Frederick C. Beiser. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiii + 243 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-01180-9.
Reviewed by Derrick Miller (German Department, Grinnell College)
Published on H-German (June, 2005)
A Part Read Whole
If the joke that even German students prefer to read Kant in English is true, then they probably consult Frederick Beiser's writings alongside their translations, just as many of their Anglophone counterparts do. In this book, Beiser again makes use of his talent for rendering the arcana of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy readily approachable, this time turning his attention towards the circle around Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel from 1797 to 1802. He aims to counter what he considers prevalent misconceptions about the early romantics: they were neither harbingers of the postmodern, nor were they the portrait that Heine painted of Catholic converts and supporters of Metternich. Both of these views are, at their root, anachronistic. The first places too much stress on the affinity between romanticism and postmodernism, and the second mistakes late romanticism for the movement as a whole. Although intended as an introductory work, this book provokes and will stimulate debate well beyond undergraduate seminars.
In ten essays, Beiser argues that critical attention has narrowed upon the aesthetics, criticism, and literature of the early romantics to the exclusion of its ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, resulting in an inverted view of the movement as a whole. He faults deconstructionists in particular as they focus on the literature and rhetoric of early romanticism, while having only an "amateurish" understanding of its philosophical-historical context. And so Beiser sets his reading against the dominant tendency of romanticism scholarship of the past decades. Instead of the fracturing, fragmentation, and indeterminacy that such interpretations find, he offers romantic holism, repeating terms like wholeness, unity, and organic nature throughout his book. He justifies this reversal by invoking the Platonism of the early romantics, which could reconcile the universe's absolute order and the human mind's inability to ever grasp that order. Totalizing philosophical systems that mirrored the harmony of this order were, indeed, no longer possible, yet they remained necessary. System, no longer constitutive of knowledge, became a regulative idea instead. The construction of such systems was no longer possible, but the striving for such a system remained the sine qua non of philosophy. In similarly surprising moves, he locates the origin of romantic aesthetics not in Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft and Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, but in their own Naturphilosophie and their organic concept of nature, which wed Fichte and Spinoza.
Beiser denies aesthetics its primacy for the early romantics, and subordinates it to their ethical and political ends. Rather than a flight from politics, Beiser argues that the early romantics envisioned aesthetics as a tool to employ in the pursuit of Bildung and a republican form of government. He thus locates their politics in a continuum with Schiller, Herder, Humboldt and Wieland, neither reactionary nor radical, but reformist. This argument makes clear Beiser's approach to the perennial question of romanticism's relation to the Enlightenment, adding his voice to the growing chorus that emphasizes the connections between the two. He does not see romanticism as a simple reaction against or rupture from the Enlightenment. Instead, he goes so far as to call the early romantics the "Aufklrer of the 1790s" and the Athenaeum another Enlightenment journal, to the extent that they are committed to Bildung and radical criticism.
Despite these startling turns, much of Beiser's book has a restoration quality. Beiser sees his work as continuing the tradition of Rudolf Haym's Die romantische Schule from 1870, and he revisits controversies that have grown cold, such as the debate around Friedrich Schlegel's use of the term romantische Poesie in Athenaeumsfragment no. 116. Haym defined it as referring to the modern novel, while in 1916 Arthur Lovejoy raised the contention that it cannot do so, as it appears to refer to drama and the romance. In 1956 Hans Eichner settled the matter by showing that it refers to any literary form. Beiser returns to that debate and adds that Athenaeumsfragment no. 116 refers to any creative endeavor--all forms of literature, all the arts and sciences, and ultimately to the individual and to the state. Athenaeumsfragment no. 116 thus does more than mark Friedrich Schlegel's turn away from neoclassical literary models. It anticipates Novalis's call to romanticize the world and proves to be another instance of the considerable ethical and political ambitions of the early romantics.
Such theses are, of course, jarring. But, through the laying out of extensive context and careful argumentation, Beiser is able to make them seem comfortable and winning. Future writing on romanticism will want to take them into account. But if The Concept of Early German Romanticism has to be criticized today, I would mention that the title itself suggests what the book lacks. By drawing attention to the distinction between early and late romanticism, and by assigning that distinction a crucial function in his argument, Beiser leads the reader to wonder what brought about the change and what was its nature. How did the early romantics become the late romantics? How did they metamorphose from the critics of Fichte in their notebooks from 1795 through 1797 into his "loyal disciples?" How did the late romantics become recognizable in Heine's caricature? Maybe we readers can hope for a sequel, The Concept of Late German Romanticism. Like its predecessor, it would certainly be worth a read.
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Citation:
Derrick Miller. Review of Beiser, Frederick C., The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10662
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