Bringing Nature to Language: Novalis’ Novices of Sais

Novalis’s Novices of Sais [Lehrlinge zu Sais] is one of the first nature-writing texts in German literature. This contribution starts by clarifying the various meanings of nature (cosmos, inner nature, landscape, wilderness, nature as text). Novalis’s discourse-like text begins with the problem of knowing and understanding nature as cosmos and then tests a series of arguments for and against nature. Some novices argue for a “lengthy well-pondered war of destruction with this Nature.” The majority, with the author’s approval, however, vote for a deeper understanding of nature that is more likely to be found in poems than in natural science. In the end, a young man pleads for an inner understanding of nature in the self-experience of its powers as “lust” and “love,” as the “innermost life of nature,” i.e., the return of a Dionysian experience of nature.