 Hegel is critical of what he takes to be an undue turn to isolated subjectivity, and in particular its affective and emotional aspects, in romantic philosophy. He traces this turn to subjectivity back to the romantic reading of Fichte. The romantics, in his interpretation, misunderstood Fichte’s work. They hypostatized his notion of spontaneous self-positing, baking it into a largely aesthetic vocabulary of the creative power of imagination. While he places Novalis within this framework, Hegel overlooks how he (Novalis) not only draws on but also criticizes Fichte’s philosophy. In Hegel’s understanding, romanticism in general and Novalis’s philosophy in particular leads to a pathological cultivation of inwardness, a naïve and otherworldly position that is not only philosophically at fault but also constitutes a genuine political risk in that it represents an alluring conversion from critical thinking to otherworldly reveries. However, as Otto Pöggeler demonstrates in his 1956 study, as soon as one distinguishes philosophical romanticism proper from its mythological image, it becomes clear that Hegel stands far closer to the romantics than he was ever willing to admit. In Novalis’s case, the philosophy of Bildung, a notion that features prominently in Hegel’s own work, would be an important point of connection. Others would be his philosophy of interpretation and his conception of the relationship between pre-modern and modern thought.