El cuerpo en el romanticismo alemán. Consideraciones sobre el cuerpo femenino en Friedrich Schlegel y el cuerpo-máquina en E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Abstract

This review article attempts to address the relationship between the natural, the machine, and the human in German Romanticism through the notion of body. Due to the extension of this European cultural movement, we will shorten our study to two episodes. The first episode corresponds to Early German Romanticism or Frühromantik. The second one is situated in the romantic period called Spätromantik, particularly, in the fantastic literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In current philosophy and literature, there are helpful elements to think about the triple relationship indicated above. The hypothesis of the work tries to show how at the heart of German Romanticism some considerations criticize the possibility of the onto-logical division between body and soul or res cogitans and res extensa presented by Descartes. For this reason, we recons-truct the assumptions that romantics think about nature in the framework of their challenge to the rationalistic natural sciences and their considerations on the mechanism of the time, their idea of Organicism in the Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie), and politics, as well as the idea of automation and machine present in stories and essays. In such assump-tions, it can be found how the body is not thought of as a matter separate and ontologically isolated from thought, spirit, or soul. To understand this process, it seems appropriate to recover the representations that exist in German Romanticism of the natural, the human, and the machine.