 According to Novalis—whose thinking at this point converges with Hölderlin’s response to subjective idealism—Fichte’s theory is ultimately rooted in the immediacy of the I’s self-positing, and it presupposes that the capacity for self-reflection can be traced back to a non-representational self-relation or intellectual intuition that evades the very structure of reflectivity and hence also the subject-object relationship between the reflecting and the reflected ego. Novalis maintains that in order to take a reflective stance towards itself, the self needs to represent itself in some form or another. The I’s most original self-relation cannot simply take the form of an original Tathandlung in which the reflecting self (the subject pole of the self-reflection) claims immediate identity with itself as reflected (i.e., as the object pole of the self-reflection). In Novalis’s view, self-reflection requires some kind of external representation. Such a representation cannot, however, be deduced from the immediate identity (FS #11). The identity of the reflecting and the reflected I is grounded in a feeling (FS #11). Thought, however, fails to grasp this feeling.