Customer Reviews

The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism (Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)

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I have studied the period between Kant and Nietzsche both professionally, as a grad student (dissertation on Hegel) and as a continuing student, not a professional academic. And yet only recently, in the last five years or so has the work of the early German Romantics (EGR -- now a technical term) exerted its force in my thinking. This is not so surprising as the works of Novalis and Schlegel are only recently emerging in translation (and I admit being in need of translated works). I think it is high time that Manfred Frank's, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism be lowered in price and be given wide attention.
The book is written with a delightful flair that reveals Frank's excitement with the material. The combination of historical details with compact and focused philosophical discussions is just what is needed to launch a greater appreciation for this period. He is adept at bringing in the other side of the debate -- the works of the Speculative Idealists (Schelling, Hegel, Holderlin at the borderline) without muddying up the picture. He makes it strikingly clear what it is that the EGRs inaugurated: the mode of living generatively as part of the great flow of the universe's unfolding -- a living that reaches for the heights and depths, but can never attain an absolute end or constituted destination. This is the mode of living and doing creative work that beckons our era. And there it was, in full display, in acutely pointed fragments, in exquisitely poetic phrases at the turn of the 18th Century, 200 years ago.
I also enjoyed the academic polemics Frank leveled at Dieter Henrich -- another author on the period whose works I enjoy (and wish there was more of in English).
I deeply appreciate Franks' concentration on Novalis and Schlegel, both of whom are now far more vivid to me. But I await his treatment of Schleiermacher. The startling contributions of that thinker (who I think qualifies as a non-artist in the EGR ranks) are brought to light by Andrew Bowie in his "Aesthetics and subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche." (This is a long, involved, frustratingly verbose tome that is also necessary reading on this period.)
I recommend this book as a necessary companion to any study of this seminal flash of light in the long night of the human endeavor.