Beneath all the variety represented by the Romantics lies a common theme: Passion.  While the empiricists were concerned with sensory data, and the rationalists were concerned with reason, the romantics looked at consciousness and saw first and foremost its dynamics, purposefulness, striving, desire... passion!

Goethe has Faust say, ''Gefühl ist alles."  Feeling is everything!

In fact, they saw passion in all life, as a basic category... life as a Darwinian struggle, not just to survive, but to overcome.  As such, it could be called instinct; but in humanity, it goes further, and involves an overcoming of nature itself.

"The only reality is this:  The will of every center of power to become stronger -- not self-preservation, but the desire to appropriate, to become master, to become more, to become stronger," said Nietzsche.

Along with their love of passion came an impatience with, even disgust at, the mediocre, the weak, the irresponsible, the unpassionate.

The romantic's view of the world is a reflection of their view of humanity:  The world is rich, full of qualities -- color, sound, flavor, feeling -- thick, you might say, and not the thin, gray, empty thing as pictured by modern science.  They tended to ignore metaphysical speculation as an intellectual game.  And for Schopenhauer, passion became the basic form of all reality:  a universe pressing to be realized.

A passionate metaphysics requires a passionate epistemology (as opposed to an intellectual or empirical one).  First, there is a preference for intuition or insight:  As Pascal put it, "the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of."  A holistic understanding is more satisfying than logical, analytical, or experimental explanations.  The world is too big for those and has to be embraced rather than picked apart.

And the importance of the subjective is emphasized.  All experience is subjective as well as objective.  This is a sort of "uncertainty principle" that applies to all sciences, and philosophy, and certainly psychology.  Objectivity is simply a meaningless goal.  So subjectivity is not something to eliminate, but to understand.

Hence we must go back to life as it is lived, the Lebenswelt.  We must study whole, meaningful experiences.  We might want to go back to ordinary people, perhaps children or primitives, to understand the lived world before it is tainted by our perpetual intellectualization.  These tendencies would eventually lead to phenomenology and related methodologies.

Last (and far from least), we must have a passionate morality.  The romantics tend to admire the heroic, taking a stand against nature, against the mediocre, against nothingness or meaninglessness.  To some extent, the heroic is closely tied to futility:  It is often Quixotic, or picaresque.  There is an affection for the foolish or unconventional.

Romantic morality is more stoic than epicurean.  Meaning, as expressed by virtue, purpose, and courage, is the highest value, not pleasure or happiness as we usually conceive of them.

Some romantics are suspicious of Asian philosophy to the extent that it represents surrender.  Nietzsche, among them, considers even the Judeo-Christian tradition "Asian" and weak.  Their suspicion is not entirely well-founded:  In traditions such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism, for example, "surrender" is valued precisely for the strength it imparts, as demonstrated physically in judo ("gentle way").  Schopenhauer understood this, and his work is clearly colored by Buddhism in particular.

A passionate morality requires freedom, which Goethe considered the greatest happiness, and which was quickly disappearing from empiricist, rationalist, and even religious philosophy.  I have to be free to take that courageous stand; to be determined is to be nothing at all.

A little Buddhism sneaks in when Nietzsche speaks of amor fati, love of fate:  When choices are taken from you, you can still conquer the moment with your attitude.

Nietzsche said "God is dead!"  Now, anything goes.  You don't have to do anything.  Be nice?  Why?  Be selfish?  Why?  As Sartre put it, we are "condemned" to freedom.  Even when we choose to allow ourselves to be determined, it is our choice.  Even Kierkegaard asks us to take a leap of faith that has no justification.  So, we have nothing to lean on, no crutch, no "opiate," no excuses.

Freedom means responsibility.  We create ourselves, or better, we overcome ourselves, or at least we should.  Others just play out their "programs."  Freedom requires that we be truly aware, fully conscious.  It requires that we be fully feeling, that we not deny but experience our passion.  It requires that we be active, involved.

Freedom means creativity, and the romantic prefers the artist over the scientist.  These ideas are the foundation for the concept of self-actualization.

The heirs of the romantics are the phenomenologists, existentialists, and humanists of today.

© Copyright 1999, C. George Boeree.  All rights reserved.