 As Friedrich Schlegel lays out his philosophical-poetic principles in the famous Athenaeum Fragment 216, Fichte’s theory of the I’s absolute self-positing established a sine qua non of the romantic program. If the French Revolution, in its earlier phases, had opened up a new space of political action, realizing, in concreto, the principle of the rational self-determination of a people, and if Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, crossing genre boundaries by drawing on philosophy, poetry, and drama alike, had set a new standard for the modern novel as a complete and all-encompassing work of art—a literary Gesamtkunstwerk—it was Fichte who had led philosophy back to the unbound spontaneity of subjectivity, thus realizing the implicit promise of Kant’s transcendental turn.