Artificiality

THUS WROTE FRIEDRICH WILHELM SCHELLING in his philosophical tract Von der Weltseele (Of the World Soul, 1798). This “idea of nature as a whole” is for Schelling the “absolute,” with the work of art as an authentic expression of the absolute. It resolves all conflict between the mechanical and the organic, and by authentically portraying the absolute it takes on a multiplicity of meanings. Schelling's juxtaposition of the mechanical and the organic has its origins in Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790) where, in paragraphs 64–65, Kant uses the image of a wheel or cog as a metaphor for the one, and that of a tree for the other. The cog is, of course, the prime component in clockwork — the very mechanism lying at the heart of late eighteenth-century automata. These mechanical puppets are exemplified in E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale Die Automate (1814), and by the doll Olimpia in his nocturne Der Sandmann (1816).

Before penning these stories Hoffmann had left his career in the Prussian administration in 1808 and moved to Bamberg to take up the post of Kapellmeister. Bamberg was a town intimately linked with Romanticism, having been home to Schelling and his experiments in natural philosophy and animal magnetism. Once Hoffmann was in Bamberg, his interest in such matters was quickly awakened, and he was soon reading (amongst other things) Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert's Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (Views from the Dark Side of the Natural Sciences, 1808).