unavoidable political dimension – for example, in the interpretations of Balibar and de Libera – do not address Romanticism.Footnote ²⁹ This lacuna is particularly evident in the references contemporary studies of post-colonialism,Footnote ³⁰ feminism,Footnote ³¹ and (especially) environmental philosophyFootnote ³² make to the German philosophy of Kant’s time (in particular Romanticism) in the pursuit of concepts and logics that might serve as alternatives to the dogmas of modern political philosophy.

To avoid the vagueness of the notion of Romanticism, I have chosen to restrict the analysis to authors who belonged to Early German Romanticism – Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, A. W. Schlegel, F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Sophie Mereau, Dorothea Veit, and Sophie Tieck – or who were closely connected to it – Franz von Baader, Johann W. Ritter, Sophie La Roche, Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina von Arnim, and others. Besides them, in order to shed new light on the debates these philosophers contributed to, some pages will also be dedicated to Hemsterhuis, Herder, Goethe, Kant, and Schelling.

This is the only way to maintain, within the scope of the book, the rigour necessary for an analysis of the key concepts along with a broader look at different positions that can be considered a constellation of different perspectives within a common framework.Footnote ³³ Some of the selected authors made up the famous Jena Romantic circle (or intensively collaborated with it, like Schleiermacher) whose intellectual vitality was generated by a continuous philosophical dialogue (‘symphilosophy’, i.e. philosophising together, as they called this steady exchange), through which they identified common problems and adopted similar approaches while maintaining their specific peculiarities. These authors have been chosen also because, although Romanticism would later expand beyond the borders of Germany to England, Italy, France, and the United States,Footnote ³⁴ it is in the Jena circle that we find the first Romantic response to Kant’s Copernican Revolution and, with that, the first outline of a ‘Romantic Self’. The authors discussed in this book who were not properly part of the Jena Romantic circle have been chosen because they belonged to a common discourse on subjectivity and nature and directly influenced the Early German Romantics. Through their consideration, it will then be possible to better comprehend the concepts and questions discussed in the Jena circle.

Over the course of the book’s four parts, it will be demonstrated that, contrary to Hegel’s and Schmitt’s interpretations, the Romantic conception of the subject was intrinsically political. Moreover, it will be shown that this political interpretation of the Romantic Self is dependent on the Romantic idea of the human/nature relationship, which excludes the mastery of the self over nature.

Part I (‘Sentimental, Rational, and Political Selves’) focuses on the relationship that Early German Romanticism saw between the cognitive faculties and politics. At the heart of the Romantic understanding of subjectivity lies an original view of the cognitive faculties that rejects the idea of rationality as an autonomous capacity detached from context. If we want to understand this theoretical shift, it is necessary to investigate the role played by feeling. Romanticism does not oppose feeling to reason; rather, its recognition of the importance of feeling leads it to reject the idea that reason subjugates objects of knowledge, which are instead taken to be in constant and mutual interaction with the subject. This part will show how the subject–object relationship thus conceived influenced the Romantic idea of social relations.

Part II (‘The Blossoming Self’) shows that the Romantics’ philosophy of nature is intertwined with their political philosophy, and must be considered if we are to gain an adequate understanding of the Romantic subjectivity. The concept of freedom is at the heart of these pages. It is a conception clearly distinct from that given within modern political doctrine, according to which the subject is sovereign and her freedom consists in autonomy. The Romantic Self, on the contrary, is the result of natural relations on which she cannot completely impose herself, and her freedom is a creative act that can in turn influence the context in which she is embedded. Romantic freedom does not, then, consist in the self’s imposing a form on an object and thus dominating it. Whereas in the modern concept of sovereignty the subject imposes an abstract order on things from above, the Romantic view emphasises instead the creative capacity of human beings to shape institutionsFootnote ³⁵ and communities through a constant interaction with the political relationships already existing between people and with nature.

Part III (‘The Utopian Self’) sheds new light on the relationship between the self and historical temporality. The Romantic Self is situated in a historical development and the cultural and political norms that have been sedimented over time. But this does not imply a conservative or reactionary political position. The telos of freedom for the Romantics is a utopian world. This part shows that utopia and the temporality it implies are consistent with a subject who is unable to impose a path on history dictated by her own will. As part of this explication, this part will look at Friedrich Schlegel’s use of the genealogical method, as well as the utopian perspective from which Novalis envisioned a new possible subject of history: humanity.

Romanticism proposed an original view of gender to which Part IV (‘The Romantic Self: Women and Gender’) is dedicated. It was a view that is consistent with the idea that the self is the result of a continuous negotiation within a mesh of social and natural relationships. Gender differences for the Romantics do not arise out of innate physical or spiritual factors but rather from education and social norms. Not only did the Romantic conception of the self grant women a space within the philosophical conversation (inconceivable for contemporaneous philosophers such as Hegel or Kant) but women philosophers themselves advocated for an idea of the subject as constructed in dialogue with others and with nature. Only in a harmonious relationship with the two can she achieve her own freedom.