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This chapter argues that Sehnsucht, instrumental music, and the sublime can be seen as intersecting concepts that partake of a poetics and an aesthetics of indeterminacy in later 18th-century German criticism. Analyzing these intersections between instrumental music and Sehnsucht in the light of the infinite, the chapter shows how they rehearse and transform the standard, 18th-century German conception of the sublime. It traces this standard conception to the discourse of elevation typifying Immanuel Kant's analytic of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgment. To show how this standard conception can be countered from within the romantic tradition, it uses E. T. A. Hoffmann's criticism of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as a starting point. Both are well-worn texts in the literature of the sublime and music, but in their juxtaposition they also reinvent each other. Thus, presenting a famous “case” of musical Sehnsucht, Hoffmann's account of Beethoven's Fifth can be at once posited as an alternative to the logic of transgression that marks the Kantian sublime.

Chapter 2 discusses Lotze’s early years in Zittau and Leipzig, especially the important influences upon him (Fechner and Weisse) and his general intellectual context. It analyzes Lotze’s early unpublished writings and his early published reviews. Special emphasis is laid on Lotze’s debts to the romantic age and to idealism. His early scientific work is also placed in the context of the scientific currents of the 1830s.

Carlyle’s ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ or synthesis of idealism and realism is interpreted by Mark Abrams as an immanentizing project. This is questioned in Chapter 12 by analysing ghost stories by women writers who reverse this trajectory to anchor the real in a supernatural cause. They use realism to open a transcendent depth in the material object. Emily Brontë’s lovers in Wuthering Heights seek to burst the limits of the material but are left in a liminal spectrality. Elizabeth Gaskell uses the reality of the supernatural to question the refusal of original sin by rational dissent. Margaret Oliphant’s Dantesque ghost stories establish the supernatural as the truly real positively in ‘A Beleaguered City’ and more problematically in ‘A Library Window’. Finally Charlotte Brontë’s supposedly new psychological Gothic is shown to be wholly traditional and to yoke feminist and theological desires for liberation in an apocalyptic union of body and soul.

Overcoming his early admiration of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science and his philosophy of the “absolute I,” Schelling crowned his own philosophy of nature with an account of the emergence of the absolute out of itself. The only way in which God or the absolute might thus emerge and evolve was if it encompassed within itself what was both itself and not itself. Two years after Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schelling published his Freedom essay, arguably setting Hegel’s 1807 dialectic on its head. Starting with God (or what-is) as a self-organizing being, Schelling introduced vitality and self-origin into an absolute that was no longer a historic terminus ad quem. By reviving Spinoza’s holism, Schelling proposed a new logic of identity: A=A and their indiscernible difference, or B. The possibility of the living absolute giving rise to itself thus resulted from two principles existing in “indifference to each other” yet inseparable, and there was no third term by which to distinguish them. Eschewing Hegelian dialectic in favor of contrariety in a genre, Schelling characterized the coexistence as Sehnsucht, an objectless “affect” out of which emerged an incipient order. All living beings contained this bi-une principle. However, in humans the two could become unbalanced, thereby accounting for the possibility of evil, of “a merely particular will” striving for ascendency. While this characterized evil in humans, the tension between the two principles, which had begun as Sehnsucht, would soon be called angst in the Ages of the World, underscoring the importance of the affect.