Buddhist Romanticism

technical rigor from their readers. Even Kant wrote a layperson’s guide to
aesthetics that went through more printings during his lifetime than any of
his other works.
Novels in particular, with their ability to explore subtleties of their
characters’ psychological and emotional development in a way that other
genres could not, encouraged readers to see the importance of exploring
their own inner emotional growth—a theme we will explore further below.
This was the environment into which news of the French Revolution
burst in 1789. As might be expected, young German university students
were originally among the most ardent supporters of the Revolution.
Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, on learning of an important victory in the
Revolution, planted a “tree of liberty” and danced around it, in hopes that
the good influence of the Revolution would take root in German lands. But
even some older portions of the educated German public responded
positively to the Revolution as well. Immanuel Kant, for one, maintained to
his last coherent day that it had been a Good Thing in advancing the cause
of human liberty.
But as the Revolution progressed into its darker phases—the Terror and
the Empire—attitudes in Germany, even among the enthusiasts for
freedom, began to change: What had gone wrong? Conservatives, of course,
gloated over the failure of the Revolution, claiming it as proof that liberty
and equality had to be stamped out wherever they reared their head.
More liberal thinkers, however, began to look for another answer, one
that might show a safer route to a German society in which liberty, equality,
and fraternity could ultimately prevail. One of the answers they ultimately
proposed was peculiarly German in the sense that it grew from German
conditions fostered by the Thirty Years War: The Revolution had failed
because the French lacked the kind of Bildung needed to handle liberty. The
follow-up questions then became: What kind of Bildung might that be? And
how could it be fostered to take root in German soil?
These questions were the legacy that the French Revolution left to the
early Romantics. To answer them, the Romantics turned to look at the state
of contemporary German Bildung. Philosophy—at that time the queen of
the sciences in German universities—was one of the first places they
looked.
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