Lyrical feeling: Novalis' anthropology of the senses.(Critical essay)

SCHOLARS HAVE RECENTLY BEGUN TO RECONSIDER KANT'S PHILOSOPHICAL project, and the Enlightenment project for which it often stands, as "one of bridging, not just sounding the abyss of dualism between reason and nature." (1) And, as Immanuel Kant writes in his Logic, to consider the unity of man is to ask "What is man?"--a question he assigns to anthropology. (2) More than an abstract philosophical problem, anthropology emerges as a discipline in the second half of the eighteenth century when disparate inquiries--from medicine and biology to literature and philosophy--converge around the possibility of a science of the "whole of man," a science that hoped to redress modernity's estrangement of man from himself, others and nature. Already in 1800, however, the German professor of history and political philosophy Karl Heinrich Ludwig Politz claimed in his Populare Anthropologie that this emergent science of man had entered a "state of crisis." (3) In Germany at least, anthropology's eclecticism gave rise to debates about the proper limits and disciplinary identity of a "science of man." In his Anthropologie fur Arzte und Weltweise (1772), Ernst Platner, professor of medicine in Leipzig, had defined anthropology as a medical discourse concerned primarily with man as a natural being. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a series of anthropologies concerned with man as a moral being capable of setting his own purposes had emerged. In 1794, Carl Christian Schmid, for example, one of the most devoted Kantians in 1790s Jena, described his own "teleological anthropology" as concerned with man's ability to determine himself through freedom. (4) In his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), Kant similarly described the so-called crisis in anthropology as a decision between a physiological anthropology that considers what nature "makes" of man and a pragmatic anthropology that considers what man as a free being can and should make of himself (K 7: 122). The very modality of Kant's formulation--the factuality of "makes" [macht] versus the normativity of "should" [soll]--condenses and foregrounds the central concerns of anthropological discourse around 1800.

While recent scholarship, especially in Germany, has shown an increasing tendency to emphasize the anthropological orientation of the eighteenth century in general, (5) scholars have only recently begun to consider the plurality of eighteenth-century anthropologies or, more precisely, the tension between a Platnerian medical anthropology, on the one hand, (6) and the emergence toward the end of the century of a more normative or cultural-philosophical anthropology, on the other hand. (7) As Jorn Garber and Heinz Thomas put it in one of the first books to take up these concerns, Between Empiricalization and Constructivism: Anthropology in the Eighteenth Century, eighteenth-century anthropology moves between the two poles of "physis and norm" (vii). (8) Within this paradigm, the now-prevailing characterization of eighteenth-century anthropology as primarily a medical discourse is limited, because concerns with the physical body of man were increasingly interwoven with concerns regarding the cultures of man. This intersection of anthropologies finds a clear expression in 1795 when Wilhelm yon Humboldt developed a plan for a comparative cultural anthropology that takes physiological methods of comparison as a model, a model that his anatomical studies in Jena with Goethe and his brother Alexander yon Humboldt in 1794 made all the more conceivable. (9)

In a chiasmic crossing of the normative and medical forms of anthropology, the early German Romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, adds a third question to anthropology's disciplinary concerns: what does man as natural being make of man? This chiasmic reformulation of Kant's distinction between nature and rational norm highlights what for the early Romantics is the fundamental problem of anthropology: the implication of man as his own object of study. With the rise of the life sciences and the subsequent naturalization of the human body during the eighteenth century, rational man becomes part of and in part nature. (10) At the juncture of a Kantian critical philosophy and the emergent life sciences, Novalis reformulates Kant's dualistic division of anthropology by turning anthropology back on itself in a recursive act that asks: if nature determines man and man forms himself as a natural being, thereby forming nature, how can anthropology account for these processes of mutual formation that always fold back upon themselves? How can Romanticism account for both the distinctions and non-distinctions of man and nature? (11) In this sense, Novalis' romantic anthropology is concerned less with the themes often associated with anthropology--racial difference, comparative ethnology or travel--and more with the structural problem of man's relating to man as man, a problem that, as we will see, has perhaps surprising ethical implications. While devoting the occasional entry in his encyclopedic Das Allgemeine Brouillon to "Anthropo[logie]," (12) alluding to Kant's Anthropologie (N 3: 457) and Platner's Anthropologie fur Aerzte und Weltweise (N 3: 356), (13) Novalis does not explicitly discuss "anthropology" as a discipline; instead, he intimates an anthropological form of knowledge that acknowledges both man's material character--the body of man as a material given--and his rational character--the productive potential of reason. This double acknowledgement suggests an anthropology that wavers between the normative anticipation of a pragmatic anthropology and the physiological gaze of a medical anthropology.

This double character of anthropology is nowhere more evident than in Novalis' conceptualization of sensibility. In this essay, I consider how Novalis develops these questions concerning the relationship of the senses, reason and the body in terms of a broader theory of modernity. By redefining sensibility so as to undo oppositions of nature and culture, physis and norm, Novalis' alternative anthropology is an ethical response to what he considers modernity's fragmentation of sensibility and man in general. I begin this essay by considering the perplexing formulations of sensual experience in Novalis' most famous poem "Hymns to the Night" [Hymnen an die Nacht]. From these stylistic observations, I argue that these odd formulations respond to two main problems related to the fragmenting effect of modernity: the commercium mentis et corporis or mind-body problem and the famous question posed to John Locke by the Irish physician Molyneux concerning the relationship of the senses to each other and reason, a question that Michel Foucault has termed one of the great "mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth-century had wished to base its beginning." (14) I then show how the poem's response to these broader problems of modernity crystallizes around Novalis' concept of attention [Aufmerksamkeit] and its corollary, imagination, which figures sensibility and reason as fundamentally intertwined.

Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" is often read as a lustful hymn to death, an abnegation of the body or a Weltflucht. (15) Reading the poem as a wish for a transcendence of the body, many critiques have failed to account for the very bodily figures and images of the poem. In what follows, I attend to the poem's odd and somewhat perplexing figurations of sensual experience. As we will see, these figurations cannot be easily explained by modern or Enlightenment paradigms of perception. The first hymn opens by suggesting an equivalence between life and sensibility:

 
   What living, sentient thing loves not above all wondrous 
   appearances of the widespread space around him, the most joyful 
   light--with its colors, rays and waves; its gentle presence, as 
   waking day. As life's most inner soul it is breathed by the 
   giant-world of the restless stars, and swims dancing in its blue 
   flood--the glittering, ever resting stone, the sensuous sucking 
   plant, and the wild, burning and many formed animal--but above all 
   the splendid stranger with sense-filled eyes, with gliding gate, 
   and the tenderly-closed, rich-toned lips. (16) 

What is this sensibility equated here with life? The reference to light seems to tie light with vision and, perhaps, reduce sensibility as such to an ocular faculty. But, this sensibility has a much broader semantic field. The giant-world, the stone, the plant, the beast "breathe" the light. And, the "stranger," with its "sense-filled eyes" and "tenderly closed tone-filled lips," senses the light in its "gentle presence." Things from stones to strangers engage the light with organs not just of vision but of tactility. When the "stranger" breathes the light, it inhales the light; it consumes it; it takes it into its body. The tactility of the experience is reiterated as the eyes of the stranger, those traditional organs of vision, are complemented by "tender lips." The light passes over and upon the body of the stranger. The descriptions of synasthesia (feeling light) complicate expected sensual pairs like light-vision, expectations based on a traditional Enlightenment paradigm of the senses that associates light with vision and knowledge. The differentiation of the senses within this paradigm implies a hierarchy of the senses as well as tends to privilege vision. (17) Sensual experiences are fused so that the oppositions presumed to guide the poem--light-night, vision-nonvision--are disrupted. In this first hymn, light as a metaphor exceeds the Enlightenment imbrication of knowledge and vision. Registered through an array of senses, light marks the confusion of traditional sense hierarchies and intimates a total sensual experience.