Buddhist Romanticism

The infinitude of the organic unity of the cosmos, an idea that the
Romantics picked up from Herschel, is what distinguished their worldview
from Herder’s. For Herder, the cosmos was only one of God’s potentially
infinite aspects, meaning that there was more to reality than the organic
unity of the cosmos. God had other, extra-cosmic aspects as well. For the
Romantics, however, the organic unity of the cosmos encompassed
everything—the infinitude of all Being—with no room for anything, even
God, outside. The infinite God—the World Soul—was One with the infinite
cosmos. By making this assertion, they felt that they were freeing humanity
from the ultimate duality: the duality between God and his creation. For
them, God was not something separate, transcending creation. Instead, he
was immanent within it. As might be expected, this aspect of their
worldview became a defining feature of their religious views. But it also
presented them with many challenges as they worked out its implications
in terms of their aesthetic and political program.
The first problem was how an infinite organism could be encompassed
in a human concept. Finite organisms are defined by the fact that they have
a purpose, which they achieve in interaction with their environment. But an
infinite organism, by definition, has no external environment with which to
interact. So what kind of organism was it? And what kind of purpose might
such an organism have? Spinoza, in his contemplation of God as infinite
substance, had already raised this question, and had suggested that even if
there was an answer, no finite being could comprehend it. As he said, the
purpose of such an infinite substance would be no more similar to our own
conception of “purpose” than the Dog Star, Sirius, is similar to a dog that
barks.
Schelling was the only Romantic who tried to tackle this problem, but
his modern scholarly commentators agree that his proposed solutions were
confused, and created more problems than they solved. One point on which
he was clear, though, was that although the infinite organism was headed
toward unity, it would never fully arrive there. Total, static unity was an
unachievable goal. The universe, to be truly infinite, was to be forever in
process—an idea that all the Romantics shared. This however, created a
further problem in that the purpose of the organism was what gave it its
unity-in-process, but if the purpose was never to be achieved, wouldn’t that
mean that the unity was illusory? Schelling wrestled with this issue as well,
but with no coherent results.
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