Buddhist Romanticism

dialogue, irony, intuition, love, and psychological development was an
ideal medium for conducting the philosophical enterprise in the context of
that universe.
The early Romantics did not call themselves “Romantics.” Even though
they used the term freely to describe the literature they admired, the first
person to apply it to them was their first great French admirer, Madame
Germaine de Staël, in her book, On Germany (1813). She herself was a
novelist, and in calling Schlegel and his cohorts “Romantics” she meant to
underline the way in which their philosophy took a novelistic form.
However, she also regarded them as apolitical, which was something of a
mistake. As Schlegel’s comment about the tendencies of the age suggests,
he and his friends saw their engagement with philosophy and literature as
having a political dimension, too. However much they disagreed with
Schiller on the details of his aesthetic theory, they agreed with him that, “It
is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Toward this
end, they wanted to combine philosophy and literature in a way that would
provide Germans with the Bildung they needed to find liberty, equality, and
fraternity while at the same time avoiding the mistakes of the French
Revolution.
Madame de Staël may have dismissed the early Romantics’ political
program because she was writing about them shortly after their group had
disbanded without having produced any coherent political theory or
tangible political results. There were several reasons for their failure on this
part, and—as we will see in the next chapter—one of the main reasons was
that the scientific worldview underlying their philosophy undermined the
possibility of personal freedom. Their attempts to synthesize the tendencies
of their age fell apart because some of those tendencies could not be
reconciled with the lessons that William Herschel had seen in the stars.
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