Some decided God did exist and arived at somewhat different conclusions about the best way … Read more ». He had his roots in Christianity and which is the path for an individual responded from a certain history culture finding new meaning individuality. He connects innocence with ignorance, not-knowing what is going to be. I am reading more about the temporal and eternal and it is absolutely worth mentioning. The eternal is the moment that one realizes that one is more than that.
This kind of fear drives one away from others, throws one back on oneself. It is the awareness that one is an individual who acts and thinks and is not … Read more ». If we are too hung up on how others perceive us, we are too conditioned by outside influence.
Hi Anna, Soren Kierkegaard is generally cornsdeied the father of existentialism, and he was a devout christian. Some decided God did exist and arived at somewhat different conclusions about the best way to … Read more ».
Reblogged this on Life-Ecstatic and commented: This is an interesting piece on romanticism and existential philosophy. About the Author. Jeff Carreira is a mystical philosopher and spiritual guide. It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name Antigone, by Sophocles from the 5th century BC. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority represented by Antigone and the acceptance of it represented by Creon , Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death.
Critic Martin Esslin in the book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene lonesco , Jean Genet , and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings lost in a universe empty of real meaning.
Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. You must be logged in to post a comment. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment.
Loading Comments Laing applied existential thinking to psychotherapy, linking psychological well-being to the search for meaning. Others inspired by existential theory entered politics: Norman Mailer pulled out of the running for existential mayor of New York City after drinking too much, arguing with his wife, and then stabbing her at the launch party.
Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we?
These philosophers were asking the same questions we are asking today about politics, and science. They addressed such issues as the right to offend, the right to privacy, freedom of speech, how technology changes our identities, and to what extent we are responsible for who we are and the world we are creating. They save us from the existential anxiety that comes with considering ourselves free agents who are responsible for what we do.
Schlegel, ITP: — Poetry elevates each single thing through a particular combination with the rest of the whole, [by allowing] the individual [to] live in the whole and the whole in the individual. Schlegel, Thoughts , KA Baudelaire summarizes these romantic sentiments, declaring,.
The one who says romanticism says modern art—which is to say intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite—expressed by all the resources of art. Salon of []. What is it about the aesthetic engagement with art and beauty that is particularly suitable for approximating the Absolute? The rest of this section will develop a few possible answers to this question. One might think that feelings are thus placed outside of rationality.
But this would be a mistake. Rationality, then, is irreducible to cognition both in the Kantian framework and in its romantic inheritance. Aesthetic feeling is rational because of its ground and responsiveness to a claim, but non-cognitive insofar as it cannot be subsumed under concepts.
Feeling does not determine any concrete property that its object has independently of subjectivity as cognition would , but is rather responsive to a relation between a subject and an object. Aesthetic pleasure, particularly, is a non-determining mode of reflecting on the relation, not between a particular subject and a particular object, but between subjectivity and objectivity as such. This rational but non-cognitive nature of feeling, in general, and of aesthetic feeling, in particular, is perhaps the central feature that renders aesthetic feeling an attractive ingredient in addressing the epistemic and metaphysical concerns that occupied the romantics.
This is exactly what the romantics have been looking for—a non-discursive, but rational and normatively governed mode of awareness. And they found it in poetry, regarding it as grounded in feeling:. Not art and artworks make the artist, but feeling and inspiration and impulse. All good poetry [originates in] the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. We are now in a position to appreciate that this romantic imperative is explained partly by the view that philosophy cannot be reduced to concepts and propositions, but must also include certain kinds of affective mental states.
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, discursive reasoning comes to an end. The non-determining character of aesthetic feeling is related to the distinctive kind of normativity that characterizes artistic production and aesthetic appreciation. Both are the source of their own normativity, without being subject to any external law. Given that, they are appropriate for approximating the Absolute insofar as this approximation must be non-determining applying no conditions , but normatively governed rather than arbitrary.
This combination of being independent of given rules and attuned to something other than yourself is required not only for the genius, but also for approximating the Absolute. If everyone is to approximate the Absolute, then everyone should model herself after the genius. Criticism consists of a related combination of features. While it is based on no prior rules, it is also open and receptive to the work it concerns. And it is through the engagement with the work that each critical judgment constitutes its own norms.
Although we can and should legitimize our judgments of beauty and art, we cannot do so by appeal to any given concepts or norms that are external to the work at stake. The critic should seek to express the work in a way that is faithful to its individual nature and be responsive to the specific norms that it constitutes:.
Fortunately, [the novel] turns out to be one of those books, which carries its own judgment within it. That means that beauty makes demands on us, demands that, according to the romantics, are analogous to the demands that other persons make on us. Schlegel, DP. This lawfulness without a law fits the requirements of the Absolute. For, if we adopt this structure of normativity and expression in our pursuit of the Absolute, we may approach it in a normatively governed and committed way, without determining and thus conditioning it according to any given law, principle, or concept.
It is an individual whole—a totality, the parts of which could be understood only negatively, as its limitations. To approximate the Absolute, then, we need a mode of consciousness that is particularly suited to discern a holistic unity in an individual.
Schlegel, AF: Schlegel, FLP: And this is the very approach that is required in the pursuit of the Absolute given its individual nature. We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself. AK 5: Aesthetic feeling is open-ended and future-oriented. This is partly because aesthetically enjoying an object involves a commitment to remain faithful to the beauty of that object, beauty that calls for and deserves an open-ended affective pursuit.
The romantics welcomed this structure of aesthetic feeling as particularly suitable for the pursuit of the Absolute. Since the Absolute can never be determined, the stance that approximates it must itself be open-ended. It should involve a commitment to keep striving after the Absolute open-endedly.
The systematic search after first principles is not only hopeless, but also unfortunate. It can only slight the significance of the Absolute by the effort to determine it through principles. Instead, philosophy should be aesthetically shaped, as an open-ended pursuit:. If knowledge of the infinite is itself infinite, therefore always only incomplete, imperfect, then philosophy as a science can never be completed closed and perfect, it can always only strive for these high goals, and try all possible ways to come closer and closer to them.
This is because the romantics turned to aesthetics to a large extent in order to pursue, rather than to reject, some of the core ethical and political values of the Enlightenment, such as autonomy or self-determination and the ideal of Bildung. Art and aesthetics also provided a model for the romantic political ideal: a democratic, egalitarian community grounded in the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity. In addition to proving the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the romantics false, tracing these romantic notions of autonomy, Bildung and political community also offers a challenge to another well-known interpretation of the movement as apolitical see Schmitt In contrast to this interpretation, we find the romantics exploring and emphasizing the importance of aesthetics for ethical and political concerns.
Yet, a central difficulty facing any interpretation of romantic ethics and politics lies in the change that this view has undergone during the later years of many a romantic: the strong democratic and egalitarian views of the likes of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher gave way to a growing conservatism and religiosity after With this shift in mind, they turned from political optimism to religion.
A unified account of romantic politics is thus untenable. While the absolute reality of freedom might not admit of a proof, according to many of the romantics, human beings should nonetheless approximate freedom by developing autonomy—self-determination and self-legislation.
Autonomy is the right of the individual to think for herself and act rationally and freely TPL II: The work of art and aesthetic judgment were seen as paradigmatic expressions of autonomy and, as such, as splendid models for the cultivation of individual human autonomy. And yet, both the production and judgment of art are not lawless, but normatively governed by the laws generated autonomously by each individual work and by each individual aesthetic judgment.
This characteristic of the production and judgment of art should not only be incorporated into the way every person is to govern herself—as the source of her own rational laws rather than as subject to external laws, and as self-determining rather than passively determined—but also serve as a model for the way in which every person should be respected and treated. Aesthetics provides us with a paradigm for following two central ethical demands—the demand to govern oneself autonomously and the demand to respect everyone else as autonomous.
For if every individual is to be autonomous, she should fashion herself after the model of the artist. Bildung is another characteristic romantic value that each individual should develop in herself.
Bildung is a particularly modern value, formed at least in part as a challenge to what the romantics regarded as the rift between sensibility and reason in modern life. The artwork is a good model for such an ideal insofar as it is, according to the romantics, an organic and harmonious whole of diverse and even conflicting parts:. Poetry…must be a harmonious mood of our mind…where everything finds its proper aspect….
Everything in a truly poetic book seems so natural —and yet so marvelous. We think it could not be otherwise…and we feel the infinite…sensations of a plurality in agreement. Novalis, Last Fragments : 3. Aesthetic judgment is also a harmony of reason and sensibility.
And achieving this harmony constitutes a genuine moral being: a balanced rational, sensible and affective person. Romantic Bildung was a political ideal as much as it was an ethical one. It was needed, not only for the sake of independent individual responsibility, but also for the possibility of a genuine non-revolutionary republic:.
There is no greater need of the age than the need for a spiritual counterweight to the Revolution and to the despotism which the Revolution exercises over people…. Where can we seek and find such a counterweight? Schlegel, Ideas : The French revolution had shown the romantics both the value of a republic based on liberty, equality and fraternity, but also the dangers of anarchism and strife that revolutions carry with them.
The proper path to a republic, they thought, is not through a revolutionary act, but through proper education. Art does not only offer a model for a harmonious, cultivated soul, but is also the best medium through which to achieve the moral education that leads to this harmony and, on its basis, to the best republic.
Attending to art as well as producing it is a form of self-cultivation because the spirit of art allows human beings to transcend baseness a particular danger given modern instrumentalism and materialism , and to develop their humanity.
As we now turn to see, the romantics regarded art also as a particularly effective medium for uniting people, no matter their differences, and so took it to be a great spur for united, social and political action. The allegiance to autonomy and to the value of Bildung may seem to indicate individualism. And it does, to an extent. While individuality is indeed a romantic value, anti-communal individualism is not. Schlegel, OP: They viewed such a universalist ethics as problematic because they regarded individual expression and the development of a unique, characteristic and unified self as intrinsically and morally valuable.
Yet, the romantics were also critical of extreme individualism, such as the one they found promoted by some Enlightenment thinkers. In other words, they challenged those individualists who criticized any form of social and communal participation as potentially a form of passive submission to external authority.
Autonomy and Bildung , in particular, though nothing other than individual freedom and self-realization, can never be divorced from the social:. Autonomy should be universal and not relate to the individual but the whole, for otherwise it would destroy itself…. We cannot consider human beings individually. TPL II: On the romantic picture, the achievement of free, fully-formed individuality is impossible independently of strong sociality and vice versa.
Rather than contradictory impulses, as they are often regarded today, sociality and individuality, on the romantic picture, are not only compatible but also naturally harmonious—grounded in human nature: [ 6 ]. No man is merely man, but…at the same time he can and should be genuinely and truly all mankind.
Therefore, man, in reaching out time and again beyond himself to seek and find the complement of his innermost being in the depths of another, is certain to return to himself. Schlegel, DP: It is this romantic view of natural human sociability—rather than some exaggerated zeal or effusiveness—that explains and is explained by the centrality of love in romanticism.
Yes, love, you power of attraction of the spiritual world! No individual life or development is possible without you. Without you everything must degenerate into a crude, homogeneous mass…. When one complements the other, both grow together inseparably.
I feel united within me the two fundamental conditions of ethical life! But as natural as it may be, the romantics believed that love has suffered paralysis in modernity. On their view, the rise of capitalism and instrumentalism had suppressed natural social bonds and encouraged self-interest. The consequent view of human beings as solely quantitatively distinct further leveled them and inhibited their distinctive and unique expressions.
How could people balance individuality and sociality in the face of modernity? Here too romantic poetry and the creative imagination come to the rescue. Poetry is not only based in love, but is itself a form of love insofar as it bonds different individuals:. Poetry befriends and binds with unseverable ties the hearts of all those who love it. Even though in their own lives they may pursue the most diverse ends, may feel contempt for what the other holds most sacred, may fail to appreciate or communicate with one another, and remain in all other realms strangers forever; in poetry through a higher magic power, they are united and at peace.
The poet integrates:. He can do this when he has found the center point through communication with those who have found theirs from a different side, in a different way. Love needs a responding love. DP: While sociality and communal spirit are ethically required for the achievement of autonomy and Bildung , community was also a romantic political ideal.
Such an ideal required that what the romantics viewed as modern alienation—estrangement of the self from others—be challenged in three ways: by promoting love as discussed above , developing a sphere of free social interaction and pursuing a holistic, social unity. The ideal political community must facilitate a sphere of social life, which is free and independent of political control because free sociality and conversation, the ends of this sphere, are both valuable in themselves and the best alternative for external laws.
The romantics believed that social bonds should not be upheld by laws that are imposed on individual citizens from outside, but by the love encouraged by a common culture and free interaction. Aesthetics is at the center of this political vision also because the political ends of free sociability and conversation are the very same ones that the romantics practiced in their intellectual-artistic salons and in their communal, cooperative aesthetic projects.
The political community should allow for creative and artistic endeavors such as the Athenaeum journal, which was the mouthpiece of the German romantics at the end of the eighteenth century and a journal that was independent of the control of the publishing establishment.
It was written in collaboration mainly by the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher , and aimed at rational criticism and Bildung.
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