Many works in the history of philosophy that focus on an intellectual relationship between various figures or schools of thought seek to dispel a congealed misunderstanding. One school of thought comes to prominence by doing battle against competing ones and putting them in its shade. Over time, each generation comes to know thinkers from the earlier ones mainly through the perspective of the victors, who were not always the most careful readers. Scholars of the history of philosophy work against this tendency by comparing the real thought of past figures to some received notions, showing for example that Hegel’s politics is not reducible to the post-war version propounded by British analytic philosophers. Much of the work on German Romanticism over the past few decades by scholars such as Frederick Beiser and Elizabeth Millán has used this method to rehabilitate the Romantics and given us a much deeper knowledge of these post-Kantian thinkers. These scholars and others have shown, for example, that the Romantics do not so much celebrate irrationality as develop a non-foundationalist epistemology.
Since it is Hegel who spread some of the most influential negative judgments of German Romantic philosophy, a book on Hegel and the Romantics would seem to stand before this task: either demonstrate the falsity of Hegel’s condemnation of the Romantics by comparing his statements to what the Romantics actually wrote, or defend Hegel’s critique as a valid one in light of our contemporary knowledge of the Romantics. Jeffrey Reid’s study assiduously avoids this kind of scholarly task. He acknowledges from the start that Hegel’s understanding of the Romantics was highly idiosyncratic, personal and lacking in textual understanding. But instead of working to correct this misunderstanding, it poses the question: What do his statements about the Romantics tell us about his own philosophy? What broader philosophical stakes are there in Hegel’s critique of Romantic irony?
Reid argues that Hegel’s polemic against the Romantics plays a central role in some of the main themes in Hegel’s thoughts. He did not merely reject and dismiss these thinkers as rivals. According to Reid, Hegel’s critique of the Romantic notion of irony contributed significantly to his conception of truth as objective. And he argues that Hegel’s critique of Romanticism actually stands in for his critique of the future direction of European civilization. He suggests that Hegel felt deeply threatened by the scandalous hedonism of Schlegel and the death-seeking nihilism of Novalis because he felt that modernity at large tended towards these outcomes. In the conclusion, Reid even argues that Hegel’s critique of the Romantics could serve as an indicator of what Hegel would have to say about current post-modern philosophy.
Reid provides a valuable scholarly contribution by weaving Hegel’s scattered statements on the Romantics into a coherent set of theses on what Hegel thought about Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher. In his treatment of Schlegel, for example, he connects Hegel’s critique of Schlegel’s notion of irony in the Phenomenology of Spirit with his moral revulsion at Schlegel’s writings on sexual mores. Hegel interprets Schlegel’s notion of irony as implying that the subject is able to disassociate itself from any binding objective content and dominate the object of knowledge with its wishes and fancies. Romantic epistemology does not begin from a deep examination of the object of cognition, but rather floats from object to object in a fanciful way based on subjective desire. According to Hegel, Schlegel’s novel Lucinde undermines the validity of traditional marriage by seducing women to think that subjective, erotic passion is more important than ethical duty. Reid pays close philosophical attention to the biting, even insulting terms that Hegel uses to interpret Schlegel and gives a philosophical content to terms such as ‘barbarity’, ‘bestiality’ and ‘vanity’ or ‘vanitization’, terms which might almost be dismissed as ad hominem invective. Hegel argues that Schlegel’s celebration of erotic passion as the essence of love is ‘bestial’ in the sense that it elevates animal feeling above rationality. And Hegel sees vanity or ‘vanitization’ (Vereitelung) as the disposition that results from Schlegel’s epistemic irony, because this free-floating attitude towards objectivity results in a silly, self-congratulatory attitude towards one’s own whims and wishes as a subject. Although one might question whether Hegel’s biting and personal attacks on Schlegel do justice to his philosophy, I find that Reid does an excellent job in showing how a coherent critique resides in Hegel’s polemic.
The subsequent chapters provide a similarly coherent vision of Hegel’s interpretations of Novalis and Schleiermacher. Reid reads Hegel’s treatment of yearning (Sehnsucht) in the Phenomenology as directed primarily at the figure of Novalis, whose most famous novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen concerns the protagonist’s search for a blue flower. Hegel argues that the posture of yearning idealized by Novalis culminates in mental illness. Yearning is a desire for another world that is free from the rules of the understanding. Because this desire lacks an object to be pursued, it is an empty desire, a desire for nothingness. This emptiness opens up a schism in the self, a split between the empirical self and the subject that desires nothingness. As Reid demonstrates, Hegel diagnoses this yearning as resulting in ‘pathology’, a split between the subject’s experience of the world and its empty desire, which prefigures his account of unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology. Thus, Novalis becomes an important figure in Hegel’s efforts to come to terms with mental illness, and the dialectic of yearning demonstrates a connection between Romanticism and nihilism.
Reid’s study devotes the least space to Hegel’s critique of Schleiermacher, despite the fact that this relationship was perhaps the biographically richest of the three. At the time when both Hegel and Schleiermacher lived in Berlin, they had a tense relationship as leaders of opposing intellectual movements. During the 1820s Hegel cultivated a well known polemic against Schleiermacher’s elevation of feeling to the supreme principle of theology. He famously argued that Schleiermacher’s opposition of understanding and feeling does not do justice to the way that Christianity represents a dialectical development out of the sphere of natural religion. Reid’s work focuses on Hegel’s reception of Schleiermacher during the Jena period, a confrontation coloured by his reading of the other Jena Romantics, Schlegel and Novalis. He emphasizes the parallels between Novalis’s objectless longing, Schlegel’s ironic art and Schleiermacher’s theology of feeling.
An interesting feature of the book is the presence of a few short intermezzos after each of the main sections and a coda at the end. In each of these chapters, Reid makes a broader survey of Hegel’s thought to show how Hegel’s polemical critique of the Romantic spills over into the development of larger themes in his philosophy. For example, in the intermezzo after the chapter on Schlegel, Reid traces the connections between Hegel’s critique of irony and his views on language and predication in the Phenomenology and Science of Logic.
Reid’s book culminates in two somewhat bold claims about the implications of Hegel’s critique of the Romantics. The first is that Hegel’s critique of the Romantics might serve as an indication of what Hegel would think of post-modern thinkers such as Baudrillard and Lyotard. Without any detailed treatment of specific post-modern thinkers, Reid argues that post-modern thinking, like that of the Romantics, combines the sceptical use of the understanding with a spirit of ironic detachment in a manner that would trouble Hegel.
Second, and on a related note, Reid argues that Hegel’s response to the Romantics demonstrates Hegel’s limited faith in the future of his own philosophical system and the progress of civilization. He writes that Hegel ‘saw himself living in a world whose absolute presuppositions were those of Romantic irony’ (7). Hegel regarded Romanticism, with its emphasis on scepticism, irony, detachment and immoral hedonism, not merely as a rival school of philosophy, or as a different philosophical method, but as a powerful symbol of the spirit of modern culture. Hegel’s method of exposition in texts such as the Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right seems to exude a faith in modern institutions and the progress of ethical ideals. Reid argues, however, that Hegel’s response to Romanticism suggests that he grasped the failure of modern culture to actually progress towards his ethical ideals. Similarly, a post-enlightenment culture defined by a sceptical use of the understanding could undermine the ethical institutions described by Hegel. ‘Our philosopher’, Reid writes, ‘would have seen himself living in a world threatened by a “new” reality, one engendered by Romantic irony and standing opposed to the world in which absolute spirit is supposed to take place’ (5). While I find this claim provocative, Reid provides little evidence for it. It is hard to imagine what form such evidence would take, but perhaps one might consider whether there are any parallels between Hegel’s critique of the Romantics and his critique of certain social institutions, such as democracy or free market capitalism, in the Philosophy of Right. It is by now an established point in Hegel scholarship that Hegel was critical of such institutions and did not actually regard the state of his time as the full embodiment of the rational. Moreover, there is by now a growing literature comparing both Hegel and the Romantics to certain trends in post-modern thinking.
Reid’s book ends with the somewhat paradoxical claim that Hegel’s response to the Romantics was both ‘justified and unfaithful’ (120). It was unfaithful because he did not have a good knowledge of the true depths of Romantic thinking, yet justified because Hegel was critiquing forces that are real aspects of modern culture, such as pernicious irony, moral relativism and nihilism. As said, Reid’s study provides a valuable service to Hegel scholarship in drawing together the scattered threads of Hegel’s response to Romanticism into a coherent set of critiques. Yet it might have profited from presenting more evidence for both of the strands of the ‘justified but unfaithful’ claim. That is, Reid might have shown more sensitivity to recent scholarship on Romanticism that demonstrates just how unjustified some of Hegel’s critiques are, and he might have provided more support for his claim that Hegel’s critique of Romanticism applies to either post-modern thinking or modern culture at large.
