r0b’s Reviews > The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism > Status Update

...no one believed more deeply in the benign political consequences of pantheism than Heine himself, who defended it passionately against the charges of fatalism and quietism. This suggests that no one was a better romantic than Heinrich Heine himself.

When Fichte made the divine a goal or ideal of human activity, he was not so wrong after all. Because it is only through our activity that the divine realizes itself, we have good reason to make it the goal of our activity. It indeed seems that we now have more reason to be activist than ever, for our activity now has a divine sanction behind it. We make the world a better place not only for ourselves, but for God.

What we must do, Herder believes, is combine Spinoza’s monism and naturalism with Leibniz’s vitalism. Ironically, Herder was reviving the two great dogmatic metaphysicians at the very same time as Kant was desperately attempting to bury them in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

It seems to me that the Herder text [Gott, Einige Gespräche] is far more important than F. H. Jacobi’s über die Lehre von Spinoza, which has lately received most attention as the source of the romantic understanding of Spinoza.

...the self is only what it makes of itself. Second, the self can create not only itself but also its world, which also ought to be the product of its reason. By this second claim Fichte did not mean that the self has created its world—as if it were somehow divine—but only that it has the power to do so; it can approach the ideal of a completely rational world through infinite striving.

What chiefly attracted the romantics to Fichte was his radical concept of freedom, specifically his claim that the self is only what it posits itself to be. This concept was radical in two respects. First, it means that the self has no eternal essence, which it somehow realizes or develops of necessity; rather, its essence is created by itself. For Fichte, whose position anticipates Sartre, the self is...

...progressive. But Hettner’s interpretation, and by implication that of Schmitt, is flawed too. It is simply false that politics was not essential to the early romantics, as if it were nothing more than an instrument or occasion for their literary imagination.

Now, with the benefit of much hindsight, it seems to me that we can finally say that both Heine and Hettner are wrong. Hettner’s criticisms of Heine are indeed telling. Although Heine’s portrait does hold for some fig- ures of late romanticism—so called Spätromantik—it is completely false for almost all the leading thinkers of early romanticism—so called Frühroman- tik—whose politics were very liberal and...

Unlike the romantics, he [Kant] was content to leave the connection between understanding and sensibility, the intellectual and empirical, a mystery.

While they [the Naturphilosophen]held that materialism is too reductivist because it cannot explain the sui generis structure of organisms, they also rejected vitalism because it is too obscurantist, involving an appeal to some occult force or supernatural agency.