In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

Life was conceived by the Romantics as the underlying force of nature, and they sought to identify its norms and rules of transformation. For them, life oscillates between contraction and relaxion, between potentiality and actuality. Life establishes and renews the norms they set. However, these sequences do not only lead to the form of living beings. Life is immanent and its creations flourish in every sphere. As we will see in this chapter, this idea of ‘life’ prompted the Romantics to focus on rhythm and habit, as the way in which life gives itself a dynamic order. Habit is the key for the Romantic reformulation of the political lexicon: it enhances sociability; individualities are not isolated beings but rather carry in themselves the inexhaustible transformative forces of life that deploy in and outside the individual. The individual is therefore always influenced by the context. For this reason, her freedom is not formulated as autonomy but rather as creativity or wisdom. This interpretation of ‘freedom’ bridges the gap between humans and nature and demonstrates that, in order to rethink our relationship with nature, we have to reformulate our political concepts.

The Romantic Self is constituted by otherness, by relations that are in constant transformation. In the preceding pages, this issue has been addressed with a particular focus on the relationship between the self and nature. In this part of the book, we shall see that the same applies to the relationship between the self and history: the I cannot separate herself from, or impose herself on, the historical conditions in which she emerges; rather, these are part of the Romantic Self. In this chapter, in particular, I will show that the ‘defective’ essence of the Romantic Self hinders her to impose her sovereign will on the development of historical events. This is reflected in her incapacity to bring into unity the fragmentation of the modern age (described by Friedrich Schlegel through an opposition to the ancient epoch) and in the impossibility to interpret history as a manifestation of human progress. The absence of a unitary line in history challenges the hermeneutics of the present, too: on this, Schlegel’s genealogical perspective wants to give a solution.

This chapter explains how the Romantic gnoseology goes together with the concept of a dependent subjectivity. Indeed, the Romantics imagine their ontology as based on relationships (rather than on identity) and, consequently, the self as entangled in a mesh of reciprocal dependencies. This perspective on the Romantic gnoseology begins with the notion of ‘experiment’, which for the Romantics is a genetic method through which the subject–object dualism is undermined. Thinking of philosophy as an experiment implied, for them, accepting that the human being does not dominate nature but is instead constantly influenced by it. The deep relationship between the knower and the known is manifested in feeling, which reveals the primordial connection between subject and object and is at the core of the relational idea of the self. The relational ontology underlying the Romantic conception of feeling is even more evident in their analysis of love as a universal force that unites beings to and in the Absolute. Love designates the network of relationships constitutive of Being, of which the self is not the apex.

This chapter focuses on the relationality that constitutes the Romantic Self, highlighting the ethical and political consequences that derive from it. The Romantics refuse the lexicon proper to modern political thought, centred on the concept of sovereignty and autonomy: they highlight the illusory essence of these concepts and the dangers they imply. Consistently, they also dismantle the possibility to write a political theory that pretends to offer universal principles. Relations are not extrinsic elements added to a fully formed subject and to be considered only after the identity of the subject has been defined. Relations are what we are. That is why in its political reflections, Romanticism’s primary polemical target is modern contractualism, founded on the tacit assumption that it is possible to study human beings in their individuality, skating over the interplay among them. This chapter shows how the idea of forces and the priority given to relationships influence the Romantic political concepts. These concepts in particular will be scrutinised: representative, constituent and constituted powers, democracy, individuality, equality, and justice.

To gain insight into the political meaning of the Romantic Self, it is essential to consider the relationship between subjectivity and nature on the one hand and the subject and the norms established within a community on the other. These two lines of inquiry converge in the examination of gender, specifically in the question of whether our sexual-biological identity, which constitutes our most nature-bound aspect, affects our subjectivity – that is to say, whether our mode of thinking, feeling, and relating to others is determined by our sexual identity. A consideration of Romantic reflections on gender will complete our investigation about the extent to which Romanticism regards the self as determined by nature or as independent from it. The first part of the chapter explains the meaning of the word Geschlecht (‘gender’ or ‘sex’) in the German philosophical debate at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the role played by women within the Romantic ‘symphilosophy’. It closes with a focus on some Romantic women philosophers and their own idea on the role women should play in the cultural and philosophical debate.

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter outlines the relationship between Johann Georg Hamann and Jacobi, demonstrating its significance for their respective reception within the history of ideas. Despite Jacobi and Hamann’s affinity in friendship, there were significant differences in the very foundation of their post-enlightenment thought.

Chapter 6 starts with the understanding of the advent of the Nights as “a major event for all European literature,” a point that Borges and others argue passionately. In order to see the impact of this event we need to differentiate the Romantic craze of William Beckford in his Vathek, Episodes, and “Long Story,” his translators, and also his admirers from others. Beckford was phenomenal in working across at least three cultures along with Arabic: French, English, and Jamaican. His infatuation and reproduction of the Nights is unique, but we have to place it in context of a raging discussion run by many, but especially Schlegel, of the grotesque and Arabesque. His writing and personal penchant to challenge everything presents him as a filiate who belongs to a specific genealogy in the Nights. His approach is different for instance from the Brontës whose writings bear the marks of a contained infatuation. They are the bridge for twentieth-century shifts in reading and response. A “murky sensualism” which Maxime Rodinson associates with “the Western bourgeoisie” prepares for the dialectic of rapprochement, engagement, and detachment that present the twentieth century and after as more experimental but also no less involved in substantiating the Nights in architecture, painting, enactment of medieval travels, and the practice of parody and pastiche in a postmodernist anxiety and search for distinction.

This chapter starts from the extraordinary historical circumstance that Schleiermacher and Schlegel, a theologian and classical scholar and philosopher, who both had a huge influence on the development of their disciplines and the institution of the university, shared lodgings as students. It explores their relationship, and the importance of it for their subsequent careers, and expands from this toconsider how the seminary, as dominant theological educational institution, was overtaken in the university by the seminar – to explore how both educational forums show similar negotiations of the dynamic between personal, affective relationships and methodological rigour. It thus raises questions about how the public and the private, emotion and objectivity became values of scholarship between philology and theology in the university