School of thought

Romanticism

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 1798-1848 CE
Regions
europe
Domains
Aesthetics , Philosophy of Nature

Overview

Philosophical Romanticism made imagination, feeling, art, and organic nature central to thought while both continuing and criticizing Enlightenment commitments to reason. It was contemporaneously entangled with German Idealism: Romantic and Idealist authors shared post-Kantian questions about subjectivity, nature, and the Absolute, but developed different accounts of whether the whole could be grasped through systematic concepts. For many Romantics, art and aesthetic experience offered ways of approaching truths that discursive reason alone could not exhaust.

Key ideas

  • Imagination: Many Romantics treated creative imagination as more than mere fancy: it could bring subject and object, or finite experience and an infinite whole, into a provisional unity.
  • The Sublime: Encounters with vast, overwhelming natural phenomena (storms, mountains, oceans) evoke a mixture of terror and awe that reveals the infinite within us.
  • Organic Wholeness: Romantic accounts of nature often opposed purely mechanistic explanation by treating parts as intelligible through their relations within a living whole.

Key figures

Friedrich Schlegel · Novalis · Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Friedrich Schiller

Positions held

Influenced by

Later connections

References

  • Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton University Press, 1999)
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 19th Century Romantic Aesthetics
  • M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1953)
  • Biographia Literaria — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • On the Aesthetic Education of Man — Friedrich Schiller