Mental Illness as Irony: Hegel's Diagnosis of Novalis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/stheg.10.2024.17808Keywords:
Early German RomanticismAbstract
Hegel reads the poet Novalis as an expression of terminal irony, a pathological case of Gemüt, where the conscious mind is alienated from reality and turns its negativity inwards on the contents of its own natural soul. The condition of self-feeling, presented in Hegel’s “Anthropology”, is a self-consumption that manifests itself somatically in the physical disease (consumption) from which Novalis dies. The poet’s literary production represents a pathological fixation that impedes the dynamic organicity of Hegelian Science. As such, Novalis’s mental illness and death constitute an expression of romantic irony and an ongoing threat to Hegel’s philosophy.
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Works by Hegel:
G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden [Werke, followed by volume and page numbers], Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.
Other works:
Behler, Ernst, “Fr.Schlegel und Hegel”, Hegel-Studien, vol.2, 1963.
Hirsch, Emmanuel, “Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phänomenologie”, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistgeschichte, vol.2,
Norman, Judith, “Hegel and the Romantics”, in Stephen Houlgate, Hegel and the Arts. Indiana: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
Pöggeler, Otto, Hegels Kritik der Romantik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998 [1956].
Reid, Jeffrey, G.W. F. Hegel, L’ironie romantique : Compte rendu hégélien des écrits posthumes et correspondance de K.W.F. Solger. Paris: Vrin, 1997.
Reid, Jeffrey, “Hegel on Schleiermacher and Postmodernity”, Clio, 32,4 (Summer 2003)
Reid, Jeffrey, “How the Dreaming Soul Became the Feeling Soul, Between the 1827 and 1830 Editions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Empirical Psychology and the Late Enlightenment”, in David S. Stern (ed.), Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Albany: SUNY Press, 2013.
Reid, Jeffrey, The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Reid, Jeffrey, “Hegel’s Critique of Romantic Irony” in Elizabeth Millan Brusslan and Judith Norman (eds.), Brill’s Companion to German Romantic Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Von der Luft, Eric, Hegel, Hinrichs and Schleiermacher on Feeling and Religion. Queenston: Mellen, 1987.
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