 For Novalis, too, philosophy involves a process of maturity and self-understanding (though he would eventually grow more critical of Goethe’s work). This is another dimension of his call for a practical turn in philosophy. In Novalis’s words: “Whoever knows what philosophizing is, also knows what life is” (AB #702). Philosophy does not manifest itself in a set of theoretical dogmas, but in a capacity to judge. As such, philosophy cannot be learned or passively appropriated, but only triggered by such Socratic provocations as the fragment, irony, the joke, and the essay. Hence Novalis’s call for a romanticizing of the world does not involve perceiving it through a new or different lens, but the ability to raise oneself to a state of critical self-understanding. This aim, Novalis emphasizes, cannot be reached through the means of isolated soliloquy, but requires an engagement with the larger community as well as with history, tradition, natural science, and art. It involves, in short, the realization that the self necessarily belongs to a more comprehensive, historically developed, and cross-culturally fertilized totality of meaning. In affinity with Schleiermacher’s Speeches (which Novalis studied in the early fall of 1799), Novalis makes it clear that individuality proper is only developed in interaction with other individuals. If “[e]ach human being is a society in miniature” (MO #42), it still applies that “[e]very individual is the center of a system of emanation” (MO #109).