"Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein". Arte e scienza nel primo romanticismo tedesco

It is commonly thought that the separation between the arts and sciences in the Western world, which can be traced back to Plato, it was finally confirmed in the Romantic era, when, on the basis of the Kantian thought, the art demands its own expressive and conceptual autonomy, determining the birth of aesthetics. Through the reinterpretation of the early German Romantics’ fragments, however, we come to a very different scenario, as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling and, in general, all the other members of the circle of Jena, prematurely suggest, albeit unsystematically, a rapprochement of all disciplines and, specifically, of the art and science, distinct on a practical level, as activities that have their own operative autonomy, but rejoinable on a theoretical level, as both aimed at the knowledge of the world. The result is a reversal of the traditional approach, which wants rational science as the only repository of knowledge and an appreciation of art’s cognitive effect, which suggests an underlying identity of the two activities.