L'âge d'or futur : Novalis relu à partir de Schiller et de Hemsterhuis. Le chiasme philosophique du mythe et de l'histoire dans “La Chrétienté ou l’Europe”
(2018) Klesis - Revue philosophique — n° 40 (2018)
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- (en) Novalis’s 1799 essay Christianity or Europe is usually criticized for its apparent nostalgic longing for a return to the medieval political embodiment of religion at the expense of art and culture, and where the Middles Ages is equated with a Golden Age. I put forward a new reading of Novalis’s essay, arguing that it has its origin in a philosophical engagement with and transformation of the ideas of two earlier texts: Friedrich Schiller’s Kantian-inspired inaugural lecture at the University of Jena on universal history from 1789, and Frans Hemsterhuis’s dialogue Alexis, or on The Golden Age (1787). By means of an analysis of Novalis’s original use of the theme of a Golden Age on the one hand, and his philosophical understanding of history on the other, the aim of this paper is to provide an explanation for the controversial intersection of myth and history at work in his essay. Far from being in accordance with the utopian, irrational and regressive image that has long been attached to this text, I show that Novalis’s discourse on Europe is based on the key romantic notion of Bildung as completion in its unitary and totalizing sense. Here the Golden Age is not merely conceived as an eternally lost paradise of the past, but history itself becomes the driving force for a new future Golden Age, understood as a consciously elevated and actively constructed harmony and unity.
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Cahen-Maurel, L. (2018). L’âge d’or futur : Novalis relu à partir de Schiller et de Hemsterhuis. Le chiasme philosophique du mythe et de l’histoire dans “La Chrétienté ou l’Europe”. Klesis - Revue philosophique, 40. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/181302 (Original work published 2018)