Chapter Four

The Romantic Universe

In Germany of the late 1790’s, there was nothing unusual in the fact that the early Romantics met frequently to discuss issues of philosophy, literature, and Bildung. The taste for this pastime was something they shared with many of the other book-reading clubs of their time. What set them apart, though, were five factors:

• The speed with which they absorbed and consolidated the latest developments in many branches of the arts, the sciences, and revolutionary politics.

• The thoroughness with which they worked out the philosophical and artistic implications of their newly consolidated worldview.

• The imagination with which they tried to resolve the inconsistencies within that worldview.

• The radical nature of the implications of their deliberations concerning the major issues of philosophy—in Kant’s terms, pure reason, morality, and aesthetics; in Plato’s terms, truth, goodness, and beauty.

• Their sense that they were at the cutting edge of human consciousness, and the missionary zeal with which they communicated their front-line reports to the rest of the world. Novalis’ words capture their sense of themselves: “We are on a mission. Our vocation is the Bildung of the Earth.”1

These five features of their “symphilosophy” transformed what could have been just another book club into a revolutionary force in European thought. The cultured public of Germany in the early 1790’s had regarded Kant’s work in philosophy as a revolution on a par with the French Revolution, and in fact saw Kant’s work as the intellectual counterpart of the political forces that the French Revolution had unleashed. However, reading Kant today, it’s hard to see him as inhabiting the same universe we do. Reading the Romantics, though, it’s obvious—allowing for some of the excesses of their style—that they were the first inhabitants of the universe we live in now.

Part of this similarity lies in the simple fact that, unlike Kant, they looked up at the nighttime sky and saw what we see there: an ever-changing universe of infinite dimensions in space and time. But beyond that similarity, their conclusions about what those dimensions meant in terms of the good life on Earth—the subjective nature of truth, the duty to be true to one’s emotions, and the position of the artist at the forefront of the evolution of human consciousness—are still very much up-to-date. Their revolution went beyond Kant’s and moved into the culture at large.

Three aspects of their thought were especially important in extending this revolution into the area of religion, and ultimately into Buddhist Romanticism: the worldview they developed in common as a result of their symphilosophy, their differing views on the role of human freedom within this worldview, and the type of Bildung through which they hoped to convert the rest of the world to their cause.

These three issues are the themes of this chapter.

Symphilosophy

As the Romantics engaged in symphilosophy, their conversations developed a central, paradoxical theme. The theme’s centrality is what provided the common ground for their discussions. Its element of paradox is what kept the discussions going, as each member of the group worked his or her own variations on the theme to make sense out of the paradox.

This central theme was one that the Buddha would have classified as defining a particular type of becoming—the nature of the cosmos and the place of the self in that cosmos. What is especially problematic from the Buddhist perspective is that they celebrated that type of becoming and denied the possibility of anything beyond it.

The theme is composed of two propositions:

Each individual is an organic part of a cosmos that is an infinite organic unity. Nevertheless, each individual has the capacity to be free.

We will treat the first proposition first, as it was the point on which the Romantics held views in common. Then, in the next section, we will treat the various ways they tried to reconcile this common view with the paradoxical issue of freedom.

Clearly, the Romantics derived their first proposition from currents in the astronomy and biology of their time: Herschel’s theory of an infinite, organic cosmos, and the biologists’ theory of a unified force bridging the gap between mind and matter. This proposition also bears a structural resemblance to Herder’s worldview, although the Romantics put much more emphasis on the “infinite” than he. Further, the distinctive implications that they drew from this proposition concerning truth, beauty, and goodness will become apparent only when we examine in detail their understanding of the words, infinite, organic, and unity.

We will start with the last word first and work backwards.

Unity

The Romantics held that, although there appear to be many dualities in experience—between the individual and nature, between the individual and society, and between the various faculties within the individual—these dualities are actually nothing more than differences in degree, rather than kind. In other words, the two sides of each duality are not radically separate. They are simply two manifestations of force arising from a single original force and existing in a tension enclosed by a larger, harmonic Oneness.

To begin with, there is no real line in the act of knowing between subject and object. Because subject and object are actually different expressions of a single force, they are parts of a higher unity. On the external level, this means that there is no line separating oneself from other people or from nature at large. On the internal level, there is no line separating body from mind, or feelings from reason. Any tensions existing between the two sides of these seeming dualities can be reconciled because of their common origin and common nature.

In erasing the line between subject and object, the Romantics felt that they had healed three huge splits in European philosophy. The first was the split between mind and matter. If mind and matter are radically different, there is no satisfactory way of explaining how they could interact: how a material object could become known by the mind, or how the mind could have an impact on the body or on the external material world. You might easily explain how matter acts on matter—to move one billiard ball, you simply hit it with another—but if the mind is simply the capacity to know and represent the world to itself, with what means would this capacity “hit” the atoms of your arm to move them? And how would matter hit the mind so that the mind could know the presence of matter to begin with? But if mind and matter are explained simply as different levels of energy, then it’s easy to explain how one level of energy could interact with another.

The second split was the split between the mind’s internal world and the external world of things in themselves. If the mind stands apart from nature—as in Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophy—all it can know are its own representations of nature: the way it pictures the world to itself. And if that’s the case, how can it get behind its representations to check whether they accurately represent the world outside? Even if its representations are coherent, that would be no proof that they accurately represented the external world. The mind would thus be walled within itself. But if the mind is regarded as part of the world of nature—rather than standing apart from it—then it is not confined “in here,” in its own world. It can be understood as acting as a part of nature, in line with nature’s laws. One can learn about the mind by studying its objects, and about its objects by studying the workings of the mind.

Thus the Romantics took what Kant classed as a mere intimation derived from the experience of beauty—the harmony between mind and nature—and made it the first proposition of their philosophy. For them, though, this principle was more than an intimation. It was a direct experience—what Schelling, borrowing Fichte’s term, called an intellectual intuition: a direct perception of the self’s activity, unfiltered by concepts. In this case, though, the activity directly intuited is not the self’s striving against nature, as it was in Fichte’s philosophy. Instead, it’s the harmonious interaction between self and nature. We sense our interconnectedness with nature directly through perceiving that the self shapes nature at the same time being shaped by nature, and that the very existence of both self and nature lies in this interaction.

The third split that the Romantics felt they had healed was the internal split between feeling and reason. Feelings were no longer regarded as passions or weaknesses that posed an external threat to the freedom and independence of one’s reason. Instead, feelings and reasons were placed on a unified internal continuum of mental forces that all followed the same laws, and so should naturally work in harmony.

By assuming that feeling and reason followed similar rather than radically different laws, the Romantics collapsed the various faculties that Kant found in the individual—animality, humanity, and personhood—into one. They even collapsed the distinctions that Schiller made between the form drive and the sense drive. Although Schiller had seen the need to harmonize these two drives, he still saw them as differing in kind. Moral law pulled in one direction; the needs of the senses in another. For the Romantics, though, these drives differed only in degree. Thus there was no inherent need for one’s moral duty to conflict with one’s feelings. They kept Schiller’s motivation for moral action—the aesthetic drive for wholeness—but they removed any basis for actions that Schiller would have characterized as showing dignity. Instead, the Romantic moral ideal consisted solely of what he would have characterized as grace. And grace, for them, was not achieved through training one’s feelings to learn to like the moral law. It was achieved through sensing that one’s feelings and reasons, if informed by an insight into Oneness, would naturally fall into harmony.

This created a problem, though, in that it called into question the traditional basis for understanding what counted as a moral duty, and how that duty derived its authority. In the eyes of all the philosophers from whom the Romantics drew, the authority of moral duties came from the fact that duties were not derived from other, more subjective aspects of the individual person, such as feelings or bodily drives. Instead, they derived from objective reasoning, based on unchanging principles. Even Herder, despite his general belief in cultural relativity, still believed in the universality and objectivity of moral law: It was one part of God’s infinite substance that did not change. The Romantics, however, in collapsing the parts of the individual into a unity, denied any source for morality that was independent from feeling. Still, they felt, some feelings were more moral than others.

Their position on this issue—and their differences from their predecessors—can be illustrated by comparing Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther with Schlegel’s Lucinde. In Werther, none of the characters even consider the possibility that Werther and Lotte might violate the latter’s vows to her husband: thus the struggle and the tragic ending. In Lucinde, however, there is no tragedy. The only struggle is the struggle to articulate and give oneself over to one’s natural feelings of genuine love, based on a sense of innate Oneness. Julius and Lucinde never mention the latter’s vows to her husband—whose very existence is relegated to the shadows—and actually say that because their love is true, it is holier than empty wedding vows.

What makes it true and holy is that it is in line with the innate divinity and innocence of the unified force of life. As Julius tells Lucinde:

These attitudes, which the early Romantics all embraced, show that they kept the ideas of moral imperative and holiness, even as they rejected the previous generation’s understanding of what those ideas meant, where they originated, and where they derived their authority. Instead of coming from a basic duality in nature, these ideas now came from the imperatives of what it means to be part of a unity that is organic. One must follow, not the laws of reason, but the laws of organic growth. Kant would have argued that the Romantics were teaching duty without dignity—the Buddha might have said duty without honor—but the Romantics felt that the evolving universe was on their side.

Organic

From their study of biology and paleontology, the Romantics extrapolated three connected principles of organic growth and causality that they applied to the activity of human organisms within the larger organism of the universe as a whole.

1) The first principle is what defines an organism: An organism is composed of parts that work together toward a common purpose, which is the survival of the organism and the production of further life. Organic causality is thus not blind and mechanical. Instead, it is teleological—i.e., it strives toward a particular purpose. This purpose is what gives the organism its unity, and also what turns the fact of life into the imperative of life: Every part of the organism has the duty to further the purpose of the organism. Any action furthering that purpose is good; any interfering with that purpose is bad.

Because one of the purposes of each organism is to create more organisms, it is connected to the larger process of continuing life. Its purpose thus goes beyond its own survival. However, this fact alone does not connect the organism with life—or the universe—as a whole. It connects the organism only with its own descendants. The larger connection, the interconnectiveness of all life, will come from the third principle, below.

2) The second principle is that organisms achieve their purpose by evolving. This principle applies most obviously on the individual level, in the development of an organism from an embryo to its adult form. But it also applies on the larger scale, to the history of life. As life evolves, the laws of organic growth and the nature of organic activity evolve as well. Thus early forms of life strived simply to survive, but as life has advanced it has grown more and more conscious: more aware of itself and its surroundings. From consciousness, it has developed—especially, in human beings, the highest form of life—the drive to express the forces within it through language and other acts of creation. Thus the peculiarly human contribution to the evolution of life, the contribution that puts humanity on the cutting edge of evolution, is the ever-advancing freedom and ability of human beings to express outwardly to one another the life force that they share within them.

3) The third principle is that organisms evolve through the principle of reciprocity. On the internal level, this means that the parts of the organism all exert a reciprocal influence on one another. Each part exerts an influence on the others, at the same time being influenced by them. On the external level, the same principle also applies: Organisms shape their environment at the same time that their environment shapes them.

Organic causality is thus not one-sided. Instead, it is a constant back-and-forth flow. A healthy organism is one that adapts to the influences of its environment just as it takes portions of that environment for its own sustenance and survival, producing new life back into the environment. In other words, it achieves its ends—at least in part—by helping other organisms achieve theirs, just as they achieve theirs—again, at least in part—by helping its.

At the same time, organic causality is not deterministic. In other words, the actions of the organism are not entirely determined by its surroundings or by physical/chemical laws. As Schelling observed, the fact that an organism, as an object, receives stimuli can be explained by chemistry. The fact that, as a subject, it organizes its reactions, cannot. Here, Schelling said, the empirical study of organisms as objects, viewed from without, must end, and one must examine from within what it means to be both a subject and an object. The necessary result of that internal examination, he concluded, would be that all objects are also subjects, and all are animated by a single organic potency operating throughout nature.

This is how the principle of reciprocity led the Romantics to the idea of the interconnectedness of all life. Because no one organism can exist on its own, each is comprehensible only as part of a larger whole. Its very being is interconnected to all Being. From this principle, Novalis and Schelling in particular extrapolated the idea that the organic system of all individual living things forms a single individual living thing: the World Soul. All individual organisms thus must strive toward the advancement of the World Soul’s ultimate purpose, even though they will not survive as individuals to see that purpose achieved. However, because life feeds on the dead remains of other life, all the parts of each dead organism become new life. This is the sense in which life is immortal.

Schelling—who, among the Romantics, thought most systematically about the implications of these principles—further stated that the purpose of the World Soul was to bring about unity within diversity. Being (with a capital B) had started from unity, had split into diversity, and would reach completion only when it achieved a higher, conscious, and fully expressed unity within diversity. Now, the phrase, “unity within diversity” had a long history in the philosophy of aesthetics: The quality that made an artwork beautiful was the fact that its diverse elements could be perceived to fit harmoniously into a unified whole. Thus, in Schelling’s terms, the World Soul was primarily an artist, striving to create the ultimate work of beauty. It was also a philosopher, striving to become fully conscious of that beauty. Thus artists and philosophers were naturally in the forefront of the advancement of the evolution of the universe, showing the way—through Bildung—to others.

Of the three principles of organic growth, the third—the reciprocity and interconnectedness between the organism and its environment—was most central to the Romantic program for Bildung. To begin with, they saw it as the most immediately intuited of the three. In contrast to Fichte, they held that the self knew itself not only in its striving, as it shaped its environment, but also in its openness to the influences of the environment shaping it. This, for them, was the most direct proof that the self and the environment had to be parts of a larger organic whole.

Here it’s important to note that in seeing reciprocity as a necessary sign of organic unity, the Romantics were simply following the sciences of their time. More recent science has shown that reciprocal interactions can also occur within systems that are not organic, that have no general purpose, and in particular no purpose to work for the common wellbeing of all their inter-acting parts. In other words, interdependence does not always mean Oneness; interdependent activities do not always share a common goal. This point will be important to remember as we compare Romantic ideas of reciprocal causation with Buddhist ideas on the same topic.

Nevertheless, the Romantics also had another motive for focusing on the principles of reciprocity and interconnectedness as signs of a larger organic unity. That was because these two principles made the imperatives of life sociable rather than selfish. If an organism’s brute survival were its only purpose, the laws of organic growth could not provide a usable paradigm for social harmony. But if human beings can be made conscious of the fact that, as parts of a larger organic unity, their wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the whole, they will be more likely to exercise their powers for the good of all.

The experience of reciprocity—sensitivity to the effects of the environment upon one, and sensitivity to one’s effect on one’s environment—thus became the touchstone of the aesthetic and political imperatives that the Romantics wanted to express through their art for the sake of their own Bildung and that of others. Art, ideally for them, should spring from a direct experience of the interconnectedness of all Being, at the same time inspiring a similar direct experience of interconnectedness in their audience. Only then could art contribute toward the purposes of the universe.

From all three of these principles of organic growth, the Romantics developed three imperatives for aesthetic creation.

The first was that the artist needed to train himself to be receptive: to open himself to the healthy influences of his environment, such as the love of others and the beauties of nature. Only then should he allow his soul to respond to those influences naturally in creating a work of art, just as a plant would produce fruit only after being open to the influences of the world around it. In Novalis’ terminology, the artist must practice self-alienation, making himself conform to his external object, which would then lead to appropriation, making the object conform to his will. “Self-alienation,” he said in Pollen, “is the source of all self-abasement, but also just the opposite: the basis of all self-elevation.” This he called “the highest philosophical truth.”5

The result of this two-way process, in his eyes, was that each side would bring the other closer to the completion of its development. The self grows and extends itself by being receptive to the world, just as its activity in shaping the world aids in the world’s evolution toward greater beauty. In this way, all three principles of organic growth—(1) a purpose (2) evolved through (3) reciprocity—are fostered by the act of artistic creation.

Schlegel also extolled the virtue of making oneself open and receptive to the influences of one’s environment in preparation for a natural creative response. In a passage in Lucinde, he expressed the organic nature of this process in even more graphic terms. His choice of words for describing this process, however, was somewhat unfortunate, and may have been inspired by his “Indian state.” He called the process “idleness” and “pure vegetating.”6

Schleiermacher, although he didn’t follow Schlegel’s word choice, made this first aesthetic imperative—receptivity—the cornerstone of Romantic religion.

The second aesthetic imperative, which grew directly from the first, was that art should be expressive, rather than imitative. What this means is that the duty of the artist is not to imitate or represent what he sees outside him, but to express the feelings that arise within him in response to what he sees. This is because the aim of life as a whole, as it has evolved, is not to imitate other forms, but to express itself. In expressing one’s feelings, one is not simply indulging in a subjective exercise. Instead, one is giving expression to the organic, unified force of life as it evolves, presenting itself freshly in the present moment. Only in this way could one inspire in one’s audience a feeling for the shared life force acting within themselves. By identifying with the author/artist, they could empathize with his attempt at expression and feel a corresponding desire to express that same life force, too. This empathy is what brought a work of art to life, and inspired further life through the experience of art.

Thus Schlegel commented, in extolling the romantic—i.e., novelistic—style of literature, that “there still is no form so fit for expressing the entire spirit of an author: so that many artists who started out to write only a novel ended up by providing us with a portrait of themselves.”7 In other words, the purpose of romantic art was not to create an object of beauty for the free play of disinterested contemplation, as Kant would have it. Instead, it was to connect the audience to what is most alive in the author.

Caspar David Friedrich, a painter influenced by the Romantics, put the point more bluntly:

Thus the only legitimate artistic activity—which the Romantics viewed as the paradigm for all human activity—is not to represent or imitate the true appearance or nature of things outside the mind. Instead, it is to express feelings within the body and mind. This point would have an important bearing on how the Romantics viewed the activity of religion.

The third aesthetic imperative that the Romantics derived from organic principles was that art must evolve. An artist should not be bound by the examples or aesthetic rules of the past, but should instead find a form that is suitable to express each inner inspiration as it presents itself in the here and now. In fact, once he has created a work of art, the artist must abandon it so that it does not interfere with the evolution of his sensitivity to the life force as it will express itself in the next moment, and then the next. Otherwise, his art will not contribute to the evolution of human society or of life as a whole. This point, too, had a major bearing on how the Romantics viewed religion as a human activity.

These three aesthetic imperatives, taken together, provide what might be called a novelistic approach to the creation and reception of a work of art. In other words, they treat the artist and his audience as a novelist would treat his or her characters, focusing attention away from the work of art itself and toward the psychological processes that give rise to it and result from empathizing with it. Given that the Romantics learned from Herder the principle that all human activity should be regarded as works of art, it should come as no surprise that—as we will see below—the Romantics applied the same principles to their understanding of philosophy and religion: Truth in both of these fields was a matter, not of statements or texts, but of the psychological processes leading a person to create such things, and of the psychological response of those who read them.

All three of the Romantics’ aesthetic imperatives were controversial. Finding a receptive audience among some people, they provoked the extreme ire of others. How could art inspired by idleness be superior to art achieved through training and a mastery of one’s craft? Why are a person’s feelings about the world more interesting than a depiction of the realities of the world? How can one relate to a work of art if one cannot discern within it any recognizable form?

Faced with these questions, the Romantics realized that they had to educate their audience to appreciate their art. As we will see below, they concluded that the Bildung they were offering to others had to depend not on art alone, but also on other, ancillary ways of sensitizing their audience to the wonders of the laws of organic growth.

For all the difficulties that the Romantics encountered in trying to get others to adopt their aesthetic imperatives, the political imperatives they tried to develop from the laws of organic growth presented even greater problems. This was because these laws, even as they provided the general outline for those imperatives—everyone should live in harmony—undercut any individual imperatives about how to achieve that harmony. Further, they undercut the objective status of any truths on which even the more general imperatives could be based.

The general Romantic political imperative was that the ideal work of art should bring society closer to realizing the purpose of life as a whole. For Schlegel and Hölderlin, this purpose was freedom and harmony; for Schelling, unity in diversity. Although it is possible to view these two principles as simply two different ways of expressing the same thing—people should exercise their freedoms responsibly in a way that does not damage the unity and harmony of society—we will see below that the Romantics had many conflicting ideas of what freedom might mean in an infinite organic unity.

In trying to further articulate their political imperatives, the Romantics ran into even greater problems. The first was that a doctrine of constant evolution allowed for no objective universal principles to govern social relationships. If each individual was free to intuit the dictates of the life force within him, and the life force was constantly changing, how could other individuals say he was wrong when his intuitions conflicted with theirs?

Even more fundamental was the fact that, if moral imperatives were derived from the purpose of life, how was that purpose to be known? It’s all very fine to speak of unity in diversity as the ultimate goal of life, but how can this principle be known, much less proven to others? This problem, in particular, was exacerbated by the third aspect of the Romantic worldview: that the organic unity of the cosmos was infinite. How could human beings, as finite beings, comprehend the true purpose of an infinite universe? It was in trying to answer this question that the Romantics came up with their distinctive conception of what constitutes a truth.

Infinite

The infinitude of the organic unity of the cosmos, an idea that the Romantics picked up from Herschel, is what distinguished their worldview from Herder’s. For Herder, the cosmos was only one of God’s potentially infinite aspects, meaning that there was more to reality than the organic unity of the cosmos. God had other, extra-cosmic aspects as well. For the Romantics, however, the organic unity of the cosmos encompassed everything—the infinitude of all Being—with no room for anything, even God, outside. The infinite God—the World Soul—was One with the infinite cosmos. By making this assertion, they felt that they were freeing humanity from the ultimate duality: the duality between God and his creation. For them, God was not something separate, transcending creation. Instead, he was immanent within it. As might be expected, this aspect of their worldview became a defining feature of their religious views. But it also presented them with many challenges as they worked out its implications in terms of their aesthetic and political program.

The first problem was how an infinite organism could be encompassed in a human concept. Finite organisms are defined by the fact that they have a purpose, which they achieve in interaction with their environment. But an infinite organism, by definition, has no external environment with which to interact. So what kind of organism was it? And what kind of purpose might such an organism have? Spinoza, in his contemplation of God as infinite substance, had already raised this question, and had suggested that even if there was an answer, no finite being could comprehend it. As he said, the purpose of such an infinite substance would be no more similar to our own conception of “purpose” than the Dog Star, Sirius, is similar to a dog that barks.

Schelling was the only Romantic who tried to tackle this problem, but his modern scholarly commentators agree that his proposed solutions were confused, and created more problems than they solved. One point on which he was clear, though, was that although the infinite organism was headed toward unity, it would never fully arrive there. Total, static unity was an unachievable goal. The universe, to be truly infinite, was to be forever in process—an idea that all the Romantics shared. This however, created a further problem in that the purpose of the organism was what gave it its unity-in-process, but if the purpose was never to be achieved, wouldn’t that mean that the unity was illusory? Schelling wrestled with this issue as well, but with no coherent results.

This is a serious weakness in the Romantic worldview. Their assumption that the universe had a purpose was what had allowed them to assert that it was an organic unity. The principle of organic unity, in turn, was what convinced them that the human mind could bridge the gap between subject and object. Only when this gap was bridged, they felt, could we know about the outside world by examining ourselves, and about ourselves by examining the outside world. But if the purpose of the universe as a whole is incomprehensible, then the underlying metaphor of Romantic thought collapses. Instead of healing the splits that made the universe “out there” unknowable, they are left with a universe unknowable in a different way: It can be understood only if it has a purpose, but its purpose cannot be achieved or even conceived. This means that nothing can be understood.

Another problem, which all the Romantics did tackle, was—supposing that the universe is an infinite organism—how finite human beings could know an infinite organism as a truth. As part of an infinite organism, each finite organism could see and understand only a small part. And because the infinite organism was changing over time, that small part was even further limited by the fact that its point of view was confined to a particular time and place. Thus there was no such thing as a privileged point of view from which a finite being could grasp and give an adequate representation of the infinite whole.

As we have already seen, the changing nature of the organic cosmos had ruled out the possibility that the laws of reason would be universally—always and everywhere—true. But by positing an infinite cosmos, the Romantics were also ruling out the other commonly claimed source for universal truths in the Western tradition: Christian revelation. The Christian tradition had maintained that God—as infinite Being, creator of a finite cosmos—was essentially unknowable by the finite beings within that cosmos, but the tradition had further maintained that God had circumvented this problem by making himself and his purpose known through acts of revelation to the human race. But now, with no God outside of the universe to explain his infinite point of view to finite human beings, and with the World Soul nothing more than the totality of Being, there was no outside authority to explain the goal of the infinite universe in finite terms.

Thus the Romantics abandoned both of the received criteria for objective truth claims in the Western tradition: reason and revelation. The question facing them, then, was what criteria to offer in their place.

The general Romantic solution to this problem was to admit that finite beings cannot fully understand infinity, but because of the organic laws that finite beings have in common with infinite Being, human beings in particular can gain intimations of the universal purpose of infinite Being by looking inside themselves. The Romantics gave two reasons for why this is so. The first reason is that human beings are at the cutting edge of evolution. By observing themselves from within as they act creatively, human beings are able to sense the general thrust of where life is going. In fact, they are the agents who decide where it is going right now. As Schlegel said, “God is really only a task for us, and we create him through our own actions.”9 In line with Kant’s dictum that we know only what we make, the Romantics felt that we knew the direction of the infinite universe because we were agents in its making. This would be especially true when human beings developed their sensibilities through the proper Bildung.

The second reason why introspection is the best way to intuit the purpose of the cosmos is that each human being is a microcosm: a small replica of the cosmos, operating by the same organic laws, and exhibiting the same behavior. As Schleiermacher put it, every individual is a “representation of the infinite.”10 Or in Novalis’ words: “[I]s not the universe within ourselves? … Eternity with its worlds—the past and future—is in ourselves or nowhere.”11 The more one can become conscious of the inner workings of one’s body and mind, the more one can sense and express the analogous inner workings of the cosmos as a whole. This is why the Romantics felt that introspection led to truths that were not merely subjective, but also applied, by analogy, to the entire cosmos. Schlegel, borrowing the Christian term, called the truths derived from introspection “revelations,” indicating that they were by nature divine.

The problem, of course, was how to judge the relative merits of even divine truths that were, by the Romantics’ own admission, partial and subject to change. In response to this problem they developed several distinctive definitions of what constituted a truth and how that truth was best conveyed.

Schelling was alone among them in following Kant’s criterion for truth: that it be rationally consistent and coherent. He agreed with his fellow Romantics that the primary intellectual intuition was of the Oneness of all Being, but he also believed that this intuition had truth-value only if one could develop a consistent view of the universe from it. For this reason, he composed systematic treatises, trying to explain all knowledge—everything from concrete scientific facts to abstract philosophical principles—in line with the principle of the Oneness of all Being.

The primary feature of these systems was that they were dynamic, explaining not a static universe, such as Newton’s, but an evolving one. Each of his systems was aimed at explaining how the Oneness of Being, as a thesis, produced its contradictory antithesis, and then through the tension between the two created a higher synthesis, which then, as a new thesis, produced a new antithesis, and so on, thus providing the impetus for continued evolution. The fact that Schelling was never satisfied with his efforts, producing and then discarding system after system, may have been what deterred his fellow Romantics from attempting to create philosophical systems themselves.

But they had other reasons for avoiding system-building, too. Schlegel, in his early writings, maintained that the drive to provide a systematic explanation of all reality was both necessary and impossible: necessary in that the mind by nature wants to see things whole; impossible in that its finitude keeps it from ever succeeding. Thus he took a novelistic approach to system-building—i.e., he looked at the system-builder as a novelist might present a character in a novel. The source of system-building, he maintained, was to be found not in abstract first principles, but in the system-builder’s psychological drive for unity of knowledge. As he put it, all philosophy begins with the principle, “I strive after unity of knowledge.”12 In an honest philosophical system, everything should be aimed at exploring the implications of the philosopher’s psychological motivation. Truth was to be found, not in the system, but by turning back to look into the mind that wants to create it. As with art, the truth of philosophy lay not in a coherent representation of the universe, but in expressing and understanding the desire to represent it coherently.

Novalis also recommended focusing on system-building primarily as an issue of the psychological development of the system-builder, but his judgment of the underlying motivation was harsher than Schlegel’s. He saw it as pathological, a “logical sickness.” “Philosophy,” he said, “is actually homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home.”13 In his eyes, to be at home was to be away from the cutting edge of change. The desire to have everything explained and familiar was an attempt to close oneself off from wonder and newness of each present moment. If the universe is truly evolving, no system—even a system to explain its evolution—can do justice to the authentic experience of being both a passive and an active participant in that evolution.

So instead of striving for truth as coherence, Novalis felt that one should strive for the truth of authenticity: being true to the fact that we are evolving creatures at our own particular place and time, while at the same time rising above those limitations, through our powers of imagination, to taste the infinite. For him, authenticity was the opposite of being a philistine, someone confined to the mechanical repetition of everyday habits. An authentic person was one who lived outside the commonplace, who was able to transform the experience of the commonplace into something continually magical and new.

Thus the primary guarantee of an authentic participation in the evolution of the universe was that it romanticized the commonplace—a process that Novalis admitted could not be explained even though it could be experienced. In his words,

Romanticizing the commonplace, Novalis thought, encouraged a sensitivity to the twofold process of self-alienation and appropriation that allowed the mind to be both more responsive to the world and to be more self-directed in shaping the world through the imagination. Moreover, by providing a glimpse of the cosmic categories of the sublime—mysterious and infinite—in the microcosm of one’s experience, the act of romanticizing also guaranteed, at least subjectively, the truth of the parallels between the finite organism and the infinite organic unity of which it was a part. To sense what might be called the microcosmic sublime was to know one’s power, like that of an infinite being, to rise above the particulars of one’s finite time and place. Thus the powers of the imagination, rather than being empty fabrications and lies, were actually a source of truth. For Novalis, this truth was proven by the fact that ordinary existence is wretched, and thus unnatural. In his words,

However, the mere act of romanticizing, even if natural and true, was powerless to convey the truth of one’s personal revelations to others. Because authenticity was to be experienced only from within, the truth of any moment’s revelation was totally subjective and could not be tested from without, inasmuch as no one else can occupy the same position in time and place as any other person, and no one person’s position in time and place is more authoritative than anyone else’s. The best a person can do to convince others of the truths of his or her own revelations, Novalis concluded, is to persuade them indirectly, through poetry and novels that portrayed the world as magical.

Schlegel, as his thought developed, came to adopt a similar position on the microcosmic sublime. For him, the feeling of the sublime in one’s immediate experience was the guarantee for the reality of the infinite, but this feeling was a “fiction,” meaning that it could not be proven true or false.

Thus he, too, felt that literature was the best way of persuading others of the truth of the infinite. However, he developed his own line of thought on how best to communicate the fact that the infinite was constantly changing. As a result, he developed two connected concepts—irony and idea—that constituted his distinctive contribution to Romantic notions of truth.

The first concept concerned the stance of the author toward his works. To convey the incessant nature of change while at the same time trying to step outside it, one should assume a stance of irony. The author should create a work of art to convey a truth while at the same time realizing that the truth is destined to change. Thus he should be serious about his message and yet take a comic—and cosmic—distance from it. In Schlegel’s own words, irony “contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary.”16 “Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great.”17 Irony, for Schlegel, was both an internal quality of the author, “the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius” and an external quality of the style of the author’s works, “the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo.”18

Although Schlegel found irony in many genres—he saw the Socratic dialogue, for example, as the greatest philosophical genre because its sense of irony transcended the rigidity of philosophical systems—he perfected his own personal genre to convey the ironic nature of the truth. This genre was the fragment: a statement short enough to be pithy, but long enough to contain at least two contrary notions, and suggestive enough to hint at implications lying beyond both thoughts—the larger whole of which the fragment is just a part. The ideal fragment, he said, conveyed an idea: “An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts.”19

In other words, an “idea” in Schlegel’s special sense of the term does not simply assert the dynamic nature of reality. It portrays that reality by presenting two opposite thoughts without committing to either of them. Furthermore, by presenting ideas in fragments with an ironic attitude, an author not only portrays and embodies the changing nature of reality, but also is able to suggest that the truth lies beyond the words. Schlegel called this ability to write with this ironic attitude, versatility and agility: “Versatility consists not just in a comprehensive system but also in a feeling for the chaos outside that system, like man’s feeling for something beyond man.”20 “Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.”21

Of course, even a philosophy of irony has its underlying assumptions about truth. In Schlegel’s case, that assumption was borrowed ultimately from the Pietists: Truth is to be judged by its pragmatic uses. In this case, as a “poet”—his term for any literary artist—he had to adopt a philosophy that encouraged the poet’s power to create. “Then what philosophy is left for the poet? The creative philosophy that originates in freedom and belief in freedom, and shows how the human spirit impresses its law on all things and how the world is its work of art.”22 This philosophy, which Schlegel was quick enough to label a “myth,” was a myth to be adopted as a truth because of the good effect it had on the people who adopted it.

Hölderlin, too, adopted a pragmatic criterion for truth, but his standards for “pragmatic” were focused not only on the truths needed by the artist or author. He was more concerned with the question of which truths an ever-changing individual should adopt in an ever-changing world. Given the fact that he later suffered a total psychological breakdown, there is a poignancy to his criterion: Each individual, he said, should choose the philosophy that best creates a sense of internal psychological unity and harmony. As the individual changes, the philosophy he or she needs will also have to change: a principle he illustrated in his novel, Hyperion, and explained in his philosophical sketches.

For instance, speaking of the conflicting philosophies of Spinoza—denying freedom of choice, and advocating passive acceptance—and Fichte—affirming freedom of choice, and advocating active struggle—Hölderlin maintained that Spinoza’s sense of the unity of nature represents a lost ideal, whereas Fichte’s view expresses the struggle to regain paradise. These opposing views are suited to different stages in life, although neither is necessarily more advanced than the other. In other words, one might find comfort and inspiration by shifting back and forth between these philosophies as needed. The image Hölderlin gave for this process was the elliptical orbit of a planet, now growing nearer to one focal point of the ellipse, now growing nearer to the other.

In other words, truth for Hölderlin was a matter of individual choice, which no one should force on anyone else. And no one else could require the individual to be consistent in sticking to any particular choice. Consistency, for Hölderlin, meant being faithful to the pragmatic need for inner wholeness and peace, with each person the best judge of which truth was most pragmatic at any given juncture in space and time.

This attitude toward truth works only if one believes that one’s ideas about reality—and in particular, about action—have no effect on anything aside from one’s peace of mind in the present moment. And, as we will see below, this is precisely the belief that Hölderlin advocated. In his eyes, the infinite, teeming life of the universe means that although individual people may be hurt by one’s actions, life as a whole is never damaged. Its overflowing energy heals all wounds. The conflicts of the world come from not realizing that our views of reality can offer nothing more than partial and fleeting glimpses of the truth. When seen from a larger perspective, conflicts of opinion—like all other conflicts—are no more than temporary dissonances in the evolving harmony of the entire cosmos.

This, however, raises two important issues with regard to all the early Romantic theories of truth: If the organic infinitude of the cosmos means that all human ideas can offer only partial and temporary glimpses of the truth, what does that say about the idea that the cosmos is an organic infinitude? Is that idea, too, only partial and temporary? If so, then (1) wouldn’t that allow for the possibility that the actual structure of the universe was not an organic infinitude? And wouldn’t that further allow for the possibility that the universe had a different structure, one that could be grasped by ideas that did offer adequate and universal views of the truth? (2) If the idea of an organic infinitude was only partially true, wouldn’t it mean that the sense of comfort offered by the idea of the harmony of that infinitude is illusory? After all, the purpose of the organic infinitude is essentially unknowable, so how can it be trusted to be benevolent? Isn’t it terrifying to be in a cosmos where life disposes so easily of life—where life actually feeds on death—and whose purpose cannot be understood?

In response to both of these objections, the Romantics insisted that the idea of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos had a special status. Unlike ordinary human ideas, it was not subject to the limitations of the senses. Instead, it was directly intuited by the sensitive mind. It, in a way similar to Kant’s categories, was built into the structure of how a direct intuition occurred. And the experience, once obtained, showed that the miseries of life as perceived through the senses—aging, illness, and death—only seemed to be miseries. The larger view afforded by this experience was infinitely comforting. Despite all the miseries from which Hölderlin suffered, he had the narrator of Hyperion state:

And then again:

Similarly, when Schlegel spoke of a chaos that lay outside of any systematic thought, he did not imply that the world beyond thought was one of danger or disorder. It was only one of seeming disorder. The direct experience of a person’s organic interactions with the universe in the act of creation, he held, served as that person’s own proof that the sublime infinite was harmonious, and nothing to be feared.

Still, this experience could not be proven to others. It could only be felt within. To prove that it was not purely subjective, though, the Romantics needed to induce other people to become sensitive to the same experience. And the only way to do that was to make the idea of such an experience attractive.

As a result, a large part of the Romantic Bildung for creating a free harmonious society lay in their attempts to make the experience of Oneness an attractive idea. To some extent, the burden of this task fell to their literary skills. But perhaps the most attractive part of their program lay in their explanation of what freedom meant in the context of an infinite organic unity.

The Attractions of Freedom

Both Kant and Fichte had argued forcibly that the view of a monistic cosmos—a cosmos in which all are One—denied the possibility of freedom in the two senses of the term that were most vital to human dignity: autonomy, the ability to formulate the rational laws for one’s actions; and spontaneity, the ability to exercise freedom of choice. If human beings were simply part of a larger unity over which they had no control, then the purposes of that unity, whatever they might be, would automatically override human freedom. With no freedom of choice, human beings could not be granted the dignity that comes with responsibility.

The Romantics were well aware of these arguments, and yet they each, in their own way, maintained that human beings were free even though they were parts of an infinite organic unity. The way they found around this paradox, of course, was to redefine what freedom meant. And when we examine the ways in which Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin attacked this paradox, we will see in each case that their resolution was directly connected to their individual ideas of what constituted a truth.

Schelling—the only one who held to the criterion that truth should be logically consistent—came to the bleakest view of the four as to what constituted freedom. Arguing from the unity of the cosmos, he concluded that human beings, as finite beings, do not even exist, in the sense that nothing can exist in and of itself. From this conclusion he further argued that finite human beings have no freedom of choice. In fact, he ultimately concluded that the very idea of freedom of choice was actually the source of all evil. To foster the good of the universe, human beings had to accept that their only freedom was to be open to the divine force acting within them. Because this openness expressed their inner nature, as parts of the whole, freedom thus meant expressing one’s inner nature.

This, of course, was Spinoza’s definition of freedom, which amounted to no freedom at all. After all, one had no choice or responsibility for determining what one’s innate nature was or for how the divine force would act. The only difference between Spinoza and Schelling was that, for the former, one’s innate nature was one’s rationality, whereas for Schelling one’s innate nature was the sum total of all the forces—physical and mental, feelings and thoughts—acting through and within one.

Unlike Schelling, the remaining three thinkers, when defining freedom, openly denied that the principle of logical consistency had any authority over them. This, in fact, was part of their expression of freedom: If, to be logically consistent with the principle of an infinite organic unity, one had to deny oneself any freedom of choice, then one asserted one’s freedom by declaring independence from the principle of logical consistency. This did not mean, however, that they made no effort to be coherent. They simply looked for coherence in other terms.

For Novalis, freedom consisted of one’s ability to romanticize one’s life. Only to the extent that you could use your powers of imagination to see the sublime in the commonplace could you know that you were playing a role in shaping the cosmos, and that you shared in the creative freedom of the infinite.

For Schlegel, freedom consisted in versatility, the ability to not be tied down by any side in conflicting issues. Thus he could maintain two totally contradictory ideas about freedom in a single “idea”: that, on the one hand, the Oneness and harmony of the universe was the sole idea of his philosophy; and, on the other, that human beings come to know themselves in the activity of trying to define themselves because that activity of self-definition, in and of itself, makes them what they are. The ability to hold both views at once in an attitude of irony, committed to neither, freed one from the confining conditions of one’s time and place, and enabled one to partake of an infinite point of view.

Similarly, for Hölderlin, freedom consisted of the ability to change one’s point of view as needed for the sake of one’s spiritual and psychological wholeness and health. This, in turn, was a function of one’s spontaneity, a term that Hölderlin borrowed from Kant while giving it a new meaning. Instead of absolute freedom of choice, spontaneity for Hölderlin meant one’s ability to impose one’s creative forces on the world around one. To be truly spontaneous, one had to believe that one could choose to view reality in any way one liked so as to foster one’s inner harmony.

Despite their attempts to assert freedom of choice in an infinite organic unity, all three of these thinkers ended up simply affirming the fact that freedom, for parts of an organic unity, can mean nothing more than the freedom to follow one’s own nature, yet with no freedom to choose or change that nature. The ability to romanticize life, to maintain an attitude of irony, or to be spontaneous in choosing one’s view of reality, may feel from the inside like an exercise of freedom. But if described from outside, as part of an infinite organic unity, these abilities can be nothing more than an expression of impulses over which one has no control.

So here again, the Romantics were caught in the conflict between description and expression. In claiming that expressions of feelings were true, they had to offer a description of reality that justified their claim. But their description of reality conflicted logically with another claim they wanted to make: that their expressions were free.

Having read Kant, all three of these thinkers seem to have recognized this conflict. This is why they abandoned the idea of logical coherence derived from first principles, and replaced it with a principle of aesthetic coherence: one that made sense, not in logical or rational terms, but in artistic ones, expressed both within a work of Romantic art and in the act of creating such a work. On the one hand, this kind of coherence resembles the coherence of a character’s motivations as might be presented in a novel: You can understand where the character is coming from, and what he or she is trying to achieve by a particular action, even if the character can’t cite logical first principles to justify that action. On the other hand, the coherence of these doctrines of freedom resembles the coherence in the author’s attitude when putting energy into the act of artistic creation: As Schlegel said, a poet needs to believe in the power of the human spirit to impress its laws on all things. Not to believe in that power would, for an author, be debilitating.

These doctrines on the meaning of freedom, whatever their validity as guidelines for aspiring artists, were totally inadequate as guidelines for implementing a social program. That’s because, despite their differing emphases, they shared one point in common: They teach freedom without accountability. There is no discussion of the consequences of one’s actions, or of how to resolve conflicts arising when one person’s exercise of his or her freedom gets in the way of someone else’s. A social philosophy that offers no means by which individuals would be held accountable for their actions and no means for adjudicating conflicts is no social philosophy at all. It’s a recipe for chaos.

The Romantics, of course, insisted that if all people were to exercise their freedom from a direct intuition of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos, there would be no abuse of freedom and no conflicts. A sense of fellow-feeling would inspire everyone to treat one another with tenderness and compassion. But the disturbing feature of their views on freedom is not simply that issues of responsibility are not mentioned. The whole idea of responsibility and accountability becomes impossible.

It might be argued that Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin—with their ironic, magical, novelistic approach to freedom and truth—were simply embodying Schiller’s doctrine of the play drive: People find freedom and learn about morality through play. To take an ironic stance toward the world, or to look for the magical in the commonplace, is to exercise one’s freedom to play. From play, comes morality. But this Romantic version of Schiller’s idea, when regarded from Schiller’s overall viewpoint, is missing an important step. The play drive, in his eyes, had to be trained to lead to a sense of moral responsibility: the realization that, for play to be a long-term activity, one had to act responsibly, in line with rules of reason, and that one’s feelings had to be trained to love those rules. Otherwise, the game of society would fall apart. But for the Romantics, there were no rules to play by, and no accountability if one’s feelings of Oneness led to actions that other people might object to. For them, the objection, and not the feeling, would be wrong.

This point becomes even clearer when we compare the general outline of the Romantics’ thought with that of Kant’s. Like Kant, they stated that the purpose of the universe “out there” is essentially unknowable, and that the only thing directly knowable is the way in which the mind shapes its experience of that universe. Like him, they also stated that many of the seeming conflicts of human reason can be resolved by recourse to an aesthetic sense of the harmony communicated by the beautiful and the sense of infinitude communicated by the sublime.

However, these views on their own could easily leave people adrift, as they would allow people to shape their experience and to find harmony in the experience of beauty in completely arbitrary ways. Kant avoided this trap by insisting on the objectivity of the moral law. People are worthy of respect, in his eyes, because they are accountable to the objective demands of reason. It was this human sense of accountability that inspired Kant’s remark about the orderliness of the nighttime sky: “Two things fill [my] disposition with ever new and increasing respect and awe the more frequently they engage [my] thinking: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”25 The orderliness of the moral law within is what gives the individual an intuition of the orderliness behind the sublime nighttime sky. Respect for the moral law is what, in his eyes, raised a person above the level of human animality, and gave dignity to the human heart.

The Romantics, however, offered no objective principle to prevent their worldview from being used in arbitrary ways. This is what Schleiermacher meant when claiming to see chaos in the stars: The organic nature of the infinite unity of their universe made the existence of universal moral laws impossible. The unity of that infinite organic process meant that no one individual could really be held accountable for his actions, and so there was no need for him to explain the reasons for his actions in universally acceptable terms. The only protection against arbitrariness, in the Romantic worldview, was faith that the forces at work in the universe were essentially good. Thus there was no need, they felt, for a moral law beyond the imperative to cultivate one’s sensitivity to the unity of all things.

This is why the Romantic view denigrated any attempt to judge another’s actions against any kind of moral law. Instead, the duty of the sensitive soul, also in tune with the unity of the cosmos, was to empathize with the psychological motivations for all kinds of behavior, regardless of what the consequences of those actions might be. In this way, the perspective for judging actions changed from that of moral philosophy to that of the novel. And the ideal novel, in this case, tried to present an infinite point of view in which even mistaken actions have their place in the glowing vitality of the whole.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion is a case in point. The novel is a sad one, centering on the emotional upheavals of the narrator’s life. A young Greek of the late 18th century, Hyperion finds an excellent friend, Alabanda, and falls in love with an even more excellent woman—Diotima, named after Socrates’ teacher. Hyperion’s main problem—much like the author’s—is a tendency toward extravagant and impulsive swings of mood. Learning of an attempted revolution against the Turks, he leaves Diotima, much against her better advice, to join—and eventually, together with Alabanda, to lead—a group of revolutionary forces. The barbaric behavior of his forces on capturing a port town, however, leaves him disillusioned with the revolution, and so he decides to return to his love. But it is too late. She has learned false reports of his death and, heart-stricken, has taken ill and will soon die. Learning that he is alive, she writes to him, telling him not to return home, as her family will seek vengeance for her death.

In a similar vein, Alabanda—again, in a series of events initiated by Hyperion’s actions—dies at the hands of a secret criminal brotherhood. Hyperion is thus forced into exile, but after many years returns home. There he adopts the life of a hermit and finally finds peace, assured that he never really has been separated from Diotima, and never will be. Toward the end of the novel he concludes, “All the dissonances of the world are like lovers’ strife. In the midst of the quarrel is reconciliation, and all that is separated comes together again. The arteries part and return in the heart, and all is one eternal, glowing life.”

As Hölderlin states in his preface to the novel, Hyperion’s story is not to be read for the sake of the moral—which would obviously be not to trust one’s impulses—but to appreciate the “resolution of dissonances in a particular character.” From the infinite perspective that Hyperion develops at the end of the story, even his grave mistakes are nothing more than minor dissonances in the harmonic progression of the universe. They carry no harmful consequences, and Hyperion has to give no more account of his actions than that they were motivated by his character. The universe, in its infinite vitality, will—by returning everything to Oneness—take care of the rest.

This view of freedom without accountability became one of the prime selling points for the Romantic view of the cosmos. This is unfortunate, for it offered no lessons on how to learn from one’s mistakes. Instead, the only lesson it offered was on how not to suffer from the knowledge of one’s past mistakes: One should view them as unreal. Although this view of freedom taught that actions had no real consequences, the adoption of the view led to many unfortunate consequences in real life.

The Romantic Program

As we have noted, the Romantics adopted Schiller’s doctrine that human beings would achieve harmony and freedom only through an aesthetic education. But because their understanding of human psychology differed radically from his, their understanding of what was involved in that education was also radically their own. Instead of trying to make their audience aware of the need to bring harmony to two disparate parts of their humanity—as in Schiller’s program—the Romantics saw their duty as making their audience aware of the pre-existing unity and harmony within themselves, within society, and within the universe at large. Having made their audience aware of the idea of this pre-existing unity and harmony, the next step would be to induce them to have a direct experience of the infinite organic unity manifesting itself within them.

Thus there were two aspects to Bildung in the eyes of the Romantics: descriptive—talking and writing about the infinite organic unity; and performative—talking and writing in a way that would give rise to an immediate sense of it.

The Romantics used many genres in the descriptive side of their program, such as literary criticism and essays on applying the perspective of organic unity to different aspects of life and knowledge. Also—in the manner of Goethe and other novelists—they inserted passages in their novels devoted to discussions of these topics, either among the characters or as narrative asides. These descriptions were often ad hoc and fragmentary, along the lines of Schlegel’s observation that finite words are better at suggesting the infinite than at describing it.

Schelling, however, felt that because all things exist only as part of a whole, they could be understood only by showing in detail how they fit within the whole. That, in turn, could be shown only by offering a dynamic picture of how each thing was constructed by the unified force animating the whole. In other words, one had to show its place in the history of the universe.

This approach, as we noted when discussing Herder, is called historicism: the belief that something can be understood and appreciated only through its own history and its place in the larger history of the world. For Schelling, the past was not a random series of events. In contrast to Fichte’s evaluation of history as more boring than counting peas, Schelling felt that history—when approached as the progress of the World Soul—was a vast and inspiring drama. All of his philosophical systems contained this historical element as an essential explanatory principle. Things could be understood and evaluated only by placing them on a time line, within their proper historical place.

In his Method of Academic Study (1803), he argued—with great influence in the German scholarly world—that all academic topics should be approached as chapters in the history of the World Soul, with the aim of furthering its purposes of unity and harmony. For example, professors of law should inquire into the ways in which public and private life could be brought into greater harmony in the ideal state. Above all, the study of history itself should be conducted with reference to the laws of divine organic growth. As he said,

This type of historicism turns history from a collection of facts to an assigning of values. Depending on one’s view of the general trend of history—up, down, down-up-down, up-down-up—the simple fact that x precedes y comes to be seen as a judgment that x is either better or worse than y. With this value judgment, the description becomes prescriptive: The general course of the past shows not only what has happened, but even more importantly, what people should do in the present to follow the intentions of the infinite mind. This, of course, assumes that one can intuit—either before one’s investigation of the past or after it—what those intentions are.

Because historicism developed at a time when people knew that their knowledge of world history was still limited, the tendency was to intuit the divine plan of history before the facts were in. For example, Herder, the father of modern historicism, had a personal fondness for origins. Early things were good because they were closer to the original Oneness to which we should eventually return, and they purely and innocently showed the seeds of all that came later. Thus he inspired the view, adopted by some Romantics, that Europe’s current sick society could best be brought back to health by studying the cultures of ancient times and distant, more innocent lands. Thus, for Herder, the trajectory of history had been up-down, but could potentially be redeemed to become up-down-up.

Schelling’s view, which was later developed by Hegel and Herbert Spencer, traced a different trajectory: Modern things were better than primitive things because they were more evolved. The best way to intuit the right way forward was through (a) seeing how modern Europe, as the most advanced society, had developed away from the primitive state of earlier times and distant lands, and then (b) continuing the arc even further away from the primitive. Thus for Schelling, the trajectory of history was down-up.

Herder’s and Schelling’s views on the general arc of history have both played a role in Buddhist Romanticism. When Buddhist Romantics want to dismiss teachings in the Pāli Canon of which they don’t approve—such as kamma and rebirth—they follow Herder’s trajectory, arguing that these teachings actually postdated the Buddha and, because they are later, are inferior. To bring Buddhism back up to its original message, they argue, these teachings should be discarded. However, when the same Buddhist Romantics want to adopt later Buddhist teachings not found in the Canon—such as Buddha nature or Nāgārjuna’s interpretations of emptiness—they follow Schelling’s trajectory, arguing that because these teachings came later, they are more evolved and thus superior to what came earlier. In this way, the historicism of Buddhist Romanticism bends the arc of history from up-down-up to down-up on a case-by-case basis.

As for the performative side of the Romantic program: Hölderlin spoke for most of the early Romantics when he wrote that the experience of the infinite organic unity was best induced in one of two ways: through love and through the apprehension of beauty. Here, of course, Hölderlin was inspired by Plato, but the Romantic view of the organic unity of reality caused him to depart from Plato in his understanding of the ways in which love and beauty work on the individual soul.

Remember that the most direct experience of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos was, for the Romantics, the principle of reciprocity in the organic part: the give-and-take of the organism with its environment, passively accepting outside influences from its surroundings and then actively shaping its surroundings in response to those influences. The recognition of the interconnected nature of this give-and-take is what, in their eyes, then leads to a sense of unity.

This is also, according to Hölderlin, the lesson taught by true love, because love requires both responsiveness—his word for the full acceptance of and receptivity to the other—and spontaneity—his word for the freedom of one’s active response. Love existentially solves the problem of how to unite these two impulses into harmony, as one freely wills to trust the free choices expressed by the other. When lovers find harmony with each other, the sense of distinctness that comes when each side is allowed to act freely is held in a sense of unity large enough to contain differences. This can then be directed toward a greater sense of unity with life as a whole.

Schlegel, in Lucinde, wrote in glowing terms of both of these aspects of what has rightly come to be called Romantic love. First, the sense of organic unity, which gives intimations of being part of a larger Oneness: Julius says to Lucinde,

Second, the way in which the love of two people leads to a sense of unity with humanity and with nature at large: Here Schlegel describes the effect of Lucinde’s love on Julius:

The fact that Julius keeps returning to Lucinde for spiritual nurture is where Schlegel’s view of love—shared by the other Romantics—differs from Plato’s view that carnal love had to be outgrown. This is because, for Schlegel, the ultimate spiritual reality lies not in abstract, unchanging Forms of Beauty itself, but in the interconnected give-and-take of immediate experience. Thus, for the early Romantics in general, spiritual love never needed to outgrow carnal love. Instead, continued carnal love was precisely the means to make spiritual love more and more mature. In contrast to Plato, who saw erotic love as a temporary step in a progression leading from a temporal to an eternal realm, the Romantics saw love as eternity united with the moment. As Julius says to Lucinde,

As for the second means for inducing a sense of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos—the appreciation of beauty—Hölderlin held that literary artists were the mediators who sensitized others to the physical beauties of nature and the beauty of the mind through their works of art. This is because art brings unity to what would otherwise seem to be the fragmented pieces of life. Although it might be said that philosophy, in trying to attain unity of knowledge, serves a similar function, Hölderlin felt that literature was much better suited to conveying the fact that Being is always in a process of Becoming—undergoing organic change—and only literature can portray this process in action, as the characters and narrators try to find balance and harmony among the changing dissonances of life.

There was little new in this part of his theory. After all, the role of art in conveying unity in difference and the resolution of conflicts has been recognized since the beginning of literature. The unique Romantic contribution was that the focus of literary art was primarily psychological: This is what Schlegel meant when he stated that all literature in his time, even lyric poetry, was romantic. All literature followed the novel in being focused on the issue of psychological development.

This focus was twofold. On the one hand, the aim of literature in the Romantic Bildung was to help the reader develop psychologically toward an intuition of the interconnectedness of the universe. On the other, the means to accomplish this aim was to portray, in empathetic terms, the psychological development of a character or narrator. This theme of organic psychological development was to be developed both in the content of a work of literature and in its form—which explains the Romantic insistence that works of art should not try to conform to established norms, but should grow organically from their particular message.

The early Romantics developed many theories about how literature should best embody these ideals, but the theories most relevant to their views on religion concerned the nature of the empathy ideally inspired by a work of art. Here Schlegel, in particular, followed two of Herder’s dicta about how ideally to relate to art. To begin with, one should look in the work of art, not for a representation of an outside reality, but for an expression of the author’s soul. As Herder had written in a piece called, “Treating of the Art of Making an Image of the Soul of Another”:

Schlegel was making the same point when he referred to authors who “started out to write only a novel ended up by providing us with a portrait of themselves.” That portrait of themselves is what leads the sensitive reader to empathize with them; empathy is what then leads to a sense of interconnectedness, open to absorbing the authors’ message and then inspired to respond creatively to that interconnectedness.

Schlegel also absorbed a second dictum from Herder, the idea of infinite taste, and developed his own creative response as to what infinite taste in terms of empathy might mean. In Schlegel’s words:

Perceptively, Schlegel said that this capacity for infinite empathy was an aspect of irony. In other words, one could identify with another human being but at the same time maintain one’s distance, simultaneously committing and yet not committing to the truth of that individual’s expression. One found unity with the author by identifying with him, at the same time knowing that one was a separate person within that unity. For Schlegel, this double ability kept one oriented to the infinite that lay beyond both oneself and the author. However, the ironic aspect of infinite empathy stands in the way of committing to the lessons picked up from any one author. Applied to novels, this lack of commitment would be no serious problem, but as we will see, the Romantics proposed applying the same attitude to religious texts. If the text gives instructions on how to live one’s life skillfully, an unwillingness to commit to its instructions long enough to give them a fair test does become a problem. And as we will further see, this attitude of ironic empathy has resurfaced in the Buddhist Romantic approach to ancient Buddhist texts.

Both means of inducing a sense of the infinite organic unity of the cosmos—love and an appreciation of beauty—were combined in the literary works for which the early Romantics are best known: novels and poems dealing with love. And the common perception—that the depiction of love in their writings was overwrought and unrealistic—is well founded. Lucinde, Julius, Diotima, and Hyperion, for instance, are all impossible to imagine, even with the best will in the world, as real human beings. Even later Romantics found the early Romantic depictions of love and lovers hard to take. For example, the poet Heinrich Heine, writing in 1836, dismissed Lucinde as “ludicrously Romantic.” In a reference to Schlegel’s later conversion to Catholicism, he further remarked that although the Mother of God may have forgiven Schlegel for writing the book, the Muses never would.32

However, if Novalis had been alive to hear these criticisms, he would have insisted that they missed the point. Of course the depictions were unrealistic. They were lessons in how to find the sublime in the commonplace. After all, it was only in this process of romanticization that one could know one’s powers to respond creatively to the influences of the cosmos as they manifested themselves in one’s consciousness, and to taste one’s share of the infinite. To romanticize one’s love was to express one’s freedom from necessity.

As noted in Chapter One, Schlegel disowned Lucinde later in life, but at the time of its writing he would have responded to criticisms of the book in another way: that a sensitive reader would have detected the implied infinite attitude of the author in the playful irony surrounding the depictions. They were not meant to be realistic. They were part of a self-conscious myth, and no self-conscious myth should be taken at face value. It, too, should be approached with an ironic attitude, both seriously and playfully at once. This approach came to mark the Romantic—and Buddhist Romantic—view of religious texts as well: that they should all be read, not for objective truths, but as myths to be approached with an ironic empathy.

In fact, Schlegel wrote Lucinde while beginning to see the connection between reading novels and reading religious texts. As also noted in Chapter One, he intended Lucinde to be the first in a series of books, planned but never finished, that would form the Bible of a new religion for the modern world. He formulated this plan from the realization that the aesthetic view he and his friends were developing had religious dimensions, too. Originally he had believed that, as people trained more and more in Romantic Bildung, there would be less and less need for religion. Now, though, he saw that religion was actually the highest Bildung, and that the means of Romantic Bildung—love and the appreciation of beauty—should be devoted to reviving a renewed spiritual appreciation of the infinite in the modern and postmodern world.

His inspiration in gaining this conviction came from another member of the early Romantic circle: Friedrich Schleiermacher.

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