CCCS Public Seminar: Professor Tim Mehigan - German Romanticism, or: The Dialectical Imagination. What it is and why it is important
Event Details
- Date:
- Tuesday, 16 September 2014
- Time:
- 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
- Room:
- Social Sciences and Humanities Library Conference Room (Level 1)
- UQ Location:
- Duhig Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://cccs.uq.edu.au/mehigan-seminar
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Mr Fergus Grealy
- Phone:
- 69764
- Email:
- f.grealy@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Critical and Cultural Studies
Event Description
- Full Description:
- ABSTRACT
For years a neglected sibling of the more philosophically distinguished, but more deeply mistrusted, movement of German Idealism, German Romanticism is now a hot topic in the Anglophone world. How has this revival of interest come about, and why should the non-specialist take note of this development?
In framing an answer to these questions, I argue that German Romanticism attempted to respond to Kant’s question about the nature of human consciousness, a question that he had posed in his first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). In Kant’s philosophy two connected, but at the same time incongruent, parts or aspects – sensibility and the understanding – make up the enabling conditions of human consciousness. Consciousness, in Kant’s account, begins and ends with the subject’s orientation in the world. Among the many open questions that arose in the wake of this philosophy is how these two aspects of consciousness can bring about awareness of an outside world, and how reliable or “objective” this awareness must be taken to be.
In the complex debate that emerged in German letters in the period after Kant, early German Romanticism effectively endorsed a theory of the dialectical imagination. In doing so, it moved away from the dominant current in German idealistic philosophy, which sought to resolve the tension between sensibility and the understanding by cleaving, under the weight of a drive towards monism, to the conceptual presentiments of the latter. Romanticism, by contrast, advocated the priority of intuition and sensibility over conceptual understanding without ever cancelling out the dualism that Kant had introduced. The result is an arguably more compelling and – by today’s standards – neurologically more apposite account of how bicameral consciousness must be considered to operate.
BIO
Tim Mehigan has published widely in the field of German literature and thought. Among recent publications are Heinrich von Kleist: Writing After Kant (Camden House, 2011), “The Scepticisms of Heinrich von Kleist” in the Handbook of European Romanticism (OUP, forthcoming 2014), and, as translator and editor with Barry Empson, K. L. Reinhold: A New Theory on the Human Capacity for Representation (de Gruyter, 2011). Tim is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2003 and received the Humboldt Foundation’s Research Prize in 2013.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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