Between Romanticism and Idealism : Karl Wilhem Ferdinand Solger, Philosophy as the Thought of Revelation

This article argues for a reading of Solger’s philosophy centred on the concept of revelation (Offenbarung). It aims to show how in this philosophy, developed mainly between 1815 and 1819, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of art, philosophy of mythology and political philosophy, are all systematically articulated around the paradoxical experience of the revelation of the idea in existence. Solger attempts to develop a position that can integrate and surpass on the one hand the transcendental idealism of the early Fichte and Schelling’s philosophy of identity, and on the other hand Jacobi’s dichotomy between faith and knowledge. He shares with the romantics the concern for a philosophy that is itself life. Going beyond the reduction of Solger to a theorist of romantic irony or a proto-Hegelian lost in mysticism, the goal here is to more precisely determine his philosophy from out of itself and its links to the post-Kantian constellation.