## 1. The Primacy of the Aesthetic



One common concern strikingly unifies otherwise different romantic
contributions. Early and late, German, British and French, the
romantics advocated what may legitimately be called "the primacy
of the aesthetic". In romanticism, the
"aesthetic"--most broadly that which concerns beauty
and art--is not just one aspect of human life or one branch of
the humanistic studies. Rather, if the romantic ideal is to
materialize, aesthetics should permeate and shape human life.
Friedrich Schlegel, one of the leading figures in Early German
Romanticism, put this idea in a few memorable phrases: "The
Romantic imperative demands [that] all nature and science should
become art [and] art should become nature and science" (FLP:
#586); "poetry and philosophy should be united" (CF:
#115), and "life and society [should be made] poetic" (AF:
#16).



Schlegel is not alone on this matter. Similar sentiments and slogans
had been expressed just a little earlier in what is commonly regarded
as the manifesto of German romanticism, *The Oldest Programme*:




> 
> 
> The idea that unites everyone [is] the idea of
> *beauty*...I am now convinced that the highest act of
> reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that
> *truth and goodness* are siblings only in *beauty*.
> (Holderlin, in Bernstein 2003: 186).[3]
> 
> 
> 



The British romantics have taken up and developed this view that the
aesthetic is the foundation of knowledge and the pursuit of truth.
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is
all//Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", Keats famously
declared in the *Ode on a Grecian Urn* ([1820] lines 49-50,
PJK). And in the Preface to Coleridge and Wordsworth's *Lyrical
Ballads* (1800), we read, "Poetry is the first and last of
all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man"
(paragraph 20, in PWWW, I, p. 141).



How is this core feature of romantic aesthetics, the primacy of the
aesthetic, to be explained?



A textually grounded and philosophically viable way to approach the
imperative is as a structural or formal demand. On that reading, the
imperative requires that we *model* our epistemological,
metaphysical, ethical, political, social and scientific pursuits
according to the form of the aesthetic comportment to the world,
exemplified in poetry. On such an approach, rather than aiming to
*replace* "real" life, science and philosophy with
poetry, the romantics urge human beings to fashion their ordinary
lives and to do science and philosophy according to the model provided
by poetry. Philosophy, science and everyday life need not be
poet*ry*, but poet*ic* or poetry*-like*.
*Structurally*, they should become similar. Why so? The main
task of this entry is to offer an answer to this question and to show
that the reasons for "poeticizing" life, science and
philosophy are philosophical.


## 2. Aesthetics and Reason


### 2.1 Enlightenment and *Sturm und Drang*



For over a century, romanticism has standardly been regarded as a
reaction against the Enlightenment (e.g., Haym 1870). The primacy of
aesthetics may seem to speak in favor of this story because, on this
interpretation, the romantics replaced the Enlightenment's faith
in the sovereignty of reason with a belief in the sovereignty of art
and the affective and imaginative capacities that are involved in
aesthetic experience. On this traditional interpretation, romanticism
is antirationalist or irrationalist. But, while the romantic pursuit
of the primacy of aesthetics marks a break with the Enlightenment,
regarding romantic aesthetics as antirational or irrational and as
antagonistic to the core Enlightenment values is unjustified for a
host of reasons (cf. Beiser 2003, Engell 1981, Gregory 2005).



First, the romantics' focus on and praise for rational and
autonomous criticism is continuous with the Enlightenment's
commitment to the value of rational criticism. Admiring Goetthold
Ephraim Lessing's ideal of criticism and his devotion to
independent thinking, Friedrich Schlegel writes, "critique is
the common pillar on which the entire edifice of knowledge and
language rests" (Critique: 271). Rather than discontinuing the
Enlightenment's call to submit every belief and every action to
the authority of rational criticism, the romantics are responsible for
continuing "the age of criticism"--which is usually
taken to characterize the eighteenth century--well into the
nineteenth century. In that sense, they are the "children"
of the Enlightenment.



Second, many of the core features of romantic aesthetics in addition
to criticism--like the relation between beauty, truth and
goodness, the pursuit of unity among variety and the significance of
the imagination and the sublime--would have been impossible
independently of key Enlightenment thinkers.



Third, the romantic elevation of aesthetic feeling and the creative
imagination did not come at the price of their faith in and respect
for reason. Even Friedrich Schlegel, who is often considered to be the
most enthusiastically inclined romantic, opened his *Lectures on
Transcendental Philosophy* by arguing that philosophy is "a
striving towards a knowledge...of the whole person" (ITP:
241). In one of his fragments, he commanded: "Never tire of
cultivating the intellect until you will have finally found what is
original and essential" (*Ideas*: #124). And yet in
another fragment, he claimed that one of the two centers of genuine
philosophy is "the rule of reason" (*Ideas*:
#117).



Such proclamations challenge the alleged break between the
Enlightenment and romanticism as much as they challenge another
standard interpretation of romanticism, one that takes it to be a
direct outgrowth of *Sturm und Drang*, a counter-Enlightenment
movement that flourished in the 1760s and 1770s. Briefly, this
response to the Enlightenment, expressed in works of literature,
theatre, music and the plastic arts, heralded individual subjectivity
and the free expression of unconstrained feelings as the proper
replacements for the values of the Enlightenment.



No doubt, the romantics shared with this movement the belief in a call
"back to feeling". But regarding romanticism as simply a
continuation of *Sturm und Drang* finds no grounding in
romantic texts. In his review of Friedrich Jacobi, one of the main
sources of influence on *Sturm und Drang*, Schlegel declared,
"Only when striving toward *truth* and *knowledge*
can a spirit be called a philosophical spirit" (*Review of
Jacobi's Woldamer*, KA II: 71-2). In the same review,
Schlegel harshly criticized what is known as Jacobi's *salto
mortale* or "leap of faith": this is Jacobi's
view that the only way to salvage our ethical and religious beliefs,
in the face of the limitations of the Enlightenment, is to renounce
reason in favor of *mere* sensation and faith. In contrast to
Jacobi, the German romantics never attempted to *replace*
reason with faith, sensation, unconstrained feeling or intuition.
Instead, they wished to bring out the rationality of the passions and
the passionate nature of reason as part of a unified and balanced
picture of human life. Rather than a straight development of *Sturm
und Drang*, then, romanticism is better understood as an attempt
to synthesize the grain of truth in the movement with the grain of
truth in the philosophy of Enlightenment, or simply put, to synthesize
reason and sensibility.



Similarly, the British and French romantics did not mean to dismiss
reason and replace it with passion and imagination, but strived after
"a conjunction of reason and passion" (Wordsworth,
"Essays on Epitaphs 1810" in PWWW). Accordingly, what
Coleridge, for example, admired in Wordsworth was not imagination and
feeling alone, but 



> 
> 
> the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of
> truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the
> objects observed. (Coleridge, BL: Ch. 4)
> 
> 
> 



The romantics, then, sought to *supplement* but not to supplant
reason with the receptive capacities of the mind, primarily with the
capacities involved in aesthetic apprehension and artistic production.
They extended Kant's renowned view of concepts and intuitions,
suggesting that *reason without feeling is empty and feeling
without reason is blind*. Without the former, human beings would
be reduced to mere animality; without the latter they would lose their
humanity:



> 
> 
> We cannot deny the drive to free ourselves, to ennoble ourselves, to
> progress into the infinite. That would be animalistic. But we can also
> not deny the drive to be determined, to be receptive; that would not
> be human. (Holderlin, *Hyperion*, HSA 3:194)
> 
> 
> 



For the romantics, our receptive and spontaneous capacities could only
be abstracted in thought, but not separated in reality: "Action
and passion are inseparable as north and south" (Novalis, FS:
#317). Human dignity is grounded in rational and normatively
constrained receptivity just as much as it is grounded in spontaneity.




> 
> 
> The restless striving after activity, the highest criterion of
> judgment, does not exclude all the virtues of receptivity but *can
> only exist with them*. (F. Schlegel, KA 12: 130)
> 
> 
> 



Rather than dismissing the role and the significance of reason as
such, the romantics challenged merely certain uses of reason--for
example, dogmatic uses of reason, the laying down of absolute
foundations, and system-building. And in a Kantian manner, they were
concerned to expose the limits of reason and constrain its uses to
legitimate boundaries. But even the romantic exposure of limits is, as
it were, "aesthetic". "Aesthetic?" one may
ask. Yes, aesthetic in the sense that some of the romantic central
devices for exposing the limits of reason are (originally)
"aesthetic", "artistic" or
"literary". "Romantic Poetry" is one such
device and "Irony" is another.


### 2.2 Romantic Poetry and Romantic Irony



"Romantic Poetry" is a notion that Friedrich Schlegel
coined and described in most detail in *Athenaeum Fragments*
(AF) number 116. Rather than a particular genre or kind of poetry,
Romantic Poetry is poetry as such insofar as "all poetry is or
should be romantic" (Schlegel, AF: #116). Romantic Poetry brings
out the limits of reason in virtue of being reflective,
"[hovering] on the wings of poetic reflection, and [capable of
raising] that reflection again and again to a higher power" (AF:
#116). Rather than being merely the "portrayed" object
itself--a poetic representation--it "hover[s] at the
midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer" (AF: #116),
and so, like Kant's transcendental philosophy, reflects on the
conditions of its own possibility and of human mindedness itself. It
is not surprising, then, that Romantic Poetry is called
"transcendental" poetry: "a poetry and a poetry of
poetry" (AF: #238). Goethe's *Wilhelm Meister*, a
romantic favorite, manifests this dual reflective and substantive
nature: 



> 
> 
> It was so much the poet's intentions to set up a comprehensive
> theory of art or rather to represent one in living examples and
> aspects....This might suggest that the novel is as much an
> historical philosophy of art as a true work of art, and that
> everything which the poet so lovingly presents as his true aim and end
> is ultimately only means. But that is not so: it is all poetry, high,
> pure poetry. (F. Schlegel, WM: 274)
> 
> 
> 



The transcendental nature of romantic poetry suggests that it does not
transcend merely the boundaries of a particular genre, but even the
boundaries of the literary as such. Romantic Poetry is poetry as much
as it is a philosophical method and a vital approach to human life. It
is a creative and reflective human power, manifested in the
theoretical, practical and aesthetic aspects of life: 



> 
> 
> transcendental poetry...really embraces all transcendental
> functions.... The transcendental poet is the transcendental
> person altogether. (Novalis, *Logological Fragments*: #41)
> 
> 
> 



Romantic poetry is not alone in exposing the conditions of finite
existence, but accompanied by an ironic way of living. Irony is a mode
of *self-restriction*, whose "value and dignity" as
a crucial dimension of human life, must be recognized (F. Schlegel,
CF: #28). Irony is the balance between "self-creation and
self-destruction" (CF: #28), which means that irony is
creative--it is constructive of its own perspective on the world.
But at the same time, it is also "destructive" of the
pretensions implicit in any perspective--the pretention to be
holistic. Irony thus presents its perspective as restricted--as
only one among many different perspectives on the unconditioned whole.
Accordingly, what romantic irony insists on through its restricting
function is (a) the conceptual inaccessibility of the
"Absolute" (explained in
 SS3),
 and (b) what is known as "perspectivism"--the view
that human beings are capable only of finite and limited perspective
on the universe as a whole. Being ironic is a way of consciously and
intentionally bringing out the fragmentary nature of the human
situation as lacking a "view from nowhere".



Like Romantic Poetry, irony is not merely a literary or even a
rhetorical device. Nor is it a purely theoretical method. Rather, in a
Socratic spirit, romantic irony is a way of life. For it is, 



> 
> 
> after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and the last,
> the most necessary and the highest duty...most necessary because
> wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the
> world; and that makes one a slave. (CF: #37) 
> 
> 
> 



Everyone, then, not only the writer, should be ironic. For, as
exposing our finitude, irony is not only another romantic analogue of
Kant's transcendental method--the antidote to
reason's natural but spurious tendency to transcend its
limits--but also an existential condition of humility (On irony
see also CF: #26, #42, #48, 108; AF: 51, 121; and *On
Incomprehensibility*).



The romantic use of irony was sharply criticized, most famously by
Hegel, as free floating form of subjectivity. But not only does this
criticism fail to do justice to the romantic insistence that irony
itself is a form of self-constraint, but also to the imperative:
"Don't exaggerate self-restriction" (F. Schlegel,
CF: #37). This demand to constrain and regulate self-restriction
itself is of equal importance to the demand to practice irony. Rather
than a free floating form of subjectivity, then, romantic irony is a
constrained, and normatively governed form of life, meant to expose
the limits of reason and facilitate a life of humility (cf. Rush 2006:
187). Romantic irony is a commitment to the form of life that is
governed by the acknowledgement of finitude; a
"transcendentally-Socratic" life of humility.



Accordingly, rather than an irrational or an anti-Enlightenment
stance, romantic aesthetics is marked by a respect for and devotion to
reason and rationality "within their bounds".


## 3. Aesthetics, Epistemology and Metaphysics



Even a cursory glance through the writings of the romantics assures
the reader that their interest in art and aesthetics is closely tied
to their epistemological and metaphysical concerns. The primacy that
the romantics attributed to aesthetics is explained by (but is not
reduced to) the roles that art and beauty may play in the pursuits of
epistemic and metaphysical goals. One such goal concerns what the
German romantics, and following them, Coleridge, called the
"Absolute" [*das Absolute*].



Briefly, this is how this explanation goes: in the aftermath of
Kant's philosophy, the romantics were concerned with the
Absolute, understood as the unconditioned totality of all conditions.
Like Kant, they believed that such an unconditioned totality is
inaccessible to discursive reason and is, *to that extent*,
unknowable to human beings. But reason's natural drive towards
this "Absolute" is nonetheless significant and valuable
 (SS3.1).
 In aesthetics they found a mode of life that best approximates (even
if never reaches or grasps) the Absolute, insofar as the aesthetic
approach to artworks (a) includes indeterminate affective aspect
 (SS3.2),
 (b) involves a *sui generis* normativity, constituting its own
norms in attunement with the artwork it faces
 (SS3.3),
 (c) is particularly suited to approach individual unities
 (SS3.4),
 and (d) is open-ended
 (SS3.5).


### 3.1 The Absolute



Most broadly, by the "Absolute", the romantics refer to
the unconditioned totality of all conditions. While the absolute
itself is conditioned by nothing, it conditions all the finite
physical and mental manifestations of the world. Inspired by
Kant's discussion of *omnitudo
realitatis*--"All of Reality"--and by
Spinoza's all encompassing "substance", the romantic
Absolute is a whole, rather than an aggregate, that encompasses
everything else, physical and mental: "Only the whole is
absolute" (Novalis, AB: #454); "The universe is the
absolute subject, or the totality of all predicates" (AB: #633).
Metaphysically, every finite thing is merely one manifestation of an
unconditional totality: only a single perspective on the whole. It is
thus ultimately finite but also infinite, as part and parcel of the
infinite whole.



This notion of the Absolute is not distinctively romantic. The German
Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, were also concerned with
related conceptions of the Absolute. But the romantic treatment of the
Absolute is distinctively different from the idealistic one. And it is
the distinctive *romantic* treatment of the Absolute that
explains much in romantic aesthetics: While the idealists took the
Absolute to be transparent to the human mind, conceptually
representable, and inferentially related to other items of knowledge,
the romantics regarded it as (1) ungraspable by concepts (i.e., as
"non-discursive") and (2) as non-foundational.



Following Kant, the romantics believed that all knowledge is
discursive: knowing requires conceptualization. But since concepts
condition everything that might be known by determining it to be one
way or another according to the forms of discursive thought, the
Absolute, by its very definition as unconditioned, cannot be known.




> 
> 
> Knowledge [*Erkennen*] already denotes conditioned knowledge.
> The unknowability of the absolute is, therefore, an identical
> triviality. (F. Schlegel, KA 18: 511, #64)
> 
> 
> 



The romantics further argued that the attempt to ground the whole
edifice of knowledge in the Absolute--familiar to them from
Fichte's project, which they both admired and harshly
criticized--is futile. Like Kant, they believed that
reason's natural and necessary drive to proceed towards the
unconditioned can never be fully realized. The unconditioned totality
of experience is "a *regulative* idea" (Novalis,
FS: #472): it cannot serve as a systematic grounding of experience. As
Novalis memorably puts it: 



> 
> 
> We seek the unconditioned [*Das Ubedingte*] and always find
> only [conditioned] things [*Dinge*].
> (*Bluthenstaub*, NS 2: 413, #1)
> 
> 
> 



Skeptical as they were about the discursive accessibility of the
Absolute and about its capacity to ground all knowledge, the romantics
never questioned either its existence or the worth of (open-endedly)
striving after it:



> 
> 
> Neither our knowledge nor our action can ever attain the point at
> which.... All is one; the determinate line can be united with the
> indeterminate only through an infinite approximation [*in
> unendlicher Annaherung*] (Holderlin, "Hyperion", HSA 3:
> 326).
> 
> 
> 



Therefore, philosophy, whose first theorem is "All is One and
One is All" (F. Schlegel, ITP: 244), must be "a
*striving*" (ITP: 244). Even though philosophy cannot
systematically deduce all knowledge from the Absolute, it must
nonetheless pursue its approximation. But if not through concepts, how
can one approximate the Absolute?



This is where aesthetics comes into the picture. Although scholars of
romanticism disagree about the exact nature of the romantic
approximation of the
 Absolute,[4]
 they widely agree that it includes a variety of feelings associated
with the aesthetic, like aesthetic pleasure, poetic feeling,
"longing for the infinite [*Sehnsucht nach dem
Unendlichen*]" and "love", and that it depends
on the deployment of critical notions like "romantic
poetry", wit, irony, allegory, myth and the creative
imagination:



> 
> 
> If we abstract from all knowledge and will...we still find
> something more, that is *feeling* and *striving*. We
> want to see if we will perhaps find something here that is analogous
> to the consciousness of the infinite.... (F. Schlegel, ITP:
> 244-45).
> 
> 
> 
> Poetry elevates each single thing through a particular combination
> with the rest of the whole, [by allowing] the individual [to] live in
> the whole and the whole in the individual. (Novalis,
> *Poesie*, NS 2: 533, #31).
> 
> 
> 



The romantics believed that these aesthetic and affective attitudes
make it impossible for us to deny that there is something "which
is not I, nor comes from the I, and which is also not merely a
Non-I" (F. Schlegel, *Thoughts*, KA 18: #83). Baudelaire
summarizes these romantic sentiments, declaring, 



> 
> 
> The one who says romanticism says modern art--which is to say
> intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the
> infinite--expressed by all the resources of art. (*Salon of
> 1846* [1981])
> 
> 
> 



What is it about the aesthetic engagement with art and beauty that is
particularly suitable for approximating the Absolute? The rest of this
section will develop a few possible answers to this question.


### 3.2 Aesthetic Feeling



In the introduction to the *Critique of the Power of Judgment*,
Kant writes that the feeling of pleasure in general, and aesthetic
pleasure in particular, is the only representation that can never
"become an element of cognition at all" (AK 5: 189).



One might think that feelings are thus placed outside of rationality.
But this would be a mistake. On Kant's picture, aesthetic
feeling is rational insofar as it is grounded in a universal mental
state that underlies our capacity to judge in general (the free play
of the imagination and the understanding), and insofar as it is,
through this mental state, responsive to the claims that beautiful
objects make on everyone's satisfaction (AK 5: 282).
Rationality, then, is irreducible to cognition both in the Kantian
framework and in its romantic inheritance. Aesthetic feeling is
rational because of its ground and responsiveness to a claim, but
non-cognitive insofar as it cannot be subsumed under concepts. Feeling
does not determine any concrete property that its object has
independently of subjectivity (as cognition would), but is rather
responsive to a relation between a subject and an object. Aesthetic
pleasure, particularly, is a non-determining mode of reflecting on the
relation, not between a particular subject and a particular object,
but between subjectivity and objectivity as such.



This rational but non-cognitive nature of feeling, in general, and of
aesthetic feeling, in particular, is perhaps the central feature that
renders aesthetic feeling an attractive ingredient in addressing the
epistemic and metaphysical concerns that occupied the romantics. For
while all cognition is determination through concepts, Kant's
aesthetics suggests a mode of reflective awareness that is not
determining, but yet a way of being aware of and responsive to aspects
of the world. This is exactly what the romantics have been looking
for--a non-discursive, but rational and normatively governed mode
of awareness. And they found it in poetry, regarding it as grounded in
feeling:



> 
> 
> Not art and artworks make the artist, but feeling and inspiration and
> impulse. (F. Schlegel, CF: #63)
> 
> 
> 
> Poetry is passion. (Wordsworth, "Note to the Thorn" in LB:
>  136)
> 
> 
> 
> All good poetry [originates in] the spontaneous overflow of powerful
> feelings. (Wordsworth, Preface to *Lyrical Ballads* (1800), paragraph
> 26, in LB)
> 
> 
> 



If, then, feelings and passions are constitutive of art, and if
aesthetic or poetic feeling is a key ingredient in the pursuit of the
Absolute, then philosophy should become poetic and "poetry and
philosophy should be made unified" (F. Schlegel, CF: #115). We
are now in a position to appreciate that this romantic imperative is
explained partly by the view that philosophy cannot be reduced to
concepts and propositions, but must also include certain kinds of
affective mental states. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, discursive
reasoning comes to an end. 


### 3.3 *Sui-Generis* Normativity



The non-determining character of aesthetic feeling is related to the
distinctive kind of normativity that characterizes artistic production
and aesthetic appreciation. An expression borrowed from Kant is
fitting here: on the romantic picture, both artistic production and
aesthetic appreciation are "lawful without a law". Both
are the source of their own normativity, without being subject to any
external law. Given that, they are appropriate for approximating the
Absolute insofar as this approximation must be non-determining
(applying no conditions), but normatively governed rather than
arbitrary.



Following Kant's account of the genius, the romantics developed
an understanding of the artist as, on the one hand, original and
imaginative (rather than submitting to any law of nature or principle
borrowed from the tradition of art), and, on the other hand, receptive
to nature: "Every good poem must be wholly intentional and
wholly instinctive" (F. Schlegel, CF: #23). This combination of
being independent of *given* rules *and* attuned to
something other than yourself is required not only for the genius, but
also for approximating the Absolute. And it is this requirement that
explains "the categorical imperative of genius[:] You should
demand genius from everyone" (F. Schlegel, CF: #16). If everyone
is to approximate the Absolute, then everyone should model herself
after the genius.



Criticism consists of a related combination of features. While it is
based on no prior rules, it is also open and receptive to the work it
concerns. And it is through the engagement with the work that each
critical judgment constitutes its own norms. Although we can and
should legitimize our judgments of beauty and art, we cannot do so by
appeal to any given concepts or norms that are external to the work at
stake. The artwork, on this picture, is *sui generis*--it
provides its own standards of appreciation: "Poetry is a
republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto
itself" (F. Schlegel, CF: #65). The critic should seek to
express the work in a way that is faithful to its individual nature
and be responsive to the specific norms that it constitutes:



> 
> 
> To judge [Goethe's *Wilhelm Meister*] according to an
> idea of genre drawn from custom and belief, accidental experiences and
> arbitrary demands is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the
> moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel.... Fortunately,
> [the novel] turns out to be one of those books, which carries its own
> judgment within it. (F. Schlegel, WM: 275)
> 
> 
> 



That means that beauty makes demands on us, demands that, according to
the romantics, are analogous to the demands that other persons make on
us. Beautiful objects make a claim on us to respond to them as the
specific individuals that they are, on their own terms: "See
your statues, your paintings, your friends as they are"
(Diderot, *Salon of 1767*). Hence, the romantic declaration,
"one cannot really speak of poetry except in the language of
poetry" (F. Schlegel, DP). 



This lawfulness without a law fits the requirements of the Absolute.
For, if we adopt this structure of normativity and expression in our
pursuit of the Absolute, we may approach it in a normatively governed
and committed way, without determining and thus conditioning it
according to any given law, principle, or concept. Here, then, is
another reason why philosophy should become poetic, and the true
philosopher, not merely a "half critic" (as the romantics
alleged against Kant), but a complete critic: philosophy should be
open and attuned to the Absolute without trying to subsume it under
any principle of reason, just as criticism is open and attuned to each
work without subsuming it under any external
 law.[5]


### 3.4 Concrete Individuality



Like Spinoza's God and Kant's *omnitudo realitatis*
(All of Reality), the Absolute is an all-encompassing
*individual*: while it comprehends everything else, the
Absolute is also concrete. It is an individual whole--a totality,
the parts of which could be understood only negatively, as its
limitations. To approximate the Absolute, then, we need a mode of
consciousness that is particularly suited to discern a holistic unity
in an *individual*. While
 SS5.3
 discusses what is required in order to apprehend holistic unities,
and the holistic unities of artworks and natural beauties, this
section focuses on the individual character of artworks and natural
beauties.



On the romantic picture, an artwork that does not present itself as a
"living individual" (Novalis, *Poesie*, NS 2:
534, #35) is not worthy of the title of a work of art, and the one who
does not approach artworks as unique individuals is not a genuine
aesthetic critic: "Whoever conceives of poetry or philosophy as
individuals has a feeling for them" (F. Schlegel, AF: #415). The
aesthetic approach to beauty, then, is an approach to those things
that are irreducibly individuals, those that should not be approached
merely as ones of many--as instances of general kinds--but
as concrete individuals: "Everything that is to be criticized
must be an *individual*" (F. Schlegel, FLP: #634).And
this is the very approach that is required in the pursuit of the
Absolute given its individual nature.


### 3.5 Open-Endedness



Kant attributes to aesthetic pleasure:



> 
> 
> a causality in itself, namely that of maintaining the state of the
> representation of the mind and the occupation of the cognitive powers
> without a further aim. We linger over the consideration of the
> beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces
> itself. (AK 5: 222)
> 
> 
> 



Aesthetic feeling is open-ended and future-oriented. In contrast to
practical pleasures (the "pleasure in the good") and to
private, sensory pleasures (the "pleasure in the
agreeable") that need to bring forth an action or an object in
order to maintain themselves, aesthetic pleasure is self-maintaining.
This is partly because aesthetically enjoying an object involves a
commitment to remain faithful to the beauty of that object, beauty
that calls for and deserves an open-ended affective pursuit. The
romantics welcomed this structure of aesthetic feeling as particularly
suitable for the pursuit of the Absolute. Since the Absolute can never
be determined, the stance that approximates it must itself be
open-ended. It should involve a commitment to keep striving after the
Absolute open-endedly.



Since the romantics take philosophy to be a tendency "towards
the Absolute" (Schlegel, ITP: 242), philosophy itself should be
reconceived. The systematic search after first principles is not only
hopeless, but also unfortunate. It can only slight the significance of
the Absolute by the effort to determine it through principles.
Instead, philosophy should be aesthetically shaped, as an open-ended
pursuit:



> 
> 
> If knowledge of the infinite is itself infinite, therefore always only
> incomplete, imperfect, then philosophy as a science can never be
> completed closed and perfect, it can always only strive for these high
> goals, and try all possible ways to come closer and closer to them.
> (Schlegel, *Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy*, KA 12:
> 166)
> 
> 
> 


## 4. Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics



The intersection between romantic aesthetics, ethics and politics
offers a particularly clear challenge to the standard view of the
romantics as anti-Enlightenment (discussed in
 SS2).
 This is because the romantics turned to aesthetics to a large extent
in order to pursue, rather than to reject, some of the core ethical
and political values of the Enlightenment, such as autonomy or
self-determination and the ideal of *Bildung*. Art and
aesthetics also provided a model for the romantic political ideal: a
democratic, egalitarian community grounded in the republican values of
liberty, equality and fraternity.



In addition to proving the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the
romantics false, tracing these romantic notions of autonomy,
*Bildung* and political community also offers a challenge to
another well-known interpretation of the movement as apolitical (see
Schmitt 1986). In contrast to this interpretation, we find the
romantics exploring and emphasizing the importance of aesthetics for
ethical and political concerns. Shelley, for example, wrote in a
letter to a friend: "I consider Poetry subordinate to moral
& political science" (Shelley, LS 2: 71). In his famous
*Defence of Poetry* (1821), he proclaimed, "Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world" (SPP). Rather than
"aestheticizing" politics, then, the romantics found in
art and aesthetics resources for solving ethical and political
problems.



Yet, a central difficulty facing any interpretation of romantic ethics
and politics lies in the change that this view has undergone during
the later years of many a romantic: the strong democratic and
egalitarian views of the likes of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich
Schleiermacher gave way to a growing conservatism and religiosity
after 1800. The first generation of British romantics likewise turned
from their conviction that to be young during the revolution was, as
Wordsworth said, "bliss" and "heaven", to an
acknowledgement of the challenges awaiting a genuine political reform.
With this shift in mind, they turned from political optimism to
religion. A unified account of romantic politics is thus untenable.
Instead, the section will focus on the political views of the German
romantics during their "formative years" (from
1797-1800) and of the British romantics mainly during their
early and middle phases This is because the ideals developed during
these phases, though different from some of the later ideals, can shed
light on the romantic path towards conservatism later on (Beiser
1992).
 SS4.5
 will briefly present the romantics' later political
thought.


### 4.1 Autonomy



"Freedom is the only reality in wishing, willing, sensing and
striving", writes F. Schlegel (TPL II: 155). While the absolute
reality of freedom might not admit of a proof, according to many of
the romantics, human beings should nonetheless approximate freedom by
developing autonomy--self-determination and self-legislation.
Autonomy is the right of the individual to think for herself and act
rationally and freely (TPL II: 155). The work of art and aesthetic
judgment were seen as paradigmatic expressions of autonomy and, as
such, as splendid models for the cultivation of individual human
autonomy. For (as discussed in
 SS3.3)
 neither the creation of art nor its appreciation is grounded in prior
given laws. And yet, both the production and judgment of art are not
lawless, but normatively governed by the laws generated autonomously
by each individual work and by each individual aesthetic judgment.
Poetry is a "law unto itself".



This characteristic of the production and judgment of art should not
only be incorporated into the way every person is to govern
herself--as the source of her own rational laws rather than as
subject to external laws, and as self-determining rather than
passively determined--but also serve as a model for the way in
which every person should be respected and treated. Aesthetics
provides us with a paradigm for following two central ethical
demands--the demand to govern oneself autonomously and the demand
to respect everyone else as autonomous.



These two duties, then, constitute another explanation of the
"categorical imperative of the genius" previously
mentioned--the demand that every person be a genius. For if every
individual is to be autonomous, she should fashion herself after the
model of the artist.


### 4.2 *Bildung*



*Bildung* is another characteristic romantic value that each
individual should develop in herself. While literally meaning
"formation", *Bildung* is best understood as a mode
of ethical and cultural cultivation, or self-realization that allows
the individual to mature into independence and responsibility.
"Concerning *Bildung*, we speak not of external culture,
but *the development of independence*" (F. Schlegel, TPL
II: 148). *Bildung* is a particularly *modern* value,
formed at least in part as a challenge to what the romantics regarded
as the rift between sensibility and reason in modern life. To achieve
*Bildung*, each individual has to constitute herself as a
unified whole that coordinates a balance between sensibility and
reason: "The end of humanity is...to achieve harmony in
knowing, doing and enjoying" (F. Schlegel, *On the Study of
Greek Poetry*, in KA I, 627).



The artwork is a good model for such an ideal insofar as it is,
according to the romantics, an organic and harmonious whole of diverse
and even conflicting parts:



> 
> 
> Poetry...must be a harmonious mood of our mind...where
> everything finds its proper aspect.... Everything in a truly
> poetic book seems so *natural*--and yet so marvelous. We
> think it could not be otherwise...and we feel the
> infinite...sensations of a plurality in agreement. (Novalis, *Last
> Fragments*: #3)
> 
> 
> 



This is why "Every human being who is cultivated and who
cultivates himself", namely, the person who achieves
*Bildung*, "contains a novel within himself" (F.
Schlegel, AF: #78).



Aesthetic judgment is also a harmony of reason and sensibility. On
this issue too, the romantics were inspired by Kant's
aesthetics, according to which aesthetic judgment consists in the free
play between the understanding, imagination and pleasure. Approaching
the world, ourselves and one another aesthetically, then, is
approaching it with a harmony of "knowing, doing, and
enjoying". And achieving this harmony constitutes a genuine
moral being: a balanced rational, sensible and affective person. For
that reason, it is not surprising to find Coleridge, the critic,
aiming to establish "the close and reciprocal connections of
Just Taste with pure Morality" (Lecture I, CLL).



Romantic *Bildung* was a political ideal as much as it was an
ethical one. It was needed, not only for the sake of independent
individual responsibility, but also for the possibility of a genuine
non-revolutionary republic:



> 
> 
> There is no greater need of the age than the need for a spiritual
> counterweight to the Revolution and to the despotism which the
> Revolution exercises over people.... Where can we seek and find
> such a counterweight? The answer isn't hard: unquestionably in
> ourselves...the center of humanity lies there. (F. Schlegel,
> *Ideas*: #41)
> 
> 
> 



The French revolution had shown the romantics both the value of a
republic based on liberty, equality and fraternity, but also the
dangers of anarchism and strife that revolutions carry with them. The
proper path to a republic, they thought, is not through a
revolutionary act, but through proper education. Art does not only
offer a model for a harmonious, cultivated soul, but is also the best
*medium* through which to achieve the moral education that
leads to this harmony and, on its basis, to the best republic.
Attending to art (as well as producing it) is a form of
self-cultivation because the spirit of art allows human beings to
transcend baseness (a particular danger given modern instrumentalism
and materialism), and to develop their humanity. 



As we now turn to see, the romantics regarded art also as a
particularly effective medium for uniting people, no matter their
differences, and so took it to be a great spur for united, social and
political action.


### 4.3 Individuality and Sociality



The allegiance to autonomy and to the value of *Bildung* may
seem to indicate individualism. And it does, *to an extent*.
While individuality is indeed a romantic value, anti-communal
individualism is not. The romantics never celebrated uncurbed
individuality, but called for a balance between individuality and
sociality: "A certain regulated interaction between
individuality and universality...constitutes the first condition
for moral well-being" (F. Schlegel, OP: 427). 



Without doubt, the romantics criticized Kant's categorical
imperative as proposing a problematically universalistic ethics that
discourages the free expression of unique personalities. They viewed
such a universalist ethics as problematic because they regarded
individual expression and the development of a unique, characteristic
and unified self as intrinsically and morally valuable. Yet, the
romantics were also critical of extreme individualism, such as the one
they found promoted by some Enlightenment thinkers. In other words,
they challenged those individualists who criticized any form of social
and communal participation as potentially a form of passive submission
to external authority.



In response to these two extremes of universalism and radical
individualism, the romantics sought after a golden mean--romantic
ethics strived to preserve and strengthen social bonds and encouraged
a pluralistic communal life *while* supporting rational
criticism, autonomy, individual rights, liberties and freedom of
expression: "Does not the universal gain from the individual,
the individual from universal relations?" (Novalis, *Faith and
Love*: #5). The romantics believed that individualism is not merely
compatible with sociality and communitarianism, but that it actually
depends on genuine forms of the latter: "The vocation of man is
attainable only through human society" (F. Schlegel, TPL II:
144). Autonomy and *Bildung*, in particular, though nothing
other than *individual* freedom and self-realization, can never
be divorced from the social: 



> 
> 
> Autonomy should be universal and not relate to the individual but the
> whole, for otherwise it would destroy itself.... *We cannot
> consider human beings individually*. (TPL II: 156) 
> 
> 
> 



On the romantic picture, the achievement of free, fully-formed
individuality is impossible independently of strong sociality and
*vice versa*. An ideal of sociality is deficient if it leaves
no freedom for the distinct expression and liberties of each
individual, and the individual is most herself, as an individual only
insofar as she freely interacts with others: "A person can be a
person only among people" (TPL II: 145).



Rather than contradictory impulses, as they are often regarded today,
sociality and individuality, on the romantic picture, are not only
compatible but also naturally harmonious--grounded in human
nature:[6]



> 
> 
> No man is merely man, but...at the same time he can and should be
> genuinely and truly all mankind. Therefore, man, in reaching out time
> and again beyond himself to seek and find the complement of his
> innermost being in the depths of another, is certain to return to
> himself. (F. Schlegel, DP: 54)
> 
> 
> 



It is *this* romantic view of natural human
sociability--rather than some exaggerated zeal or
effusiveness--that explains and is explained by the centrality of
love in romanticism. In contrast to many a modern thinker, the
romantics regarded love rather than self-interest as a basic condition
of human nature ("Love is...the core of ourselves"
(F. Schlegel, TPL II: 151)), and as the proper basis for a genuine
sociable but pluralistic community:



> 
> 
> Yes, love, you power of attraction of the spiritual world! No
> individual life or development is possible without you. Without you
> everything must degenerate into a crude, homogeneous mass....
> There is no individual development without love, and without the
> development of one's individuality there is no perfection in
> love. When one complements the other, both grow together inseparably.
> I feel united within me the two fundamental conditions of ethical
> life! (Schleiermacher, "Monologue II", 180).
> 
> 
> 



But as natural as it may be, the romantics believed that love has
suffered paralysis in modernity. On their view, the rise of capitalism
and instrumentalism had suppressed natural social bonds and encouraged
self-interest. The consequent view of human beings as solely
quantitatively distinct further leveled them and inhibited their
distinctive and unique expressions.



How could people balance individuality and sociality in the face of
modernity? Here too romantic poetry and the creative imagination come
to the rescue. Poetry is not only based in love, but is itself a form
of love insofar as it bonds different individuals:



> 
> 
> Poetry befriends and binds with unseverable ties the hearts of all
> those who love it. Even though in their own lives they may pursue the
> most diverse ends, may feel contempt for what the other holds most
> sacred, may fail to appreciate or communicate with one another, and
> remain in all other realms strangers forever; in poetry through a
> higher magic power, they are united and at peace. (F. Schlegel, DP:
> 53)
> 
> 
> 



The poet is, quintessentially, "a social being" (F.
Schlegel, DP: 55) insofar as he *both* expresses, "in
lasting works the expression of his unique poetry" (DP: 55)
*and* reaches to others and reciprocally communicates with
them. The poet integrates: 



> 
> 
> his part with the entire body of poetry.... He can do this when
> he has found the center point through communication with those who
> have found theirs from a different side, in a different way. Love
> needs a responding love. Indeed, for the true poet's
> communication...can be beneficial and instructive. (DP: 55)
> 
> 
> 



Following the "categorical imperative of the genius" is
required, then, also for achieving *Bildung* and autonomous
individuality in and through society: it is an ethical and social
demand as well.



### 4.4 Political Community



While sociality and communal spirit are ethically required for the
achievement of autonomy and *Bildung*, community was also a
romantic *political* ideal. Such an ideal required that what
the romantics viewed as modern alienation--estrangement of the
self from others--be challenged in three ways: by promoting love
(as discussed above), developing a sphere of free social interaction
and pursuing a holistic, social unity.



The ideal political community must facilitate a sphere of social life,
which is free and independent of political control because free
sociality and conversation, the ends of this sphere, are both valuable
in themselves and the best alternative for external laws. The
romantics believed that social bonds should not be upheld by laws that
are imposed on individual citizens from outside, but by the love
encouraged by a common culture and free interaction. Romantic poetry
is an exemplary model for achieving such a free domain since it is
"a republican speech...in which all the parts are free
citizens and have the right to vote" (Schlegel, CF: #65).



Aesthetics is at the center of this political vision also because the
political ends of free sociability and conversation are the very same
ones that the romantics practiced in their intellectual-artistic
salons and in their communal, cooperative aesthetic projects. The
political community should allow for creative and artistic endeavors
such as the *Athenaeum* journal, which was the mouthpiece of
the German romantics at the end of the eighteenth century and a
journal that was independent of the control of the publishing
establishment. It was written in collaboration (mainly by the Schlegel
brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher), and aimed at rational
criticism and *Bildung*. Such aesthetic projects are a model
for the politician. This is because "sympoetry" and
"symphilosophy", as Schlegel and Novalis called such
cooperative intellectual and aesthetic projects, should be an integral
part of political life:



> 
> 
> Perhaps a whole new epoch of science and art would be inaugurated were
> symphilosophy and sympoetry to become so common and deeply felt that
> there would be nothing odd were several people of mutually
> complementary natures to create works in communion with each other.
> (F. Schlegel, AF: #125)
> 
> 
> 



The ideal political community must also be characterized by a specific
kind of relation between the political body as a whole and its
members: the state should be an organic or holistic whole, which means
most broadly that the state as a whole must be prior to the parts (see
Beiser 1992).



First, the best state is prior to its parts since, as we saw, it is
necessary for individual identity and self-realization.



Additionally, the romantic community as a whole is prior to the
individual citizens (i.e., its parts), insofar as genuine social bonds
and a well-functioning political entity cannot be
"constructed" out of separate self-sufficient and
self-interested individuals (as the modern social contract theory has
it). To properly function and achieve the ethical aim of sociality,
the links between the political members should be organic: the members
should not be connected to one another by an externally imposed social
contract, but by natural love, affection and attraction.
Unsurprisingly, it is through poetry that the familial-like bonds,
required for the ideal state, should be developed over and above the
unit of the biological family. "Within the family, minds become
organically one, and for this reason, the family is total
poetry" (F. Schlegel, *Ideas*: #152).



While the state as a whole should be prior to its parts *in this
sense*, the law of such a state should not be imposed on its
citizens from outside, but be *self*-determined. Individual
autonomy should be supported by promoting the direct and active
participation of all individuals in the political process. The organic
unity of the state, then, implies *reciprocity:* the parts are
dependent on and are posterior to the whole, while the whole, in
respect of its essential self-determination, also depends on and is
posterior to its parts.



The work of art provides, once again, the structural model for this
political ideal by virtue of its organic unity, where "every
whole can be a part and every part really a whole" (Schlegel,
CF: #14). When genuine, art is characterized exactly by the kind of
holistic, organic, but egalitarian and pluralistic unity that must
characterize the ideal community:



> 
> 
> Many works that are praised for the beauty of their coherence have
> less unity than a motley heap of ideas simply animated by the ghost of
> a spirit and aiming at a single purpose. What really holds the latter
> together is that free and equal fellowship in which, so the wise man
> assures us, the citizens of the perfect state will live at some future
> date; it's that unqualifiedly social spirit.... (F.
> Schlegel, CF: #103)
> 
> 
> 



An organic state is called for also because the mechanistic structure
of the modern state is responsible for the decline of religion. This
structure caused, according to the romantics, a form of
"enslavement" and a faith in materialism and
instrumentalism, both of which prevent people from cultivating their
spirituality and relation to the divine. Both in their early and late
phases, the romantics believed that poetry was the best way for
inspiring spirituality and religiosity. "Every artist is a
mediator for all other men", writes F. Schlegel (*Ideas*:
#44), regarding this "mediator" as mediating between man
and God. Schleiermacher confirms and develops this connection when
suggesting that poets are:



> 
> 
> the true priests of the Highest.... They place the heavenly and
> eternal before them as an object of pleasure and unity, as the sole
> inexhaustible source of that toward which their poetry is directed.
> They strive...to ignite a love for the Highest...This is the
> higher priesthood that proclaims the inner meaning of all spiritual
> secrets and speaks from the kingdom of God. (Schleiermacher, *On
> Religion* [translation modified]).
> 
> 
> 



It is for these reasons that "at the time of the republic, the
artists will not be a special class" (F. Schlegel, PF: #749). In
such an ideal republic everyone must be an artist who, by means of the
poetic spirit of love, is related to the other citizens as artists
relate to one another.


### 4.5 Late Romanticism



Statements such as Blake's claim, "Princes...and
Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords [are] something Else besides
Human Life" ("Public Address" (1809) in PPWB) clearly display
the revolutionary nature of the romantics. But the romantic transition
from a more liberal framework to a more conservative one is explained
primarily by their reaction to the terror of the French revolution.
Though many of the romantics kept allegiance to the revolution until
fairly late (1798), the acknowledgement of its failures and the
dangers involved in any revolutionary act led them to modify, though
not to renounce, their republican ideal. Even during this stage of
their development, the romantics believed that the republic offered
the best political structure. But, while still involving democratic
elements, a proper republic, they argued should also involve
aristocratic and monarchical elements because the educated should rule
over the uneducated:



> 
> 
> A perfect republic would have to be not just democratic but
> aristocratic and monarchic at the same time: to legislate justly and
> freely, the educated would have to outweigh and guide the uneducated,
> and everything would have to be organized into an absolute whole. (F.
> Schlegel, AF: #214)
> 
> 
> 



Rather than opposed to the original romantic ideal, this late view is
a natural outgrowth of the earlier ideal since it does not only
maintain the early republicanism, but also continues, through
modification, the early romantic emphasis on *Bildung* as a
necessary condition for a proper republic.



Since even during this later period, the romantic political ideal
consisted of a republican, holistic community grounded in love, art
and aesthetics still played significant ethical and political roles in
the late romantic phase. Even later on in their careers, the romantics
insisted that art and aesthetics were crucial models and resources for
the pursuit of ethical and political ends.


## 5. Aesthetics and Nature



One of the romantics' central aims was to (re)enchant nature in
the face of what they regarded as a threat from modern science. The
threat was embodied primarily in the worry that modern science
alienated (rational and free) human beings from nature, which, through
the lens of this new science, had been viewed as a domain of brute,
determined, mechanical causality
 (SS5.1).
 Aesthetics is capable of (re)enchanting nature insofar as it brings
out a different conception of nature as organic rather than mechanic.
On this organic conception, nature is (a) an organic whole, which is
reciprocally interdependent on its parts; (b) a domain of teleological
rather than merely mechanical causality; and (c) a dynamic and living
force, which is self-organizing and self-generating
 (SS5.2).
 "Science should become poetic" insofar as it should
approach nature in the same way that criticism approaches romantic
poetry. Like romantic poetry, nature should be viewed as an organic
and spontaneous whole. Under this conception of nature, rational,
autonomous human beings are not alienated from, but are rather part
and parcel of, nature
 (SS5.3).


### 5.1 The Worry



> 
> 
> We have fallen out with nature, and what was once (as we believe) One
> is now in conflict with itself, and mastery and servitude alternate on
> both sides. It often seems to us as if the world were everything and
> we nothing, but often too as if we were everything and the world
> nothing. (Holderlin, Preface to *Hyperion*, HSA 3:
> 326).
> 
> 
> 



Holderlin expresses here a ubiquitous romantic sentiment. Not
only has modernity divided man from himself by enforcing the duality
between reason and sensibility and severed the individual from his
natural social relations (section 4), but it also alienated man from
nature. Modern science, "[a] vulture, whose wings are dull
realities", was regarded as the main culprit (Edgar Allen Poe,
"Sonnet--To Science").



Through the lens of modern science, nature was regarded as an
inanimate, mechanistic domain of dead and meaningless matter that is
composed of separate atoms and thoroughly determined by efficient
causality. Modern science "dissected [nature] atomistically like
a dead corpse" (Eichendorff, EW 5: 423). The romantics regarded
this approach to nature as reductive as much as they regarded it as
"dissecting": it reduces nature to *mere* matter,
devoid of the features that the romantics took to be essential to it,
like holistic unity, self-organization and life. The growing sense of
man's alienation from his natural surrounding was seen as a
product of this reduction of nature: human beings seemed alienated
from nature exactly because the rational, soulful and sense-making
character that is usually associated with them is opposed to a
mechanistic and deterministic domain.



The troublesome consequences of this approach to nature are multiple.
First, there is the psychological and existential crisis that is well
encapsulated by Novalis's claim, "Philosophy is actually
homesickness--the *urge to be everywhere at home*"
(*General Draft*: #45), and commemorated by landmark romantic
works, such as Caspar David Friedrich's "The Wanderer
above the Mist" (1818).



In the epistemological and metaphysical domains, varieties of
skeptical doubts loom large behind the modern approach to nature. If
modern science is right then the relation between nature and
normativity is unclear. But if nature cannot provide rational norms,
then how can we account for and justify our empirical claims to
knowledge (human experience)? On the flipside of this epistemological
worry is a metaphysical concern about the nature of the subject. For
the subject, as the source of meaning, is seen as *only*
that--a dematerialized source of meaning, devoid not only of a
body, as Descartes emphasized, but, if Kant is right, of any
substantiality at all (see Bernstein 2003).



Third among the consequences is the threat to any awe-inspiring stance
towards the world. Not only can the divinity once attributed to nature
no longer be found therein, but modern science was also seen as posing
a challenge to any attempt at a secular alternative to religion. Seen
as fully accessible to the calculative part of the human mind, nature
becomes transparent and devoid of any mystery or human-transcending
power. Are we left without a source of wonder, awe or reverence in our
modern world?



According to the romantics, the way out of these worrisome
consequences requires that we recognize that modern science is
reductive not only in terms of its object--nature--but also
in terms of its methodology: modern science employs merely what
Wordsworth called the "independent intellect". The
romantics understood this as calculative reason when it is isolated
from non-calculative reason, sensibility and imagination. Employed
thusly, the independent intellect works as a "knife in
hand" (Wordsworth, *The Prelude* (1805), book X, line
877).



This is crucial because, if the romantics are to retrieve the lost
unity of nature itself and our lost unity with nature, they must
propose a new scientific methodology, or, what comes to the same
thing, a new approach to nature. The romantics aspired to reform and
counterbalance the merely calculative, quantitative and mathematical
use of reason that is characteristic of modern science, and open an
era "When no more numbers and figures feature//As the keys to
unlock every creature" (Novalis, *Henry von Ofterdingen*,
NS 1:344). Human beings should strive to return to "the laws of
things which lie/beyond the reach of human will or power;/The life of
nature" (Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned", 1798, LB)
by adopting a more holistic approach that includes practical reason,
sensibility, feeling, imagination, and above all the aesthetic
capacity of the mind.



It should be no surprise that this holistic approach to
nature--the new romantic science--is, in essence, poetic. It
is romantic poetry, which, as *Athenaeum Fragments* (AF) #116
announces, "fuses and mixes" opposing forces: reason,
feeling, imagination, physics, poetry, philosophy, medicine and
alchemy--when it comes to methodology--and matter, form,
freedom and nature--when it comes to the object of study,
nature:



Anyone who finds in infinite nature nothing but one whole, one
complete poem, in every word, every syllable of which the harmony of
the whole rings out and nothing destroys it, has won the highest prize
of all. (Ritter, *Fragmente* 2: 205)


### 5.2 Romantic Science



While Kant's discussions of nature, organisms and teleological
judgment in the third *Critique*, and Schelling's *On
the World Soul* (1798) and *First Outline of a System of
Philosophy of Nature* (1799) are the primary sources of
inspiration for romantic science, the metaphysical starting point for
the romantic view of nature is what Fredrick Beiser aptly dubbed
"a strange wedding plan" between Fichte's idealism
and Spinoza's realistic monism (2003:
 131).[7]



Why synthetize these seemingly opposed philosophical projects--a
form of idealism with realism, indeterminism with determinism, and
dualism with monism? Briefly, in Fichte, the romantics found a
philosopher that took the Kantian insight about the absolute value of
freedom a step further, and in Spinoza, one who recognized the genuine
monistic structure of the universe, where the mental (in the form of
reason and subjectivity, the seats of freedom) is the flipped side of
the physical (in the form of matter and objectivity). If nature itself
is both physical and mental, if it has a soul or reason and a body,
then, it differs from human beings only in degree, not in kind.
Natural phenomena and human beings are simply different manifestations
of an encompassing nature, which is therefore nothing other than
Spirit: "Nature should be visible spirit, and spirit should be
invisible nature" (Schelling, *Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature*, SW 2: 56).



Thus, the marriage between the philosophical outlooks of Fichte and
Spinoza promises to consummate the valuable nucleus of modernity (the
Enlightenment's emphasis on freedom and individual rational
criticism), while rebutting the modern ills of division and
alienation. It promises to allow human beings to "feel at
home" in a meaningful, free and natural world. 



But this is only the metaphysical presupposition behind the romantic
conception of nature. Their understanding of nature, not only as
monistic but also as an organic whole that is self-forming and
self-generating--in their terms, as a creative, living
force--is inspired by what, according to them, Kant only started
to point to, but failed fully to develop in the third
*Critique* since he restricted it to a regulative and heuristic
conception: namely, the conception of organic nature.



Thinking about nature as Spirit, different from the human merely in
degree, already presupposes a holistic conception of nature, where the
whole is prior to the parts. For, if all individuals are, in
Spinoza's words "modes" of nature, namely, merely
different manifestations of the one and same whole, then these parts
are necessarily dependent on the whole. But insofar as nature is also
an (all encompassing) organism, then just as its parts are dependent
on it (for their existence and intelligibility), so it depends on its
parts for its existence as the organism that it is: independently of
its parts, an organism could not sustain its particular organization,
i.e., its life form. In an organism, the parts are the
*reciprocal* cause and effect of one another and of the
organism as a whole.



But an organism is also *self*-organizing and
*self*-forming. While the organization of artifacts is imposed
on them from outside by their producers, the particular organization
and so the life form of any organism is self-produced. Consequently,
to view nature as an organism is to view it dynamically--not as a
dead matter, but as self-forming and self-generating. Indeed, for the
romantics, nature is one living force, whose different parts--not
only self-conscious philosophers, creative artists, animals, plants,
and minerals, but also kinds of matter--are different stages of
its organization.



> 
> 
> From moss, in which the trace of organization is hardly visible, to
> the noble Form [*Gestalt*] which seems to have shed the chains
> of matter, the one and same drive within rules, a drive that strives
> to work according to one and the same ideal of purposiveness, strives
> to express *ad infinitum* one and the same archetype
> [*Urbild*], the pure form of our Spirit. (Schelling,
> "Review of the Newest in Philosophical Literature,
> 1796")
> 
> 
> 


### 5.3 Art's Nature, Nature's Art



Beauty in nature and art is a key for this organic and dynamic
conception of nature for multiple reasons. First, the holistic and
unifying character of poetry is suitable not only for the reformed
scientific methodology that fuses together reason, imagination and
feeling, but also for unraveling analogies and unities that are
usually hidden from the bare eye, for example, the unity between kinds
of matter and self-conscious human beings as different stages in the
organization of the same life force.



Second, natural beauties and artworks inspire an interest in natural
organization and life by their analogy with organisms, or as the
romantics often put it, by being themselves organic in nature. 



> 
> 
> The transcendental poetry of the future could be called organic. When
> it is invented it will be seen that all true poets up to now made
> poetry organically *without knowing it*. (Novalis,
> *Logological Fragments*: I, #38). 
> 
> 
> 



Artworks and natural beauties are analogous to organisms in various
respects.



To begin with, the analogy concerns their structure or unity. Both
have holistic unities, where the parts and the whole are reciprocally
interdependent. Artworks and natural beauties are so structured since
(1) their beauty as a whole depends on the existence and the exact
organization of their parts (for, if, say, any of the specific shapes,
hues, or composition of a painting were to change, the painting as a
whole may not be beautiful any longer), and (2) their parts are
recognized as what they are (as beauty-making parts, or parts of a
*beautiful* object) only in light of the whole (so that, for
example, a mere shade of white may be beautiful only in light of the
beauty of the painting to which it contributes as a whole, but not
necessarily beautiful on its own, or when it figures in any other
object). "In poetry", then, just as in organisms,
"every whole can be a part and every part really a whole"
(F. Schlegel, CF: #14).



Kant claimed that the main difference between the holistic unity of
organisms and the holistic unities of artworks and natural beauties is
the difference between a causal or existential unity and what he
called a formal unity. In organic life, the reciprocal interdependence
between parts and wholes is causal and existential in the sense that
it is life-sustaining. Kant thought that in aesthetics, the reciprocal
interdependence is formal, rather than causal or existential, in the
sense that it does not explain the *existence* of the objects
at stake, but their beauty. While, for example, a painting might
continue to exist as a painting even if some of its parts changed
(say, if its composition, shapes, or hues changed), the beauty of this
painting is unlikely to survive such a change. In this case, it is the
*beauty* of the whole painting that depends on its parts, and
it is the *beauty* of the parts, rather than their existence,
that depends on the beauty of the whole: for were the painting as a
whole not beautiful, its parts would not be recognized as what they
are, namely, *beauty-making* parts. 



The romantics seemed to diverge from Kant on that matter. For them,
great poetry is materially and not merely formally organic:



> 
> 
> The innate impulse of this work [*Wilhelm Meister*], so
> organized and organizing down to its finest detail to form a whole. No
> break is accidental or insignificant;...everything is at the same
> time both means and end. (F. Schlegel, WM: 273-74)
> 
> 
> 



This means that the romantics took the work of art to be analogous to
organisms in yet a stronger sense--not only in terms of its
holistic unity, but also in terms of its life--its
*self-*organization and self-judgment. Recall the *sui
generis* character of artworks (discussed in
 SS3.2):
 each work constitutes the norms according to which alone it could be
properly judged. In romantic terms, every work has its own
self-judgment. Seen as such, the artwork is not a *mere*
artifact, but a *quasi*-organism in the sense that it organizes
and regulates itself. And like other organic products of nature, the
work too has, as it were, a life of its own, even though it is not
*self-*organizing in the strict sense: 



> 
> 
> Just as a child is only a thing which wants to become a human being,
> so a poem is only a product of nature which wants to become a work of
> art. (F. Schlegel, CF: #21) 
> 
> 
> 



It is the holistic unity and life in the aesthetic domain that draws
our attention to organisms and inspires us to seek the organic
structure of nature as a whole.



Third, following Kant, the romantics believed that the beauty of
nature reveals the purposiveness without a purpose of nature as a
whole. It inspires and guides us in seeing nature as purposively
organized--organized as if according to a specific
purpose--even though we cannot attribute this purposive structure
to any will, creator, or any end-governed activity:



> 
> 
> That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the
> infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic, and
> therefore, the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is
> true for morality and love. (F. Schlegel, *Ideas*: #86)
> 
> 
> 



While this view is to be found in the third *Critique*, the
romantics went a few steps further than Kant: first, they considered
purposiveness, teleological structure and life real features of
nature, rather than regulative principles for approaching nature.
Second, they took these features to indicate that nature is different
from self-conscious, creative human beings only in degree, but not in
kind: like human beings, nature is end-governed. It is beauty, above
all, that inspires this realization. As Novalis puts it,
"Through beauty, nature transforms itself into a human
being" (*Heinrich von Ofterdingen*, NS 1), the same being
that governs itself by creatively and self-consciously setting ends.
The more we properly attend to beauty and art the more capable we
would be of seeing nature and humanity as different aspects of a
single, unified phenomenon: 



> 
> 
> Actually *criticism*...that doctrine which in the study of
> nature directs our attention to ourselves...and in the study of
> ourselves directs it to the outside world, to outer observations and
> experiments--is...the most fruitful of all
> *indications*. It allows us to sense nature, or the *outside
> world*, like a human being. (Novalis, *General Draft*:
> #42).
> 
> 
> 



Aesthetics is central for the romantic "scientific
revolution" for yet another reason that concerns its capacity to
"enchant" nature. "Enchanting" stands here for
the process of rendering nature magical, or mysterious, and thus
inspiring reverence and awe (see Stone 2005). While bringing out
nature's organic structure is decisive for rebutting modern
alienation, enchantment is required primarily for challenging two
other consequences of modern science: the threat of a detached and
unresponsive treatment of nature and what the romantics regarded as a
threat of secularization. Not only did modern science portray nature
as a brute domain of mechanism, and thus devoid of any awe-inspiring
power, but it also rendered it completely transparent to the human
mind, and thus lacking in the kind of mystery and magic that may
inspire awe in a secular world. Changing our attitude towards nature
and inspiring awe for it requires that we recover a sense of mystery
and magic in nature, and, indeed, in everything ordinary, in
everything that we have come to take for granted. This
process--of recovering a sense of mystery and magic in nature and
the ordinary--is so central in romanticism that it takes on the
movement's name:



> 
> 
> Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualitative raising into higher
> power.... By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a
> mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted
> to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinity to
> finite, I romanticize them. (Novalis, *Logological Fragments*:
> #66)
> 
> 
> 



Poetry is most suitable for the business of romanticizing by virtue of
two of its main features: (a) its "defamiliarizing" power,
and, (b) its "ironic" ability to point to the limits of
our knowledge, and thus to what must remain mysterious--beyond
our cognitive capacities.



First, by virtue of its power to subtly describe even the most
concrete of details and to bring to life even what, independently of
it, attracts no attention, poetry has a special capacity for
defamiliarization--a power that was first noticed by the
romantics in their account of "romanticizing", but dubbed
"defamiliarization" only later, by 20th century
literary theorists. By its non-ordinary use of language, attention to
details and evoking power, poetry brings out in vivid colors what we
are usually blind to, even if it is, literally, the closest and most
familiar to us. Poetry has the power to make the most familiar new,
refreshing, and thus, other than familiar--different and even
mysterious.



Like Novalis, Wordsworth is one of the first proponents of
romanticizing in this sense. He instructs: while romantic poetry
should start with the most familiar and contingent--"the
incidents and situations from common life"--it should also
strive to elevate them by 



> 
> 
> throw[ing] over them a certain coloring of the imagination, whereby
> ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and
> further and above all [poetry should aim] to make these incidents and
> situations interesting by tracing in them...the primary laws of
> our nature. (Preface to the *Lyrical Ballads*.) 
> 
> 
> 



Wordsworth calls on poets to write in the language of "low and
rustic life". But it is exactly the poetic use of this language
that allows the "passions" of those whose language it
is--ordinary people--to be "incorporated with the
beautiful and permanent forms of Nature" (ibid.). And it is
through this process of romanticizing that nature appears again as
great and awe-inspiring, "The great Nature that exists in
words/Of might Poets" (Wordsworth, *The Prelude* (1805),
Book V, lines 618-19).



Second, romantic poetry is essentially ironic insofar as it brings our
finitude, particularly the limits of our knowledge, to consciousness
(see
 SS2.2).
 While romantic irony is the basis for a way of life that is centered
on humility, it also paves the way for awe and reverence for it
suggests that there is much beyond our comprehension, much that
remains mysterious, incomprehensible, greater than our capacities and
possibly infinite rather than finite like us. There is much around us
that merits awe.



Wordsworth's description of nature is possibly the most powerful
portrayal of the awe-inspiring character of nature as it is revealed
by the poetic imagination:



> 
> 
> A sense sublime
>   
> 
> Of something far more deeply interfused,
>   
> 
> Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
>   
> 
> And the round ocean, and the living air,
>   
> 
> And the blue sky, in the mind of man,
>   
> 
> A motion and a spirit, that impels,
>   
> 
> All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
>   
> 
> And rolls through all things.
>   
> 
> ...
>   
> 
> I, so long
>   
> 
> A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
>   
> 
> Unwearied in that service: rather say
>   
> 
> With warmer love, oh! With far deeper zeal
>   
> 
> Of holier love.
>   
> 
> (Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
> Abbey" (1798), lines 96-103 and 154-57, in LB)
> 
> 
> 



Through the romantic lens, then, nature becomes alive and a locus of
Spirit. Rather than an alien force, nature speaks to us as we speak to
it and to each other. 



> 
> 
> Nature is a temple where living columns
>   
> 
> Sometimes let confused words come out;
>   
> 
> Man walks through these forests of symbols
>   
> 
> Which observe him with a familiar gaze.
>   
> 
> (La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
>   
> 
> Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles
>   
> 
> L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symbols
>   
> 
> Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers) 
> 
> (Baudelaire,
> *Correspondences*, 1861 [2000]) 
> 
> 
> 



This is liberating and re-enchanting, but it also puts certain demands
on us, for example, the demands to love nature as we love other human
beings:



> 
> 
> Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature!
>   
> 
> Have I not worshipped thee with such a love
>   
> 
> As never mortal man before displayed?
>   
> 
> Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation,
>   
> 
> And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways
>   
> 
> As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage?
>   
> 
> (unknown date, Humphry Davy [1778-1829], *Fragmentary
> Remains*, 14)
> 
> 
> 



As eccentric as the romantic call to poeticize nature and science may
initially seem, it is arguably of relevance today. The organic and
re-enchanted conception of nature did not only anticipate some
currents in the modern ecological movement, but it also contains
resources for further developments in contemporary environmental
philosophy and philosophy of science.


## 6. Romantic Legacy



Interestingly, scholars tend to explain romantic aesthetics not only
in terms of its sources (discussed in
 SS2.1),
 but also in terms of its legacy. While there are very interesting and
well-established connections between romantic aesthetics and modernism
(see Abrams 1971, Frye 1968, Cavell 1979), this section focuses on the
attempt to draw a link between the former and postmodernism, a link
whose ground is significantly weaker.



In recent decades, a large number of romantic scholars have argued
that romanticism, in general, and the romantic primacy of aesthetics,
in particular, is a precursor of the fundamental outlook of
postmodernist and poststructuralist views (see, for example,
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, Bowie 2003, Bowman 2014, and Gasche
1991). This reading is based on the skepticism the romantics raised
about first principles and about systematicity, the romantic emphasis
on human creation and language, historicism and hermeneutics, their
view of the fragmented nature of modern life and on certain
formulations of the primacy of aesthetics that may seem, initially, to
erase any distinction between what is "real" and what is
"poetic", a product of the creative imagination. Friedrich
Schlegel, for example, proclaims: "No poetry, no
reality.... There is, despite all the senses, no external world
without imagination" (AF: #350), and "Everything that
rests on the opposition between appearance and reality...is not
purely poetic" (FLP: #146). 



These proclamations may seem to suggest that "there is no way
out" of creative constructions, or "texts", or that
"art...does not need to point beyond itself" (Bowie
2003: 53), as if romantic aesthetics anticipates central trends in
post-modernism and
 post-structuralism.[8]
 But there are reasons to worry about such a
"postmodernist" reading. Some lines in
romanticism--skepticism about foundationalist philosophy and
system-building, the emphasis on human creation, language, and the
role of historicism and hermeneutics--are indeed related to
certain strands in postmodernism. But reading romantic aesthetics as
proto-postmodernist is limited for a host of reasons.



First, the romantic faith in the imaginative and emotive capacities
associated with the production and reception of art, and their
skepticism of absolute principles and philosophical systems did not
make them skeptical of reason, as many postmodernist thinkers are (see
 SS2.1
 and Beiser 2003: 3). Even romantic skepticism of absolute principles
(see
 SS3.1).
 cannot be equated with the rejection of all principles and rules. For
example, though art and art appreciation cannot be reduced to any
given, prior rules, they are not lawless, but the source of their own
normativity (see
 SS3.3).



Second, in spite of the romantic stress on the fragmentary nature of
human experience (embodied in their choice of the aphoristic style,
which is emphasized by their post-modernist readers), the romantics
never gave up the striving after unity and wholeness. Art was not
meant as a replacement for unity, but exactly as the best way to
strive after and approximate unity in our modern and fragmentary
condition. 



> 
> 
> For the philosopher...art is supreme, for it opens to him the
> holiest of holies, where that which is separated in nature and
> history, and which can never be united either in life and action or in
> thought, burns as though in a single flame in eternal and primordial
> unity. (Schelling, *System of Transcendental Philosophy*, 1800,
> in Heath 1978: 231)
> 
> 
> 



Third, the romantics' desire for and search after the Absolute
(discussed in 3) is another reason to reject the post-modernist
interpretation. For such a desire is anathema to most post-modernist
thinkers, who resist and shun the possibility (and desirability) of
*any* absolute reality.



Moreover, if one opposes the idea that there is "no way out of
texts", or that reality is "nothing other than
construction", then the post-modernist reading of the romantics
appears uncharitable. Fortunately, this interpretation does not force
itself on us since there are many other charitable and (historically,
textually and philosophically) well-grounded readings of the
proclamations just mentioned and of the romantic primacy of the
aesthetics. Many of these readings were proposed in this entry under
the umbrella of the formal approach to romantic aesthetics. On this
formal account, rather than claiming that there is no distinction
between "reality" and "fiction", or that there
is "no way out of imaginative constructions", the
romantics urged human beings to fashion their ordinary life and
philosophy aesthetically for epistemological, metaphysical, ethical,
political and scientific reasons.



Arguably, romantic aesthetics is not of merely historical interest.
This entry has pointed to a few facets of the relevance of romantic
aesthetics, thus supporting views like Berlin's, for example,
according to which the revolution brought about by romanticism is
"the deepest and most lasting of all changes in the life of the
West..." (1999: xiii). Its tremendous impact on generations
to come all the way up to the present day is one explanation of the
difficulty of precisely delimiting when the age of romanticism begins
and when it ends. Indeed, rather than a post-romantic age, our age may
be yet another phase in the age of romanticism: 



> 
> 
> Romanticism...is the first major phase in an imaginative
> revolution which has carried on until our own day, and has by no means
> completed itself yet. (Frye 1968: 15; see also, Larmore 1996)
> 
> 
>