The genial education of genius in German idealism and early romanticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, Early German Romanticism has been viewed as a reaction against the science-oriented and rationalistic Enlightenment philosophies that preceded it; exemplary of such readings is that of G. W. F. Hegel, who accuses the Romantics of irrationalism and a retreat from community.The purpose of the following thesis is to refute Hegel's criticism and argue that Romantic philosophy presents us with a truth-oriented discourse.Although others have defended the Romantics against Hegel, the reading presented here is unique insofar as it foregrounds the importance of human sociability, discursive practices (symphilosophy), and Immanuel Kant's conception of genius for Romantic philosophy.On my reading, Hegel's criticism can be divided into three parts: the accusation of the egoism of the Romantic genius, the charge of the elitism of the Romantic circle, and the claim that the Romantics give all authority to the individual.The first chapter explicates Hegel's criticisms of the Romantics, showing how they both parallel and expand on his understanding of the artistic (Kantian) genius.The second chapter takes up Hegel's charge of Romantic egoism, arguing with the help of Schleiermacher and Kant that the Romantic self comes to be communally constituted through its interactions with others.The third chapter explores Hegel's charge of elitism, analyzing Friedrich Schlegel's ironic discourse, along with the lectures of the later Fichte, to argue that the Romantics' epistemological fallibilism necessitates a populist expansion of philosophical truth-seeking.The fourth chapter concerns itself with the issue of the authority of the exceptional individual, arguing that the Romantic discourse conceives of its audience as ideal (how an audience should be) rather than actual (how an audience is), but that this idealization is a humble solicitation rather than an arrogant demand; that is, this chapter shows that the Romantics follow the Kantian account of genius in claiming that a social warrant is necessary for sorting sense from nonsense.The conclusion points out that this Romantic picture of the community as both responsive to individuals and capable of substantial change-a community of genius-acts as a corrective for a conservative tendency in Hegel's own account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit).Accordingly, this thesis both refutes Hegel's historically important reading of the Early Romantics and develops a novel account of Romantic sociability that informs the Romantics' theories of the self, the community, and their discursive interplay.Giovanni and Hasana Sharp, both for their comments and criticisms of my many drafts and scribbles, as well as their moral support over my time at McGill.A tall
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".