Knowing without knowledge: Ahnung in philosophy, aesthetics, and literature from the Enlightenment to Romanticism

This dissertation "Knowing without Knowledge: Ahnung in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literature from the Enlightenment to Romanticism" examines how Ahnung, or premonition, develops over the course of the eighteenth century from a central issue in Enlightenment debates over the basis of the aesthetic faculties and the nature of the imagination, to a key narrative structure and mode of formal reflexivity in the prose fiction of writers like Goethe and Tieck. The significance of premonition has been largely neglected by modern criticism, which has seen in it little more than an irrational way of foreseeing the future. By tracing the development of the term, from such Enlightenment philosophers as J. G. Walch and J. Chr. Hennings to Kant and post-Kantian philosophy, I demonstrate its highly visible and symptomatic place in the epistemological debates of the time. More specifically, I explain the structural significance of premonition for the new discourse of aesthetics in Baumgarten and Moritz. In the classical discourse of aesthetics, premonition's career culminates in Moritz's argument that the conception of every beautiful artwork rests on a moment of premonition. Furthermore, premonition becomes involved in the developing formal self-consciousness of the novel, where it is used as a means of linking characters' experience of the future with questions of narrative structure. In my final chapters, I show how in Tieck's William Lovell and "Der Blonde Eckbert" premonition thwarts conventional Enlightenment understandings of causality, and how in Goethe's Elective Affinities it mediates between the formal parallelism of the novel and the open, undetermined future of the characters, allowing them to see into the future without fully predicting it. I thus reveal the emergence of Ahnung, which becomes a trivialized catchword in later Romanticism and an object of suspicion in Realism, as a virulent motif of epistemological investigation, a powerful device in narration and, most importantly, as the site of their imbrication, in the eighteenth-century development from Enlightenment to Romanticism. To disregard premonition as irrational fancy is to underestimate the importance the Enlightenment attributed to its "dark side," and how it participated in the formation of beauty, knowledge, and literature.