Romanticism [addendum]

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When romanticism is understood broadly, as referring to a major development in European thought and culture since the turn of the nineteenth century that shows itself distinctly in the spheres of art, historical writing, and political thought, the concept has only a limited role to play in the history of philosophy: Certain very general notions—an emphasis on agency, expression, the cognitive dimension of affect, and the potential of human beings to become genuine wholes—can be described as manifestations of romanticism in philosophy, but the term does not serve to pick out any more determinate set of philosophical commitments.

Here, as with modernism, is a category that is indispensable for general intellectual history, but lacks equivalent value in the history of philosophy. Where the concept does achieve significant purpose in the history of philosophy is in its much narrower application to the group of thinkers based in Jena at the very end of the eighteenth century known as the (early) German romantics, or Frühromantik, whose activity centered on production of the Athenäum, a journal whose historical importance far exceeds its short life span. Friedrich von Schlegel and Novalis (the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg) comprise the philosophical core of German romanticism, with F. W. J. von Schelling and F. D. E. Schleiermacher in close, albeit temporary and qualified, association. J. C. F. Hölderlin—like Novalis, a major German lyric poet—did not belong to the group in Jena but is considered properly as belonging to the same philosophical tendency as Schlegel and Novalis.

Philosophical understanding of the German romantics has been obstructed by the fragmentary form of much of their output, and the literary concern of the movement taken as a ground for assuming its importance to lie outside philosophy, but more recent work, above all by Manfred Frank (b. 1945), Ernst Behler (b. 1928), and Frederick Beiser (b. 1949), has revealed the distinctiveness and importance of the philosophical outlook formulated by the German romantics in the context of the problems and issues facing post-Kantian philosophy. The problems of Immanuel Kant's legacy revolved in the first place around the perceived incompleteness of Kant's transcendental or critical philosophy, which was considered to have opened up a new range of intellectual possibilities and yet to require further development for it to fulfil its emancipatory promise and thereby meet the demands of the age. Johann Gottlieb Fichte's attempt to do exactly this in his Wissenschaftslehre held the attention of, but failed to convince, the German romantics, who accepted the rational necessity of seeking to construct a self-grounding philosophical system but believed themselves to have achieved insight into the reasons why this ideal cannot be realized and must remain an infinite task.

Schlegel's original and influential conception of irony as not merely a literary trope, but rather a corollary of the structure of reflection that, having achieved critical freedom, cannot bring itself to a halt, was developed in part to rationalize this complex attitude toward the ideal of philosophical systematicity. The reorientation proposed by the German romantics in place of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre centered on a novel and very high valorization of art and the aesthetic. This move, far from signalling an aestheticist turning away from the philosophical tasks and the social and political realities that occupied Kant and Fichte, was envisaged as engaging with the full spectrum of philosophical, practical, and cultural problems. The key to the importance ascribed by the German romantics to art—at least, to that art which possesses the qualities of what they called Poesie (romantische)—lay in its supreme exemplification of true (organic) unity, its synthetic relation to the metaphysical oppositions that structure human existence and reality at large, and its embodiment or symbolization of freedom.

Both this conception of art and the romantics' claim for its practical importance show the influence of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education, but the German romantics projected the concept of art and the aesthetic, in a way that Schiller had not, well beyond the sphere of works of art in the strict sense. Schelling's account in the final part of his System of Transcendental Idealism of art as what he calls the only true organ and document of philosophy provided one formulation of the German romantic idea that art is philosophically preeminent, and the Naturphilosophie that Schelling developed in the late 1790s, which attributes organic status to nature as a whole, and disputes the primacy of mechanism over teleology maintained in modern philosophy even by Kant, falls equally into line with the German romantic program.

In the ethical and political sphere, the German romantics sought to achieve recognition for the claims of personal individuality while at the same time urging the pursuit of organic wholeness in collective life, in opposition to Kant's ethical universalism and political atomism, yet without any intention of contradicting Kant's modern affirmation of freedom. Schleiermacher's ethical theory, though it was composed some years after the dissolution of the romantic circle, may be regarded as giving systematic shape to at least some German romantic ethical insights, in the same way that his earlier, highly successful work, On Religion, stood in close accord with the German romantic intention to recreate religious forms.

German romanticism has affinities with positions that had been developed earlier by J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder, and F. H. Jacobi in their critique of the German Enlightenment, and some commentators have suggested that it also prefigures deconstruction and postmodern philosophy, on account of its skepticism regarding the attainability of final philosophical truth. This view runs a risk of anachronism, however, for while it is true that German romanticism diverges from the three great developments of German idealism, it nevertheless remains committed to an ideal of rationality and retains many of the idealistic, not to say Platonistic, elements that are present in the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Indicative in this regard is the fact that the sharp criticism made by Hegel of German romanticism—which collapses, Hegel believes, into hyper-subjectivism and arbitrariness—is premised on an understanding of the movement as having grasped, without giving adequate form to, important philosophical truths.

Enlightenment; Fichte, Johann Gottliebgerman Philosophy;; Hamann, Johann Georg; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Herder, Johann Gottfried; Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich; Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich; Kant, Immanuel; Modernism and Postmodernism; Novalis; Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von; Schlegel, Friedrich Von; Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst.

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