Kant rejects the possibility that the human sense is able to perceive something in the realm of ideas. Rather, the figure used by Novalis dates back to Renaissance concepts of a “visio intellectualis”, the intellectual perception of totality. One of Novalis’s contemporaries was the exiled Swedish philosopher Thomas Thorild (1761-1808) who developed a perception theory based on the so-called “all- blick” enabling man to see everything on a scale from the most invisible to the most visible. Thorild rejected the Platonian and Kantian concept of a realm of ideas unperceivable by man– it is possible to measure everything and hence Thorild’s major work was called Archimetria (1800), popularized in a German version as Die Gelehrtenwelt. Thorild spent some of his time in exile in England where according to a letter written in 1800 addressing the German philosopher Herder he had tried to “arrange humanity as an invisible universal state” (“die Menschheit als einen unsichtbaren Universalstaat einzurichten“). English


Novalis – psued. di Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg


writings of Thorild are preserved, but have to the best of my knowledge never been analysed in the context of their origin during his time in London. An examination of Thorild’s British encounters and the way he attempted to realise the invisible universal state would be most fascinating. In his talk, Novalis communicates a broad picture of European historical


development and also delivers outlines of theoretical approaches towards it that in many senses tangent the emergingtrans-national history (orshouldwerather say post-national historiography?) of our times. From Novalis’s point of view it is impossible to separate a part from the whole when it comes to (European) history: “partial historiesare impossible –each history has to be universal history and only when related to the whole of history is it possible to treat one single element historically.”25 This leads him (and subsequently also Hegel) to the conclusion that European historical development is a result of a dialectical opposition between the “holy sense” and its counterparts such as reason and utility. However, there are three given phases in historical development: a “golden age”, a phase of real, contemporary history, characterised by struggle, resistance and alienation, and a future phase when a new realm of peace, faith and love will come into power. This utopian picture of historical development is projected by Novalis on the European history of state, church, religion and intellect in its development from the strongly idealised middle ages to thestrongly criticised contemporary times. The first part of Novalis’ talk contains a bright description of a Christian realm of belief, the second


25 Quoted by Carl Paschek in Novalis Fragmente und Studien, Die Christenheit oder Europa, Stuttgart 2006, p.


148. 25 Pauline Kleingeld: “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 521-524.


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