"A character is a completely fashioned will"
About this Quote
A character is not a personality trait you’re born with; it’s a piece of craftsmanship you force into being. Novalis’s line snaps “character” out of the realm of vibes and into the realm of will: something forged, shaped, and finished. “Completely fashioned” is doing the heavy lifting here. It implies labor, discipline, even artifice - the self as a work that demands tools, repetition, and a refusal to remain raw material.
The subtext is quietly polemical. Against the Enlightenment’s faith in rational systems, and against any social notion that identity is merely inherited rank or temperamental destiny, Novalis stakes a Romantic claim: the interior life has agency. Yet it’s not the mushy Romanticism of spontaneous feeling. Will is the engine. Character, in this view, is feeling made reliable - emotion disciplined into a consistent direction.
Context matters: late 18th-century German Romanticism is obsessed with Bildung, the formation of the self. Novalis, writing in a world jolted by revolution, secularization, and new ideas of citizenship, offers a compact ethic for modernity’s instability. If tradition no longer supplies a fixed script, the self must become its own institution.
The line also contains a paradox that makes it linger. “Will” suggests something volatile, momentary, appetitive. “Completely fashioned” suggests closure, an end-state. Novalis fuses them: character is the moment-by-moment act of choosing, stabilized into form. Not authenticity as “just be yourself,” but authenticity as construction - a self you can stand behind because you built it.
The subtext is quietly polemical. Against the Enlightenment’s faith in rational systems, and against any social notion that identity is merely inherited rank or temperamental destiny, Novalis stakes a Romantic claim: the interior life has agency. Yet it’s not the mushy Romanticism of spontaneous feeling. Will is the engine. Character, in this view, is feeling made reliable - emotion disciplined into a consistent direction.
Context matters: late 18th-century German Romanticism is obsessed with Bildung, the formation of the self. Novalis, writing in a world jolted by revolution, secularization, and new ideas of citizenship, offers a compact ethic for modernity’s instability. If tradition no longer supplies a fixed script, the self must become its own institution.
The line also contains a paradox that makes it linger. “Will” suggests something volatile, momentary, appetitive. “Completely fashioned” suggests closure, an end-state. Novalis fuses them: character is the moment-by-moment act of choosing, stabilized into form. Not authenticity as “just be yourself,” but authenticity as construction - a self you can stand behind because you built it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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