Romanticism - The First Critique of Reason (before Hegel)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Romantic Position
Before Hegel completed his system, early German Romanticism had already formulated a critique of Enlightenment reason that in many ways anticipated the later critique of Hegel. Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher - they all emphasized the limits of conceptual thought and set against it: feeling, intimation, art, the fragment.
Friedrich Schlegel developed Romantic irony as a philosophical principle. Irony recognizes that every conceptual fixation remains incomplete, that the infinite cannot be captured in the finite. “Irony is the form of the paradoxical. Paradoxical is everything that is at once good and great.” The paradox cannot be resolved - it is the structure of reality itself. Novalis radicalized this into a philosophy of the fragment. “A fragment must be, like a small work of art, entirely separated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.” The fragment is not an incomplete system but the completed form of the incomplete. The system is an illusion - the truth lies in fragmentary flashes.
Romanticism thereby established a fundamental opposition: against the concept, intuition; against reflection, feeling; against mediation, immediacy. The absolute is not thinkable - it is feelable, sensed, experienced in art, in nature, in mystical absorption.
What Hegel Actually Says: The Integration of Immediacy and Mediation
Romanticism asserts an opposition that Hegel had already dissolved. The Science of Logic begins with immediate intuition - pure being as the wholly indeterminate. But it shows: this immediacy is empty. “Pure being […] is the pure abstraction, and hence the absolutely negative, which, likewise taken immediately, is nothing.”[1] It must mediate itself in order to become determinate. Feeling is not the Other of the concept. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel develops the unity of intuition and concept through a natural movement: from sense-certainty - immediate intuition - through perception as determinate intuition, to understanding as conceptual apprehension.[2] These are not opposites but moments of a process. Sense-certainty holds that the true is what is immediately perceived. But when it wants to say what it means, it must already use concepts: “the here,” “the now,” “this thing.” The immediately singular withdraws precisely in the attempt to hold onto it.
The fragment is not the Other of the system. The category “something and other” shows: the singular is constitutively limited - but precisely thereby determined. “Something is, through its limit, what it is.”[3] The limit is not lack but determination. What makes the fragment a fragment - its limitation - is at the same time its determinacy. The fragment refers to the whole from which it demarcates itself. It is thus systematically grasped as what it is: determined by its own limitation. The Romantic longing for the isolated, self-sufficient fragment overlooks that it is precisely the demarcation from the whole that constitutes the fragment.
Immediacy is not the Other of mediation. Hegel’s entire Logic shows: every immediacy is the result of mediation. The Encyclopedia states explicitly: immediate knowledge is “the result of a long chain of mediations.”[4] A child experiences its native language as “immediately given” - but this immediacy is the result of a complex learning process. The master craftsman handles his trade “intuitively” - but this intuition is sedimented practice. Development does not erase the immediate but preserves it as a sublated moment. The Romantic longing for original immediacy fails to recognize that what is supposedly original is itself already mediated.
The Romantic polarization thus does not hit Hegel but a pre-Kantian Enlightenment thought. Hegel stands beyond the Romanticism-Enlightenment dichotomy. He shows: feeling and concept, immediacy and mediation, fragment and system are moments of a process, not alternatives. Romanticism was right to protest against an abstract culture of understanding that killed the living through concepts. But it fell into the opposite one-sidedness: the absolutization of the immediate against all mediation.
Why the Critique Was Nonetheless Unconvincing - and Why It Recurred
Why did this integration fail to convince Romanticism? Because Hegel did not stop at the mere acknowledgment of immediacy but showed its development. Romanticism wanted to preserve immediacy - Hegel showed that it must sublate itself. Romanticism wanted to fix the fragment as complete - Hegel showed that it refers to the whole. Romanticism wanted to establish feeling as self-sufficient - Hegel showed that it is mediated through language, culture, history.
Romanticism polarized: either feeling or concept, either immediacy or mediation, either fragment or system. Hegel showed: this polarization is itself the problem. Feeling is not unmediated - it is mediated through language, culture, history. Immediacy is not simply given - it is the result of complex processes. The fragment is not self-sufficient - it refers to the whole from which it separates itself.
After Hegel’s death, the Romantic critique returned once more - not because Hegel had failed to answer it, but because his answer was not understood. Public reception reduced Hegel to a “system of pure conceptuality” - a caricature that ignored the integration of immediacy and mediation, feeling and concept. The post-Hegelian critics reacted to this caricature, not to Hegel’s actual position.
They had a legitimate intuition: not everything is completely mediable through concepts. There is a moment of the living, of feeling, of intimation, that eludes conceptual fixation. But they formulated this intuition as an opposition to something Hegel had already integrated. The elephant principle is particularly evident here: they felt out a real aspect - the significance of the immediate - but they treated it as an opposite to the concept rather than as its moment.