Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801)

Novalis (the name is a pseudonym adopted for his published writings) was, together with Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the leading philosophical thinker of ‘early German Romanticism’. Until recently Novalis was regarded primarily as a poet and as the author of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who wrote some philosophical work in conjunction with his writings on natural science and on the political matters of his day. In the wake of the renewed philosophical interest in the philosophy of J.G. Fichte and other German idealist thinkers, there has been a reassessment of the writings of both Schlegel and Novalis. It is now apparent that, far from being, as most commentators present them, defenders of Fichte’s ‘subjective idealism’, Novalis and Schlegel arrived at significant criticisms of Fichte’s idealism and initiated an anti-foundationalist tendency in modern philosophy which still has significant resonances today.