The late eighteenth century German Romantic movement of universal poetry, pioneered by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others is inflected by a strain of Spinozist pantheism, which becomes key to its cosmic orientation. Nowhere is the Spinozist influence in Romantic universal poetry more obvious than in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion: Speeches to its Educated Despisers (1799), which recast religion as an absorptive experience of “intuition and feeling” of the universe in explicit homage to Spinoza. Though often treated as marginal in the scholarship on early Romantic aesthetics, these speeches constitute Schleiermacher’s most meaningful contribution to the movement, and serve as inspiration, both formally and philosophically, for Novalis’s much more canonical Christianity, or Europe (1800).
This paper turns to a key scene of cosmic absorption in Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion (the so-called “nuptial scene” of the second speech), considering how it constructs representation – and attention – as aesthetic and philosophical problems. While Schleiermacher renders the experience of union with the universe through a lush succession of erotic images, he simultaneously laments the inarticulability of religious feeling, which he conceives of as immediate, ecstatic, and even pre-conscious “feeling.” He thus constructs an opposition between the two central affects of his definition of religion. In the past, this internal rhetorical and conceptual tension has been interpreted as a philosophical allegory for the fall of immediate religious feeling into reflective (visual) non-identity, and thus as an implicit critique of Fichte’s philosophy of absolute identity, which is based in intellectual intuition (e.g. Hermann Timm, Die heilige Revolution). While Schleiermacher’s philosophical critique of Fichte is correctly diagnosed, my paper challenges the conclusion that is frequently drawn from this: that religious experience of the Universum is therefore incommunicable, and merely deconstructs Fichtean intellectual intuition. As speeches intending to persuade, even convert their listeners, Schleiermacher’s On Religion serves to initiate, even seduce its auditors into his romantic religion, and not to undermine its own rhetorical premise. Attending to the speeches’ aesthetic strategies (and specifically the sort of aesthetic reception they aim to produce) is a necessary step to understanding Schleiermacher’s definition of religious experience as intuition and feeling of the universe.
To develop a better understanding of Schleiermacher’s aesthetics of intuition and feeling, we can turn to late eighteenth century art criticism and the early Romantic cult of art worship that developed around Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In the late eighteenth century, and especially in Romanticism, affective responses to art were becoming increasingly uncontrollable and excessive as critics sought for different means to “animate” works of art for an increasing bourgeois viewership. This paper considers these excessive affects as problems of attention, analyzing how they make their way into Schleiermacher’s speeches and inspire a new aesthetic program of cosmic absorption.
Two problems of attention rise to prominence in late eighteenth century art criticism. On the one hand, attention tends to become excessive, even idolatrous. This idolatrous form of attention is exemplified by the cult of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (encouraged by Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and A.W. Schlegel), and by the myth of Pygmalion, valorized in Johann Gottfried Herder’s essay on sculpture. While transgressive to the ontological status of art, the excessive attention lavished on Madonnas and Venuses seems to prove that art is capable of evoking tremendous feeling in viewers, translating vision into emotion and tactility. This is why it becomes valorized in Romanticism, despite its contradiction of Kantian aesthetic disinterest. On the other hand, as Hans Belting has argued in The Invisible Masterpiece, the Romantic mythologization of art risked distracting attention from the works themselves: with the advent of Romantic art writing, attention to works was often converted into an increasingly objectless, immaterial imagination. In many cases, e.g. in the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, whom Schleiermacher cites in his speeches, the problem of distraction coexists with that of idolatry: aesthetic affects seem to vacillate from one side to the other.
These twin problems of attention are central to the Romantic project of universal poetry and its engagement with art and religion. Schleiermacher takes up these problems in order to develop an aesthetic conception of Romantic religion. Turning to the “nuptial scene” of Schleiermacher’s second speech in On Religion, I demonstrate that both excessive, idolatrous attention and imaginative distraction become positive means of ascent toward an experience of religious-erotic cosmic absorption that has no specific object because it participates in the universe’s endlessly proliferative process of self-representation. That is to say, Schleiermacher’s turn to the universe (which he analogizes to an endless gallery of artworks) rather than to a specific work of art) allows him to overcome the twin problems of idolatry and distraction; indeed, the ultimate goal of the speeches is to overcome the distinction between reality and art. Both “reality” and “art” are mediations of a greater and ungraspable cosmic whole, which includes the viewer (who now must simply learn to participate in this whole). As I argue, Schleiermacher hereby also fundamentally redefines the nature of Anschauung (intuition) from a separating and objectifying faculty, to one that is participatory and imbricated with touch; in parallel to this, he portrays “image” and “reality” (and with them, subject and object) as two interchangeable relata in a more universal process of cosmic mediation that transcends these distinctions.
Through its close reading and aesthetic genealogy of Schleiermacher’s aesthetic strategies for representing an experience of cosmic absorption, this paper contributes a theorization of the aesthetics of religious experience, in conversation with such recent works as Niklaus Largier’s Figures of Possibility (2022). While Largier is primarily interested in mystical thinkers, this paper opens the possibility for understanding late eighteenth-century Christian pantheism as engaged in similar aesthetic mediations of religious experience. Further, this paper contributes to the understanding of late eighteenth-century and especially Romantic aesthetics in relation to the philosophical movements of the time (most prominently Fichte- and Spinoza-reception), revising the widespread intellectual-historical understanding of Romanticism as an aesthetic mediation of the problems of idealist philosophy (e.g. the school of thought associated with Manfred Frank).
This paper situates Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 speeches On Religion within the aesthetic framework of Romantic universal poetry. While Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as “intuition and feeling” of the universe has typically been read as a critique of Fichtean intellectual intuition, these affects also play an important role in late Enlightenment and early Romantic art criticism, where they become associated with problems of attention and imagination. In On Religion, Schleiermacher transforms two key problems of attention that emerge at this time: 1) a Pygmalion-like attentive overinvestment, which seeks to animate, even copulate with the work of art, and 2) the Romantic problem of a distracted, excessive imagination that ignores the artwork. For Schleiermacher, both excessive attention and distraction – paired together – become positive means of ascent toward an experience of religious-erotic cosmic absorption that has no specific object because it participates in the universe’s endlessly proliferative process of self-representation.