What is a romantic idea?

How romantic! "We sometimes say this without further consideration of what kind of' romantic ideas' are behind it. Maybe this is a concept. Reality is like a novel, in which the impossible happens. Perhaps it is also an imagination about rural scenery, although the original romantic world view is not particularly rural. At least we can imagine that "it means more than just drinking tea once" 1, as Andersen satirized. This is not what the older generation of German romantics thought of as "the romance of a small garden family house"-but romance is first and foremost a German phenomenon.

In the years around 1800, the world was at dusk, and its dim light made all the boundary lines flow: the world dissolved in various incompatible opposites; In Moonlight, the validity of "enlightened" rational value is questioned; The joy of life and the fear of life slide each other and merge into a mysterious and strange mixture: Weltschmerz (the pain of the world). Romance reflects the ups and downs of paradise lost forever; Milton's Paradise Lost (through Ropes Doek/klopstock 2) was praised, or the myth of "the fall of sin" in the Bible was explained by all philosophers at that time, from Kant to Hegel. Different from the progressive optimism and the harmonious pursuit of classicism in the Enlightenment, romanticism is "Gothic" and medieval, and at the same time it is modern: the world encounters doubts, and the belief that reason is the navigation principle begins to collapse. In the disharmony between the external world and the inner world, romantics went into "inner exile" to seek escape, and therefore described the world as a strange and sometimes ominous place-a place that did not accept people's true nature. Parallel to romanticism is an extreme dualism, which appears in everything (the slogan is clair-obscur, trmendum-fascinosum, tragik-komik, Hass-Liebe, 3 light and dark sides); Romantic kept those memories, the memories of God's creation order and the primitive unity of nature-the great secret of nature. After being banished from this paradise, all existence is a kind of "floating between extremes that must be connected and separated" (Novalis). The same is true of nature. Growth and extinction, reproduction and corruption, life and death are all extremes. If the process of humanitarian education is the product of German classicism, then the last natural philosophy with great tendency in Europe originated from German romanticism and its related philosophers.

In chronological order, romanticism and what people usually call "German idealism" philosophy are contemporary, but the relationship between them is quite unclear. Outside Germany, the word "romantik" usually refers to a wide range: it involves everything that can cover up the extreme and despair in its original design. In a considerable sense, it is a criticism of civilization, based on what we call the (re-) discovery of self, subjectivity or "sincerity". "rediscovery" in such a sense: modern philosophy is said to begin with Descartes' self-definition as the basis of philosophy; It is found in this sense that the romantic self-concept is different from Descartes' self as the subject of thinking. Then, the concepts of these two egos are distinguished. For example, Descartes' ego has a definite and firm grasp of the world through its conceptual clarity, while the romantic ego is more modern in this respect: it grasps the whole world not through its rationality, but only through its concept. Descartes is through the intermediary of God, so he can also ensure the consistency between "external" world and "internal", nature and consciousness. In his philosophical system, the world is still a whole, because the two aspects of the world have the same foundation: God, the absolute existence of God lies in the integration of thought and existence, and consciousness and nature are the same thing. Relying on this unity, "the reality of knowledge" is guaranteed, and rational knowledge, namely philosophy, exists in the form of a system composed of eternal and universal laws: philosophy becomes a science about "the world conceived as nature". As rational knowledge, philosophy appears in two parts, which is consistent with the division of "subjective-objective" and "consciousness-nature" in the world: metaphysics and physics (or, philosophy of nature//philosophy of nature).

For romanticism, Kant appeared here and deprived the world from philosophy with his criticism of reason. To become a science, philosophy can only have an independent field: a "discipline" that reaches the cognitive and moral foundation. As a critique of reason, philosophy must realize that it has no basis for "talking about the world" in reason, and it must be transferred to (natural) science; At this time, science became a natural science and began to lose contact with philosophy (that is, metaphysics). Natural science's understanding of the "world" is no longer based on the rational world blueprint and the sacred world order, but on the subject of understanding. The objectivity of that kind of knowledge lies not in "the world can't be different", but in "the imagination can't be different"-especially the imagination can't be different with human knowledge; The impossibility of metaphysical understanding is based on this difference between thinking and existence. Kant's destruction of metaphysics, as a kind of knowledge about the world and its roots, not only means a revolution in philosophy (God is proved and cosmology is expelled), but also means more than "a branch of philosophy is overthrown": it marks the decline of the world, which was once a universal vision and universal internal relations, and now only this world remains. The world can only be recognized as an external phenomenon, that is, the world is no longer a world, it is an object, an object. Kant's symbol of "hidden" reality (the world order that avoids human understanding) is the thing itself (das Ding an sich). This is a world that is "not limited by the senses (time and space), not based on the form (category) of knowledge, and cannot be the object of any science". This is an invisible world.

Kant's use of the concept of "thing itself" is not to draw conclusions in the direction of skepticism, but to limit every kind of arrogance in this field from the field of natural science: he tries to appear with a requirement of "giving a whole explanation to the world" Metaphysics without determinism and materialism can be rationalized by citing physics. On the other hand, the possibility of rationalizing the new world blueprint of natural science through the old metaphysical world concept has also been ruled out. Humans can't find a basis for the "natural world" in a "supernatural" or extrasensory reality, but "understanding" (science) can't refuse "such a real existence", but it can't recognize it.