Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism

By Adrian Daub

“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?”

Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage.

Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226136950

Adrian Daub

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford’s Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, and he is the author of several books published by academic presses. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Uncivil Unions

I am married, just not with a ceremony. —J. W. Goethe

In his 1845 text In Vino Veritas, Søren Kierkegaard has a group of his repertory players (an all-male cast featuring Johannes the Seducer, Victor Eremita, and others) put on a self-conscious revival of Plato’s Symposium. They gather in a house in a wooded region a few miles from Copenhagen, where they arrive on horseback or in their Holstein wagons, and where an orchestra accompanies their disputations with the sounds of Don Giovanni. Just as Plato’s dialogue explicitly situates itself at a particular moment in Athenian history, Kierkegaard’s text outfits the group’s deliberation over the nature of love in the concrete and recognizable accoutrements of Golden Age Denmark. Accordingly, the topics have also shifted—and the text, which hews quite closely to Plato’s dialogue, presents at its conclusion, where the Symposium features Socrates’ dialogue with Diotima, a married couple, a sight that leaves the banqueting men dumbfounded. They come face to face with an uncivil union: a private configuration entirely independent from wider social structures, which nevertheless seems to place some sort of demand on their community. They were surprised—I do not mean the two whom the foliage concealed, the happy pair, . . . too confident of their security to believe themselves the object of anyone’s attention.¹ No, it is the men watching them whose self-confidence and security seem severely shaken. Diotima’s discourse in the Symposium, which extolled begetting with respect to the soul over the brute animality of mere sexual attraction, has been replaced with the marital banter of a couple taking its morning tea. Why exactly Kierkegaard, himself famously marriage-resistant, replaces Socrates’ initiation into the mysteries of love with what amounts to an encomium to marriage is, as so often in Kierkegaard, rather ambiguous: Has our age replaced eros’s striving for beauty with the banal transactions of marital life, or does the wordless, well-rehearsed connubial ritual constitute something of a refutation of the wordy paeans to and indictments of love that dominate both Kierkegaard’s and Plato’s dialogue?

While one might read Kierkegaard’s substitution of a married judge for the mysterious priestess of Mantineia as simply a bourgeois domestication of Platonic eros,² there is a strange corollary to this substitution. Even if In Vino Veritas holds up bourgeois domestic bliss as the wordless cure for the wordy erotics of philosophy, the dialogue’s model, the Symposium, requires Diotima’s (offstage) intervention only because singing the praises of eros turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Diotima is introduced by Socrates precisely to help sort out the difficulties, niceties, and contradictions his interlocutors have gotten themselves into in their pursuit of the praise of love. And if Kierkegaard holds up marriage, or a particular kind of marriage, as a solution, he does so because marriage has become a central problem in the metaphysics of love. And this in itself represents a shift: For Socrates, marriage was not much of a topic in the Symposium. It was the absence of Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife, that made philosophy possible. As Nietzsche notes, Xanthippe, in fact propelled [Socrates] deeper and deeper into his own proper profession, inasmuch as she made his house and home uncomfortable and unhomely to him.³ Marriage required no philosophy; rather, thinking philosophically about eros necessitated a turn away from common marital life.

By the time Kierkegaard’s cast of characters gathered for their retreat outside of Copenhagen, however, marriage had become a problem for philosophy. The first speaker, a young man, speaks of his ignorance of love, but more importantly registers his profound puzzlement over the institution of marriage. Unlike Socrates, who no doubt would have regarded marriage as part of our immediate immersion in the world of appearances from which we need to turn in refining our erotic aims, the young man insists instead that there is nothing immediate or trivial about marriage at all—that, whether good or bad, it abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

What a strange invention marriage is! And what makes it still stranger is the fact that it is regarded as an immediate step. And yet there is no step so decisive, for there is nothing so self-willed and domineering in relation to a human life as is marriage. . . . Marriage is not a simple thing but something extremely complex and ambiguous. . . . Is it something pagan or something Christian or something pious or something worldly or a little of everything, is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership or expediency or use and wont in certain lands, or is it a little of all that.⁴

In rehearsing his list of puzzlements over the institutions of marriage, Kierkegaard’s young man neatly encapsulates the starting point for a group of thinkers his creator otherwise had nothing but disdain for—the German Idealists. In the closing decade of the eighteenth century they had begun interrogating the institution of marriage along much the same lines and had in the process done away with many of the assumptions that had subtended thinking on marriage for centuries: Could marriage be severed from religion? Did it need to be severed from religion? Was it a matter of inclination (of elective affinity) or was it a matter of law? Did it effect a complete unification, as Johann Gottlieb Fichte claimed, or did it constitute a contract, as the natural law theorists of the Enlightenment had thought? If it exceeded the standpoint of contract, by what authority did it do so? And if it had essential features, where did they flow from?

On one score, however, there was no disagreement among them (nor any disagreement with Kierkegaard’s young proxy): Marriage is anything but immediate, there is indeed nothing so self-willed . . . in relation to human life as marriage. Much as in Kierkegaard, their insistence that marriage is something extremely complex and ambiguous did not necessarily go hand in hand with the idea that marriage was historically determined and contingent. In fact, the theories proffered by the German Idealists and Romantics set themselves apart from the previous two centuries of thought about marriage precisely by their rejection of the empirical. The Enlightenment bequeathed to the thinkers of their generation theories like those espoused by Pufendorf, Rousseau, or the Encyclopédistes that attempted to ground the institution in a philosophical anthropology, a theory of morality, or observations of nature. In an 1802 essay, G. W. F. Hegel summed up what the thinkers considered in the following chapters found lacking in this approach: Rather than being truly scientific, such theories were content to present "a collection of an empirical set of cognitions [Kenntnisse]."⁵

This book tells the story of a number of theorists of marriage who attempted to sidestep both the dictates of empirical reality and the precepts of conventional morality or theology, and instead sought to explain and structure the marital relation with respect to metaphysics, in particular to the philosophy of subjectivity. This made it possible for them to link the autonomous subject and the voluntary surrender of that autonomy in marriage in ways that they found politically productive. Most centrally, it allowed them to suggest that marriage had an autonomy that structurally resembled that of the human subject. They all differed on exactly what that resemblance and what that subject looked like, and eventually their attempts came up against the question of how the unity of the subject might preserve the irreducible two-ness of marriage.

Hegel’s essay on natural law encapsulates their approach: a truly scientific way of approaching the questions of natural law was to "take away the particularity from the separate, albeit accurate [individual] science, and to recognize its principle in accordance with its higher context [Zusammenhang] and necessity."⁶ This higher context was in the first place that of a system. The Idealist and Romantic theories of marriage attempted to establish the nature and structure of marriage not by abstracting from an empirical set of cognitions, but rather by progressively concretizing a more general principle into a system. This was what since Kant had characterized a metaphysical approach to morals. In the introduction to his 1797 Metaphysics of Morals, Kant asserts that a metaphysics is "a system of knowledge a priori from pure concepts.⁷ Thus a metaphysics is not entirely divorced from empirical facts about an object (something that would seem to be entirely nonsensical in the case of marriage); however, even though metaphysical propositions apply to empirical facts, they are not abstracted or otherwise derived from them: a metaphysics of morals cannot be founded on anthropology, but it can be applied to it."⁸

Their refusal to ground the institution in anthropology set Kant’s followers apart from the vast majority of their contemporaries, who, whether they offered moral theories of marriage or materialist ones, inevitably found their way back to concrete sexuality and marital life either of their own day or of faraway times and peoples. In particular for the thinkers of the Enlightenment, gazing beyond the boundaries of Europe or into Europe’s distant past had become an integral part of understanding the family. The natural law theorist Samuel Pufendorf’s theory of marriage, while holding up modern and Western notions of marriage as uniquely licensed by natural law, nevertheless brims with descriptions of possible kinship systems drawn from the distant, often mythic past and faraway, often equally mythic lands. Pufendorf’s survey spans continents and ages, as he invokes the Queen of Sheba, Alexander the Great, the Amazons, and Tacitus’s descriptions of the ancient Germans, weaves in travelers report[s] from the Kingdom of Congo, from the court of the King of Calecut, the right of prima nocte in Scotland, and of polygamy in the kingdom of Pegu in modern-day Burma. Dowry customs among the Japanese, Chinese foot binding, matrilineal succession in sub-Saharan Africa come in for often bemused, at times outraged, at others admiring, scrutiny, but Pufendorf never stops placing these foreign customs in relation to those he seeks to vindicate in his own culture. Over a hundred years later, and with very different intent, Theodor Gottlieb Hippel (1741–96) also embarked on a voyage around the world from the comfort of his study—all the way to Tierra del Fuego: Travelers claim that there men and women are treated the same, and that, were it not for their different manner of dress, or the men’s facial hair, the two sexes would be impossible to distinguish.⁹ The historic guises in which the marital relation had appeared, and the guises in which it appeared across the globe, were central to Hippel’s sense of the contingency of bourgeois marriage, and to Pufendorf’s sense of its legitimacy.

They were accorded no such centrality in the central texts of the conversation about marriage among the German Idealists and Romantics—and the way those theories sidelined the empirical and the straightforwardly political element of marriage was part of a larger program. The Idealists and Romantics turned away from Enlightenment-thought about sexuality and instead drew on currents of counter-Enlightenment thought, especially Platonism and mysticism. Their thought attempted to map out a way of basing marriage neither on theology, nor on reason or common sense, but rather on metaphysics. If they followed the Enlightenment in rejecting attempts to ground marriage in theology, they also rejected the Enlightenment’s focus on the empirical and anthropological. This detour into metaphysics represents something of a German special path. The rest of Europe was much faster to replace the theological grounding of marriage and family with one in empirical observation. Only in Germany was there a sustained attempt to elaborate a nontheological metaphysics of marriage, although it was short-lived even there: the successors of the thinkers considered in this study would soon turn back to the empirical and reject the metaphysical speculations of their teachers. While this turn to the metaphysical characterized their thought in general, they brought it to bear on marriage in particular with a specific agenda. As an intersubjective connection that nevertheless expressed more of the subject’s own desires and inclinations than other institutions, marriage allowed them to balance an insistence on self-determination and an insistence on the necessarily social character of human beings.

Why Marriage?

In his 1919 study Political Romanticism, Carl Schmitt provides a portrait of the political Romantic as an individual torn between an excessive concern with the self and an equally excessive concern with togetherness. In every Romantic, Schmitt writes, "we can find examples of an anarchistic sense of self [Selbstgefühl] as well as an excessive need for sociability [Geselligkeitsbedürfnisses]."¹⁰ While much of Schmitt’s critique may strike the modern reader as overblown and targeted more at the political Romantics of Schmitt’s own day than those of the late eighteenth century, Schmitt is right on this central point. There is a strange blend of anarchism and sociability in Romanticism, an instinctual rejection of antecedent structures and their rules, but a similarly compulsive readiness to submit to something else, or better yet someone else, in the name of feeling, faith. or love. Characteristically, for the period under discussion here Schmitt’s description does not apply only to writers usually thought of as Romantics—the young Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, for instance, are very much on Schmitt’s mind as well in his diagnosis of political Romanticism, and justifiably so. The strange blend Schmitt describes requires peculiar concepts to capture both aspects at once: The isolating tendencies of the Enlightenment were to be rejected, but so were those binding agents that smacked of arbitrary or arrogated authority.

Romantic politics turned to marriage as such a concept, or, perhaps better, turned marriage into such a concept, by emphasizing the autonomy of marriage. By unmooring it from state or ecclesiastical structures, the Romantics gave it something anarchic, and by adducing its structure from that of the subject they were able to make sociality a form of subjectivity. The autonomy of marriage constituted a protuberance of the autonomy of the subject. The institution of marriage was not an other that checked the subject’s autonomy, it extended that autonomy; but by extending it, it turned the lone transcendental subject into a being-together. Marriage received from the lovers not just the feelings animating it but its structure as well. The Romantic and early Idealist understanding of marriage as an uncivil union served both the anarchistic and the communitarian inclinations of those that promulgated them.

The Romantic and Idealist elaboration of the autonomy of marriage coincides with the moment at which the state began to intervene with renewed force into the marriage business. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Allgemeines Landrecht in Prussia and especially the Code Napoléon subsumed marriage under the regimen of constitutional rights and provisions. Both of these were suprapositive laws, that is to say, they opposed themselves to laws established simply by virtue of localized custom; to free marriage from positive law they had to make the family the colony of an all-encompassing constitutional system. The Allgemeines Landrecht für die preußischen Staaten went into effect in 1794 but had initially been demanded by Frederick the Great, who had sought to streamline the impenetrable profusion of feudal laws into one structure authorized ultimately by the king’s sovereign power. In following the king’s wish, his chancellor, Samuel von Cocceji, turned to natural law theories in the mold of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. As Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, a student of Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s successor in Berlin, put it in the 1860s, this tradition tended to regard marriage . . . as identical with a common contract, neglecting the ethical nature of marriage.¹¹ Trendelenburg’s objection captures neatly the problem earlier Romantics and Idealists had with this constitutional colonization of the family: they approved natural law’s opposition to positivity but decried its inability to register the fact that marriage had an ethical dimension.

What they meant by this ethical dimension is made clear in their relationship to the theory of marriage contained in the French Code Civil. The Code Civil (also known as the Code Napoléon) was passed in 1804 and was in effect throughout the burgeoning French Empire, which included many of the German states—and it remained in force in parts of Germany until the end of the nineteenth century. Like the Allgemeines Landrecht, the Code Civil insisted on a unitary basis for initiating, performing, and dissolving marriages; unlike the Allgemeines Landrecht it also sought to sever marriage from any theological bases. It provided for marriage by a civil officer, and it permitted divorce, but its concessions to the commune were extensive. Marriage required the authentic act of the consent of fathers and mothers; it provided that the civil officer could not celebrate a marriage if there had been an opposition to the union.¹² The idea that the union effected in the marriage ceremony transcended positive law or custom even to the extent that religion ought to have no bearing on it was one that appealed to the Romantics and Idealists, at least in the period under consideration in the following chapters. But the fact that this new autonomy was purchased at the cost of a greater dependency on the authority of the community ran afoul of what Schmitt called their anarchistic streak: While marriage depended on a wider community to give it meaning, that community’s role was not that of a party to a contract, a party that could voice opposition, determine the terms of the union, or withdraw its consent outright.

It is against this backdrop of the retrenchment of the theological purchase on marriage and the increasing dominance of civil codes that the Romantics and Idealists presented marriage as an uncivil union. Civil marriage had done away with the notion that the family differed essentially from civil society—civil codes could govern the relations between its members just as well as they could govern those between, say, the parties to a contract. This was precisely the step that the Romantics and Idealists were not prepared to take; when they argued that state and family resembled each other, it was because in the best case, the state was (or ought to be) organized like a family, not the other way around. Marriage was uncivil in that the unification effected in it drew only on itself, structured itself only in reference to itself, and required, for its legitimacy, its essence, and its purpose, no reference to a civil society outside.

As Agnès Walch has argued, the sexual mores of the French Revolution sought to resolve the contradiction of how to integrate love into a conjugal relation structured by reason.¹³ The Romantics and Idealists set themselves the same task, but the Kantian conception of reason allowed them to shift the meaning of this task in important ways: Reason was not just another external yardstick brought to bear on a private relation, replacing the religious or moral disapprobation of yore with a new kind in the name of rationality. Rather, human rationality inhered in the structure of the subject itself—and the reason that was to sustain the conjugal relation had much more to do with the internal constitution and autonomous structure of that relation than with questions of external civic ends and roles. This internalization of the rationality of marriage eventually gave rise to the well-known idea that Romantic marriage was an entirely private affair and had nothing to do with rationality, but was instead a preserve of the irrational.

This highly influential view confronts the present study with a strange conjunction of problems: This book attempts to link and put in dialogue two lines of thought, one of which has barely received any critical attention at all, the other of which has received plenty, though much of it misbegotten. The sexual theories of the German Idealists were often regarded as bizarre tangents, testament to a will-to-system run amok. And the theories of marriage these sexual metaphysics underwrote were often considered little more than quaintly repugnant reminders of the individual philosopher’s prejudices.¹⁴ Apropos of Rousseau, Penny Weiss has posed a very important challenge to such assumptions: Why, she asks, do we suppose that thinkers so fearless in critiquing many of their contemporaries’ most deeply held assumptions reflexively turned to received wisdom when it came to sexuality?¹⁵ Her troubling suggestion is that the misogyny of their sexologies may spring not from some lazily imported bits of conventional thinking but from systematic (and thus endemic) considerations instead.

If the important systematic place of the Idealists’ theories of sexuality has often been missed, the Romantic theories of and encomia to the love relation have hardly escaped notice. But where the systematic investments of Idealist sexology were widely ignored, it was the political valence of Romantic theories of love that was increasingly sidelined in the course of the nineteenth century (not least by the erstwhile protagonists of Frühromantik themselves). In the two-hundred-year reception of German Romanticism, from Hegel’s own attacks on the Romantics and Heinrich Heine’s Romantic School via Rudolf Haym to Carl Schmitt, a number of prejudices prevailed, at least two of which apply a fortiori to a Romantic theory of marriage: (a) the claim that Romanticism is inherently apolitical and, in the specific case of marriage, thinks the institution as an entirely private relation of love; (b) the claim that Romanticism is inherently interiorized and preoccupied with psychological states, making marriage primarily an effect of individualized psychologies (a charge inaugurated by Hegel’s critique of the Beautiful Soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit). It is the purpose of this study to correct or at least complicate these claims by confronting Romantic marital theory with its origins in and persistent dialogue with German Idealism.

The psychologization of political Romanticism often proceeds in tandem with a pronounced biographization of Romantic writing—in particular Novalis, easily one of the most radical early Romantics, was neutered entirely into a death-loving aesthete by his nineteenth-century reception. This is a fate he shares with the man whose reflections on marriage I cited in the opening—Søren Kierkegaard, whose challenging and puzzling ideas of marriage are frequently deflated into mere commentary on his broken-off engagement to Regine Olsen. In an article entitled Romantic Marriage (Romantische Ehe, 1925)¹⁶ the poet and historian Ricarda Huch (1864–1947), author of two classic works dealing with the rise and the decline of German Romanticism (Blütezeit der Romantik and Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik), treats her topic in a way that can count as symptomatic: Huch lays out the Romantic theories of marriage (she discusses Schlegel and Schleiermacher) and then juxtaposes them with the actual marital praxis of the German Romantics, giving brief biographical sketches of the marital life of the Schlegels, Tieck, Brentano, and even E. T. A. Hoffmann. Apparently, their theories of marriage did not deserve a refutation by theory but, for Huch, could be dispensed with by reference to the bedroom antics of the subjects that elaborated them.

What further makes Huch’s text symptomatic for the reception of Romantic theories of love and marriage for much of the last two-hundred years is the fact that it juxtaposes the theories of the earliest stirrings of early Romanticism on the one hand, and the sordid love lives of poets characteristic of high or late Romanticism. Her conclusions, which tend to valorize the very bourgeois institutional marriage that the Romantics reacted against, read what she perceives to be the failure of Romantic marital praxis (and by extension theory) in terms of the sensibilities of high and late Romanticism. In so doing, she presupposes the necessity of the very form of marriage the Romantics denied—the mercantile, elective, atomistic kind of marriage lampooned by the Romantic philosopher Franz von Baader as Hans Stein & Company,¹⁷ a marriage that merges two otherwise independent entities for mutual benefit. Anything else, she implies, is not really a marriage—which was precisely the problem the Romantic metaphysicians of marriage posed themselves. Huch claims that the Romantics regarded marriage essentially as a private matter between two persons.¹⁸ She thus diagnoses an abnegation of a social or political stake in Romantic marriage (be this Sittlichkeit, morality, or mere realpolitik): Questions concerning the outside world did not occupy the Romantics much, since all they had in view were the lovers in a strangely unreal detachment from the world.¹⁹ What is more, the Romantics, according to Huch, denied the moment of necessity, of duty that is to Huch inherent in marriage (a claim clearly inspired by Hegel’s critique of the Romantics in the Philosophy of Right).²⁰ This second claim amounts to denying that the Romantic theories of marriage are about marriage at all. Since marriage without a sense of duty cannot possibly endure, they really rejected marriage in general, and their championing of a ‘marriage of love’ was really tantamount to a fear of marriage.²¹

This set of claims represents what the present study seeks to question. It seeks to show that Romantic theories of marriage were not apolitical; rather, they saw marriage as profoundly nonpoliticized, in the sense that marriages did not receive their significance from the polis. As metaphysical entities, they were significant in and of themselves, and they faced the political as an autonomous sphere (Hegel) or even reversed the thrust of determination (Novalis). That is to say, rather than allowing the private to be determined by the public, the Romantics saw the impulses of the private emanating into the polis. Uncivil unions could still shape civic life.

This constellation of thinkers and the nature of their thinking about marriage in particular require an approach that takes care to highlight the logic of their conversation: the political and cultural valences of their theories of marriage would have been obvious to a generation for which the French Revolution was the defining world-historic event of their youth. Their philosophical influences, however eclectic, were part of a zeitgeist and, combined with the gravitational pull of historic events, could push thinkers who never met in almost identical directions. Therefore, this book will not offer a historical-genetic exposition of their conversation about marriage. Instead, it tries to consider the conversation as a language game in which the way the German Idealists and Romantics posed the question of a metaphysics of marriage, the resources they drew on to articulate and answer it, allowed for a discrete range of possible responses. This is, for example, why Hegel and Kant will often appear out of temporal sequence, as it were: Even the late Kant refused some of the premises, lemmata, and doxai that the early German Idealists had been operating with for years.

The incredible productivity of these years, combined with the protagonists’ mobility as they associate and disassociate in ever new constellations, produces thoroughly paradoxical historical developments: For instance, the early Idealist critique of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre predated Fichte’s presentation of his system—it had been developed as a critique of the Elementarphilosophie proposed by Fichte’s predecessor in Jena, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a development that Fichte, who was busy giving private seminars in Switzerland, had been unaware of.²² Hegel and Novalis managed to develop strikingly similar critiques of Fichte during periods when there is little or no evidence of sustained contact between them; Hegel’s account of shame bears a resemblance to that produced in Berlin by Schlegel and Schleiermacher, who seem to have been barely aware of him and disliked him to boot. These ubiquitous affinities and parallels between distinct philosophical projects meant that the ways these thinkers posed the problem of a marital metaphysics, the ways they answered it, and the ways they failed to answer it tended to resemble one another. At least when it came to marriage, it was only the conclusions they drew from the failure of their early metaphysical systems that would place them on highly divergent trajectories. By 1820, when Hegel produced the Foundations of the Philosophy of Right, Schlegel was lecturing on the Philosophy of Life in Vienna, and Schleiermacher was completing his Glaubenslehre, whatever uncanny affinities had bound the efforts of their youth together had long sundered.

Not only the temporal compactness of the early development of Idealist and Romantic thought requires an approach that excavates an overall logic from individual lines of influence. It is also necessary in order to follow their syncretic insights across disciplinary lines. Even when they were offering these insights in the form of poems, novels, or fairy tales, the poets and thinkers considered in this study were trying to make philosophical points about the nature and potential of marital unification. At the same time, however, their philosophies of marriage tended to grapple with the discursive or narrative aspects of this unification—to what extent language, fiction, or poetry were or had to be involved in marriage was thus always an issue for them. The fact that German Idealist and Romantic philosophy of marriage after Fichte frequently had recourse to fiction is thus owed not to its protagonists’ day jobs but rather to the object of their meditations itself. Retracing these meditations will require reading poetic texts as philosophical ones and vice versa, without ever losing sight of the fact that these are in the end philosophical claims, claims that concern the nature of human common life, its prospects and potential.

At the same time, however, the thinkers considered in the following chapters conceived of their theories of marriage as political, though not in any straightforward sense. From the beginning, the metaphysics of marriage was part of a political philosophy, albeit a political philosophy that refused the conception of the political common in eighteenth-century philosophy. Talking about marriage meant also talking about how a state ought to be constituted, rather than about how marriage ought to be rightly administered in the state as recognized by traditional political philosophy. The protagonists of this study thought that political philosophy in the natural law tradition or that of the Enlightenment missed precisely the ethical aspects of any kind of human community. Their marital politics tended to reconsider not just traditional constructions of marriage but traditional constructions of politics as well. As a result, this study will have to reconstruct the relationship of traditional political philosophy and a political theory of marriage that at first blush seems to have very little in common with that tradition.

If the political theories of marriage offered by the first Romantic and Idealist generation seem to afford new mobility to the term politics, they also entail an altogether unprecedented mobility to the term marriage. In many of the texts being considered in the following chapters, terms like love, marriage, and sex are used interchangeably. Some of this is owed to the moral squeamishness of their age, which made it easier to talk about sex as long as it took place in the marriage bed. But it is worth noting that this usage contravened much of the thinking on sexuality of the eighteenth century, in which love and marriage were often opposed. A text that predates the Romantic and Idealist metaphysics of marriage by only about a decade, written moreover by one of their frequent (though frequently hostile) interlocutors, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Woldemar: A Rarity of Natural History (Woldemar: ein Seltenheit aus der Naturgeschichte, 1779), presents exactly such a theory. The main character lives in something of a metaphysical ménage à trois: he lives in a platonic friendship of souls (Seelenfreundschaft) with the widow Henriette but marries her best friend Allwina.

Even though Jacobi’s novel seems to suggest that such an arrangement may be impossible (and may be made impossible by nothing so much as the necessity of its linguistic mediation), Jacobi holds apart two ideas that Fichte and the Jena Romantics would have considered indistinct: physical intimacy and spiritual intimacy. At the same time, the Romantics absolutized a distinction that had run through eighteenth-century thought since at least Rousseau. The early eighteenth century had distinguished mostly between physical and spiritual love; the late eighteenth century tended to draw the distinction between authentic and inauthentic love. Authentic love need not really be distinguished from an authentic marriage—instead, they both had to be distinguished from inauthentic forms of intimacy. While there were some forms of inauthentic love that concerned the Romantics (shallow flirting, for instance), their anarchistic bent directed most of their concern toward inauthentic marriage. This accounts for their confusing usage of these terms: when love was authentic, they regarded it as already a (true) marriage; when an institutional marriage was not subtended by feeling, it was not really a marriage.

Importantly, while the outlook of the early Idealist and Romantic metaphysics of marriage was distinctly political, its politics did not always point in a single direction. Rather, the metaphysical discourse of marriage was controversial at the moment of its first appearance and remained so by the time its proponents abandoned it. But the attacks on the metaphysics of marriage were far from apolitical but rather raised important political issues in their own right. In investigating this constellation, the present study falls into four parts: The first three chapters present the classic texts constituting the conversation on marriage and metaphysics in the decades straddling the year 1800. This discourse was inaugurated by Fichte but developed by the young Romantics and Idealists who fused his thought with Neoplatonism and Rousseauism. Many of the central figures in the Romantic and Idealist reception of Fichte, including Schelling, Hölderlin, the young Hegel, and Novalis will be discussed in this part. Many of the central figures, but not all. This is because even as the main exponents of this discourse rhapsodized over the complete unification of lovers in marriage and attempted to map this unification onto communities, congregations, and even states, several of them struggled with some of the more problematic consequences of this metaphysics of unification.

Chapters 4 and 5 will therefore deal with a number of texts and thinkers that are at once central to this discourse but also exhibit (sometime in spite of themselves) a specific misgiving with the Idealist and Romantic metaphysics of marriage—in particular Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel and F. D. E. Schleiermacher. The exact nature of this irritation will be introduced in more detail below, but generally it concerned the question of whether the unified structure of marriage could itself impose a kind of institutional constraint very much like religion, tradition, or family line. If marriage provided its own structures and placed its own strictures on the individuals united in it, did it differ substantially from the outside forces the metaphysics of marriage had attempted to ban?

Chapters 6 and 7 will return to the inaugural moment of the metaphysics of marriage, Fichte’s arrival in Jena, and highlight a tradition of skepticism vis-à-vis the rapturous discourse on marriage and autonomy prevalent among the Romantics and Idealists. Sophie Mereau, Fichte’s only female student in his private seminars, used Fichte’s theory of marriage and eroticism (still inchoate at the time) to criticize Fichte’s metaphysics of autonomy in general. Her friend Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) similarly uses marriage and the erotic as a kind of royal road into Fichteanism’s unconscious. Behind the seemingly progressive metaphysics of autonomy, Jean Paul’s erotic skepticism locates nothing but nihilism, self-enclosure. and downright philosophical masturbation.

Given that trenchant critiques of the discourse sprang into existence almost at the moment of its inception, it is perhaps not surprising that its own main purveyors abandoned the project before long. The final two chapters trace their path away from the metaphysics of marriage and shows how both the discourse itself and its critique were picked up throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the metaphysics of complete unification and the protestations of a discontent each have afterlives in the nineteenth century—taken together, their entwined afterlives map out a history of nineteenth-century philosophical thought on gender and sexuality. One problem in particular came to dominate the gradual move away from the Romantic and Idealist metaphysics of marriage, and it continues to be of interest to this day: what with F. W. J. Schelling we will call the problem of the product, that is to say, the question whether there isn’t something in marriage that necessarily opposes itself to the emotions of the partners unified in it, and whether that something might hold a political promise of its own. From Hegel’s later theories of the family to the current debates on gay marriage, it is the fact that marriage combines momentary feelings with something more enduring that has become philosophically interesting.

Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

If the theories of marriage proposed by the young protagonists of German Idealism and Romanticism rejected theology as a basis for their arguments, their rejection was motivated quite differently, and proceeded quite differently, from that of earlier eighteenth-century thought on marriage that had sought to replace the theological foundation of marriage. Eighteenth-century thought about marriage is itself exceedingly varied, owing partly to the variegation of the Enlightenment and its numerous countercurrents. Those who followed Leibniz understood reason and its operations as downright mathematical, whereas the reason those in the empiricist mold meant to bring to bear on marriage was something much closer to everyday common sense. There were wide disagreements on the nature of the passions and their relation to reason once parts of the German Enlightenment took a sensualist turn at midcentury. The German Idealists and Romantics by and large rejected the dominant strands of Enlightenment thinking about marriage. In fact, they turned to metaphysics in many respects to sidestep the problems that beset these earlier approaches in their eyes, or to avoid presuppositions they regarded as untenable.

By far the most influential account of marriage that the Enlightenment bequeathed to the thinkers considered in this study was the contractual account. It was born along with the natural law tradition of political philosophy and had its origin in the desire to explain and adjudicate marriage without explicit reference to divine law or theological precepts. Its last exponent in Germany was Kant, and his infamous formulation of marriage as a contract for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes²³ soon emerged as the bête noire of the Romantic and Idealist accounts of marriage. Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), easily the most influential philosopher and jurist of this tradition, and one of the central figures in establishing the Enlightenment in Germany, is usually credited with pioneering the notion of marriage as a contract. Drawing on thinkers like Descartes, Hugo Grotius, and Hobbes, Pufendorf sought to establish a natural law independent of theological doctrine, instead taking recourse to concepts like human dignity, innate sociability, and the propagation of the species. Since marriage was to be established from natural rather than divine law, Pufendorf seeks to discover . . . how the Law purely natural directs in these matters.²⁴ His famous answer, given in Of the Law of Nature and Nations—Eight Books (De iure naturae et gentium libri octo, 1672) is that marriage is at base simply a Covenant . . . between a Man and a Woman, for their mutual Assistance in serving Posterity,²⁵ a pact in which the wife signs over certain rights to her husband, though he does not, as the Bible would have it, rule over her²⁶ with sovereign power.

The idea that marriage was a contract had become accepted without question among students of Leibniz. In his Institutions of the Law of Nature and of Peoples (Institutiones Iuris Naturae et Gentium, 1750), Christian Wolff (1679–1754) speaks of marriage in much the same way as Pufendorf. While the marital partners may not be aware of the specific terms when they enter into a marriage, reflection shows that they implicitly pledge themselves to clearly enumerated terms (the duty to procreate, the exclusive use of one another’s genitalia).²⁷ Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), another follower of Leibniz, similarly opines that "since all communities [Gesellschaften] are contracts, marriage too is nothing more than a contract: and as a consequence everything that is true of contracts in general, and for social contracts in particular, applies to [marriage]."²⁸ This view, though by no means shared by all marriage theorists of the Enlightenment, represented for the Romantics and Idealists the ultima ratio of and the clear sign for the intellectual and ethical bankruptcy of Enlightenment thinking about the subject of marriage.

By midcentury the German Enlightenment underwent a sensualist realignment: reason was no longer championed to the exclusion of affect, but rather affects were taken to have a reason of their own when rightly exercised. While Pufendorf had meant to replace theological justifications of marriage with justifications that referred to reason, the second half of the eighteenth century saw thinkers and poets both from within the ranks of the Enlightenment (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, most prominently) and from among the Enlightenment’s critics (Johann Gottfried Herder, for instance) turn to the wisdom of attraction to explain and vindicate the marital union. In particular, the thinkers associated with Sturm und Drang turned to marriage as an expression of untrammeled sensual love. Any attempt to make marriage metaphysical, to divorce it from the sensuality of love, they argued, hampered the directness of this expression. Whether it was the sensualism of the Enlightenment, or the emphasis on passion among its critics, the Romantics and Idealists found that both simply asserted the dignity of human feelings, rather than showing where that dignity came