Fichte’s Subject and Its Romantic Transformations

This essay explores Fichte’s influence on German Romantic literary theory and composition in the work of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. The key moment in Fichte that gets taken up by Novalis and Schlegel is the idea that the subject must posit itself. For Novalis, such self-positing is always a matter of self-representation, and thus an aesthetic act. Schlegel adds to this by showing that such self-positing is never certain of success, that one can never truly possess oneself fully. Each author begins from a Fichtean position in order to show not its limitations, but its primacy for aesthetic creation.