Buddhist Romanticism

eciprocity. On the internal level, this means that the parts of the organism
all exert a reciprocal influence on one another. Each part exerts an influence
on the others, at the same time being influenced by them. On the external
level, the same principle also applies: Organisms shape their environment
at the same time that their environment shapes them.
Organic causality is thus not one-sided. Instead, it is a constant backand-forth
flow. A healthy organism is one that adapts to the influences of
its environment just as it takes portions of that environment for its own
sustenance and survival, producing new life back into the environment. In
other words, it achieves its ends—at least in part—by helping other
organisms achieve theirs, just as they achieve theirs—again, at least in part
—by helping its.
At the same time, organic causality is not deterministic. In other words,
the actions of the organism are not entirely determined by its surroundings
or by physical/chemical laws. As Schelling observed, the fact that an
organism, as an object, receives stimuli can be explained by chemistry. The
fact that, as a subject, it organizes its reactions, cannot. Here, Schelling said,
the empirical study of organisms as objects, viewed from without, must
end, and one must examine from within what it means to be both a subject
and an object. The necessary result of that internal examination, he
concluded, would be that all objects are also subjects, and all are animated
by a single organic potency operating throughout nature.
This is how the principle of reciprocity led the Romantics to the idea of the
interconnectedness of all life. Because no one organism can exist on its own,
each is comprehensible only as part of a larger whole. Its very being is
interconnected to all Being. From this principle, Novalis and Schelling in
particular extrapolated the idea that the organic system of all individual
living things forms a single individual living thing: the World Soul. All
individual organisms thus must strive toward the advancement of the
World Soul’s ultimate purpose, even though they will not survive as
individuals to see that purpose achieved. However, because life feeds on
the dead remains of other life, all the parts of each dead organism become
new life. This is the sense in which life is immortal.
Schelling—who, among the Romantics, thought most systematically
about the implications of these principles—further stated that the purpose
of the World Soul was to bring about unity within diversity. Being (with a
capital B) had started from unity, had split into diversity, and would reach
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