Buddhist Romanticism

systems, these four thinkers wrote philosophy in the form of dialogues,
letters, novels, myths, and aphorisms. This style of philosophy is called
anti-foundationalism.
Schelling, however, during the late 1790’s, was a foundationalist. He
agreed that the most direct intuition of experience was that all Being is One,
and that this experience could not be adequately expressed in a judgment.
Still, he noted that even to say this much is to assume a great deal about
experience. And for these assumptions to be persuasive, there was a need to
show that they were consistent. To be consistent, he felt, they had to follow
logically from a rational foundation. This was why, even though Schelling
believed that philosophical systems couldn’t express everything, he saw a
need to write philosophy in the traditional style: building systems—and he
built many different systems during the late 1790’s—founded on the
principle of A = A. Only in his later years did he become an antifoundationalist
himself. Thus on this criterion, Schelling would count as a
late Romantic philosopher, but not as an early one.
However, there is another criterion for defining early Romantic
philosophy, and that’s by its worldview. All five of these thinkers agreed that
the universe is an infinite organic unity, and that human beings are integral
parts of that unity. Because these thinkers also defined religion as an issue
of the relationship of human beings to the universe, this seems the most
relevant definition of Romantic philosophy when discussing Romantic
religion. And because Schelling meets this criterion, he, too, deserves to be
included in any discussion of early Romantic religious views.
We will present the cultural reasons for why the Romantics developed
this worldview and this understanding of religion in Chapters Three to
Five. Here we will briefly sketch their biographies to give an idea of some
of the personal reasons for the way they arrived at Romantic religion.
We will start with Novalis first.
Novalis (1772–1801)
Georg Philipp Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenberg, the only one of the early
Romantics to come from a noble background, was born on the family estate
in the Harz mountains to parents who were devout Pietists (see Chapter
Three). He studied law in Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg. While at Jena, he
read philosophy as well. This was during a period when one of the major
32