rhythm and romanticism 91relation to the notion of ‘feeling’. The key issue here is the understand-
ing of the spontaneity which Kant regards as essential both to judge-
ment and to moral self-determination. In order to get beyond Kant’s
split between the thing in itself and the subject’s knowledge of the world
of appearances, the Fichte of the early versions of theWissenschaftslehre
argues that the absolute, as what encompasses both the subjective and
the objective, must be essentially subjective, so that spontaneity is the
essence of what he terms an ‘absolute I’. He makes this claim because
the fact that there is anobjectiveworld requires something prior to the
objective world if the world is to be manifestasobjective at all, rather
than remaining just inert, wholly unarticulated being, i.e. being ‘en soi’
in the most radical sense. The world of nature which we experience as
the objective world is therefore the result of the infinite (and therefore
indeterminate) expanding activity of the I ‘inhibiting’itself, and this
self-inhibition is what, for Fichte, allows one to avoid the idea of the
thing in itself, as something fundamentally other to the I.^6 The world is
not an inert, completed entity because the absolute I cannot be reduced
to the finite things as which it objectifies itself at any particular time. It
is therefore ‘infinite’, in the sense that it is always driven beyond any
finite determination. In this conception feeling, as Fichte maintains, ‘is
always something negative, feeling of a limitation’ (Frank 2002 : 35 ),
which means, Frank argues, that it is ‘immediately clear that no feeling
could exist of an absolute activity’ (ibid.). Feeling, as we saw in Nuss-
baum, necessarily involves passivity, a dependence on something not in
the control of the will, which means it must in some sense be relative
to what it depends on.
Frank contrasts Fichte’s view of feeling with that of Novalis in his
Fichte-Studies( 1795 – 6 ): ‘In contrast to Fichte Novalis takes the first and
original apprehension of the self not as the self-transparency of an
action, but as a not-wishing and not-doing, precisely as a feeling’ (ibid.:
36 ). The experience of the I is therefore from the beginning the feel-
ing of itself as something finite, limited by an other, not as something
transparent to itself via its ‘infinite activity’. For Fichte, being is ‘see-
ing that does not penetrate itself’ (ibid.: 37 ), and feeling is transcended
by philosophical insight into its limited status relative to the absolute
activity of the I. For Novalis, in contrast, there is a crucial link between
6 Whether this is how Fichte is to be interpreted is still disputed, but he was understood in
this way by his contemporaries. His notion of the ‘check’ (‘Anstoss’), which drives the I’s
activity back into itself, is thought of as within the absolute I, not as an external thing in
itself.