This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

This chapter contrasts the approach to nature taken by Alexander von Humboldt and Hegel. In particular, it focuses upon the notion of Naturphilosophie and how it is developed in the work of both thinkers. It gives details from the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling in order to provide historical context to the discussion. To clarify some of the contrasts between Humboldt’s and Hegel’s approaches to nature, the chapter focuses upon their approaches to the landscape and people of America. The fate of natural beauty in the work of both thinkers is highlighted. It argues, by reference to Adorno’s critique of Hegel, that while Humboldt gives natural beauty autonomy by not limiting it to what the subject contributes to it, Hegel’s view of nature is as repressed natural beauty, eclipsing it with human reason and human subjectivity. Ultimately, Humboldt’s more empirical approach, balanced with a recognition of the role of freedom, allows nature to come into clearer focus than it does in Hegel’s work. Hegel’s more abstract, speculative approach keeps nature too far from the empirical realm. In the case of our understanding of nature, Hegel’s clean hands become a problem, resulting in a Naturphilosophie that does not bring us close enough to nature or its beauties.

This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

Hegel’s “natural philosophy” is an extension of his overall systematic project having to do with a post-Kantian philosophy that did not rely on Kant’s conception of “pure intuitions.” Instead, Hegel proposed a Logic that as an internally self-enclosed system of pure thoughts required to make sense of making sense. Famously, he concluded his Logic with some not entirely clear ideas about the need to move from it to a Naturphilosophie, a move which he somewhat puzzlingly said was not itself a further logical “transition.” Hegel also defends a non-empiricist study of nature, that is, an explanation not merely in terms of empirically determined regularities, for all such regularities, although existent, are not fully “actual” in that they are not what is doing the real work of explanation. What explains the regularities themselves are the various pure objects of the Naturphilosophie which are involved in working out what “external to pure thought” would mean: the mechanical, the physical, the chemical, and the biological fields of nature, each of which manifests a power (Potenz) that explains why the empirically found regularities in nature actually hold. This chapter suggests that the reason for the transition from Logic to Nature is that pure thought on its own is powerless, and that this has implications for how we think of Hegel’s system as a whole.

In our Introduction we briefy discuss Collingwood’s life and philosophical career, as well as mentioning his work in other fields such as history and archaeology. We argue for the continued relevance of Collingwood’s thought for both twenty-first-century academic philosophy and for some of the central concerns of contemporary life beyond academia, such as scientism, the idolatry of technology, and the current political climate. The second part of the Introduction gives an overview of the fourteen chapters in the volume.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

Modern objections to Romantic music criticism often take aim at its hieratic posture, as if it were committed to the absolute metaphysical ‘truth content’ of the works it paraphrased. In fact the Idealist philosophical basis of sentimental-Romantic critical practice was a much more subjective interrelationship between feeling and reflection. As theorized by Herder, this formed the basis of Bildung, the originally anthropological idea of ‘cultivation’ later fetishized by the German middle classes. Through Kant and Schiller it tied into notions of ‘character’ and poetic ‘characterisation’, developed during the 1790s and soon a firm part of Romantic music criticism. Romantic poetic imagery could be pressed into the service of religious dogma, as it was by Joseph d’Ortigue writing on Beethoven’s instrumental music. But other forms of Romantic criticism after Herder used ‘characterisation’ instead as an empathetic path to understanding the diversity of musical cultures, an approach exemplified by Joseph Mainzer.

Liberalism is at the heart of modern ‘Western’ history, politics, and international relations. Central to understandings of liberty, freedom, democracy, rights and the rule of law, liberalism has animated debates on abolition and empire, war and peace. This chapter provides an account of liberalism as a contested phenomena that originated at least in the eighteenth century and has had profound international political consequences ever since. To tell this story, the chapter begins by considering how to make sense of the contestations surrounding liberalism, before examining how and why liberalism matters to International Relations at key moments of its development as a discipline: in the age of empires, the inter-war years, during the Cold War and ‘new’ world which ensued, and now in this epoch of endless war.

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

After addressing Germaine de Stäel’s ‘invention’ of European Romanticism in On Literature and On Germany, the introductory chapter explains the editorial choices behind the collection, including its expansive time frame, European focus, and comparative method. It then surveys Lord Byron’s continental reception to demonstrate the utility of a pan-European approach. Although extremely familiar, the case of Byron and of Byronism is of central importance to the history of European Romanticism because of the European role that it gave to British literature, but also because it brings to the fore some common problems raised when using Romanticism as a critical category. The next section looks at how literary historians have addressed these problems, then discusses some of the period’s most salient features. The final part provides a chapter by chapter synopsis in order to help readers navigate the volume.

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.

The two great Victorian Platonists – George Grote and Benjamin Jowett – are often perceived as championing diametrically opposed perspectives on Plato: utilitarian vs. idealist. This chapter argues that no less important is what they had in common: an ‘atomist’ hermeneutics, in fierce reaction against attempts to make a system out of the dialogues; and a combination of scrupulous attention to the texts as historical documents with insistence that giving Plato his place in the history of philosophy and ‘in the scale of human improvement’ was no less the historian’s obligation. Finally, both men were active in the public sphere, looking for similar ‘modern applications’ of what was best in Plato’s political thought, particularly in the sphere of education.