Romantic Philosophy: The Thought That Made the Modern Self

“Man is free, and he has the duty to make himself free.” — Friedrich Schlegel, 1796

Romantic philosophy was the body of thought that accompanied and shaped the Romantic movement in literature, art, and music between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. It took many forms across Europe and America — German Idealism, French moral and political thought, British aesthetic theory, and American Transcendentalism — but its central conviction was that the rationalist tradition inherited from the Enlightenment had become too narrow. Human beings, the Romantics insisted, are not just thinking machines. They are feeling, imagining, willing, creating creatures whose deepest nature cannot be captured by abstract analysis alone.

The Philosophical Crisis of the Eighteenth Century

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had produced extraordinary achievements: the methods of modern science, the political theory of liberal government, the philosophical analysis of knowledge. Yet by the 1770s and 1780s, a number of thinkers felt that this rationalist inheritance had left something essential out of account. The most powerful of these early critics was the Geneva-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose novels, educational treatises, and political works insisted that the modern individual had been corrupted by civilization and that the path to authentic human life lay in the recovery of feeling, nature, and the moral voice of the heart.

In Germany, the crisis of rationalism took a more academic form. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) had laid out, with unprecedented rigor, the limits of human knowledge. Within a generation, his successors — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the Schlegel brothers — were turning those limits into a positive program, arguing that the deepest realities were not accessible to the abstract intellect at all but to the imagination, the will, and the creative spirit.

Major Figures in Romantic Philosophy

The thinkers below are among the most important. Each is the subject of further pages elsewhere in this site.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Kant is the hinge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. His three great Critiques — the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790) — set the terms in which later Romantic philosophy was conducted. The third of these, with its powerful analysis of the beautiful and the sublime, was particularly important for the Romantics, since it argued that aesthetic experience and judgments of taste are not merely subjective preferences but reveal something about the structure of the human mind and the world it inhabits.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

Fichte, the founder of philosophical Jena idealism, made the I — the active, willing, creative self — the foundation of all knowledge and reality. His addresses to the German nation, delivered in 1807–08, were a major contribution to romantic nationalism.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854)

Schelling developed a “philosophy of nature” that saw the natural world itself as a kind of unconscious work of art, and a “philosophy of art” that elevated art to the status of the highest form of human knowledge. He was a major influence on Coleridge and on later English and American Romantic thought.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Hegel built the most ambitious philosophical system of the nineteenth century, treating history itself as the unfolding of Spirit (Geist). Though often regarded as hostile to Romanticism, Hegel’s dialectic had a profound impact on later Romantic and post-Romantic thought, and his lectures on aesthetics, on philosophy of history, and on the philosophy of religion became central texts for the nineteenth century.

The Schlegel Brothers

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) were the leading theorists of Jena Romanticism. Friedrich’s fragments in the journal Athenäum (1798–1800) and his Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy defined Romantic irony as the central concept of the new art. August Wilhelm’s translations of Shakespeare into German, his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, and his Lectures on the History of Literature helped make the German Romantics the literary schoolmasters of Europe.

The Jena Circle

Around the Schlegels, in the little university town of Jena, gathered an extraordinary circle: Novalis, Tieck, Schelling, the philosopher and political writer Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, the legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the critic Dorothea Schlegel, and others. The Athenäum journal and the extraordinary intellectual ferment of these years produced much of the theoretical core of European Romanticism.

The British Romantics

In Britain, the philosophical work of the Romantics was carried out in prose as well as in poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), his Lay Sermons, and his notebooks helped introduce German Romantic philosophy to the English-speaking world. Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and others extended this tradition in the Victorian era.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Rousseau is often treated as the first Romantic. His insistence on the natural goodness of human beings, his critique of the arts and sciences as corrupting, his autobiographical Confessions, and his political writings — including The Social Contract — set the agenda for much of what followed.

The American Transcendentalists

In the United States, Transcendentalism — the most ambitious American philosophical movement of the nineteenth century — was a direct outgrowth of European Romantic thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their circle adapted German Idealism and English Romanticism to the new American republic.

Central Concepts in Romantic Philosophy

Several concepts recur across the very different forms of Romantic thought.

Imagination

For the Romantics, imagination was not a faculty for fantasy but the highest power of the human mind. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, distinguished between the lower “fancy” and the higher “imagination,” which he described as a kind of living power that fuses the perceiver with the perceived. The Romantic artist, in this view, did not merely copy the world but actively reconstituted it.

Genius

Closely connected to imagination was the Romantic concept of genius. The genius was a person in whom the creative power of nature seemed to work directly. The genius was original, irreducible to rules, and a kind of law unto himself or herself. The cult of the genius — Beethoven, Goethe, Turner, Wordsworth, Carlyle — was one of the great inventions of the Romantic age.

The Sublime

The sublime — the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation before vast, overwhelming, or terrifying objects — was perhaps the central aesthetic concept of the period. Theorists such as Edmund Burke and Kant analyzed the experience in detail, and the sublime became a guiding principle for landscape painting, Gothic fiction, and the great Romantic symphonies and tone poems.

Nature and the Natural

For the Romantics, nature was not just material for study but a living system of signs, a teacher, and a refuge. They read natural objects as symbols of spiritual realities, and they argued that human beings, separated from nature by modern civilization, needed to recover their relation to the natural world. This idea, taken up later by Thoreau and the conservation movement, became the philosophical foundation of modern environmentalism, as our page on Romanticism and environmentalism explores.

Symbol and Myth

The Romantics saw in symbol and myth not primitive errors but higher modes of knowledge. The symbol participates in what it represents; the myth gives form to truths that cannot be expressed in discursive prose. The Romantic defense of myth and symbol — a defense taken up again by the Symbolists, by Nietzsche, and by much twentieth-century art — was one of the most influential legacies of the period.

Irony

Romantic irony — a self-conscious awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the finite and the infinite, the work of art and the absolute — was a central concept of the Jena Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and the novelist Jean Paul. The ironist knows that every statement is partial and provisional; the work of art becomes the perpetual dance of creation and self-critique.

Nationalism and the People

The Romantic philosophers developed a powerful theory of national identity, language, and culture. Herder’s idea of the Volksgeist — the spirit of a people as expressed in its language, poetry, and customs — became the philosophical foundation of romantic nationalism. This idea would inspire both the liberation movements of the nineteenth century and the more troubling forms of nationalism that emerged in the twentieth.

The Continuing Influence of Romantic Philosophy

The ideas of the Romantic philosophers did not die with the Romantic period. They were carried forward into the Victorian age by Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, and others; into American Transcendentalism by Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller; into existentialism and phenomenology by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre; into depth psychology by Freud and Jung; and into literary theory by the New Critics and many later movements. The Romantic conception of the self, of imagination, of symbol, of myth, and of the natural world remains a powerful part of modern thought.

Further Reading

• Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Chatto & Windus, 1965) — the most humane, most intelligent, and most readable short book on the Romantic philosophical tradition in any language. Highly recommended.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — for the canonical entries on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, the sublime, and the philosophy of art.
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard, 1989) — the great modern study of how the modern conception of the self was formed, with long chapters on the Romantics.
• Robert Wicks, European Romanticism: A Brief Sourcebook (Hacket, 2010) — a useful anthology of primary sources with editorial commentary.

Related Pages

• German Idealism
• The Sublime
• Transcendentalism
• Romantic Nationalism
• Genius and Imagination
• Romanticism vs. the Enlightenment
• Romantic Literature
• Romantic Art
• Romantic Music
• The Legacy of Romanticism