This Philosopher Believed in Magic | James D. Reid on Novalis

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In this conversation, James D. Reid joins Jack and Milo to discuss Novalis: poet, philosopher, natural scientist, early German Romantic, and perhaps the greatest pen name in literary history.

Novalis — born Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg — died of tuberculosis just before his twenty-ninth birthday, yet left behind one of the strangest and most suggestive bodies of work in European Romanticism. Reid discusses Novalis as a thinker who refuses ordinary divisions between philosophy, poetry, religion, science, nature, and love. Was he a poet doing philosophy, a philosopher writing poetry, or some bizarre contortion of the two: a philosopher for whom poetry was the only possible means of philosophizing.

The discussion begins with Novalis’s life and intellectual world: Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling, the Freiberg Mining Academy, early German Romanticism, and the extraordinary range of Novalis’s unfinished projects. Reid explains why Novalis should not be reduced to the familiar image of the death-haunted mystical poet, and why his notebooks, fragments, novels, and poems reveal a more precise and incisive mind.

Much of the conversation centres on Kant and the imagination. Reid explains how the German Romantics inherit Kant’s "subjective turn," but extend the imagination far beyond perception and art, into science, morality, politics, religion, and our most basic orientation toward the world. We discuss Fichte, the thing-in-itself, appearances, language, and the Romantic conviction that reality is not simply found, but partly shaped by how human beings attend to it.

The second half of the conversation turns to Novalis’s *Hymns to the Night*, the death of Sophie von Kühn, erotic longing, Christianity, mysticism, darkness, mediation, and the possibility that poetry can do philosophical work which ordinary propositional prose cannot. Reid discusses the challenge of translating Novalis, the relation between philosophy and poetry, the *Monologue*, magical idealism, and the idea that words do not merely describe a world, but help give us one.

Expect reflections on:

Novalis as poet, philosopher, scientist, and early Romantic

Kant, Fichte, imagination, and the thing-in-itself

The fragment as philosophical and literary form

Why Novalis is more than a mystical death-haunted poet

The *Hymns to the Night* and the death of Sophie von Kühn

Christianity, mediation, religion, and heterodoxy

Night, eroticism, death, and mysticism

Poetry as philosophy, and philosophy as a literary form

The problem of translating beauty and precision

Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, and the sciences

Magical idealism and the possibility of poetising the world

Mountains, language, ecology, and seeing the world as a “you”

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Is Novalis the greatest literary pen name? And can poetry think things that philosophy cannot?

00:00:00 Words, world, and magical idealism

00:02:00 Introduction to James D. Reid and Novalis

00:08:17 James arrives

00:15:44 Poetic epigraph

00:18:06 Who was Novalis?

00:21:54 Novalis, fragments, and Romantic “memes”

00:24:16 Kant's imagination

00:35:31 Fichte, subjectivity, and things in themselves

00:40:49 Language and perception

00:43:13 Novalis or Hardenberg?

00:46:21 Friedrich Schlegel and the early Romantic circle

00:47:17 What made Novalis unique?

00:52:07 *Hymns to the Night*: origins and textual history

00:58:24 Was Novalis a Christian?

01:08:02 Erotic night, death, and mysticism

01:18:04 Translating Novalis: poetry as philosophy

01:24:14 Kant and the night

01:30:01 The *Monologue* and language

01:31:44 Plato, Descartes, and philosophy as literature

01:34:14 Wagner, Nietzsche, and Romanticism after Novalis

01:37:00 Why philosophers distrust poetry

01:44:41 What is magical idealism?

01:49:01 The magical power of words

01:54:47 Mountains, ecology, and seeing nature as a “you”

01:58:40 The blue flower, longing, and *Heinrich von Ofterdingen*

02:01:37 How James D. Reid came to Novalis

02:08:10 Conclusion