Absolute Renunciation

This essay is motivated by a volume published in 2023, aptly titled: The Being of Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy.2 While this brilliant collection of essays deals with the essential figures of post-Kantian philosophy, e.g., Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, the literary and philosophical movement of German Romanticism and, more specifically, the work of the philosopher-poet Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, or Novalis, is notably absent.3 This essay serves to amend this scholarly blind spot, arguing that Novalis’ philosophical work not only centralizes negation and negativity, but uses it as a means to address a key problem in post-Kantian philosophy, i.e., the problem of negation.4