Division and interconnection between spirit and the world: Karoline von Günderrode’s reception of Soliloquies

Abstract

This paper explores philosopher and writer Karoline von Günderrode’s reception of Soliloquies . Günderrode receives certain aspects of Schleiermacher’s thought. However, she distances herself from the central thesis of the soliloquy that she comments upon (“Die Reflexion”), in which Schleiermacher maintains that the spirit is the foundation of everything, including the external or corporeal. Günderrode understands spirit and world to be in a polar relationship, where the two terms are irreducible and inseparable. Both emerge from a “primordial foundation” or “Urgrund,” which is neither purely spiritual nor purely corporeal. Günderrode’s position depends on an argument aimed at solving a problem to which the first edition of Soliloquies has no answer, namely the difficulty of explaining a totality that is mysterious and beyond determination, on which the interior and exterior depend, starting from what is only one of its parts: the interior or spirit.