ROMANTICISM, PHILOSOPHICAL

The process of conceptualizing the romantic intuition of man and being, and the doctrines resulting there-from; also the movement, with its witnessing documents, in which this process transpired historically. Romanticism views man as pure, vital activity, generative of self and of the world, and as a finite principle open to an infinite revealing itself interiorly as the inexhaustible self-generative force of life, which is deployed through determinate expressive forms that can always be transcended. Romanticism views reality as the immanent determination of such activity. Historically, romanticism has been the expression of this vision in the complex culture succeeding to, and reacting against, the enlightenment and embracing all aspects of life: literary, artistic, political, social, religious, and scientific.

Characterization. Romanticism may be contrasted with classicism, which views man as possessing a determinate nature—defined as much by its limits as by its powers and achieving its perfection within these limits. It may be contrasted also with rationalism, which, though conceiving man as open to the infinite, limits this openness to one power—reason or intellect. In romanticism, the integral, existing human principle is itself open, and it is open to an infinite that is not abstract but concrete.

The complex, expressive forms of romanticism give rise to the distinction between practical, or sentimental romanticism, and philosophical romanticism. The latter conceptualizes the basic intuitions of romanticism, whereas the former is characterized by its spontaneity and lyricism.

Philosophical romanticism may be characterized negatively as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Opposing the analytical method of the latter, it advocated the synthetic or speculative method. Against excessive intellectualism, it stood for a total reconstruction of human presence with renewed emphasis upon the positive power of the imagination, the senses, and the passions in attaining and witnessing to reality. Against mechanism, it stood for spontaneity and finality. Assigning limits to the natural sciences, it gave fresh vitality to history, the historical method, and the sciences depending on historical data.

The positive character of philosophical romanticism becomes apparent in its anthropology, whose basic note is integralism. The life-presence of man is a unity and totality, within which all powers conspire to a pure, transcendental consciousness. All dualisms, as between body and spirit, sense and reason, etc., are eliminated. The immediate, nonreflective operations of the human principle—passion, sense, imagination, will, and intuition—are recognized as positive elements of this synthesis. Integralism is extended also to the expressive forms. Art, as expression, is assigned the status of a principle of transcendental unity for consciousness. aesthetics, as the general theory of expression, becomes a fundamental discipline among the philosophical sciences. The social bond, earlier seen as contractual, becomes organic and historical; it rests upon spontaneous and affective processes as much as upon reflection and volition.

Historical Survey. Historically, philosophical romanticism is polarized between the figures of Giambattista vico (1668–1744) and G. W. F. hegel (1770–1831). Its progress falls into three stages: protoromanticism, the critique of Kantianism, and the system of reason.

Protoromanticism. This movement is represented by Vico, whose Scienza Nuova (successive versions 1724–44) anticipates all the basic lineaments of philosophical romanticism. By the doctrine of "poetic consciousness," it achieves a total reconstruction of human presence; by the deployment of human presence through chronological time on the basis of ideal time (the latter determined by the constitutive modifications of the human mind), it establishes the order of history in the romantic sense; by the theory of "ideal and eternal history" informing every particular history, it establishes the openness of human history to the eternal and transcendent, in the manner of the romantic philosophy of history.

Critique of Kantianism. Although Kant is not included among the romantic philosophers, the speculative enterprise of philosophical romanticism takes form through criticism of the Kantian achievement. This formation exhibits two aspects: the dissolution of the thing-in-itself and the transformation of the synthetic a priori from a formal to a dynamic dialectical principle for the speculative construction of reality.

Numerous thinkers contributed to the process of the dissolution of the thing-in-itself. F. H. jacobi (1743–1819) pointed out the dilemma in which this concept involved Kantian criticism, and J. F. Fries (1773–1843), advancing Jacobi's criticism, emphasized the unity of the noumenal world revealed in the Critique of Practical Reason as contrasted to the division of phenomenal and noumenal in the Critique of Pure Reason. K. L. Reinhold (1758–1823), a confirmed Kantian who wished to systematize his master's doctrine, substituted an order of objective consciousness for both the ego and the thing-in-itself. Both J. G. von herder (1744–1803) and J. G. hamann (1730–88) censured the Kantian division among the forms of cognition and sought some principle of unity for consciousness. They reintroduced the Leibnizian notion of a gradual transformation of sensibility into ideality, thus adumbrating both the system of reason and the phenomenology of spirit or mind. G. E. Schulze (1761–1833), in his Aenesidemus, offered a negative but important critique; Salomon Maimon (1754–1800) pointed out that the entire notion of the thing-in-itself demands a fresh analysis of consciousness; while J. S. Beck (1761–1840) drew the entire process to a focus by noting that it is the relation of thought and being that demands rethinking.

The process of dissolution, being negative, could not reveal adequately its own implications; these became clear, however, with the ideal construction of a unitary structure of intelligible existence through a dialectical interpretation of the synthetic a priori. This project corresponds completely with the principle of philosophical romanticism—that reality is a living process generating alike self and world, world-in-itself, self-in-the-world, and the complete in-and-for-itselfness of intelligible existence. The synthetic a priori, transformed from a formal to a dialectical principle, is the instrument of construction of the system of reason.

System of Reason. The construction of the system of reason is associated principally with J. G. fichte (1762–1814), F. W. J. von schelling (1775–1854), F. D. E. schleiermacher (1768–1834), and, principally, Hegel.

For Fichte, the structure of the system of reason rests upon the categorical imperative, the pure form of the rational will; the world becomes the matter of duty, the content of that imperative in sensuous form; the world is there (dasein ) as the theater of human moral activity. The "ought" is the pure and ultimate form of reason and the ground of the world (subjective idealism).

For Schelling, the system of reason rests on the ground of nature (objective idealism). The question thus arises: How does the self-conscious process of reason generate the order of objects in which it is (ostensibly) negated? That it must generate order follows from the previously established notion that rational activity is autonomous, i.e., it does not arise in the presence of a "given," as Kant had supposed, but generates even the "given" as a dimension of its own activity. Schelling replies: Nature, the order of objects, is the self-generative process of consciousness in its concreteness, in the process of becoming self-commensurate and wholly present to itself. Without the order of objects, nature would remain abstract and in alienation from itself.

Schleiermacher introduces a religious element into the system of reason. A tendency to make the ultimate unity of the noumenal and phenomenal orders the object of faith had long existed; Schleiermacher continued this into the construction of the system of reason. The faith of Schleiermacher resembles the activity that Kant discusses in the Critique of Judgment; it establishes an aesthetic relation between man and the world and manifests itself concretely as a feeling of dependence in man.

The construction of the system of reason culminates in Hegel, who judged the efforts of his predecessors negatively because they rested on partial principles of presence, namely, will, nature, etc. Logic alone can generate the system of reason by generating the Idea; in the Idea all the partial modes of presence are synthesized and transcended. This process is illustrated in the Phenomenology of Spirit; its principles are established in the System of Logic and elaborated in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Through this process Hegel establishes in principle the totality of intelligible being and existence in its complex structure of being-in-itself, being-for-another, and being-for-itself as the pure synthesis of being-in-and-for-itself.

Influence. The resonances of philosophical romanticism are widespread. They may be traced in traditionalism in France (though this has other sources as well); in the works of A. rosmini-serbati and V. gioberti, as well as of others in Italy; and in transcendentalism in England and the United States. In its own right, the position that philosophical romanticism assumed has entered into the permanent philosophical heritage of the Western world.

Bibliography: v. mathieu, Enciclopedia filosofica, 4 v. (Venice-Rome 1957) 4:187–203. a. r. caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (London 1953). j. g. robertson, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng. 1923). h. i. c. grierson, Classical and Romantic (Cambridge, Eng. 1923). g. boas, French Philosophies of the Romantic Period (Baltimore 1925). a. o. lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass. 1936). m. joachimi, Die Weltanschauung der deutschen Romantik (Jena 1905). e. kircher, Philosophie der Romantik (Jena 1906). o. f. walzel, Deutsche Romantik (Leipzig 1908). r. haym, Die romantische Schule (5th ed. Berlin 1928). w. schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgart 1955).

[a. r. caponigri]