The Age of Kant and Goethe

It can be said of Romanticism that it pursued Schiller's sentence: "Man only plays where he is man in the full meaning of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays" to its utmost consequences. She wants to turn the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed human being knows no other norm than the laws that he creates with his freely exercised imagination, just as the artist creates those that he imprints on his work. He rises above everything that determines him from the outside and lives entirely from within himself. The whole world is merely material for his aesthetic play. The seriousness of everyday life is alien to him. He cannot take things seriously in themselves, because they are not valuable to him in themselves. Rather, it is he himself who gives them value. The mood of the mind, which is aware of its sovereignty over things, is what the Romantics call the ironic. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819) gave the following explanation of Romantic irony: It "must be the artist's mind that summarizes all directions in an all-overlooking gaze, and this gaze hovering over everything, destroying everything, we call irony". Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the leaders of the Romantic school of thought, says of the ironic mood that it "overlooks everything and rises infinitely above everything conditional, even above one's own art, virtue or genius". Those who live in this mood feel bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of their actions. He can "tune himself at will philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, anciently or modernly". The ironic mind smiles at a truth that wants to be shackled by logic; but it also smiles at an eternal, moral world order. For nothing tells him what he should do but himself alone. The ironist should do what he likes, for his morality can only be an aesthetic one. The Romantics are the heirs of Fichte's idea of the uniqueness of the ego. But they did not want to fill this ego with ideas of reason and with a moral faith as Fichte did, but relied above all on the freest power of the soul, the imagination, which is not bound by anything. For them, thought was completely absorbed by poetry. Novalis, the most amiable of the Romantics, says: "It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that poets constitute a special guild. It is nothing special at all. It is the peculiar behavior of the human spirit. Doesn't everyone write poetry and aspire every minute?" The ego, preoccupied with itself alone, can arrive at the highest truth: "It seems to man as if he were engaged in a conversation and some unknown spiritual being is causing him to develop the most evident thoughts in a wonderful way." Basically, the Romantics wanted nothing other than what Goethe and Schiller also made their confession: A view of man that makes him appear as perfect, as free as possible. But they based their views on firm, unshakeable foundations. Schiller rose to a free way of life through incessant philosophical thinking, Goethe through the exploration of the laws of nature.