Buddhist Romanticism

they were parts of an infinite organic unity. The way they found around
this paradox, of course, was to redefine what freedom meant. And when we
examine the ways in which Schelling, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hölderlin
attacked this paradox, we will see in each case that their resolution was
directly connected to their individual ideas of what constituted a truth.
Schelling—the only one who held to the criterion that truth should be
logically consistent—came to the bleakest view of the four as to what
constituted freedom. Arguing from the unity of the cosmos, he concluded
that human beings, as finite beings, do not even exist, in the sense that
nothing can exist in and of itself. From this conclusion he further argued
that finite human beings have no freedom of choice. In fact, he ultimately
concluded that the very idea of freedom of choice was actually the source of
all evil. To foster the good of the universe, human beings had to accept that
their only freedom was to be open to the divine force acting within them.
Because this openness expressed their inner nature, as parts of the whole,
freedom thus meant expressing one’s inner nature.
This, of course, was Spinoza’s definition of freedom, which amounted to
no freedom at all. After all, one had no choice or responsibility for
determining what one’s innate nature was or for how the divine force
would act. The only difference between Spinoza and Schelling was that, for
the former, one’s innate nature was one’s rationality, whereas for Schelling
one’s innate nature was the sum total of all the forces—physical and
mental, feelings and thoughts—acting through and within one.
Unlike Schelling, the remaining three thinkers, when defining freedom,
openly denied that the principle of logical consistency had any authority
over them. This, in fact, was part of their expression of freedom: If, to be
logically consistent with the principle of an infinite organic unity, one had
to deny oneself any freedom of choice, then one asserted one’s freedom by
declaring independence from the principle of logical consistency. This did
not mean, however, that they made no effort to be coherent. They simply
looked for coherence in other terms.
For Novalis, freedom consisted of one’s ability to romanticize one’s life.
Only to the extent that you could use your powers of imagination to see the
sublime in the commonplace could you know that you were playing a role
in shaping the cosmos, and that you shared in the creative freedom of the
infinite.
For Schlegel, freedom consisted in versatility, the ability to not be tied
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