Notes for a

Romantic Encyclopaedia
SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Rodolphe Gasché, editor

 Notes for a
Romantic Encyclopaedia

Das Allgemeine Brouillon

Novalis

Translated, Edited,
and with an Introduction by
David W. Wood

State University of New York Press

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2007 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Novalis, 1772–1801.
[Allgemeine Brouillon. English]
Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia : Das Allgemeine Brouillon / Novalis ;
translated, edited, and with an introduction by David W. Wood.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, intersections: philosophy and critical theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Translation of: Das Allgemeine Brouillon : Materialien zur Enzyklopäedistik
1798/99.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6973-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Knowledge, Theory of—
Early works to 1800. 2. Science—Early works to 1800. 3. Romanticism—Germany.
I. Wood, David W., 1968– II. Title. III. Series: Intersections (Albany, N.Y.)

BD153.N68 2007
033'.1—dc22 2006014434

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents


Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

Text by Novalis:
Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia 1

Appendix:
Extracts from the Freiberg Natural Scientific Studies (1798/99) 191

Notes to Introduction 223

Notes to Text by Novalis 231

Notes to Appendix 265

Select Bibliography 269

Index 275

v
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 Acknowledgments


Like the original manuscript of Novalis’s Encyclopaedia, which for many years
traveled the world in the hands of private collectors (and was therefore “lost to
scholarship”), this translation has likewise gone on its own scattered wanderings
in the last seven years. From the sun-scorched Australian outback to the small
German university town of Erlangen, from the vibrant metropolis of modern
Dublin to the eternal cultural capital that is Paris, both this English text and I
have consequently benefited from the kindness of countless people.
I would especially like to thank the following friends and colleagues for
their unstinting support and assistance. Their numerous scholarly suggestions
and penetrating comments have infinitely improved my translation:
Emeritus Professor Gerhard Schulz (University of Melbourne), who
greatly encouraged me from the very beginning of the enterprise and painstak-
ingly read through the entire translation and introduction.
Professor Dennis Mahoney (University of Vermont), Professor Karl
Ameriks (University of Notre Dame), Professor John Neubauer (University of
Amsterdam), Dr. Brian O’Connor (University College Dublin), Dr. Olivier
Schefer (University of Paris), Dr. Celeste Lovette (University of Savannah), and
Niall Keane (University of Leuven), all generously read portions of the transla-
tion and introduction.
Hans-Joachim Morcinietz and the Morcinietz family, for their genuine
warmth and hospitality during my stays in Oberwiederstedt, Germany.
Dr. Gabriele Rommel and family, and all the staff at the Novalis Museum
and Research Centre at the Schloss Oberwiederstedt, for their wonderful friend-
liness and helpfulness concerning all things Novalis.
Professor Dr. Renate Moering and Hans Grüters of the Freie Deutsche
Hochstift in Frankfurt, for kindly granting me access to the original handwritten
Brouillon manuscript.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

I am also extremely grateful to my family in Australia, for their faith and

support. And to my ever-precious friend Laure, for her constant inspiration.
Finally, this translation owes very much to the late Professor Dr. Hans-
Joachim Mähl, the Brouillon scholar par excellence, for his unparalleled insights,
reine Menschlichkeit, and stimulus to complete the work.

Note on Text and Editorial Symbols

< > Entries enclosed by angular brackets were those crossed

out by Novalis in his later revision.
[ ] Lacunae in text or editorial additions.
— The ubiquitous use of dashes instead of commas or paren-
theses is a particular feature of Novalis’s notebook style.

It must be borne in mind that the present text is an unfinished notebook and
was not intended for publication in its present form. Consequently, there still re-
main certain obscure or illegible passages and unknown references. Difficulties
of this nature are indicated in the detailed endnotes. The numbering of the en-
tries stems from the German editors. Novalis himself did not number the en-
tries: to signal the transition to another entry he simply used a longer horizontal
dash or stroke in the center of the page. Square brackets are used around entry
numbers when this transition is unclear.
 Introduction


David W. Wood

The Unknown Novalis

Friedrich von Hardenberg, or Novalis as he later chose to call himself in print,

still remains a rather obscure figure in the English-speaking world. If known at
all, it is mostly as the German Romantic poet of the blue flower, whose fiancée,
Sophie, died young—and like Petrarch for Laura and Dante for Beatrice before
him, penned sublime lyrical words to immortalize his beloved.1 Or perhaps one
has read a philosophical fragment or two. Indeed, from Edgar Allan Poe to Karl
Popper, John Stuart Mill to Martin Heidegger, it is still the height of philosoph-
ical fashion to adorn one’s book with a Novalis fragment as a motto.2 But who
exactly was this enigmatic young philosopher-poet?
Born May 2, 1772, in Oberwiederstedt, Germany, toward the twilight of
the Enlightenment, his schooling coincided with the tumultuous Storm and
Stress period of German literature. Here he steeped himself in the works of
Friedrich von Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, and finally forged his intellectual maturity in the furnace of the Kantian
or Critical philosophy. Above all, Novalis belonged to that extraordinarily tal-
ented younger generation of writers and thinkers who have become known in
history as the “Romantic Circle.” This enormously influential group also in-
cluded the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit,
Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Caroline Schlegel, and the young
Friedrich von Schelling. Gathered at the end of the eighteenth century, their in-
novative literary talents generated an avalanche of essays, fragments, dialogues,
speeches, and notebooks, whose revolutionary shock waves still continue to
reverberate today throughout the literary, cultural, and artistic worlds.

ix
x Introduction

Yet with regard to Early German Romanticism in our time, perhaps the most
significant revolution is occurring in Anglophone and German philosophical
circles. Long considered as solely a literary movement, current research is shedding
unexpected light on Early Romanticism’s serious philosophical credentials.3 Un-
known and unappreciated texts are finally gaining the attention they deserve. This
is especially true of the theoretical writings of Novalis, due in no small part to the
thoroughly revised critical edition of his collected works in German, and recent
translations of these writings into both English and French.4 Now with the appear-
ance of each new volume, a genuinely philosophical Novalis has started to emerge.
Perhaps the most striking instance of this former neglect is the present
work: Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia. Incredibly, his extraordinary project to
reunite all the separate sciences into a universal science lay obscure for nearly a
century and a half. The text has finally been restored in accordance with his orig-
inal plan, and though uncompleted, it clearly demonstrates that he was not sim-
ply a haphazard thinker, or a mere writer of fragments.
Novalis was also a natural scientist, thoroughly schooled in the sciences of
mineralogy and geology. This too is a lesser-known aspect of his life. Not only
was he an outstanding lyrical poet, and fully conversant with the latest philo-
sophical developments of the time, but he worked in an altogether practical ca-
pacity, as a mining engineer, valued and respected by his employers and scientific
peers alike. He strove to harmonize his interests in the fields of poetry and phi-
losophy with the concrete demands of working life. And this factor is also telling
for his personality. He was being deadly serious when he remarked to close
friends in December 1798: “Writing is a secondary consideration—Please judge
me according to the main thing—practical life. . . . I treat my writing activity as an
educational tool.”5 Thus the time has come to finally overhaul our outmoded
perception of him as an impractical and irrational Romantic poet.6
With his universality, it is tempting to compare Novalis to other thinkers.
Shortly after Novalis’s death, Thomas Carlyle was already calling him a “Ger-
manic Pascal,” since he saw in his fragments a religious, mathematical, and artis-
tic profundity similar to that found in the Pensées.7 Again, with their scientific
diversity, for many his jottings recall the notebooks of a young Leonardo Da
Vinci; or with their imaginative fluidity and artistic form, scholars now draw com-
parisons with the philosophical style of Friedrich Nietzsche and even Jacques Der-
rida.8 Yet for all these comparisons, there is still something incomparable and
intangible about his writings, an intriguing elusiveness about his fragments.
“Modernity” may be one of the most overused expressions today, but with this
restless and penetrating thinker it must surely be one of the most appropriate.
And thus Novalis remains forever Novalis, a truly unique and original spirit.
Although numerous misunderstandings persist concerning German Ro-
manticism and Romantic philosophy, there now exists a growing band of people
who believe that their philosophical texts merit a fresh reappraisal. I consider
this to be particularly true of Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia. It is for this reason
 Introduction xi

that this first translation into English has been carried out—to finally make
accessible to an English-speaking audience one of the most remarkable under-
takings of the Golden Age of German philosophy.

The Genesis of the Romantic Encyclopaedia

At the beginning of September 1798, Novalis wrote the following words to the
other members of the Romantic Circle in Jena:

I have been on my journey of discovery, or on my pursuit, since I saw you last,

and have chanced upon extremely promising coastlines—which perhaps cir-
cumscribe a new scientific continent.—This ocean is teeming with fledgling islands.
(HKA IV, p. 260)

Although adopting the tone of a round-the-world voyager, at the time No-

valis was actually a twenty-six-year-old student at the Freiberg Mining Academy in
northeastern Germany. Here he was immersed in a study of the sciences, in-
cluding higher mathematics, physics, biology, and the earth sciences. The town’s
mining academy was the first institution dedicated to the study of mineralogy
and geology in Europe, and renowned throughout the scientific world for its dis-
tinguished teachers. These included, among others, the chemist Wilhelm August
Lampadius (representative of an antiphlogistic or Lavoisierian chemistry) and
the mathematicians Johann Friedrich Lempe and Johann Friedrich Wilhelm
von Charpentier (the father of Novalis’s second fiancée, Julie). Yet chief among
these was the famous figure of Abraham Gottlob Werner—the founder of sys-
tematic geology and mineralogy. Prior to this Novalis had studied law, history,
and philosophy at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg, in the years
1790 to 1794. During these earlier academic years he had made contact and be-
come friends with some of the leading German writers and philosophers of the
time, such as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich
Schlegel, all of whom immediately recognized the brilliance of his mind.9
Novalis arrived in Freiberg at the beginning of December 1797. His course
of study was both practical in nature—including excursions into the mines and
tunnels beneath the town and its surrounding districts—and highly theoretical,
insofar as he was able to hear the latest scientific ideas within the walls of the
academy itself. Scientific work was congenial to Novalis’s disposition, and he
often praised the rejuvenating effects of the sciences on one’s health. In fact, his
decision to change the course of his studies and delve into rigorous scientific
pursuits was partly taken in an effort to overcome his grief at the death of his
first fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, in March 1797.10
It was not long before these diverse academic studies in Freiberg bore cre-
ative fruit. On the one hand, Novalis decided to chronicle his reflections on his
xii Introduction

regular scientific studies in a large assortment of notebooks—printed in his col-

lected works as the Freiberg Natural Scientific Studies (see the Appendix for detailed
extracts).11 On the other hand, as he excitedly related in the letter to Caroline
Schlegel (see the extract at the beginning of the current section), he had hit upon
an extremely promising idea. Novalis faithfully recorded the exploration of this
idea or “new scientific continent” in a separate so-called Brouillon (rough draft or
notebook), which was diligently continued over the next seven months. Al-
though written directly parallel to them, the Brouillon is radically different from
the other Freiberg notebooks. For its purpose was at once breathtakingly univer-
sal and ambitiously idealistic: to discover the common principles underlying all
the different arts and sciences. He soon gave a name to this search for a unified
or a universal science: “encyclopedistics.” Novalis outlined his intended course
of action in the notebook itself (see entry 229):

I will now specifically work my way through all the sciences—and collect mater-
ial toward encyclopedistics.
First the mathematical sciences—then the others—philosophy, morality etc.
last of all.

This “collecting of materials” from every kind of sphere resulted in the pres-
ent mass of notes that constitute the basis for nothing less than a veritable Ro-
mantic Encyclopaedia. The title of the work in the German edition of his collected
works—Das Allgemeine Brouillon (The General or Universal Brouillon)—also stems
from one of these notebook entries. However, it was at most only a provisional
title for a work in progress, and was not chosen by Novalis himself to head the
book.12 This is not entirely unexpected, since the work was neither completed nor
published in his lifetime. Referring to both the origin of his new project and his
general academic studies, he wrote in late September 1798 (entry 231):

I will first of all work through the theory of gravitation—and the arithmetica uni-
versalis. I will devote one hour to the former, and 2 hours to the latter. What-
ever else occurs to me will also be written down in the universal brouillon. The
remaining time will be partly devoted to the novel, partly to miscellaneous read-
ings—and to chemistry and encyclopedistics in general.13

In early November 1798, roughly two months after commencing the un-
dertaking, Novalis reported on the progress of his Romantic Encyclopaedia in a let-
ter to Friedrich Schlegel, and again hinted at its radical scientific nature:

I am occupied with an exceedingly comprehensive work—which will absorb my

entire activity for this winter. . . . Here I imagine generating truths and ideas writ
large—of generating inspired thoughts—of producing a living scientific organon.14
 Introduction xiii

At about the same time as he wrote these words, Novalis set about revising
and rearranging the swelling mass of material, including classifying the majority of
the notes with striking and unusual headings: “Classification of all my thoughts,
and an index of these titles. Revision of the thoughts” (entry 597).15 This process of re-
vision was carried out fairly rapidly and completed in a matter of days. With well
over 150 different types or disciplines of classification (see the index), the ency-
clopaedic nature of the project began to take concrete shape, and quite significantly,
Novalis now started calling the text a “book” (see entries 552–557).
However, by January 1799 the project had run into difficulties: he had not
“had one decent thought for the last two months,” causing “everything to come
to a standstill.” This was mainly on account of outer circumstances, specifically:
“anxiety, distractions, work and travel, then joy and love, not to mention bouts
of illness.”16 For December 1798 and January 1799 had proved to be busy
months for Novalis. He celebrated Christmas in the small village of Sieben-
eichen, became engaged to Julie von Charpentier a week later, and then spent a
few days at the end of January in Dresden with his brother Anton.
Notwithstanding all these externals events, the work on his book still ap-
peared to have advanced far enough for Novalis to harbor the hope of finishing
it in the coming summer, as he now related in letters to both Caroline and
Friedrich Schlegel:

In the last few months I’ve been swamped by all kinds of studies. I’m collecting a
lot—perhaps I’ll be able to complete something in the summer. . . . With regard to
my future plans, I’m only collecting at present, and imagine that in the summer I
might be able to complete a number of things that I have begun or sketched out.17

Unfortunately, although he toiled hard for a few more months on the text,
his Encyclopaedia remained unfinished, with the last notebook entry dated March
1799. In addition to the pressing and time-consuming nature of his work as a
mining engineer, other literary projects soon claimed his attention. The latter in-
clude some of his most famous works: the novel of the blue flower, Heinrich von
Ofterdingen; the lyrical works Hymns to the Night and Spiritual Songs; and the nat-
ural-philosophic novel The Novices at Sais. Despite filling further notebooks with
fascinating philosophical and scientific fragments in the following two years, No-
valis never returned to the Romantic Encyclopaedia.18 In late 1800, just as Werner
promoted him to the mining administration in the Weissenfels district, the signs
of a terminal illness started to appear in Novalis, confining him to his bed. Early
on the morning of March 25, 1801, Novalis asked his brother Karl to play a
piece of classical music on the piano. Just after midday, to the strains of the
music and in the presence of his oldest friend Friedrich Schlegel, the young poet-
philosopher finally succumbed to the effects of tuberculosis, dying two months
short of his twenty-ninth birthday.
xiv Introduction

Science and Romanticizing

Virtually all of Novalis’s philosophical and theoretical writings were published

posthumously. Regrettably, many aspects of their editorial history form a rather
sorry and somber chapter in Novalis scholarship. This is because for over a cen-
tury after his death successive editors tore apart and arbitrarily rearranged these
texts in order to make them into collections of fragments similar to Pollen.19 This
was a fate that acutely befell the Brouillon notebook. The true nature of Novalis’s
astonishing plan to write a Romantic encyclopaedia lay concealed for close to
130 years. The notebook was only published for the first time in its entirety in
1929; that is to say, including all his revisions as well as the essential classificatory
headings. And it was not until 1968 that the correct chronological order of the
text was finally unraveled by Hans-Joachim Mähl. It is only with these all-impor-
tant classifications that one can perceive the obvious progression from a miscel-
laneous notebook to the plan for an encyclopaedia. Indeed, a modest perusal of
Novalis’s writings from 1798 to 1799 should suffice for one to quickly see that
the Brouillon notebook is completely unlike any of the other theoretical writings
from the same period, such as Pollen, Faith and Love, or the Teplitz Fragments.
Hence, as Mähl has rightly pointed out, this work should not be considered as a
collection of isolated and unrelated fragments, but as the preparatory materials
for a genuine Romantic Encyclopaedia.20
A deepened reverence for the natural world is one of the features of Early
German Romanticism. Keenly sensing modern humanity’s continued estrange-
ment and alienation from Nature, the Romantics favored a staunchly antimate-
rialistic conception of the world. They put forward an organic model that viewed
matter as a living force, and were particularly inspired by the physiological theo-
ries of the Scottish physician Dr. John Brown (see entries 439–454). As he makes
plain in the Encyclopaedia, Novalis too defended the thesis of a nondeterminis-
tic life force, and attempted to unravel its secrets. For him, “life is absolutely only
to be explained from life itself ” (entries 593 and 786), it is a “moral principle”
(entry 255) that has its origin in itself, and even went so far as to devise his own
fundamental propositions of natural science (entry 649). In this regard, the
Freiberg Natural Scientific Studies from 1798 to 1799 are essential for understand-
ing the extent of Novalis’s contemporary scientific knowledge (see the Appen-
dix). 21 Novalis was not alone among the German Romantics in expressing his
enthusiasm for scientific theorizing. Toward the close of the eighteenth century,
we also find Friedrich Schlegel writing “scientific” fragments, the early Schelling
proposing a hypothesis for a higher type of physics in his On the World Soul
(1798), and Franz Xaver von Baadar writing mathematical-natural philosophic
works. However, like Henrik Steffens and Johann Wilhelm Ritter before him,
Novalis differed from the other Romantics insofar as he was academically quali-
 Introduction xv

fied and professionally trained in the sciences. Although he criticized certain sci-
entific results and approaches to science, he only did so from within, so to speak,
as a working scientist familiar with its methods. Moreover, he tried to combine
the spheres of poetry and science—a fact rendered explicit in his unfinished
novel on Nature, The Novices at Sais (see Select Bibliography). In this respect he
shares a strong affinity with his celebrated contemporary, Johann Wolfang von
Goethe—Germany’s greatest poet, who was also a formidable natural scientist. In
fact, Novalis seems to have been one of the first thinkers to appreciate the true
significance of Goethe’s studies in the natural sciences, and the latter may have
unwittingly played a role in the genesis of the Romantic Encyclopaedia: “Goethean
treatment of the sciences—my project” (entry 967).22
A basic methodological aim of the Encyclopaedia was the “classification of all
scientific operations” (entry 552), yet in a fresh and innovative sense. It was to be a
kind of Romantic version of René Descartes’s Discourse on Method, as Olivier
Schefer has fittingly remarked.23 What were these “scientific operations” ac-
cording to Novalis? Just below this entry, Novalis expanded on this thought, say-
ing, “Logical, grammatical, and mathematical investigations—in addition to
varied and specific philosophical readings and reflections—must show me the
way” (entry 558). In entry 228 he is even more specific, listing sixteen different
mathematical operations, including differentiating, integrating, logarithmicizing,
and exponentializing. One of the most characteristic features of Novalis’s theo-
retical works is his appropriation of ideas, concepts, and tools from one disci-
pline for use in another completely different domain. In this regard the
operations of mathematics appear to enjoy a special status. Gabriele Rommel has
recently argued for this special priority of mathematics within Novalis’s theoret-
ical conceptions, and shown that an essential aspect of German Romanticism in-
volves the application of scientific and mathematical methods to the spheres of
literature and poetry (cf. the selections from Novalis’s Mathematics Notebooks in
sections 2, 7, 8, and 12 of the Appendix).24
Novalis’s use of the mathematical concept of potentization is a special case
in point. The Romantics believed that the world had lost much of its original sig-
nificance. Thus in order to regain it, one must rethink or “re-present” its content
and form in altogether new and unusual ways. In this regard Novalis (and the
philosopher Schelling to a certain degree) especially appropriated the mathe-
matical process of potentization, and insisted that it could be extended beyond
its narrow quantitative domain. Thus, not only mathematical entities, but every-
thing in the world may be raised to a higher power (or to a lower power—the
process of logarimization). Potentization broadened and rendered qualitative be-
comes in Novalis’s terminology “romanticizing.” This point is explicated by No-
valis in his now famous definition from 1798, where poetic philosophy becomes
intertwined with mathematics:
xvi Introduction

The world must be romanticized. This yields again its original meaning. Roman-
ticizing is nothing else than a qualitative potentization. In this operation the
lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are a potential
series of this kind. This operation is still entirely unknown. By giving the com-
mon a higher meaning, the everyday, a mysterious semblance, the known, the dig-
nity of the unknown, the finite, the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize
it—For what is higher, unknown, mystical, infinite, one uses the inverse opera-
tion—in this manner it becomes logarithmicized—It receives a common expres-
sion. Romantic philosophy. Lingua romana. Reciprocal raising and lowering.
(HKA II, p. 545)

The true Romantic, therefore, has the whole of Nature as his domain,
and almost anything may be “romanticized,” as long as its finite aspect ap-
proaches the infinite and the everyday is made mysterious. The results of this ac-
tivity are not dry mathematical combinations, but artistic and philosophic
elevations (entry 894). For Novalis, this is especially the case with art, philoso-
phy, and poetry, in which the human spirit becomes the dynamic “principle,”
so that literature, or “the world of writing is Nature that has been raised to a
higher power” (entry 243).
The scientific and encyclopaedic structure of the Romantic Encyclopaedia is
particularly apparent in its most distinctive feature: its system of classifications. As
noted earlier, in late 1798 Novalis decided to revise the entire text. He gave each
entry a classificatory heading, whereas anything deemed to be extraneous (in-
cluding booklists and both personal and private notes etc.) was crossed out. The
extraordinarily diverse titles of the entries range from the conventional: such as
physics, chemistry, physiology, philosophy, medicine; to the more unusual:
theosophy, cosmology, anthropomorphic physics, organology; to the highly orig-
inal: musical mathematics, pathological philosophy, poetical physiology, logical
dynamics, theory of the future life. The most frequent classification by far (it oc-
curs seventy times!) is a neologism coined by Novalis himself: “encyclopedistics.”
These classifications play the vital role of interrelating the entries, and were a
first attempt at trying to unify the text as a whole.

The Bible Project

Composed of over eleven hundred different notebook entries, the Romantic En-
cyclopaedia is easily Novalis’s largest theoretical work. And though it only re-
mained at the semirevised notebook stage, Novalis nonetheless believed that the
text was on its way to becoming an actual book. One of the most widespread mis-
conceptions about Novalis’s theoretical writings is that he was only a writer of
fragments and disconnected thoughts, that he never developed the skills or
vision to work on a large and comprehensive project.
 Introduction xvii

Now it is of course true, the Romantics did harbor a predilection for writ-
ing fragments, for presenting their ideas in brilliant short bursts of prose. Here
nontechnical styles of writing were often combined with unconventional tenden-
cies. Indeed, the fragment style of presentation is generally considered to be one
of the hallmarks of philosophical Romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel insisted that a
fragment had to be self-contained, “like a hedgehog.”25 For his part, Novalis de-
fined his own fragments as “beginnings of interesting sequences of thoughts—texts
for thinking”; and while acknowledging that “many are play pieces and only pos-
sess a transitory worth,” he qualified this statement by adding, “on the other
hand, I’ve attempted to impress my deepest moral convictions upon some of the
others.”26 Although employed to great effect by G. C. Lichtenberg and Ernst Plat-
ner earlier in the century, literary-philosophic fragments of this kind first came to
general prominence in the journal Athenaeum—the main organ for Early German
Romanticism edited by the Schlegel brothers from 1798 to 1800. Hardenberg’s
initial contribution to this journal was Pollen, his most famous collection of frag-
ments, and it marks the first time that the name “Novalis” appeared in print.27
With regard to the Encyclopaedia, Novalis stated that the work was devel-
oping into a “book” four different times in the text (entries 552, 555, 557, and
945). The majority of these passages occur right in the middle of the notebook.
Here Novalis was engaged in an examination of what he considered to be the
true nature and aim of any book. In fact, he thought he may have already fin-
ished a significant portion of the work: “If I have now really completed a genuine
part (element) of my book, then the highest peak has been scaled” (entry 555). In
September 1798 he contemplated writing a letter to Friedrich Schlegel, and in-
corporating an excerpt from his new text, one composed “as romantically as pos-
sible” (entry 218). However, he was still completely at a loss as to the exact form
of his fledgling book. All styles and structures seemed a possibility—not only a col-
lection of fragments!

Shall it be a recherche (or essai), a collection of fragments, a commentary in the

style of Lichtenberg, a report, an exposition, a story, a treatise, a review, a
speech, a monologue or a fragment of a dialogue etc.? (entry 218)

Notwithstanding the Romantics penchant for universality, it is still re-

markable to behold just how varied he pictured the potential form of his book.
This point is again highlighted toward the very end of the text (entry 945), where
Novalis comments on the book’s possible finished format, intimating that his
undertaking might even include poetical works:

Every part of my book, which may be written in completely different styles—In

fragments—letters—poems, rigorous scientific essays etc. Dedicated to one or
several of my friends.
xviii Introduction

Of the many misunderstandings associated with this largely forgotten proj-

ect of Novalis, his definition of it in entry 557 has perhaps provoked the most
speculation:

My book shall be a scientific Bible—a real, and ideal model—and the seed of
every book.

Not surprisingly, it is sometimes assumed that here Novalis wished to

write something like a “new romantic gospel,” or even institute a “Romantic Re-
ligion.”28 This idea of writing a new, modern gospel was derived from the con-
clusion of Lessing’s work from 1777, The Education of the Human Race, in which
he remarked: “It will certainly come, this age of a new, eternal gospel, which is it-
self promised in the elementary books of the new covenant” (aphorism 86). This
challenge was seized upon by the Jena Romantic Circle, with the idea suggested
of writing a so-called second part to Lessing’s book (yet was never executed in the
end). However, the Romantic Encyclopaedia was not Novalis’s attempt at writing
this new gospel mentioned by Lessing. The confusion has arisen because with
Novalis we are dealing with two distinct projects, which are often conflated.
One project, which may be termed the “gospel project,” was indeed di-
rectly linked to Lessing’s idea. In fact, in 1799/1800 Novalis actually remarked
that he was thinking of joining forces with Schleiermacher, Tieck, and Friedrich
Schlegel in order to carry out this task of writing, as he now termed it, “a gospel
of the future” (HKA III, p. 557). Further accompanying notes reveal that this
gospel project was thoroughly religious in both content and form. This “gather-
ing of data for a second part to Lessing’s Education of the Human Race” had its im-
mediate starting point in the New Testament, since according to Novalis, there
are present in the four gospels the “fundamental features of future and higher
gospels” (HKA III, p. 669). These thoughts of a new Christian gospel were to
later find lyrical expression in his Hymns to the Night and Spiritual Songs, and
reach their climax in the controversial essay, Christendom or Europe, where Novalis
enjoins us “to proclaim the divine gospel in word and deed, and to cleave to this
true, eternal faith right up until death” (HKA III, p. 524).
The other project, the Romantic Encyclopaedia, although containing strik-
ingly original religious thoughts, was not at all concerned with Lessing’s idea and
a new Christian gospel as such. Rather, its aim was much more universal, with
its basis rooted in the empirical and philosophical sciences.
The question therefore is, What did Novalis mean here by “Bible”? When
he used the term “Bible” in this context, Novalis understood it in an utterly gen-
eral sense. For as he jotted in marginalia to Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 work Ideen
(Ideas): To him the idea of a Bible was a “Gattungsbegriff ” or a generic con-
cept.29 In this sense, a Bible is simply the highest form of a book in a specific
genre or discipline. As he had earlier written in the Encyclopaedia: “A Bible is the
supreme task of writing” (entry 433).30 Each field of human knowledge could
 Introduction xix

have its own Bible, it all depended on the method employed or the “spirit,”
something already noted in Pollen: “When the spirit renders it sacred, then every
genuine book is a Bible.”31
Despite its scientific orientation, the Romantic Encyclopaedia was still com-
prehensive enough to accommodate Novalis’s ideas on theology.32 Indeed, in
terms of fundamental definitions, he was perhaps contemplating making God
into one of the central principles of the work:

Definition and classification of the sciences . . . Should God be the ideal of the
degree, and the definition of God—the seed of all definitions? (entry 554)

Matters are further complicated by the fact that precisely at the same time
as Novalis was casting his Encyclopaedia as a “scientific Bible,” Friedrich Schlegel
was likewise conceiving a Bible project. It is surely a curious kind of conjunction
that both Novalis and Schlegel conceived their Bible projects at virtually the
same time. Novalis attributed this amazing coincidence to their inner harmony
of thought, an intellectual symbiosis that they called “sym-philosophizing.”33
Nevertheless, their ideas for a Bible were vastly different. How did Novalis de-
scribe his book? In a letter to Friedrich Schlegel about his Bible project (Letter,
November 7, 1798), Novalis wrote:

A striking example of our inner sym-organisation and sym-evolution is con-

tained in your letter. You write about your Bible project, while I’m engaged in
my study of science as a whole—and its body—the book—and have likewise hit
upon the idea of a Bible—the idea of the Bible—as the ideal of each and every book.
(HKA IV, p. 263)

In contrast to Novalis’s endeavor to supply an ideal book or “body” for the

sciences, the aim of Friedrich Schlegel’s Bible project was indeed to “establish a
new religion” and follow in the footsteps of “Mohammed and Luther.” Here the
two parted intellectual company, for Novalis was not particularly impressed with
his friend’s grandiose religious plan, saying it was altogether “illusory and
obscure” to him.34
Thus, with the Romantic Encyclopaedia Novalis’s primary concern was
not writing a religious text as such, but a supreme book of the sciences.
Taking his start from the single methodological principle “Proposition—All sci-
ence is one” (entry 526), we can see how all these conceptions started merging
into the grand idea of a single unified book of the sciences, i.e. into that of a
“scientific Bible”:

All the sciences amount to one book. . . . My undertaking is really a description of

the Bible—or better, the theory of the Bible—art of a Bible and theory of Nature.
(Elevation of a book to a Bible). (entry 571)
xx Introduction

Romantic Philosophy

From 1790 to 1791 Novalis received a thorough philosophical education in

Jena, studying philosophy under Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the populizer and in-
terpreter of Immanuel Kant, and the playwright and avowed Kantian, Friedrich
Schiller. Moreover, Reinhold was the originator of his own system, “Elementary
Philosophy,” which radicalized post-Kantian philosophy with its insistence on
philosophy as a rigorously systematic and unified enterprise.35 Novalis undoubt-
edly first learned about the Kantian philosophy in detail from the lectures of
Reinhold and Schiller, with both of whom he later became friends and corre-
sponded. It is difficult to gauge the true impact of Reinhold’s doctrines on No-
valis, since there is only the very occasional reference to him in his many
notebooks. Notwithstanding, Novalis seems to have accorded him a central place
in the history of German Idealism: “Kant established the possibility, Reinhold
the reality, and Fichte the necessity of philosophy.”36 With Schiller, Novalis val-
ued above all his engaging and magnetic personality, his graceful style and expo-
sitions on aesthetics.37 As he playfully noted in the Encyclopaedia, “Schiller makes
exceedingly philosophical music” (entry 419).
In the next few years the study of philosophy began to assume priority in
both Novalis’s thinking and his personal life: “My favourite study basically bears
the same name as my fiancée: Philo-Sophie—it is the soul of my life and the key
to my inner self.”38 Yet he could still teasingly mock both the “prejudices” of pro-
fessional philosophers toward poetry (entries 468 and 749), and the practical
and social value of philosophy itself: “Philosophy cannot bake bread—however,
it can provide us with God, freedom and immortality—now which is more prac-
tical—philosophy or economics?” (entry 401).
A dramatic turn occurred in 1795—he fell under the spell of Johann Gott-
lieb Fichte, the successor to Reinhold in Jena. “Fichte is the most dangerous
thinker I know. He powerfully enchants one into his circle” (HKA IV, p. 230).
From autumn 1795 to autumn 1796 he plunged into an intensive study of the
Fichtean philosophy. The results of these detailed meditations have come down
to us as the so-called Fichte Studies notebooks.39 He appears to have been spurred
to write these notes after finally meeting Fichte in person in May 1795, at the
home of philosopher, and editor of the Philosophisches Journal, Friedrich Niet-
hammer. That same night also appears to be the first and only time Novalis came
into contact with another talented young philosopher-poet in Jena: Friedrich
Hölderlin.40
Of all of Novalis’s philosophical writings, the Fichte Studies has been sub-
ject to the most academic scrutiny, due in large measure to the groundbreaking
studies of Hans-Joachim Mähl and Manfred Frank.41 In his reactions to the Crit-
ical philosophy, they show Novalis searching for his own philosophical voice and
identity. Breaking with the Fichtean model, he tried to elaborate his own philo-
 Introduction xxi

sophical theory on the nature of self-consciousness. Moreover, there is a clear an-

tifoundationalism expressed in the Fichte Studies, an opposition to the Fichtean
and Reinholdian belief that the whole of philosophy could be derived from a sin-
gle first principle. Instead of a logical deduction from a first principle, Novalis
and the Romantics sought a more fruitful conception, invoking the now famous
idea of an “infinite approximation.”42 Here the notion of a first principle be-
comes inverted, as it were, into a Kantian regulative idea, which the elements of
the system “infinitely approach” yet never actually reach. This conception is in-
timately related to the Romantics’ view of human nature as being finite in a phys-
ical sense and infinite in a spiritual sense. A tension or “longing for the infinite”
famously uttered by Novalis in his very first Pollen fragment, with its untranslat-
able wordplay: “We search everywhere for the Unconditioned (Unbedingte), but
only ever find things (Dinge).”43
Hints of this opposition to a first principle in philosophy are even present
in the Romantic Encyclopaedia: “Why do we need a beginning at all? This unphilo-
sophical—or semiphilosophical goal is the source of all error” (entry 634). Here
Novalis extends the theory of infinite approximation to the distant ideals or
“Gods” of every science and discipline: “Every science has its God, that is also its
goal.” In philosophy, it is the search for a first principle; in chemistry, a universal
solvent; in politics, perpetual peace; and in medicine, an elixir of life (entry 314).
Yet these “forever frustrated expectations” are an infinite and endless quest, like
the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the attempt to square the circle (entry
640). These reflections highlight some of the key tenets of the Romantic Circle:
that there are limits to philosophy, a distrust of closed, all-embracing systems, and
that philosophizing itself is an infinite activity. In Isaiah Berlin’s succinct defini-
tion, Romanticism is a current in “perpetual movement.”44
However, for all his opposition to a Fichtean first principle, Novalis did
not completely abandon Fichte’s philosophy. In fact, it continued to exert the
greatest influence on him. Along with the majority of the Romantics, he wholly
shared Friedrich Schlegel’s conviction (articulated in an oft-quoted Athenaeum
fragment from 1798), that besides the French Revolution and Goethe’s educa-
tional novel of development, Wilhelm Meister, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Doc-
trine of Science) was one of the three greatest tendencies of the age.45 If Novalis
had initially termed Kant the “Copernicus” of philosophy, he now considered
Fichte greater, calling him a “2nd Kant” (entry 463) and a modern “Newton,”
since he was “the discoverer of the laws of the internal system of the world—the
2nd Copernicus” (entry 460).
What did Novalis especially prize about Fichte’s philosophy? What partic-
ularly appealed to him was the method and type of thinking employed by Fichte in
the Wissenschaftslehre, or what he and the other Romantics started calling the “art
of Fichticizing.”46 By subjecting the laws of thought to a critical examination,
they believed Fichte had discovered the very “rhythm of philosophy” (entry 382).
xxii Introduction

It was a radical new manner of philosophizing, a “process for generating thought”

(entry 1147), that allowed one to further develop “flashes of inspiration,” and
to systematically organize one’s own faculty of genius (entry 921). “Fichticizing”
became identical for Novalis with “metaphilosophy,” with a deepened analysis of
the activity of philosophizing itself:

It may well be possible that Fichte is the inventor of an altogether new way of
thinking—for which our language doesn’t even have a name yet. The inventor is
not perhaps the most skillful and ingenious artist on his instrument—although
I’m not saying that this is so. However, it is most likely that there are and will be
people—who Fichticize far better than Fichte himself. Fabulous works of art could
come into being here—as soon as one begins to Fichticize artistically.47

Fichte’s philosophy catered to that eternal Romantic concern—the nature

of genius. However, for the Romantics, “genius” wasn’t a gushing God-given fac-
ulty for the destined few, rather a potential creative power possessed by everyone:
“every person is the seed of an infinite genius” (entry 63). On the one hand, they
considered the power of genius as necessary for a deeper understanding of the
world of Nature: “Natural genius belongs to experimenting, that is to say, that
wondrous ability to capture the sense of Nature—and to act in her spirit.” 48 On
the other hand, they saw it as one of the results of genuine Bildung—that is, of the
cultural development or higher education of the individual and society.49 De-
spite being ennobled and from the upper social stratum, Novalis’s view of hu-
manity was extremely open-ended and egalitarian: “I believe that in order to
reach a completed development one has to pass through various stages. One
should be a tutor, professor, and artisan for a period of time, as well as a writer.
Even a position of servitude wouldn’t do any harm” (HKA IV, p. 266). His edu-
cational theory is addressed to our inner plurality, in which humanity is capable
of an infinite and ongoing development. It is romanticizing applied back to our-
selves: “every person, who consists of people, is a person raised to the 2nd power—
or a genius” (HKA II, p. 645). The harmonious interaction of all our abilities
ultimately results in the “completely developed human being,” or the “true
scholar,” a modern-day Midas, “who bestows on whatever he touches and does,
a scientific, idealistic and syncritistic form” (entry 470).

Magical Idealism

The artistic form and style of philosophical writing was a particularly burning
question for the Romantics.50 In this regard we encounter some of the most
damning criticisms of the Critical philosophy. According to Novalis, for all their
philosophical ingenuity and innovation, the form of the presentations of Kant
 Introduction xxiii

and Fichte were at best “one-sided and scholastic” and at worst “frightful convo-
lutions of abstractions.”51 Up to now, these expositions were not yet “complete
or presented precisely enough—absolutely unpoetic—Everything is still so awk-
ward, so tentative” (entry 924).
This critique of “unpoetic” and abstract philosophical works led the Ro-
mantics in turn to consider the roles of art and language within philosophy. As
both Andrew Bowie and Charles Larmore have recently argued, it was a central
conviction of German Romanticism that art was in fact a better path for under-
standing such mysteries as the Infinite and the Absolute than philosophy; that
essential intellectual insights cannot always be realized in a philosophical text,
but sometimes have to be communicated in a work of art.52 Hence, there are in-
herent limits to philosophical discourse that can only be approached using the
deeper linguistic potential of poetry. As Manfred Frank has eloquently stated,
“[P]oetics must jump into the breach where the air becomes too thin for philos-
ophy to breathe.” However, he forcefully adds that this reasoning of the Ro-
mantics is not a piece of poetic production, but rather a “work of genuine and
rigorous philosophical speculation.”53 Thus, although the Early German Ro-
mantics sought to transform philosophy to include poetics, they still endeavored
to remain within the margins of philosophy.
Indeed for Novalis, poetry and philosophy had always been indivisible and
inseparable, merely two sides of the same coin. In earlier times, the poet and
philosopher were united and one, but in our time “the separation into poet and
thinker is . . . to the disadvantage of both—It is a sign of sickness” (entry 717). It
is only by becoming more varied and universal that the philosopher is able to
raise himself up to ever higher levels, and ultimately, up to that of the poet. If the
“diversity of the methods increases—the thinker eventually knows how to make
everything, out of each thing—the philosopher becomes a poet. The poet is but the
highest degree of the thinker” (entry 717).
Toward the end of 1798 Novalis finally drew together all these diverse
strands of his earlier contemplations. Philosophy, art, and science were richly
blended together to result in his most mature and original theoretical work: the
Romantic Encyclopaedia. It is the audacious attempt to reconcile and reunify all
the disjointed sciences, by means of incessant poeticizing or philosophical ro-
manticizing. As Novalis boldly proclaimed to August Schlegel, “In the future I’ll
carry out nothing but poesy—all the sciences must all be poeticised.”54
Here we arrive at perhaps the most well-known and controversial aspect of
Novalis’s philosophy—his theory of “Magical Idealism.” This doctrine features
prominently in the Romantic Encyclopaedia, and in spite of ongoing disputes
about its precise nature, there are good grounds for considering it as Novalis’s
own personal philosophy.55 But what exactly is Magical Idealism? As the name
suggests, it was a combination of the idea of romanticizing and an extension of
transcendental idealism. The term “magical” referred to Novalis’s belief in the
xxiv Introduction

“art of using the sense world at will,” that is, that the rest of nature could some-
day conform or be subjugated to our will.56 And though he once remarked in a
celebrated poetic fragment that “Nature is a magical petrified city” (HKA II,
p. 761), he believed that it could be “enlivened” again. “The Magician of the
sense world knows how to enliven Nature, and as with his body, to use it at will”
(HKA II, p. 546). Here there is an indivisible nexus between willing and think-
ing, for the will is nothing else but “the magical, powerful faculty of thought”
(entry 1075). This theory posits that ultimately we will have control over the ex-
ternal senses, just as we now have control over our internal organs of speech and
thought, to become veritable “artists of immortality” (entry 399; also see entry
137). His “Idealism” of course had its origin in the doctrines of Fichte and Kant,
in the theory that what we perceive depends on our own creative activity. He ex-
tended this by suggesting that certain pure thoughts and images are subject to
“an extramechanical force” (entry 826), that at base all thinking itself is a true
“action at a distance” (entry 1120). In an extraordinary passage, this “brand-new”
theory of metacriticism “lets us divine Nature, or the external world, as a human
being”—wherein Fichte’s Nicht-Ich or non-ego becomes transfigured into a “you”
(entry 820). However, as Frederick Beiser has recently shown in great detail, Mag-
ical Idealism neither rejects reason and the rational element, nor is a form of ir-
rationalism. It is syn-criticism, or the attempt at creating a synthesis of realism
and idealism by adding an aesthetic dimension to Kant and Fichte.57 In the his-
tory of philosophy Novalis viewed his own theory as follows: “Voltaire is a pure
empiricist, as are most of the French philosophers . . . from transcendental em-
piricism we come to the dogmatists—from there to the enthusiasts or the tran-
scendental dogmatists—then to Kant—from there to Fichte—and finally to
Magical Idealism.”58 The Magical Idealist “wonderfully refracts the higher light”
(entry 638), by changing “thoughts into things, and things into thoughts” (entry
338). It affirms the necessity of transforming Nature into a work of art, so that it
regains its inherent magic and beauty (cf. the most poetic passage of the Roman-
tic Encyclopaedia—entry 737). As such, it is none other than genuine romanticiz-
ing, the potentization of the world as defined by Novalis above.
Another significant strand of Magical Idealism is its connection with Pla-
tonism and neo-Platonism.59 Plato had been one of Novalis’s favorite authors since
his student days in Leipzig, and both he and Plotinus take pride of place in the
pantheon of philosophers enumerated in entry 1096. However, Novalis only dis-
covered the philosophy of Plotinus in December 1798, while reading Dieterich
Tiedemann’s The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy (see section 9 of the Appendix).60
Tiedemann’s work was decisive for the Encyclopaedia, since Novalis not only drew
his knowledge of Plotinus from it, but much of his information concerning magic,
the Cabbala, theosophy, and mysticism. Novalis now noted Plotinus’s similarity to
Fichte (entry 908), and gave many of his former Fichtean concepts a neo-Platonic
interpretation.61 Here Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition is compared with
 Introduction xxv

the ecstasy of Spinoza, and the ego is proclaimed as the precursor of the divine
logos (entries 896 and 897).62 And following the example of the neo-Platonist
Frans Hemsterhuis, he formulated both the existence of a “moral organ” in man
(entries 197 and 782) and the necessity of a mediator for humanity (entry 398),
which would reconcile Platonism with the deeper aspects of Christian spiritual-
ity.63 Other neo-Platonic notions such as a new Golden Age (entries 894 and 634),
a higher paradise of Ideas (entry 929), and the theory of “emanations” (entry 137)
all feature heavily in the text. Excavating these more esoteric strata that he found
missing in Fichte, Novalis discovered “the idea of infinite love” in Spinoza, the fa-
mously “God-intoxicated man.”64 Love is another essential element in Novalis’s
philosophy of Magical Idealism. In the Encyclopaedia, love forms “the highest sci-
ence” and is the “basis for the possibility of magic,” because only “love works mag-
ically” (entry 79). Hence, love now becomes “the ideal of every endeavor” (entry
835), and one of the fundamental axioms of Novalis’s encyclopaedic project: “Love
is the final goal of world history—the One of the universe” (entry 50).
The Romantic Encyclopaedia remained unfinished, and was destined never
to possess a polished philosophical form, such as that acquired by G. W. F.
Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences just seventeen years later. How-
ever, it is precisely on account of its fragmentary state that we can peer into the
workshop of the author, and are granted a fascinating glimpse into the inner
workings of Novalis’s mind. As Olivier Schefer has remarked, Novalis had a
philosophical spirit that wished to be at home in every sphere, from the most
mundane to the highest realms of abstract science and thought.65 More than
anyone else, Novalis embodies Early German Romanticism’s ever-restless and
incessant philosophical longing:

Philosophy is really homesickness—the desire to be everywhere at home.

(entry 857)

What is Encyclopedistics?

With regard to its encyclopaedic form, it is obvious that Novalis’s Romantic Ency-
clopaedia was drawing on a long tradition whose general aim was the systematic com-
pilation of human knowledge. A principal inspiration was the famous Encyclopédie
of the French philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste D’Alembert, published
between 1751 and 1780. In fact, entries 327–335 of Novalis’s project are based on
a close reading of this text, with entry 336 a direct quote (in French) from D’Alem-
bert’s long preliminary discourse. The goal of the French Encyclopédie was to de-
scribe the “order and sequences of human knowledge,” and in so doing furnish a
so-called “rational dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts.”66 Novalis’s citation
and reflections on this work are important, since they show just how different his
xxvi Introduction

own project was to the alphabetical enterprise of the Encyclopédie. If the French
philosophes stressed individual definitions and the strict division of our mental fac-
ulties, Novalis in contrast emphasized the deeply unified nature of science (entry
333) and the future harmonious interactions of our mind (entry 327). With his
“new view of idealism and realism” (entry 331). Novalis wanted to uncover noth-
ing less than an “absolute universal science” (entry 333). And it is striking that these
contemplations lead directly over into his theory of Magical Idealism (entry 338).
Novalis sought to discover a deeper foundation for his encyclopaedic un-
dertaking by subjecting the notebook to a revision or a “critique,” an approach
deeply embedded in the propaedeutic tradition of German idealistic philoso-
phy.67 His project wasn’t simply to be a collection of unrelated fragments, but a
true “science of the sciences” (entry 56), which is exactly the same lofty intention
as Fichte had envisaged for his Wissenschaftslehre.68 According to Novalis, Fichte’s
attempt was highly promising in the sphere of philosophy, but far too narrow
when contrasted with his own interdisciplinary endeavor. “Fichte has only begun
to realise a single idea in this manner—the idea of a system of thought.”69 And
hence the universalizing tendency that Fichte has wrought within philosophy,
“should be undertaken in all the other sciences” (entry 155), since, in Novalis’s
opinion, “there exists a philosophical, a critical, a mathematical, a poetical, a
chemical, a historical Wissenschaftslehre” (entry 429).70
Unfortunately, Novalis’s notes on this topic remain highly sketchy and
speculative, and are undeveloped in most of their details. Nevertheless, it appears
that Novalis took Fichte’s specific philosophical Wissenschaftslehre to be a template
for a much more universal Wissenschaftslehre. And if we regard the remarkable
sketch in entry 820, then it is possible that the Romantic Encyclopaedia was to be
the vehicle for a “higher science” of the combined histories of the human self and
Nature (entry 76); or what he called in early 1798 “a higher Wissenschaftslehre.”
Taking its start from the Fichtean intuition of the ego, and again employing the
operation of potentization in a qualitative sense (since it is directed back upon the
activity of consciousness), the end result would be a wholly new or “higher I.”
And just like in Fichte’s theory of the self, this fact is not logically demonstrable,
but must be experienced by everyone themselves. Novalis writes:

There are certain poetical activities in us that appear to be of an entirely differ-

ent character to all others, because they are accompanied by the feeling of ne-
cessity, and yet there doesn’t seem to be any external stimulus present. It
appears to man as if he were engaged in a conversation, in which some kind of
unknown, spiritual being wondrously incites him to develop the most evident
thoughts. This being must be a higher being because it is placed in such a rela-
tion with himself that it cannot be a being of the world of appearances. This
higher kind of ego or “I” is related to the human being as the human being is
related to Nature, or as the wise man is related to the child. . . . This fact can-
 Introduction xxvii

not be presented. It is a higher kind of fact, which is only the concern of the
higher human being. However, man should strive to engender it in himself.
The science that comes into existence here is the higher Wissenschaftslehre.71

In his commentary on the German edition of the Romantic Encyclopaedia,

Hans-Joachim Mähl has also drawn attention to the close parallels between No-
valis’s plan and the little-known works of other contemporary German thinkers
from the end of the eighteenth century.72 The encyclopaedic and scientific writings
of Karl Eschenmayer (1768–1852), W. T. Krug (1770–1842), J. H. Lambert
(1728–1777), and Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) have left their indelible imprint on
Novalis’s text.73 With its emphasis on the “reciprocal relations between the sci-
ences,” Krug’s idea for a general systematic encyclopaedia, outlined in his Attempt at
a Systematic Encyclopaedia of the Sciences, is particularly aligned with Novalis’s project:

A specialized encyclopaedia, be it universal or partial, is a mere aggregate of the

sciences, which can be more or less orderly arranged. The main purpose of a
general encyclopaedia, on the other hand, is not the presentation of the sciences
themselves, but rather the depiction of the reciprocal relations, sketched in ac-
cordance with the principles of a perfected system, and therefore must also be
a science, or be at least analogous to a science, to a systematic conception of science.
(pt. 1, p. 11, § 15).

With regard to his natural scientific studies at the Mining Academy, another
possible influence on Novalis’s project was a series of lectures delivered by Abraham
Gottlob Werner entitled: “The Encyclopaedia of Mining Sciences.”74 Although
nothing is known about these Freiberg lectures except their title, the long reflection
on Werner’s methodology of an encyclopaedia may have been written down after
attending this series of talks (cf. entry 670). In the Encyclopaedia, Novalis frequently
criticizes Werner’s method of classification, specifically its pretension to objectivity
(see entries 532, 534, 609, and 662). Notwithstanding, Novalis thought he could
gain much by at least practicing “classifying and defining etc. using Werner’s sys-
tem” (entry 558), albeit in a “much more universal” fashion, (entry 475).
Stimulated by these diverse contemporary projects, Novalis attempted to
develop his own system of encyclopaedic classifications. With a mixture of richly
poetic-philosophic contents and exotic scientific titles, it is clear it was no ordi-
nary encyclopaedia that Novalis had in mind. “The ordering of my papers is de-
pendent on my system of science” (entry 597). A method of scientific classifying
he otherwise called “encyclopedistics.” However, what did Novalis mean here by
the term, encyclopedistics? In entry 233 he gives his clearest definition:

One hour of encyclopedistics in general. This includes scientific algebra—equa-

tions. Relationships—similarities—equalities—effects of the sciences on each other.
xxviii Introduction

An examination of the text itself shows that the countless entries classified
as “encyclopedistics” are indeed concerned with scientific procedure and
method, with the interrelations and interactions between different scientific dis-
ciplines. In the letter to Friedrich Schlegel from November 7, 1798, mentioned
earlier, Novalis spoke of writing an “introduction to genuine encyclopedistics,” for
the purpose of producing inspired thoughts, truths, and ideas.75 It would be a
“science of active empiricism,” and give rise to nothing less than “the free genera-
tion of truth” (entry 924). This introduction is vital, since it was to perhaps sup-
ply the “philosophical text to the plan,” or the real “encyclopedistics of the book”
(entry 599). Inspired by the combinatorial and mathematical theories of Gott-
fried Wilhelm Leibniz (entry 547) and Karl Friedrich Hindenburg (entry 648),
Novalis understood his theory as a kind of “scientific grammar . . . or theory
of composition” (entry 616). And like the French thinker Condorcet’s early
attempt at a Sketch for a Historic Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit, his
project too stressed the importance of studying the history and philosophy of sci-
ence (cf. entries 480–490 and 790–807). As Irene Bark has noted in her discus-
sion of Novalis’s method, it is important to bear in mind that although the main
principles of encyclopedistics are theoretical, they are gleaned from the empiri-
cal sciences, and can moreover be reapplied to them to serve as a confirmation
of their validity.76
Novalis’s theory consists in an ascending and descending hierarchy of sci-
entific stages. He termed the lower components of science “words,” which cor-
respond to higher elements, the so-called propositions of natural-scientific
theories. Each principle of this scientific schema could in turn be elevated to a
higher degree. Since “a proposition is a word raised to a higher power. Every
word can be raised to a proposition, to a definition” (entry 333). It should be
clear that this operation is the by now familiar method of potentization. Yet this
time the process is applied back to the structure of science itself, since “through
pure potentization, every science can be raised to a higher science” (entry 487).
In the Romantic Encyclopaedia potentization is none other than the fundamental
scientific operation of Novalis’s theory of encyclopedistics. This process of po-
tentization may be continued up to an ever-higher level:

Propositions are raised up to sciences—Science is the dignity of the proposition—

and thus this elevation may be continued up to an absolute universal science.
(entry 333)

Following Hemsterhuis, Novalis assumed that in ancient antiquity science

was once a unity. The original paradisiacal stage of this universal science was
called a “total-science” (entry 199). In the course of time the sciences had be-
come splintered, and our task is to unite them again. This dilemma exposes the
 Introduction xxix

eternal tension between our separating intellect and the unifying ability of our
reason. This task is too great for the mere “intellect,” it requires the services of a
higher faculty—that of genius.

It is entirely due to a lack of genius that the sciences are separated.—The rela-
tions between the sciences are too intricate and distant for the intellect. We
owe the most sublime truths of our day to such interactions between the long-
separated elements of this total-science.77

It is by means of the “utmost simplification and reduction” that the “ency-

clopaedic scholar” attains this highest degree of perfection, whereby “all the sepa-
rated sciences are changed into a single science” (HKA II, p. 586). In line with
his earlier Jena conviction of philosophy as an infinite approximation, Novalis
doubted whether this total-science could ever be truly “finished” or “completed”
(cf. entry 526); it is simply a “schema for the future” (entry 886).78 Hence, there
is “no philosophy in concreto. Philosophy, like the philosopher’s stone—and the
squaring of the circle etc.—is simply a necessary task of the scientist—the ideal of
science in general.” (entry 640). And because “the poet understands Nature bet-
ter than the scientific mind” (entry 1093), Novalis was absolutely confident as to
what form this ideal science would assume—“the perfected form of the sciences
must be poetical.”79
Perhaps it is then not surprising to see that Novalis’s Encyclopaedia re-
mained unfinished, precisely because it was romantic. Romantic in the sense that
it embodied some of the leading motifs and methods of Early German Roman-
ticism: “a longing for the infinite” and the philosophies of infinite approxima-
tion and Magical Idealism; meditations on the history and aims of Nature and
humanity; the future development of our faculties of reason, imagination, ge-
nius, and the senses; and the wedding of poetry and philosophy in order to ar-
ticulate the different operations of science, art, and religion. Its contents are
expressed in short philosophic fragments and notes, united by poetic-scientific
headings. Systematically, however, it remained open-ended and capable of meta-
morphosis. It was not only to enliven the static sum of human knowledge, but its
deeper currents and interrelations, based on a unifying philosophical ideal.
If all the different sciences amount to “One book,” then it is clear that No-
valis did not wish to furnish the individual chapters of this book. Instead, in the
Romantic Encyclopaedia he conceived the ambitious plan to reunite all the dis-
jointed and separated sciences, to raise them up to the level of a universal sci-
ence. This was done by means of romanticization or potentization, the central
operation in his theory of encyclopedistics. He sought to elevate every proposi-
tion and book of science into a book of books, and it is for this reason that he
called his project a “scientific Bible.”
xxx Introduction

Ultimately, romanticizing is a philosophy of artistic activity, and it is pre-

cisely in this original and transformational sense that we must understand the
term—it is an attempt to transform the world. The Romantic Encyclopaedia is No-
valis’s most mature philosophical work, whose boldness of vision and wealth of
sparkling ideas can still inspire us today. This project is simply a continuation of
that noble task he had already announced in Pollen: “We are on a mission: to
educate the earth.”80