Kant made a considerable contribution here as well. In his aesthetics he
investigated what happens when we are overwhelmed by beauty—in a work
of art, for instance. When we abandon ourselves to a work of art with no other
intention than the aesthetic experience itself, we are brought closer to an
experience of ‘das Ding an sich.’ “
“So the artist can provide something philosophers can’t express?”
“That was the view of the Romantics. According to Kant, the artist plays
freely on his faculty of cognition. The German poet Schiller developed Kant’s
thought further. He wrote that the activity of the artist is like playing, and man
is only free when he plays, because then he makes up his own rules. The
Romantics believed that only art could bring us closer to ‘the inexpressible.’
Some went as far as to compare the artist to God.”
“Because the artist creates his own reality the way God created the
world.”
“It was said that the artist had a ‘universe-creating imagination.’ In his
transports of artistic rapture he could sense the dissolving of the boundary
between dream and reality.
“Novalis, one of the young geniuses, said that ‘the world becomes a
dream, and the dream becomes reality.’ He wrote a novel called Heinrich von
Ofterdingen set in Medieval times. It was unfinished when he died in 1801, but
it was nevertheless a very significant novel. It tells of the young Heinrich who
is searching for the ‘blue flower’ that he once saw in a dream and has yearned
for ever since. The English Romantic poet Coleridge expressed the same
idea; saying something like this:
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if,
in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful
flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah,
what then?”
“How pretty!”
“This yearning for something distant and unattainable was characteristic
of the Romantics. They longed for bygone eras, such as the Middle Ages,
which now became enthusiastically reappraised after the Enlightenment’s
negative evaluation. And they longed for distant cultures like the Orient with
its mysticism. Or else they would feel drawn to Night, to Twilight, to old ruins
and the supernatural. They were preoccupied with what we usually refer to as
the dark side of life, or the murky, uncanny, and mystical.”
“It sounds to me like an exciting period. Who were these Romantics?”
“Romanticism was in the main an urban phenomenon. In the first half of
the last century there was, in fact, a flourishing metropolitan culture in many
parts of Europe, not least in Germany. The typical Romantics were young
men, often university students, although they did not always take their studies
very seriously. They had a decidedly anti-middle class approach to life and
could refer to the police or their landladies as philistines, for example, or
simply as the enemy.”
“I would never have dared rent a room to a Romantic!”
“The first generation of Romantics were young in about 1 800, and we
could actually call the Romantic Movement Europe’s first student uprising.
The Romantics were not unlike the hippies a hundred and fifty years later.”
“You mean flower power and long hair, strumming their guitars and lying
around?”