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Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel disagreed with Fichte, because for them philosophy was a never-ending process of thinking about thinking itself. It was an infinite reflection upon self-reflection.
Novalis wanted to collect information from all disciplines and subject areas, but unlike the Encyclopédie’s alphabetically ordered entries, his aim was to unite everything.
Why dream of travels through the universe when the universe was within us, Novalis wrote elsewhere, ‘inwards runs the mysterious path’.
They wanted to romanticise the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole. They were talking about the bond between art and life, between the individual and society, between humankind and nature.
Unlike Fichte, Schelling did not declare the external world simply as a non-Ich. Instead, he explained that nature and the Ich were an interconnected whole.
Where Fichte’s Ich was shaped by its opposition to the non-Ich, Schelling believed that the self and nature were identical.
As Schelling put it: ‘Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.’
the young Romantics began to feel a deep sense of connection to the world around them. They wanted to see the world through the lens of their own selves. Instead of just visiting museums and cities, this new generation scrambled into caves, slept in forests and hiked up mountains to be in nature. They wanted to feel rather than observe what they were seeing. They wanted to discover themselves in nature and ‘to be one with everything living’,
Kant had claimed that a woman’s only purpose was the ‘preservation of the species’ and to entertain her husband.
Goethe had always believed that the process of gaining knowledge – Erkenntnis[*1] – came through direct observation. Most idealists, including Fichte, rejected this idea and insisted that all knowledge of reality originated in the mind. But not Schelling. He was an idealist who believed that ‘absolutely all of our knowledge originates in experience’.
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie had opened a door to a world in which everything – from gravity, magnetism and light to plants, animals and humans – was connected.
Schelling said, art was so much more. Because we’re part of nature, an artwork produced by us is actually a reflection of nature.
By giving art a leading role, Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism became the philosophical underpinning of Romanticism.
they embraced spirituality as part of the greater romantic project. Their new interest was about injecting feelings, imagination and beauty into an increasingly materialistic world. This was not a search for God but a search for themselves as part of the universe.
Fichte had become interested in what he called the ‘national self’. Until France’s decisive victory, the Ich-experience had been the lens through which the friends in Jena had experienced reality. Now, Fichte also paved the way for a bigger Ich – the Ich of a nation. This was a dangerous idea, and one that would be exploited in Germany in the future.
‘The most wonderful phenomenon, the eternal fact, is our own existence,’ Novalis wrote in 1797. Life’s most important task was to grasp the self because ‘without perfect self-understanding we will never learn truly to understand others’. Let
