The German Romantic movement was a literary and philosophical movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romantics, much like their English counterparts, valued spontaneity and naturalness, in part as a reaction to the beginning loss of the natural world due to industrialisation and urbanisation. Here we look at Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772–1801), who is one of the more poetic and mystical German Romantics.
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Here’s an excerpt from Novalis, a German Romantic philosopher and writer of the late 18th century (translation © 2008 by Douglas Robertson, found here):
Mankind travels along manifold pathways. He who pursues and compares them will perceive the emergence of certain strange figures; figures that appear to be inscribed in that massive tome composed in cipher that one everywhere and in everything beholds: on wings, eggshells, in clouds, in the snow, in crystalline and stone formations, in freezing waters, on the skins and in the bowels of mountain-ranges, of plants, beasts, people, in the stars of the heavens, in contiguous and expansive panes of pitch and glass, in the clustering of iron filings around the magnet (…) In these one may glimpse an intimation of the key to this wondrous text, its very grammar-book (…) He [our teacher] would behold the stars and plot their courses and positions in the sand. He would gaze into the celestial sea, never tiring of contemplating its movements, its clouds, its lights. He would collect rocks, flowers, beetles of all species, and array them in manifold sequences and combinations. He would keep a keen eye on both men and beasts and sit on the seashore searching for shellfish. He would eavesdrop attentively on his own thoughts and emotions.
This is a long and demanding read. But it is easy to see how its view of the world of the German Romantic movement differs from what we, today, call science: wings, egg-shells, clouds, snow, stone formations, freezing waters, skin and bowels of plants, beasts and people: these are all just a code, a cipher, and if one knows how to see, he will be able to understand the ‘wondrous text,’ its ‘grammar-book’. He will be able to read nature, to understand her language, as easily as one reads a book.
One could perhaps argue that this precisely is what science does. Do physics and chemistry not give us a language, the language of atoms, the grammar of molecules, with which we can describe wings, egg-shells and clouds all at once? Does physics not give us the formulas that describe the forces that act on wings, on egg-shells and on clouds alike, and that make them move and behave as they do?
There seem to be crucial differences.
First, notice that the things described never lose their individuality. Open a chemistry book, and you will not find any wings and egg-shells and rocks in it. After the phenomena …
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