Georg Friedrich Phillip von Hardenberg is primarily known to Anglo-American philosophers, if at all, as a German Romantic poet, not as a philosopher. Indeed, until rather recently, the idea that early German Romanticism might comprise a philosophical as opposed to a purely literary phenomenon has hardly been taken seriously in anglophone philosophical circles at all. Hence the name “Novalis,” as Hardenberg chose to call himself, typically conjures up images of a somewhat effete young man with large, moony eyes who fell in love with a child destined to die before she was old enough to marry him, and who himself died, romantically, as it were, of tuberculosis at the early age of twenty-nine. Even his literary efforts tend to be dismissed by analytically minded contemporary philosophers as paradigms of a stereotyped Romanticism: dreamy and mystical, valorizing medieval times, idealizing nature and human individuals, and worst of all, tending toward irrationalism. But just as the engraving of Novalis adorning the jackets and covers of books about him for the last hundred and fifty years is arguably a distortion, so is this dismissive view of his work. The aim of this translation is to make accessible to an English-speaking audience the early, formative, and provocative philosophical struggles of a remarkable young thinker living in a remarkable time and place.

Friedrich von Hardenberg was born May 2, 1772 in Oberwiederstedt in Thuringia. His father, Heinrich von Hardenberg, traced his family origins to nobility in lower Saxony as far back as the twelfth-century.