Buddhist Romanticism

human being came from freedom in both his senses of the term. Anyone
who believes that governments should not oppress people—that people
deserve to be treated as ends in themselves and not as a means to one’s
ends—has to respect the principle that people have the dignity of freedom.
If you have any respect for human thought at all—either your own or that
of others—you have to respect the principle that people are free.
However, Kant did not propose that the principles of theoretical reason
should be discarded to make way for the principle of practical reason. He
expressed the conflict here as a genuine dilemma.
Still, he did propose two approaches for dealing with this dilemma,
neither of which satisfied the Romantics—or many others, for that matter.
The first approach was to state that there were two levels of self: the
phenomenal self, or the self as experienced in the realm of nature, which
meant that it was subject to the causal laws of nature; and the noumenal self
—the self in-and-of-itself—which lay outside the world of nature and so
was not subject to those laws. This distinction, however, created a divided
self, with the relationship between the two selves left unexplained. It also
meant that the self in-and-of-itself was unknowable—just as things-inthemselves,
outside our experience, were also unknowable—and it further
left hanging the question of how such a self could actually influence the
world of experience.
Kant’s second approach was to call in another area of philosophy: the
field of aesthetics, or the study of beauty. The experience of beauty, he
claimed, did not prove that there was a resolution of the dilemma, but it did
intimate that freedom of will might, on a supersensible level, be compatible
with causality on the sensible level. His argument here centered on two
concepts.
The first was the beautiful. Beautiful things express freedom in that they
excite the free play of our imaginative faculties as we contemplate them. In
fact, Kant insisted that there were no objective standards of beauty,
probably with the purpose of maintaining that the experience of beauty was
one of freedom. At the same time, though, beautiful objects express
necessity in that they suggest that all their parts are meant to serve a single
aim. In this way, they are like biological organisms. The word suggest here
is important, because we can have no proof that the creator of a beautiful
object had any purpose for it. Still, the beauty of the object excites a strong
intimation that this is so. And thus, Kant argued, the same can be said for
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