;;A Battle As Yet Not Fought;;: The Tragic Consequences of Early German Idealism.

[摘要] This dissertation articulates the relationship between Kant;;s critical philosophy and the discourse of tragedy that characterizes early German Romanticism and early German Idealism.Since Peter Szondi’s _Essay on the Tragic_ (1961), literary scholars as well as philosophers have located this ;;tragic turn;; in the Tenth Letter of Friedrich Schelling’s _Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism_ (1795); from this shared premise, however, scholarship synthesizing both literary and philosophical approaches to the ;;tragic turn” has generally not resulted.This dissertation seeks to address that need.Chapters 1 and 2 clarify the philosophical motivations for a ;;tragic turn;; within eighteenth-century philosophy and isolate the discursive figure of ;;conflict;; (Kampf), through which Schelling brokers a philosophical appeal to art from within the antinomies of freedom and theoretical reason.I first examine how Kant;;s philosophy was itself led to such dualisms, then how these dualisms led to an impasse within post-Kantian foundationalism, and, finally, how Schelling;;s frustration with the solutions offered to this impasse by Fichte;;s ;;Criticism;; as well as Spinoza;;s Dogmatism led him to wonder in the _Philosophical Letters_ whether the problems of philosophy could be solved by philosophy. The ;;tragic turn;; thus emerges as a strategy for overcoming the self-alienation of philosophy;;s ends and means through an appeal to tragedy as a model for the sublation of the false dilemma between two absolutely opposed positions. Chapter 3 examines the risks and rewards of this appeal to tragedy for Hegel;;s development of dialectic beyond the dualisms of Kant, raising questions about the relationship between Hegel;;s desire for the disciplinary autonomy of philosophy and his rationale concerning the ;;end of art.;;Chapter 4 concludes with an exploration of the consequences of the ;;tragic turn;; for a tragedian, Heinrich von Kleist, whose ambivalence concerning the use-values of both philosophy and tragedy are legible in the relationship between his ;;Kant crisis;; (_Kantkrise_) and his presentation of failed mediation in _Penthesilea_ (1808).Through a close reading of _Penthesilea_, I show that the radicalization of the tragic medium by an artist could be employed to contest Idealism’s utilization of tragedy for its own self-legitimizing, anti-aesthetic, and rather anti-tragic ends.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Kleist

[关键词] Kant;Kleist;Penthesilea;Schelling;Philosophy and Literature;Tragic Turn;General and Comparative Literature;Germanic Languages and Literature;Philosophy;Humanities;Comparative Literature & Germanic Language and Literature