James Vigus

Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-Period Aesthetics

That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kants Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral even to questions of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout.

“You surely don’t wish to cure Anglomania with Anglophobia”

This article recovers a neglected episode in Henry Crabb Robinson’s increasingly well-mapped first phase as a literary and cultural mediator between England and Germany.1 At the beginning of June 1803, writing to his brother from Jena where he was a student, Robinson recounted with satisfaction that a meeting with Friedrich Nicolai had resulted in his submitting a letter for publication in a famous German periodical: