An Encyclopedia of Organs: Judgment and Genre in Romantic Metaphysics

An organ is both the functional part of a living being and the instrument of philosophy, the Greek organon. German life-scientists and philosophers slowly associated these two meanings over the course of the eighteenth century, and the “organ” became that which simultaneously unites and divides. This lecture shows how Hölderlin and Novalis used the flexible lexeme – organ – to make metaphysics a matter of literary genre in a common program I call Romantic organology.