Buddhist Romanticism

this truth was proven by the fact that ordinary existence is wretched, and
thus unnatural. In his words,
“Do we perhaps need so much energy and effort for ordinary and
common things because for an authentic human being nothing is
more out of the ordinary—nothing more uncommon—than wretched
ordinariness?” 15
However, the mere act of romanticizing, even if natural and true, was
powerless to convey the truth of one’s personal revelations to others.
Because authenticity was to be experienced only from within, the truth of
any moment’s revelation was totally subjective and could not be tested
from without, inasmuch as no one else can occupy the same position in
time and place as any other person, and no one person’s position in time
and place is more authoritative than anyone else’s. The best a person can do
to convince others of the truths of his or her own revelations, Novalis
concluded, is to persuade them indirectly, through poetry and novels that
portrayed the world as magical.
Schlegel, as his thought developed, came to adopt a similar position on
the microcosmic sublime. For him, the feeling of the sublime in one’s
immediate experience was the guarantee for the reality of the infinite, but
this feeling was a “fiction,” meaning that it could not be proven true or
false.
Thus he, too, felt that literature was the best way of persuading others of
the truth of the infinite. However, he developed his own line of thought on
how best to communicate the fact that the infinite was constantly changing.
As a result, he developed two connected concepts—irony and idea—that
constituted his distinctive contribution to Romantic notions of truth.
The first concept concerned the stance of the author toward his works.
To convey the incessant nature of change while at the same time trying to
step outside it, one should assume a stance of irony. The author should
create a work of art to convey a truth while at the same time realizing that
the truth is destined to change. Thus he should be serious about his
message and yet take a comic—and cosmic—distance from it. In Schlegel’s
own words, irony “contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble
antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the
impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest
of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the
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