Abstract
When in the spring of 1789, Schiller arrived at Jena to take up his post as a professor of history, the city was a bastion of Kantian doctrine. When he left it for Weimar, in December 1799, Jena had become the most vital center of the Romantic movement. These two statements indicate a most formidable concentration of intellectual forces, for in a chain-reaction, the thoughts of Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck, the Schlegels and Goethe were to influence and intensify each other.
Daher offenbart sich der Inhalt der Freiheit durch das Leben in Polaritäten und Gegensätzen. Daher ist Freiheit in Bewegung und in Dialektik. Jaspers
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References
Eckermann, Gespräche, 253.
Letter to Huber, May 1st, 1786. Jonas I, 299.
Athenäum III, 2, p. 350.
Walter Silz, Early German Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass. 1929, p. 13.
Silz, Op. cit. p. 212.
F. Schlegel, Briefe an seinen Bruder, 253, 263.
A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, New York, 1960, 227.
Die Romantische Schule, Berlin, 1870. p. 229.
Silz, Op. cit., p. 6.
Cf. Johannes Thyssen, Geschichte der Geschichtsphilosophie, Bonn, 1954, 2nd ed. p. 42.
Cf. John Vietch in his Introduction to The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes, Universal Classics Library, Washington, 1901.
“Korte verhandeling van God, de mensch, en deszelfs welstand.” Opera quotquot reperta sunt, Hagae Comitum, 1914, ed. tertia, Vol. IV, p. 89.
Tomaschek, p. 404.
Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschicbte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1888, vol. III, p. 304.
Geschichte der neuen deutschen Literatur, Berlin, 1930, vol. II, p. 1.
Paul Kluckhohn. Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik, Tübingen, 1953, p. 25.
Schelling, Werke, Leipzig 1907, I, 29.
Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Leipzig 1887, 2nd ed. IV, p. 103.
Athenäum III, 1, 104.
Silz, op. cit., 188.
Ibid., 188.
Schelling, op. cit., vol. I, p. 707.
Romanticism and the Modern Ego, Boston, 1943, p. 40.
Introduction to Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, New York, 1954.
Letter to Karoline Beulwitz, Nov. 27, 1788, Jonas II, 162.
Meinecke, Werke, IV, 292.
Werke, (HA) X, 248.
Meinecke, Werke, IV, 293.
Ibid., IV, 295. Cf. Barzun’s treatment of the classic objection to Romantic psychology, “that it accepts an inner dualism — the “two souls in one breast.” Op. cit., p. 70.
It is notable that English Romanticism, even in the work of Byron, never exploited the inherent dualism to the full dimensions of crisis. It was aware of it, but toned it down. Walter Jackson Bate, in From Classic to Romantic, Harvard 1946, stresses the attitude of compromise in English Romanticism and quotes Schlegel’s remark that German authors, though receiving the first impetus from England, were required to develop the full potentialities of Romanticism by the combination of poetry and the “professionalism” of German thought. (p. 190).
Written in 1796, Werke (HA) XII, 189.
Kluckhohn, op. cit., p. 21.
Quoted in Eudo C. Mason, Deutsche und englische Romantik, Göttingen, 1959, 21. Mason sees this innate Satanism in German Romanticism as “somehow derived from Fichte’s philosophy,” p. 22.
Philosophie der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1907, p. 91.
Werke (SA) XI, 90.
Jutta Hecker, Das Symbol der blauen Blume, Jena, 1931, p. 23. This author recognizes that the words blau and Blume require separate treatment, but does not bring out the characteristic polarity in the symbol.
Cf. the fairy-tale drama Aladdin by the Danish poet Oehlenschläger, in which a Faustian search for a sanctuary is described. This ideal, a glimpse of distant times, can only be found by an innocent child.
Pietism of the Romantic movement found its most articulate expression in Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion in which the basis of religion is seen as the acceptance of life as a form of the infinite. “Remind yourselves how everything within you strives to widen the sharp outlines of your personality and to gradually dissolve them into the infinite.” Werke, Leipzig 1911, IV, 289.
I Canti, Torino, 1920, p. 172.
Ibid., 198.
Cf. Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident, Paris, 1939, I, 1. “Love and death, mortal love: if this is not all of poetry, it is at least all that is popular about it, all that is universally moving in our literatures.”
“Die Entzückung an Laura,” Werke, (HA), XIX, 46.
Ibid., I, 166.
Werke (HA), XII, 114.
Ibid., XII, 118.
Ibid., X, 5.
Ibid., V. 30.
The last two volumes of De kleine Johannes, though a contrast to the nature symbolism of the first part in their concentration on social problems, are nevertheless rooted in the mysticism of the opening volume.
Haag, 1923, 59.
“Das Ideal und das Leben,” Werke (HA) XVII, 141.
Kluckhohn, op. cit., 125.
Johannes Thyssen, op. cit., 51.
Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, Tübingen, 1932, 308.
Collingwood, op. cit., 87.
Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller, et livsfragment, Kopenhavn, 1950, II, 187.
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© 1965 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Regin, D. (1965). Romantic Polarity. In: Freedom and Dignity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9097-8_4
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