Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism
Cambridge University Press, 1/17/2019
EAN 9781108429443, ISBN10: 1108429440
Hardcover, 264 pages, 23.6 x 16.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today.
Part I. Romantic Religion
Transcendence for an Age of Immanence
1. The romantic vocation
2. Realism, idealism and the transcendentals
3. Re-contextualising romanticism
the problem of subjectivity
4. Re-contextualising romanticism
the question of Religion
Part II. Give Me a Place to Stand
The Absolute at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
5. The immanent absolute
Spinoza and Fichte
6. Jacobi and the transcendence of the absolute
7. Herder and the immanent presence of the transcendent absolute
8. Moritz and the aesthetics of the absolute
Part III. Romantic Religion
The Transcendent Absolute
9. Platonism and the transcendent absolute
10. Schlegel
the poetic search for an unknown God
11. Holderlin
becoming and dissolution in the absolute
12. Novalis
the desire to be at home in the world
Part IV. Our Romantic Future.