Hopefully, this is as close to a self-help essay as I will ever come. Hopefully, you won’t find it all that helpful unless not building a retail empire is one of your secret desires.

It has come to my attention that at least one Billionaire has (not surprisingly) decided to ignore Nature and suggest that introspection is some kind of pernicious recent invention (after “Western Civ” invented “the individual”). I can’t begin to tell you how many nihilist historicist modernist chunks are concatenated in a phrase like “Western Civ invented the Individual”…but a lot. Totally bogus history is the basic coin of nihilist historicist modernist constructions and contriving the Individual is one of the most basic of basic bogus constructs…but maybe another time. I’ll just hint that in aesthetic terms, nihilist historicist modernist constructions are easy to detect. Obviously, there’s a reason Art History is disdained by power mongers; it allows nihilist historicist modernist build-ups to be scrubbed off of most topics pretty easily.

For now just plain old introspection.

We will start with a mysterious question: Do you despise your toes because they won’t work to let you hang upside down from a tree branch?

Probably not. Then why think that the natural flow of your mind is pernicious?

Minds and toes: a single formerly arboreal entity now living on the ground. But most of your mind is still built for living in trees, as all your ancestors did for the last sixty or seventy million years. We have only been less arboreal for the last seven million years, so that’s ten times more arboreal leaping than earthly strolling. The arboreal leap recurs in the earthly dance.

But what about all that pernicious introspection? The dance of the mind now wondering about its earthly journey?

It has to do with being or not being somewhere in the branches of a tree. The leap has to be considered in all its aspects before the leaper leaps. The mind of the arboreal leaper has to check all the angles or find itself hurtling in a very bad way all the way down.

And what about on earth? You still see branching paths. Hence, you are naturally introspective, and Western Civ has nothing to do with that fundamental aspect of your mental world.

For primate/Plesiadapiformes arboreality, see for example:

https://www.linnean.org/news/2026/02/03/jumping-for-joy

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2026.2614024#abstract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiadapiformes

The Spheres there are by P. Otto Runge in 1809.

As Manfred Frank points out in lecture 10 of his Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, Schlegel is a little late in the constellation or trajectory of Jena (or early or Frühromantik) Romanticism. Novalis, for example, was active in Jena five years before Schlegel arrived. Novalis was a visionary poet of Night as a sublimely hallucinogenic realm of many-facetted hopes and fears, especially in his Hymns to the Night from the interior of which darkness we see the world sinking away at some distance into a forlorn grave alone, enshrouded in grey, distanced by memory, submerged in dew, dreams and ashes.

Meanwhile, much later ( from about 2015 to now) Philipp Weber, working with early Romanticism in terms of cosmos and subjectivity (see the article indicated in the sources section below), has suggested that the present world (such as seen from the point of view of Night in Novalis’ Hymns to the Night) in Schlegel’s philosophy around 1800 was unfinished. Schlegel thought this was consistent with the various cosmic antimonies that Kant had noted. Weber argues that early Romanticism has a reverse side, a very dark side, wherein the worldly human viewer is to consider themselves as actively making their way through a world that is still under construction and where there is no definite support for any unified and dreamy longing for the sublimely indeterminate because even the sublimely indeterminate is not really there at all. It is a vision. It is a memory. It is a grave.

But the grave isn’t really there. Even oblivion doesn’t quite happen. The pieces never all get joined up. The fragments are ever-shifting and Schlegel is happy with all that ironic Romantic Negativism. Note that this is very different from Nihilism, as Schlegel gladly ironically notes in opposition to the inventor of Nihilism, Jacobi. One Jacobian leap doesn’t take you out of fragments to a completed world, you are running toward that leap, but you never get there. And keep in mind that Historicism in its attempt to guarantee a lost completeness for the sake of Modernism, triggers Nihilism when that Historicist completeness does not arrive as expected or even at all. Yes, Romantic Negativity is a very different kind of negativity.

And so, in his final, supremely unsuccessful lecture in Jena on March 24^th 1801 as Novalis lay dying, Schlegel asked, “Why doesn’t the play (spiel, game) of Nature end immediately, so that absolutely nothing exists?” Well, that’s quite a gambit. Some kind of unnatural repetition forces incompleteness. Or, to exist is to exist as fragmentary. Nothing hangs between the pieces. In the interstices we glimpse the immense darkness around us. Here, even the bold Weber must flee to a footnote on the logic of Brigitte Falkenburg’s exegesis of Kant’s cosmology: “The Completion of the concept of the understanding of Nature to the cosmological concept of the world is illegitimate…”

With an illegitimate universe at hand, one might (in skipping over Žižek as one always has to at this point in discussing early Romanticism) jump to St. Augustine and the early Kant and continuous creation or follow Schlegel into new territory and take the universe as a nascent reality on its own – something “completely different” (as Weber boldly says), a place of the permanently potential transgression of any boundaries at all – pantheism with a vengeance – the dark and mysterious source of the “incursion of the other” in Romantic art.

I suppose we more or less have zoomed into mysticism, a hazard that Schlegel notes according to Manfred Frank in a fragment that reads “mysticism is the most somber and most solid of all furies.”

I haven’t checked that translation but let us suppose by “fury” that Schlegel means, in the Latin-derived term, the form that the Erinyes take when they pursue vengeance on Earth and not in the Heavens or in the Underworlds. Maybe we can leave it all there for now at the release of ancient and absolute vengeful darkness into the Romantic world. Any singular Erinys is dark and ancient enough, being attested in Linear B from the tablets at Knossos on Crete in the forms 𐀁𐀪𐀝, e-ri-nu and 𐀁𐀪𐀝𐀸, e-ri-nu-we

Here I sign off in the somber shadows of the Furies’ wings and take refuge in my sources

Oh, and at one point, Novalis (note 743), suggests that the colors of different celestial objects, aethers and firmaments are derived each one from their own particular “Night”.

Some furies.

Sources:

Wood, David W. ed and trans, Novalis Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia

Millan-Zaibert, Elizabeth, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy

Ameriks, Karl ed, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism

Millan-Zaibert, Elizabeth, trans., Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism

Philipp Weber’s Article on Romantic Acosmism in THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 2021, VOL. 96, NO. 1, 23–40 https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2020.1862035

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00168890.2020.1862035

Wikipedia on the Furies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erinyes

Novalis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novalis

F. Schlegel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schlegel

When Schlegel arrived in Jena in 1795, revising the Kantian picture was all the rage. The problem with Kant, it was thought, was that he did not evolve his philosophy from any kind of grounded first principles – unlike say, Jacobi who grounded things in the immediate, total and miraculous complete perception and understanding of anything as soon as you looked at it. A very strong ground, though perhaps a bit strenuous for everyday life. And there was the problem that any wondering about things turned you more or less instantly into a Nihilist. Dangerous and don’t try this at home.

In the 1780s, Reinhold set out to help Kant and Jacobi at the same time. He popularized Kant’s first critique and attempted to work out a safer way to be miraculous every day: a stable starting point where epistemology was a bit more rational and slightly less miraculous so that things could be rationally constructed as needed from the ground up. Naturally, this did not satisfy anyone and the various opacities, quasi-abyssal gaps, and blockages that Kant allowed in his metaphysical adventures had to be reimagined as aspects of a single “abyss”, which is to say all the unknowable, unconditioned, potential realities of the world and the mind. Personally, I think the abyss is an extremely useful concept or non-concept. In Derridean terms, you keep the abyssal sous rature (under erasure as when Heidegger X-ed out “Being” in 1955). Again personally, I’d say the abyss gets filled in in about 1949 by structuralism – but that’s just me (but see the note at the end of this wall of text).

Anyway…to repeat myself from an earlier post…

I don’t think consciousness itself was problematic for Schlegel and the early Romantics. Consciousness was just your thoughts, perceptions and experiences. What was problematic was the relation of building conclusions about the world on the basis of what your consciousness was doing to whatever was really out there. You might say that their problems in that area centered on how you essentially were in that black box of your soul or your self or your “I” or your experiences. Their strategy was to move the black box of the soul into another region – the Abyss. You were not conceptualized as being boxed or ensouled or inherently abyssal. You were provisionally outside the abyss looking in at all the unknowable, unconditioned, potential realities of the world and the mind and the soul in the abyss.

If you think about the black boxes available in the wake of Kantian metaphysics, you had a non-Kantian choice of the abyss as one big black box to hold all black boxes or sets of black boxes: some for consciousness, and some for the rest of the universe to mix and match…which, as Hegel pointed out about Schelling’s boxed sets, results in a night in which all cows are black.

You can use black boxes in other ways such as the P-Zombie with a black box on its “consciousness” that looks just like the black boxes on anyone’s “consciousness.”

Well, you can avoid all that with the Romantic/Idealist approach of putting the unknown in the black box of the abyss and staying outside the abyss as a potentially conscious site of experience and reflection.

By 1797, Schlegel was going his own way. Sure, he thought the abyss was better than knowing everything miraculously or by overall rational construction; moreover, the abyss was naturally unknowable. You had to duck and dodge your way along its edges without ever being entirely sure whether your fragmentary ploys were even going in the right direction. Schlegel called this strategy Wechselerweis, which Millan-Zaibert suggests could be translated as “alternating proofs” or proof by alternation., which is to say zig-zagging from miraculous metaphysics to common sense and back again – an antifoundational alternation that is never resolved. So there is no grounding at all.

How the abyss gets filled in in about 1949 by structuralism – the secret sauce of structuralism – which begins to be on the table in about 1949 as Levi-Strauss gets to work – is that it shows why there seems to be a resonance between how the mind works and how the world works. The Savage Mind like any mind constructs its categories provisionally and fills in gaps and re-evaluations from two sources: one the logic of its constructed categories and two the re-emergences of objects in the world it observes. I say re-emergence because (as Heidegger noted) things in the world are “always already” incipiently categorized. Structuralism simply allows this system of resonances to be observed and characterized and with that – the abyss ceases to be abyssal. With early Romanticism, this play of the abyss as a resonance of the mind and the world becomes at least almost imaginable in a proto-structuralist way as Kant begins to bring into consideration in the Critique of Judgement

Here we have Waterhouse’s 1888 Lady of Shallot, maybe more of a Hegelian situation than an early Romantic one.

But anyway, on February 28, 2026, as things started blowing up all over the Levant, Mark Slight asked an interesting question:

Does solving all the easy problems of consciousness also solve the meta-hard problem of consciousness?

(the meta-hard problem is the question of why many people believe there is a hard problem)

Since I was in the middle of writing about Schlegel 1795 or so, I wondered how the early Romantics would have seen this question. First, I don’t think consciousness itself was problematic for them. Consciousness was just your thoughts, perceptions and experiences. What was problematic was the relation of building conclusions about the world on the basis of what your consciousness was doing. You might say that their problems in that area centered on how you essentially were in that black box of your soul or your self or your “I” or your experiences. Their strategy was to move the black box of the soul into another region – the Abyss. You were not conceptualized as being boxed or ensouled or inherently abyssal. You were provisionally outside the abyss looking in at all the unknowable, unconditioned, potential realities of the world and the mind and the soul in the abyss.

In this positioning of the problems of consciousness (as thoughts, perceptions and experiences. In relation of building conclusions about the world) in a nearby abyss, the early Romantics were able to deal with the problems as subject to a series of provisional solutions. Schlegel says the unknowable nature of the abyss is “trivial’ – that’s just the way it is; the self-constructing self and the world don’t quite always get along or even in the same way in the midst of their differences. Others, for example Schelling, took a very different approach and went on deep dives into the abyss and took it on mano-a-mano – which Hegel found odd and perhaps inspiring.

Of course Hegel ran back and forth over that abyssal scheme so thoroughly as to make his history of the resolution of minds and abysses pretty “absolute” with an internal dynamic that is (rather paradoxically) essentially static in the end.…but, for the early Romantics, they could do what they wanted with their minds and abysses without worrying about what would eventually be the absolute Hegelian results which leave only some version of history and the state as driving forces.

Sorry about the facile characterization of Hegel, but in terms of aesthetics and Historicism, he doesn’t play well (ie constructively/critically) in the period between 1835 when Hotho brought out a compilation of his aesthetic lectures and NeoKantianism arrived in 1870…which is what I’ve been looking at.

I guess I should note that the various opacities and blockages that Kant allowed in his metaphysical adventures had to be reimagined as aspects of an “abyss”…so you can sort of blame Kant for the abyss…but it was a response to his more bit-by-bit efforts rather than anything he constructed. But more on that later in the more focused post about Schlegel.

Meanwhile, what about that 1888 Waterhouse painting of the Lady of Shallot?

Well, several things. One, like a Hegelian spinning out of control, she is cursed. The curse requires her to see reality only through a mirror and to weave what she sees. Sooner or later, she looks outside. The mirror breaks and she gets in her boat and takes her weaving and dies.

Or as Tennyson has it (somewhere between 1832 and 1859, there are many versions)

And down the river’s dim expanse

Like some bold seer in a trance,

Seeing all his own mischance

With glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day

She loosed the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

For another, Waterhouse is reviving a Pre-Raphaelite image in a Pre-Raphaelite mode in Historicist fashion which is typical for the crucial time after 1870 when Modernism and Historicism began to erode. The Pre-Raphaelites were the ideal modernists in many ways. Classic, almost generic simplicity of presentation. A perfect and unattainable past (ie before Raphael) and many layers of Historicism. There is nothing left of early Romanticism in this, but in 1888, you can still get a buzz off the atmospherics.

Still, after 1870, there is a lot of unease with all the layering of perception (as enacted by the curse, the mirror, the weaver, the tapestries, the flow of the river and death). Breaking out of the box of an ensouled consciousness is fatal. This is not true in the imaginations of the early Romantics.

Sources:

Millan-Zaibert, Elizabeth, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy

Ameriks, Karl ed, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism

Wikipedia on the Lady of Shallot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott_(painting)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott

The image is Carl Friedrich Schinkel’s Castle by a River (oil on canvas 1820). Very late middle Romantic. You might say it is already full of nostalgia for early Romanticism which by then was two decades in the past and on the other side of most of the Napoleonic wars, with maybe some traces of nostalgia for the vanished quasi-Medieval Holy Roman Empire which was just as gone forever as early Romanticism.

But let’s get to the chronological enthusiasms of the basic article/post.

Frühromantik is literally “early romantic”…see you get your footnotes served on top around here.

As English-speakers began to notice (around 1988) the earliest moments of Romanticism (Frühromantik), the first step was always to confess how strange their original interest seemed. Stanley Cavell in 1988 was a very early case. He was led to some reading in early Romanticism by The Literary Absolute (Philipple Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy 1978, trans 1988), as he recounts in This New Yet Unapproachable America (1988). Apparently somebody caught him reading some Schlegel or something on aesthetics somehow mixed with his film criticism, Emersonian musings and wondering how to do things with words and if we must mean what we say. Good questions, but years of nightmarish self-reflection ensued. After all, at that point, Isaiah Berlin was the only known person to have reflected on Romanticism in general (and not on early Romanticism in particular) and only in a radio show with text a to be published after his death (according to his wishes and when he would be safely dead) and he seems to have gone on about Herder and Fichte – an odd pair that keeps turning up in blogs (not mine!) eternally ever after as somehow vaguely fascist if you want to feel better about your fascist sympathies or something without reading anything actually relevant to your supposed topic or something. Anyway, no Herder or Fichte here ever if I can help it.

Similarly, Frederick Beiser makes a similar confession, though he was reading Schelling and so was probably completely alone with his secret early Romantic obsessions. He confessed to Isaiah Berlin and was probably encouraged to write about the Enlightenment as a form of penitence, and he did. But, by 2003, he was ready to write some introductory essays to whatever was going on in early Romanticism.

Which brings us to where we are now: an introduction with a chronological emphasis on early Romanticism: Beiser, Frederick C. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism, which has the advantages of being somewhat critically sensitive and contextually sophisticated, but also well-focused on a very narrow time period and not overly adventurous (at least on the surface). Beiser had done a lot of early work in the shifty period from the end of the Enlightenment to the onset of Idealism and so his preliminary efforts have come in for plenty of criticism, but his introduction is still a good place to start.

For one thing, it is very precise in chronological terms -- 1797 to 1802.

And it starts with a more generalized confessional notice – that is that early Romanticism has been neglected in the English-speaking world – indeed – “After more than a century of neglect” – well from 1802 to 2003, it would seem. A lot of neglect. More than a century.

And – since the book was coming out in 2003 – a notice of his determined and very explicit anti-post-modern agenda – even though Isaiah Berlin was something of a proto-post-modernist according to Beiser – the other postmodernist misinterpreters of early Romanticism don’t have the excuse that they are Isaiah Berlin, because they evidently are not. In fact they are Manfred Frank, Ernst Behler, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. Such was the world of 2003. But we are not going to let that stop us. And it didn’t stop Manfred Frank or Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert who translated Frank’s more in-depth book on early Romanticism and wrote Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy in 2007. And of course sometime around 2010, Žižek got hold of Schelling’s Ages of the World which was written from 1809 to 1815 and was mostly blown up in 1944. But that Žižek moment is best left to the imagination for now. Think of it as an optional sub-partition of the Abyss or a rain check for reflecting on the Absolute.

Anyway, back to basics. Back to – wait – some “historiography”…now I know for some of you the sound of historiography takes you back to learning the hard way about the three different kinds of washing machines in Aunt Carol’s basement…BUT, Beiser does bring up an interesting point right away – the early historiography of early Romanticism.

As you can imagine, irate pantheists like Heine in 1835, did not have much good to say about the results of early Romanticism. Early Romanticism was seen as ultimately reactionary in a strangely dual mode, something like Isaiah Berlin’s assessment that Romanticism in general over a vast period of time in some general way leads to fascism and existentialism, or (as Heine might have said) into an increasingly ossified Historicism and an enlarged hugeness of Imperialist Neoclassical Modernism by 1835. Interestingly, Beiser says he is avoiding such assessments so as to follow the lines of Rudolf Haym’s brilliant book Die romantische Schule (Berlin: Gaertner, 1870). Beiser says, “I see my own work as a continuation of Haym’s original project. It was Haym who first stressed the need for a detailed investigation into the origins of Frühromantik, who first insisted on bracketing political and cultural prejudices, and who first made it a subject of historical study.” But, in his final assessment, Beiser suggests that maybe Heine in his pantheistic distaste was the final real early Romantic.

But let’s get back to 1797. The Schlegels are about to found the Athenaeum, a journal that ran til 1800 and published the Schlegels, Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel, Novalis and Ludwig Tieck. In the pages of the Athenaeum, Friederich Schlegel pursued a progressive, fragmentary method to push his idea of Romanticism. Schlegel and company described how they would make the entire world Romantic. Possibly a problematic project at best.

But also note the year that Romanticism is seen as needing some kind of historical context: 1870, exactly the moment when Historicism and Modernism began to falter and Western Civ started constructing a different series of pasts for itself as the Neoclassic reading of the Ancient World fell apart and as Neo-Kantianism arrives to disperse the mists of Idealism around 1870 along with Walter Pater and Venus in Furs as part of a modulation of Modernism into a less fixed relation with its various required nostalgic versions of primordial goodness; the Greeks get some variety to their eternal beauty, art gets artier and the savages get sexier.

I forgot to mention noble savages. There are none in the Frühromantik except perhaps inasmuch as everybody is a noble savage of sorts in the light of early Romanticism. They are present in Isaiah Berlin’s radio talk, though, so maybe that’s why they haunt the chronologically indistinct edges of our topic. They do show up all over the place outside of our limited purview, though, so there is that. The mysterious ubiquity of noble savages wandering all over the Romantic landscape suggests why it is important to be chronologically and topologically precise when discussing Romanticism. Yes, there are some forms of noble savagery in some forms of Romantic-adjacent milieus at some times, but to separate the noble savage into his own space with hints of a primordial paradise is a crucial and essential bit of purely Modernist aesthetics. In pure Romanticism, as in Surrealism (an antimodernist moment), the savage is always with us, always in our ever-questing hearts.

Okay. We got to 1797. Let’s check on a few minor aspects of the overall context of Romanticism:

1) The Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797. The beginning of the end of the Holy Roman Empire. It would take another nine years to finally be extinguished but by a secret agreement to stack things in the Imperial Congress of Rastatt, the series of “compensations” that dismantled the Empire was outlined.

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Campo_Formio

3)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congress_of_Rastatt

4) The Ossian craze and noble savages. This is much earlier (more than a generation earlier) than the earliest moments of Romanticism:

5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian

6) Ossian was a huge hit with Napoleon

7) Napoleon was a huge hit with Hegel in 1806, by which time Romanticism was well into its middle phase. More on that later as we push along chronologically.

8) ETA Hoffmann was not so happy with Napoleon since in 1813 at Dresden; one of Hoffmann’s earliest works described the huge bloody mess that Napoleon’s last big victory had left behind. When he died, Isaiah Berlin was working on a look at Romanticism that centered on ETA Hoffmann, which would have been pretty interesting.

Anyway, Doyle leaves Ice Vein thinking that he knows what is going on.

Let’s face it, Doyle was made for problems like this.

I had not really thought about how Sci-Fi and the Sacred might interact for better or worse. It’s true that in my Dangerous Gifts series, a Pagan Prussian Princess restores the Holy Roman Empire, but that’s a subplot and it only works in a particular 1811 version of a Regency Romance Evil Vacation world run by an Evil Wizard who has been trapped into being somewhat Good. So that’s not really a very good example, though it does make me wonder about the overall place of some forms of the sacred in my work and elsewhere in the worlds of various genres

There are other more oblique forms of some kinds of references to sacred things. For example, the Old Kingdom lurks at the heart of what is left of the wrecked universe that sort of survives in the Cosmic Flow. There is the House of Reflection which seems to believe in the potential goodness of all things (as opposed to the Old Kingdom which seems to rely more on the potential badness of all things). Again, maybe not the clearest evocation of the sacred you are likely to find even in Sci-Fi or it nearest neighbors in sword and sorcery, where there a plenty of temples and evil gods and whatnot.

Which reminds me that here and here my stories do have a few divine beings – gods and goddesses, nymphs, demons and imps oh and one out-of-control AI who more or less acts as a deity of some kind. That’s what you get in stories. And these beings switch back-and-forth: goddess to nymph, demon to natural man etc. Perhaps more polymorphous than the sacred usually is.

Well, I sign off for now noting the image of Mount Taylor at the top of the post, a sacred mountain and not quite as polymorphous as the sacred seems to be in my stories.

Venus in Furs. Well, we will get there. That’s Maria Rohm in 1969. But I think in some ways, the period 1870-1885 marks the beginning of the end of Modernism as Historicism begins to self-destruct due to discoveries about what Ancient Greece was really like. You can even see that in Nietzsche of course.

I’m wondering about Nihilism as an oblique aesthetic strategy, ie a strategy that throws something else into relief. Nihilism resembles the Lacanian concept of the oral demand which can never be satisfied or satiated. Yes, insatiable. Always swallowing a great deal of nothing. Always missing its mark but claiming that it is meaning that is missing, not the end of a drive that is endless that therefore always misses its end. Always denouncing what it cannot consume – which is everything reprocessed as nothing and not even happy with that.

As I’ve noted in the case of F. H. Jacobi, Jacobi’s discovery that everybody is a nihilist except himself and maybe the trivial Daedalic automaton AI style of consciousness elaborated by Kant, is simply too late to be an Enlightenment problem. Nihilism is a problem of Historicist Modernism. No wonder we have a hard time imagining it as anything other than a case of extreme dissatisfaction. We never expected History to hand us a big chunk of meaning anyway. The Enlightenment was over before its supposed nihilist nature was apparent and if it was nihilist somehow – it has blossomed far beyond whatever it was into a proto-scientific upheaval – so whatever Jacobi noted as nihilism was already gone – as you might expect – not even there. The missing nature of Nihilism itself is perhaps its main and most mysterious attraction. It’s all about missing something that we never have expected to find anyway once Historicism imploded.

But what about all that nihilism that people used to experience? What about the hopes of proto-scientific searching under every rock as a method for inevitably uncovering forbidden knowledge? You have your Mad Emperors looking for something in Alchemy. You have your Doctor Faustuses. You have your Frankensteins and so on. Doesn’t all that hope rebound into disappointment and nihilism?

Seemingly not. As people like Jon Stewart (A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century) often observe, it’s not that scientists or Mad Emperors are disappointed, but that the possibility of finding things out actually just plain drains meaning out of the world. Yep. Meaning just goes away as soon as you look into it. This seems a bit like taking a bite out of the old oral demand lexicon: chew on what you will and the flavor fades pretty fast. This seems like an undynamic methodological formulation that fails to arise even to the level of mild disappointment.

But what about the really emotional or novelette-sized or aesthetic side of nihilism back when it hit people really hard? What’s new about life and death and suffering at about the same time as the proto-sciences begin to blossom in the early nineteenth century? Perhaps the transition from sentimentality to Gothic Horror? It’s one thing to feel badly sentimental about dying, but it’s another to invoke any random part of Medieval religious décor as props in the settings for horrific lethal hellish goings on. Suddenly, you’re not just feeling mortal, but you’ve elaborated the void between happily being alive and sadly being dead. And that void is pretty much both the philosophical adventure of abyssal consciousness and the nihilistic space where meaning becomes disturbingly problematic. Not gone or forgotten but haunting or even demonic – like lost gods or lost religions or something: the gold mine of fantastic horror and the feast (for the oral drive) of meaninglessness. The oral drive is finally at home in the nihilistic abyss. Not satiated, but well-fed.

But how did people escape from Nihilism, back when it was a least a novella-sized emotional event? Masochism perhaps? That might whip up some meaning pretty fast, or at least a non-oral analog of meaning.

As Freud always used to say, “It’s not Rocket Science: Kant’s Categorical Imperative is just the inside-out form of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex; the inner guilt of Oedipal negotiations just gets turned outward into a masochistic resolve to always act like you are somebody else.”

Freud’s reading of the guilt and masochism that underlies the operation of Kantian moral imperatives probably explains much of why there seems to be a cultural compulsion to misread the actual “masochistic” novella, Venus in Furs, which was published in Stuttgart in 1870, by an up-and-coming literary star, Leopold Franz Johann Ferdinand Maria Sacher-Masoch, who also had the pseudonyms Charlotte Arand and Zoe von Rodenbach – short, handy, feminine and right there in Wikipedia along with a categorical drive to be somebody else. Sacher-Masoch also had a sort of assistant author, Fanny Pistor, who was a kind of real-life Wanda figure. Wanda being the person in the novella who appears in the framed narrative to subjugate Severin (the assistant-hero who offers the framed narrative to cure the nominal hero of his interest in divine beings in furs).

Essentially, in cultural terms, once Nihilism faded in the wake of the demise of Historicism, the original masochistic novella tends to be reduced to the single topic of how some femme fatale does the dominatrix bit to some man, perhaps more in some obsessive narrative scheme than anywhere else. Sometimes just remembering the femme fatale is suffering enough for some versions of the story. In the original novella, the definitely masochistic events do happen, but they happen in a narrative offered explicitly as a cure to the narrator who functions as a kind of Conradian Marlowe as in Heart of Darkness or Youth or Lord Jim. A cure, mind you. A cure for what? A certain amount of other stuff happens (none of it nautical), but here we switch gears, take a different tack, and have a look at what Catriona MacLeod has to say about Venus in Furs and the statuesque (or not) imagery underlying a particular manifestation (or not) of a goddess in furs in a dream in relation to the problematic nature of sculpture in the nineteenth century and some quasi-Venusian figures in some kind in a few furs mostly from – yes, you guessed it – Titian.

In Fugitive Objects, MacLeod follows the fortunes of sculpture in nineteenth-century German literature from its late-early-Romantic dematerialization, extending through a more melancholy mid-Romantic spiritual trip around the slippery or sticky realms of lost love, a Luther made of sugar, balloons and soap bubbles, and an inflatable Apollo all the way to its renewal in cacti and furs by 1870 far beyond the bounds of any Romanticism. A lot happens with the perception of classical sculpture between Winckelmann’s work (circa 1760) and the general perils of aesthetic culture, which set in by 1879 according to the cartoon from Punch shown on page 201 of Caroline Vout’s Classical Art.

With Venus in a Punch cartoon, of course, things get a bit odd since the cartoonist’s implied gripe about the aesthetic ambiance of classical sculpture is that real people are not that pretty, technically at least. Angelina, for example, is no Venus de Milo. Edwin’s comparative failure is less obvious; apparently he doesn’t resemble the bust of Michelangelo’s Moses as much as he ought to. Uncle John is stunned as Angelina with difficulty restrains her sobs.

Here, one might sympathize with the Uncle Johns of the world in their wonder at how what appears to be a miniaturized head of Michelangelo’s Moses got into the picture. Perhaps via a bit of humor after all?

One might think that there was some earlier overall cultural impact from all the shocks emanating from the realization that the hitherto idealized (if unseen) Greek art looked very different from what was expected. It’s a slippery slope from finding the Aegina pediment (brought to Rome by 1816 to be made presentable, in Munich after 1830) to trying to make sense of the Parthenon frieze (in London, not made particularly presentable, by 1812) to the Venus de Milo and the ultimate shocks -- the sculptures from Pergamon (parts in Berlin by 1871) and Olympus (casts systematically available after 1875, in London by 1884).

But no, of all that, in literary terms all that matters is the Venus de Milo until the very beginning of fin de siècle aesthetic culture arrives. She appears early (1820) and goes straight to Paris. By 1827 Heine is ready to have his blood sucked out by any sphinx who cares to give it a try and all the other proto-masochists are ready to line up. However, as Heine points out sadly after 1848, Venus doesn’t want your blood, however anxiously you offer your Oedipal wounds. Macleod can deal with all that: chapter two is “Biting Back.” You might say that resolving the Oedipal side of the Venus de Milo is precisely what enabled the expanding role of sublimation in fin de siècle aesthetic culture.

By 1873, Walter Pater, as quoted by Prettejohn in The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture is sure that the Venus di Milo died, Christ-like, piece-by-piece, for your sins in the abyss or at least that she is somehow stepping into the mystical Christian Age as a safely buried, blurry set of damaged divine othernesses. Resurrection is always high on to-do lists of sublimation.

Well, as Macleod points out prefatory to all that, before sculpture suffered its Romantic deflation, it could be somewhat hazardous. Before Venus de Milo, any random Venus might convert you to a slave to higher forms of mental love devoid of sensuality. I suppose it must be a smaller step than it seems to the average armchair masochist to climb from Sacred Love to masochistic devotion. But after Venus de Milo arrived, all bets were off. The melancholy ambiance of damaged marble bodies could no longer be relied on to distance the average sad literary persona from the sculpturally divine. Hence also, perhaps, the furs and cacti.

The post-Romantic distance provided by the melancholy contemplation of a lost world seems to have been fractured by the arrival of so much from an ancient world that looked nothing like it was supposed to. I guess it is very hard for somebody living at the beginning of the 21^st century to re-imagine what people were expecting if they dug up the ancient world at the beginning of the 19^th century. What they found was so different from what they were expecting that they had to reprocess what they found as vaguely “Egyptian”, strangely savage and oddly animalistic. No wonder Hegel decided that the properly spiritual mental buzz of Christianity was just the thing after all that. At least, as Hegel saw it, all that sculpture was white, isolated and abstracted from the natural world – which of course it often was when weirdly repaired and rededicated to a very different set of cultural agendas. A lot of societal effort was required to get all those battered shapes into some kind of cultural order and by the 1860s all of that effort was becoming problematic in its side-effects on nihilists and slightly decadent moralizing educators searching for the religiously confused (eg, Walter Pater and Nietzsche and Mary Oliphant who reviewed Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873 and said it was “rococo from end to end” and bad for people who were looking for a well-defined Low Church approach to reality. Oliphant wrote 120 novels so her approach to reality was pretty incisive it would seem.)

But, as Macleod points out (and see Betzer Animating the Antique for more on these topics), luckily there was the dense primordiality of the cactus plant to fill the cultural void where a more acceptable version of an ancient world might have been elaborated. The gods failed and the plants filled in. So, genuine cactus mania arrived in about 1800 and was fading into a more limited cult by 1850. In 1866, Stifter (a more Bildung-oriented novelist than Sacher-Masoch) wrote Sacher-Masoch to confess that he was a fool for cactuses. You can see the spiny cactus as a kind of diametrically converse counterpart to a marble goddess of love in furs. I suppose that’s a non-Kantian (sort of Structuralist) reanimation or resolution of some kind of categorical imperative and a kind of return of the divine aspects of the old gods. By 1881, Vernon Lee in “The Child in the Vatican” feels the need to place an imaginary child spectator in the Vatican museum to behold the gods and demons as captives in the museum, returning somehow to their divine natures and approaching the verge of some escape. For some reason, for the 1880s at least, it takes some kind of pure naiveté to see into the Vatican and find the statues in its

“desolate” corridors “vague, white things, with their rounded white cheek, and clotted white hair, with their fold of white drapery about them . . . in their vagueness, their unfamiliarity, they seem also to be all alike.” For Lee, domestication means distortion of meaning: the Vatican is “a place of exile; or worse, of captivity, for all this people of marble.”

Vout, Caroline. Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (p. 178)

And yet as Betzer reports Lee’s version of the imaginary Oedipal child’s experience, in the end, the child’s vision at least is freed to wander in a realm of museological pleasure by the demons that are also present with the gods.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqYkCPCnb_zIDPVdCYrCxfQ

And then look at my old aesthetics blog from last year:

Nihilism is a topic I covered in my Aesthetics blog last year, mostly because F. W. J. Schelling and F.H. Jacobi quarreled a lot at the Bavarian Academy of Knowledge (Wissenschaften) in the early nineteenth century. Nihilism came into being as the Rococo style was officially suppressed in Bavaria in the 1770s as Modernism, as a form of Neoclassicism, began to emerge.

So it seems to me that Modernism, Nihilism, and ultimately Historicism are tightly bound together at least in Aesthetic terms.

And Jacobi seems to have invented Nihilism to explain what was wrong with the Enlightenment.

And Schelling is one of Žižek’s heroes and one of the original Nihilists according to Jacobi. I find Schelling interesting and even heroic in a weird way but I haven’t looked into what Žižek thinks about these topics.

And for some reason (maybe Hölderlin? Definitely a textbook case of a non-nihilistic person) 1806 is the year the story gets more detail.

Oh, here is the answer: from 1806 on, Jacobi and Schelling were both at the Bavarian Academy of Knowledge (Wissenschaften). Jacobi as president of the Academy and Schelling as a member looking after the paintings and lecturing on aesthetics and nature.

Nihilism, like most useful characterizations of things in and about the world, seems somewhat puzzling. It seems to have to do with some “crisis of meaning” – apparently somewhere in “Modernism” sometime in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.

It seems quite possible that Nihilism has something to do with something problematic about “meaning” – BUT (and this is a big BUT), not meaning as an ascription of some function to an indicator or any set of indicators even with complex time sequences and strongly implied causal connections…so if I ask a Nihilist: “Which bunny ate the cheese?”

He’s not going to consider it a meaningless question – even in the absence of cheese and bunnies. No. It seems the “meaning” that is problematic is the meaning of universal values – that X ought to seem significant to every person – for example. Or that there is some useful scale of relative values. Horses are less natural than sharks or larks, for example (a topic that comes up in Kant’s Critique of Judgement). Or that relatively rational mental steps seem to generate their own context of validity as they go along. Things like that.

The value/meaning trickiness underlying Nihilism there gets even worse because apparently (at least in the current standard version of Nihilism) your idea of “relatively rational mental steps” and “seem” and “to generate their own context of validity as they go along” is not the same as mine which suggests the assignment of value is so doubtful as to be meaningless. You might answer that assigning a significance to such differences suggests the value/meaning problem of Nihilism would seem to arise from some source other than differentials of comparative significance or lack thereof.

And yes, in fact there is an odd twist concealed within the structure of a Nihilistic assessment. How can that possibly be? What (at first glance) could be more obvious than an overarching lack of meaning?

Obviously we know what meaning means or how would we notice it is missing its meaning? Or is it not that it is missing but that it is so ambiguous as to paralyze reflection?

Well, part of the problem with Nihilism is that, like Reason, Modernity is not quite what it seems. Kant and Romanticism showed that Reason is not what it seems and the end of Historicism pulled the all the last plugs on Modernism in about 1949. It’s true that Modernism has not gone down the drain very nicely given that it started looking suspiciously less viscous by the 1870s and that it still slicks some surfaces, but, like Nihilism, it mutates to stick precise, curiously Neoclassical, doses of nothing to things as needed.

Modernity has a grim prehistory that is entwined with Nihilism. They both emerged as it seemed that the Enlightenment was getting a bit too Rococo. Things were getting out of hand. Decoration was exploding and so were the proto-sciences (not quite what we would see as Science, but definitely as out of hand as messes of colorful angels in churches in Bavaria). Things had escaped from the Leibnizian rules of preexisting perfect harmony and into pure brute Newtonian abundance.

Apparently, the Enlightenment didn’t so much come to some kind of end as it mutated away from its earlier model of monolithic reason and took its less-than-ideal formulations with a swarm of half-baked proto-scientific endeavors and vanished into productive specializations: Geology, Biology, Paleontology, Archaeology – all subjects that were about to receive their designations and come to their first bedrock methods. But, when Early Romanticism ended and Idealism arose to bury a certain amount of conceptual wreckage as Hölderlin began to lose his mind completely about 1805 whilst Lewis and Clark set off perhaps to find Mastodons and Megatheria still living somewhere up the Missouri, things were not quite so well sorted out.

By 1806, even Early Romanticism had disappeared from the scene in Germany. Schelling had gotten a somewhat pantheistic scheme for the natural world going but even Schelling was giving up on trying to spontaneously deduce the absolute from what his inner being was saying to itself – an endeavor that could get you declared an atheist and kicked out of your teaching post for reasons that seem oddly technical from the point of view of the twenty-first century. Atheism was a tricky point as the Enlightenment mutated into a rapidly expanding maze of proto-scientific endeavors. To avoid the ever-present possibility of being detected as a nihilistic, fatalistic, pantheistic (wait, let me check on this list on page 131 of The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism 2^nd ed) – oh, I left off “monistic” whatever that is – atheist, in 1806 it was not enough to profess a deep belief in major supernatural beings and/or forces or gods or even supercosmic deities such as the well-known God the Father within the appropriate Trinity and so on. No observable personal depth of concern with the reality of any number of nymphs could protect one from the hazards of being detected as a monistic, nihilistic, fatalistic, pantheistic, atheist. In fact, no professions of belief or exacting attendance to religious events could deflect the detection of one’s fatalistic, atheistic nature.

Since none of these terms seems to mean quite what they might mean to somebody in the twenty-first century, it is a little hard to get at what exactly was going on mentally as the original rational projects of the Enlightenment became terminally unfashionable in academic and administrative circles in Germany in 1806. For example, a “nihilist” in that context was not some jaded, cynical, bomb-throwing pessimistic searcher for nirvana, but, as its “inventor” (yes, even Wikipedia says “nihilism” was “invented” by F. H. Jacobi), Jacobi, saw it, a “nihilist” was anyone who countenanced any speculative philosophy that put some form of rationality at the center of its methodologies. Now, you might think that would include pretty much all philosophy and even some innocent moments of mental reflection, and in a curiously proto-Heideggerian way, Jacobi’s “nihilism” does strongly suggest that philosophy has been barking up the wrong metaphysical trees at least since Aristotle. Of course, Jacobi saw nihilism as something that happened to other people’s rational thinking and as a thing to be avoided. Plus, it had a simple cure. All you had to do was to miraculously (Jacobi’s term) see things comprehensively as they are presently – just like that, directly right then and there and with no trouble at all, indeed immediately, as they say in philosophically correct English. Anyway, in say, 1806, a nihilist (as belatedly invented by Jacobi as an assessment of culturally Enlightened badness), was somebody who went a little too far in their interest in elucidating rationality (whether subjectively mental or naturally cosmic or both).

So well, that takes care of all of philosophy, right? Well, not quite instantaneously and right away, oddly enough. Kant, who was himself critical of philosophy’s claims to understand the proper operation of the powers of rationality, was a strange, less immediately detectable, kind of nihilist. Jacobi, as he reports himself to other fictional versions of himself in his dialogs on David Hume, finds Kant to be an especially odd case, “…a nonsensical mixture of the empirical and the pure…” (as Benjamin Crowe quotes in his chapter in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the Ends of the Enlightenment, Cambridge 2023). Jacobi says Kant is Daedalic. In a Daedalic (daedalisch) way, like automata made by Daedalus (and mentioned only in Plato’s Meno), the nonsensical Kantian philosophical mixture is only rational enough to remove itself from the scene – assuming Jacobi was thinking only of those autonomic AI-style Daedalic creations and not, say, Cretan labyrinths, bull-sized sex toys, manned flight, or theatrical spaces for dancing. So I’m not sure Kant even quite makes it to being a monistic, nihilistic, fatalistic, pantheistic, atheist in Jacobi’s view since, as Jacobi sees it, the problematic ontological status of things in themselves in Kant’s somewhat anti-metaphysical epistemology, leaves Kant’s notions as amounting to nothingness about nothingness and so not quite even achieving a nihilistic level of rational introspection about things that would otherwise amount to nihilism. Yes, as Crowe summarizes it, Kant’s critique of philosophy was “a patchwork that ultimately could not function as the real thing” ( as the things in the real world “function” or as something really nihilistic? One must wonder) – a kind of proto-Frankenstein monster of a philosophical nature, indeed, just some bad pictures from an unreal universe and certainly not of the world as we know it —or at least as it miraculously made itself manifest (always immediately) to Jacobi.

Kant more-or-less answered Jacobi that, be that as it may, he was pretty sure that formulating workable ideas about how the world is constructively to be reviewed, even if perhaps only as the image of a model somewhere, should take some effort.

Well, and yes, of course, by 1806, Kant was dead and that left only Schelling facing Jacobi and Hegel as Schelling started to work with the Daedalic mixture that Kant had proposed in his critiques, for, by 1806, Schelling was abandoning the idea that the workings of rationality could be completely elucidated by some kind of idealist harmonization of the world and reason, the kind of sufficiently idealized rationality that both Hegel and Jacobi could immediately accept as not being excessively monistic, fatalist, pantheistic, atheist and/or nihilist. Schelling was abandoning that and reverting to the Daedalic Quasi-AI Kantian Core to pursue deeper (well, at least more pantheistic) critiques.

From 1806 on, Jacobi and Schelling were both at the Bavarian Academy of Knowledge (Wissenschaften). Jacobi as president of the Academy and Schelling as a member looking after the paintings and lecturing on aesthetics and nature. They even seem to have tried to get along for a while initially, but Jacobi thought Schelling was too fond of the natural world while, of course, Jacobi preferred more purely supernatural things. As for Schelling, he soon seems to have developed an unadorned and even kind of just plain your basic simple, nihilistic hatred for Jacobi. As Jacobi went on preferring (hopefully completely non-pantheist) supernatural things and running the Bavarian Academy, Schelling was changing into something else, metamorphosing like some self-made naturphilosphisch Frankenstein into his own monster.

Remember, as Schelling did, in terms of Kant’s critiques, rationality is not quite what it seems.

What is so Daedalic about how Kant pictures the world? What are the monsters that are kept in that labyrinth? What’s in there which Jacobi dismisses as nothingness and that Idealism will burn away to the barest recyclable trace of nothingness?

In 1806, it was hard to even begin to get a handle on such things, but in 1807 there were perhaps a few post-Enlightenment flashes of clarity as Hegel started publishing major works and Jacobi and Schelling set the framework for their last set of tiffs. The basic occasion seems to have been (and here my source is Sean J. McGrath’s “The Jacobi-Schelling Debate” in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the Ends of the Enlightenment ) Schelling’s lecture on the relationship of painting and the natural world that helped him secure the appointment as the General Secretary of painting at the Academy but earned him Jacobi’s contempt for being kind of pantheistic (and all the rest on that list of bad things about the vanished Enlightenment). Schelling, of course, was happy to suggest the Daedalic drives behind the conceptually productive interlocking mesh of the proto-sciences, well as Nature and Art. In response, of course, Jacobi has nothing new to say ( he’s still trying to deal with aspects of an Enlightenment appraisal of rationality that had flourished half a century earlier) and Schelling is just getting started. Though other people would have to edit the results, Schelling wasn’t turning back.

video to cover a few topics: Valentines, some kind of Apocalypse, and some periheral crudity.

Here’s the video ad for the next Crude Tale — which features Doyle versus an overly helpful superhero.