Sztuka przyszłości według Novalisa

Abstract

RYSZARD KASPEROWICZ (University of Warsaw) / Art of the future according to Novalis
In the concepts of Jena “early Romanticism”, art played a fundamental role, although it was also situated in the space of utopia – in an undefined, but possible, and therefore real (from the perspective of the realized Romantic self) future. Novalis, himself a great poet after all, repeatedly addressed the question of the art of the future. It was not a speculation on the assumed or predicted fate of art, but an outline of a great, however perhaps unsystematic and fragmentary project to expand the scope of cognition and to grasp the limits of human subjectivity and the sources of human freedom by creating art and interacting with it. This project was born, among other things, through reflection on various threads of post-Kantian, partly inspired (critically) by Johann Ficht, reflection on the problem of self-knowledge and the constitution of the world as an actually artistic (or quasi-artistic) act. It was also directly related to the reflection on the power of poetic language, within which the typically Enlightenment, nomenclatural and instrumental conception of language was reversed. An autonomous dimension was attributed to the language of poetry, recognizing language as a space of action for the poet, who makes real the possibilities of infinite expression inherent in it, as a space of spontaneous play, practised for its own sake. The unique power and position of art, a manifestation of freedom, was at the same time to be evidence of the virtually infinite potential for the transformation of the spiritual – and by extension, sensual and empirical – structure of the human. The present sketch is devoted to bringing these problems closer.