 For Novalis, the classical world is so to speak the other of modernity; it is different, yet a fundamental part of it. Furthermore, any modern culture—and here we see, again, the traces of Novalis’s turn towards the more cosmopolitan spirit of the Hanseatic League—understands itself in critical interaction with other cultures, including those of the non-Western world and the temporally distant parts of the interpreter’s own culture. In his 1798 reflections on Goethe, Novalis writes that spirit by nature strives to absorb and understand its other. This process of expanding one’s horizon by considering the other’s point of view is, at one and the same time, the nature and the ultimate goal of Bildung. In Kant Studies such an enterprise is presented, along the lines of Kantian anthropology, as the theory of the causes and remedies of prejudices (KS 330).