Poetic metaphysics in Karoline von Günderrode

Thesis

This thesis looks at poetic metaphysics in the work of the Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806). There has hitherto been no attempt to write Günderrode into a Problemgeschichte that would account for her significance as both a poet and a philosopher in the late eighteenth century. This thesis recontextualises Günderrode in the aftermath of the Pantheismusstreit of the 1780s. Günderrode’s work is underpinned by series of metaphysical commitments that correspond to Spinozist panentheism, and specifically to the variant that emerged with Herder’s vitalist reading of Spinoza. When viewed in this context, Günderrode emerges as the most consistent adherent to panentheism not just in Romanticism, but also in the period more generally.

Panentheism is an attractive construct since it lies between deism and deterministic materialism (the latter carrying associations with fatalism and atheism) and presents a heterodox way of retaining certain cherished concepts, such as teleology, perfectibility, and the development of the self. This thesis interprets Günderrode’s recourse to panentheism as significant because her political texts cannot be understood without presupposing a metaphysical grounding of reality, since they make use of an understanding of individual agency that rests on a form of moral universalism. Broadly speaking, Günderrode’s more metaphysical texts are engaged in a project of naturalisation: of re-writing the individual into nature, as a riposte to extreme forms of scientific empiricism and instrumentalising reason. The logical endpoint of this project is that panentheism absorbs materialism entirely: it becomes a form of spiritualised materialism, inflected with Platonic and Neoplatonist ideas. Günderrode’s distinctiveness also lies in how far she pushes this idea of naturalising the individual, to the point where nature and the human are no longer separate orders of being. Rather, all is subsumed into the subjectivity of nature.

Authors: Raisbeck, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-w4qewzpxx
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: German, English
• Keywords: Spinozism; German Romanticism
• Subjects: German Literature; Poetry; German Philosophy