Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 4 Kant and the Background of Philosophic Romanticism
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THE self of the Romantic movement is attached to the Kantian self with which we have already become acquainted. We have it very interestingly presented in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, which is one of the early romantic developments of the Kantian doctrine. The Kantian self, as we have seen, had two aspects. One aspect is purely formal as it appeared in the transcendental unity of apperception, that unifying power which holds together, constructs our percepts, makes them different from bare sensations, and gives unity to them. But this unity was a pure function from Kant's standpoint, it was not an entity, was not a spiritual being; it was just a function of unity. The other aspect of this self, we have seen, appears in the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant reaches it by way of his postulates. We find ourselves accepting responsibility for our own actions. We could not lay any such responsibility upon ourselves unless we were free, unless actions were our own. From Kant's standpoint, the very fact of the acceptance of responsibility carries with it the postulation that men are free. But in the world of experience-the Kantian world of experience everything is subject to the laws of the mind, those of the sensibilities-space and time-and those of the understanding -- the categories. What takes place there takes place in accordance with the laws of cause and effect. Every effect is a necessary result of its antecedent causes. Thus, freedom cannot be found in the world of experience as we know it. Kant's assumption is that we must postulate a self which, so to speak, lies in a different realm from that of the phenomenal, namely, in the noumenal world of "things-in-themselves. " He has proved
(67) to his own satisfaction that we cannot know anything of this latter world, but we find ourselves continually postulating such a world. A self, then, that belongs to the world of "things-in-themselves," the noumenal world, is the implication of the Critique of Practical Reason. It is a self that must be constantly postulated and that cannot be known. What took place in the Romantic period along a philosophical line was to take this transcendental unity of apperception, which was for Kant a bare logical function, together with the postulation of the self which we could not possibly know but which Kant said we could not help assuming, and compose them into the new romantic self.
Kant's nearest approach to this came not in the first two critiques but in the third, the Critique of Judgment. What he points out in that critique is that in life, in vital phenomena, we cannot help assuming some sort of an end which determines the nature of the process that goes on. That is, he brought up the conflict between what is known as the teleological and the mechanical interpretations of nature. Our physics and chemistry undertake to state the nature of the living process in terms of the necessary succession of cause and effect. What takes place does so because of what has occurred before. On the other hand, the biologist talks about functions, about the life-process maintaining itself. He deals with all the functions -- respiration, the circulation of the blood, the assimilation of food - from the point of view of the maintenance of the species. There is an end, that is, which lies ahead. The life that is to be lived by the species is to be maintained; it exercises a control over the living process. Kant pointed out that in our perception, our judgment on living things, we are always assuming some sort of an end which determines what takes place.What he is referring to here is not any metaphysical conclusion that can be drawn from this, but that the very object as we know it, the animal or the plant, is perceived as carrying with it its future ends and purposes. We perceive a plant as something more than a mere congeries of atoms and molecules. We per-
(68) -ceive a tree as getting moisture from the earth, constructing the starch necessary for the building of its tissues, turning it into sugar, and so forth, as processes essential to its being a tree. These processes together are what a tree is. There is something more in this than in the sort of statement, the mechanical account, that the physicist and the chemist can make.
And then Kant turned his attention to the field of aesthetics, of beauty. There our process of perception constructs that which is itself pleasing, agreeable to our aesthetic taste, and which is not the same as perception. It goes out beyond the mere physical object, the mere sensations themselves, and creates them in such a fashion that one shall get a certain sort of delighted response in connection with the object. There is a creative process that puts things together in such a fashion that we can enjoy them. And that enjoyment is a thing which is involved in our aesthetic appreciation.
The judgment, then, which is involved in the recognition of the life-process of plant and animal, the judgment in our recognition of that which is in itself beautiful, is, in a sense, something which seems to go beyond the world as it is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, the world of science, with its necessity, which is a priori. It even goes beyond the mere affirmation of responsibility which we find in the Critique of Practical Reason. It reconstructs the world from the observation of certain ends and purposes-those involved in the very processes of living, on the one hand, and those involved in art, on the other hand.
As I have said, it was, perhaps, from these three different points that the new doctrine of Romantic idealism grew, or to which it attached itself: first was Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, second was the self, the free self which our moral attitude postulates; and third was the experience as depicted in the Critique of Judgment which sets up a sort of end or purpose as determining the life-process of living things, and which determines the structure of that which delights our aesthetic tastes. These were the points around which
(69) grew up the philosophy which succeeded Kant. One of the earliest expressions of it is found in Schiller's Briefe uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen. These are a study of the aesthetic experience in so far as it expresses this new or romantic self. The new self, as we have seen, appears actually, in the experience of Europe, at the time when people deliberately opened their chests to regain the treasure which belonged to the past but which people now felt, for the first time, might be valuable.
In this connection it is interesting to see that here we have, perhaps for the first time, an expression of our modern historic attitude. That is, people were turning back to the past and were interested in that past as a means of appreciating present conditions. The philosophical representative of this historic phase of the movement was Herder, with his presentation of earlier conditions which were to be found among more primitive people. There was a going-back to the earlier legends and stories and myths that gather around histories, such as the Cid in Spain, and the early French heroes; a going-back to those figures which lay in the memory of the race, of the nation. This process is to be found in the early history of the Romantic movement. In England it is found in the legends of King Arthur and his Round Table.
This historical interest attaches itself to the same movement of the self back into the past. What one has is just such a transcendental unity of apperception as Kant's phrase implies. That is, the self looked back at its own past as it found it in history. It looked back at it and gave the past a new form as that out of which it itself had sprung. It put itself back into the past. It lived over again the adventures and achievements of those old heroes with an interest which children have for the lives of their parents-taking their roles and realizing not only the past but the present itself in that process. The old stories were brought back in their archaic form. That form had the same fascination for people that old garments have for children. People turned back into the past, became interested in it, and got an interest
(70) which showed itself not simply in the pageant, in the story, in the myth, but also in getting the historical connections, seeing how the present had grown out of the past. As I have said, we have in that the beginning of our whole modern historical interest. It had not, as yet, taken on its scientific technique, it had not yet gathered together all its periods; but it was the beginning of that scientific movement.
What I want to bring out, in this connection, is that this interest arises only through the new self going back into the past. It is only because this new self had gone back into the past that such an organized past arose at all. We know, for example, the difference between the histories which are written at the present time and the old chronicles, and we marvel that people could have been willing simply to put down a set of events, the accounts of certain battles, the crowning and death of kings, a mere statement of the meetings of ecclesiastical councils, all these being bare bones without flesh. And yet we have to recognize that history does not exist except in so far as the individuals of the present in some sense put themselves back into the past. It is only in a process of memory--memory of the people, if you like--that history can be created. And such a reconstruction of the past is possible only when we have, so to speak, reached some such point that we can become aware of ourselves. Thus, all the moments which come with the development of adolescence are what make adolescence a romantic period. The child up to the age of twelve does not have a past in any such sense as a child who perhaps only two or three years later has a very definite past. There have been, of course, a succession of days, seasons, years, of periods of vacation out of school, but the past is there simply in those detached events which lie behind. When he goes through the later period-- -the romantic period, if you like the child more or less suddenly discovers this past. He discovers it in his reaction against the order of things in the family, the school, and the community. He is in more or less of an attitude of opposition; and in this attitude he goes back over the past, and generally he has a set of grievances
(71) which he recognizes. This attitude which belongs to adolescence is essential if the past is to have a definite structure. Otherwise, it is just taken for granted, it is just there; but now it becomes a part of the individual himself. He creates it. Thus in the Romantic period a new self arose, an adolescent, self-conscious self. It turned back upon its past, lived it over again, took up this and that incident and presented them from its own present standpoint.
What I want to make clear is that such a past as that of which I have been speaking is always the creation of a new self, one that has attained content that it did not have before. I want to attach that romantic attitude as we find it in Europe to the attitude which we all have passed through in our own romantic eras. It is a perfectly natural development. It is that of a self that has become aware of itself and turns back upon its own past in order to hold onto that self and, so to speak, create that past as its own. This was the atmosphere of the Romantic period. It is presented vividly in the discussion of Fichte and, more particularly of Schelling, in Royce's The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.
The revolution had attempted to define the principles for the reconstruction of society as these are found in the rational nature of the individual. Kant generalized this and undertook to find in the mind of the individual the principles for the organization of nature itself. This position of man had been abandoned in one sense in the breakdown of the French Revolution, but the self that turned to the old order as a result of this breakdown was a very different one than existed originally under this old order. It had taken on a critical attitude. It was in that sense independent. It looked upon the old order, as it accepted it again, from the point of view of one who had rejected it but was again taking it up with more or less definite acceptance.
There is a story of the transcendental period in this country which is illustrative of this. It is a story about Margaret Fuller, one of the transcendentalists gathered about Emerson. This, of course, was the Romantic period as it found philosophical ex-
(72) -pression in America. Margaret Fuller said, "I accept the universe." To this Carlyle rejoined, "Begad, she'd better!" This represents the attitude of the Romantic period. It accepted an order of things that was there. Its acceptance was a part of the romantic attitude itself. The mind went back to the old order but in a different sense. It went back to it and found something which the mind accepted, and in this the self that accepted the old order was a very different self from that which had existed under the old order, a self which had accepted that order without questioning. It is this different self which is the important characteristic of this Romantic period.
A good illustration of it can be found in the aesthetic attitude toward religious ritual. This is the romantic return to the old religious order. The self sought for that which was aesthetic, attractive in the ritual itself; it was not interested in the dogma as such. The dogma of the church was accepted, but the interest of the individual did not lie in the dogma. It lay in the ritual, the form which united people together in the process of worship, which was expressed in the architecture of the church, in the pageantry of the ritual itself. This appealed directly to the religious response and became characteristic of the religious response during the Romantic period. This response comes back to the individual, to his aesthetic approval or disapproval. In the end, one gets to the point at which he says, "I like this or I do not like this." Of course, there is a great deal more than that in the aesthetic judgment; but at the bottom, one does reach that attitude. That is, one gets back to the direct response of the individual as a basis for judgment. There may be an objective beauty, something that is there independently of the man who appreciates it; but it exists for him only in so far as he is aware of it. Dogma, of course, directly binds man's reason in so far as he accepts it. And this acceptance, from the point of view of reason, is not based upon one's own rational comprehension of the dogma. It transcends the reason of man. It was said, "One believes because the thing believed is impossible." The Trinity, the transubstantiation, were mysteries that transcend-
(73)-ed the reason of man. Yet, man accepted the dogmas. He did not undertake to determine whether he should accept them or not by their rational character. Dogmas are given by God. They come to man through inspiration, through God's agent on earth -the church-and man accepts them because of his relation to God. Thus dogmas do not appeal directly to man for their support, do not appeal to his reason for their acceptance. But an aesthetic response, on the other hand, always depends upon the individual himself. One responds to them or one does not. And in so far as the revival of religious experience characterized the Romantic period, and in so far as its revival was one in which the aesthetic element was dominant, it inevitably emphasized the individual's response. One found within himself the emotional reason for responding to this ritual. One found in himself that which gave the basis for his acceptance of the church.
There is something of this same attitude in the response to the old political order in so far as it still continued to exist. It had a romantic flavor. Men brought back the pageantry of things. They could not reinstate the knight-errant, for the methods of fighting had driven him from the field; but still they were very much interested in him. He became the object of romance. Novels of the type written by Scott were written about the knight and about the feudal order. And it was the aesthetic response to this order that was of peculiar importance during the period. It was highly interesting, it was fascinating; and, where one went back into it, as did those who had seen the revolution fail, one was able to get a delight out of it which did not belong to the earlier period itself. In that sense the Romantic period rediscovered the Middle Ages. It discovered the aesthetic values in the past that gave the peculiar flavor to it.
Turning again to the philosophical aspects of romanticism, we find the relation of subject to object more fundamental than that of substance and attribute. The way to this lies, of course, through Kant's doctrine. Substance and attribute, cause and effect, are just categories of the mind. Kant did not speak of them as expressions of an Absolute Self, but as forms of the mind
(74) itself. The Romantic school, on the other hand, comes back to a Self that is infinite, divine, absolute one that inevitably has a not-self as its object. That is the nature of the self, that it should have an object; and this latter as an object is a not-self. We cannot have the one without the other; there is no self without its not-self. The self must have a world within which it lives. You can set up an absolute substance in the Spinozistic sense, make everything simply a part of it, and there is nothing which is opposed to it as a not-substance. But if you make the relation between subject and object the central one, you come back to a self which is a subject. But this self cannot be thought of without a not-self, that is, without an object. Furthermore, this relation cannot be presented in static terms. If you are to have an infinite self it must be all-inclusive; you cannot set up a not-self. If you are to reach that outside, you will have to do it in terms which are not static, but dynamic in import, in terms of a process. The self must set up its own not-self. But if it does set it up as a not-self, it must eventually identify this not-self with itself.
Thus, when we come back to the self, which is the dominant conception of the Romantic period, we reach that which must have a relationship with something else beyond itself. The self does not exist except in relation to something else. The word "itself," you will recognize, belongs to the reflexive mode. It is that grammatical form which we use under conditions in which the individual is both subject and object. He addresses himself. He sees himself as others see him. The very usage of the word implies an individual who is occupying the position of both subject and object. In a mode which is not reflexive, the object is distinguished from the subject. The subject, the self, sees a tree. The latter is something that is different from himself. In the use of the term "itself," on the contrary, the subject and object are found in the same entity. This very term "itself" is one which is characteristic of a romantic phase of consciousness. Romanticism turns about a vivid self-consciousness. The romanticist sees things through the guise of his own emotions. Not
(75) only that, but he himself bulks larger in his own experience than do other things. He assesses them, evaluates them, in terms of himself. He sets himself up as the standard of values, or at least his own standard of values is that which is dominant in his calculations. That is characteristic of the romantic experience. Whether we find it in such a Romantic period as this which we are considering, or in the period gone through in our own lives, that assessing of things in terms of one's own feeling, one's assertion that a thing is valuable because it is valuable is characteristic of the Romantic period. The self sometimes becomes inordinately prominent in the experience of such an individual. We have to assure people, at that stage, that it is transient, that they will pass through it, and that things will have a different value a little later. It is a period in which the self itself and the relation of things to this self are the important factors in experience. I again want to refer to the peculiar aspect of this self, namely, that it is both subject and object. The individual under these circumstances, then, is apt to be subjectivistic, self-centered, turned in upon himself. I just used the words "turned in upon himself." That is perhaps not characteristic of the Romantic period. The romantic attitude is rather the externalizing of the self. One projects one's self into the world, sees the world through the guise, the veil, of one's own emotions. That is the essential feature of the romantic attitude. The self-centered attitude may be one which is anything but romantic. It may be a hard, selfish attitude, or, on the other hand, a very conscientious attitude. Neither of these is romantic.
The romantic attitude is the ability to project one's self upon the world, so that the world is identified in some fashion with the self. At least the world has value to the individual only in terms of himself. I have referred, in this connection, to the subject-object relationship. At least here in self-consciousness one has both the subject and the object given in the immediate experience; and, if you think of it, it is an attempt to get the subject and the object together, so to speak. That has been the goal of
(76) epistemological thought in philosophy in so far as it has attempted to solve the problem of knowledge. How can we assure ourselves of the validity of our knowledge? How can we be sure that what we see and hear is there; that the meanings of things that we grasp are really the meanings that belong to them in the universe outside? That has been the search of philosophy, to get the justification for our knowledge as it appears in experience. Philosophy, throughout its whole existence, has been fighting with the dragon or bogy of skepticism that arises out of the negative answer to this problem.
The philosophy of the Romantic period grew out of the last two critiques of Kant, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. In a sense these belong rather to the period of the revolution. They tried to define the rational nature of man as the ground for his conduct and for the order of society. Kant generalized the position involved in the theory of natural rights, which was that one could claim for himself only that which he recognized equally for others. And Kant gave a generalization of this as the basis for his moral doctrine, the categorical imperative-that every act should be of such a character that it could be made universal for everyone under the same conditions. Kant said that this judgment was one which carried with it the sense of responsibility. As a rational being, one found himself responsible for making such universal judgments; that is, one assumed the responsibility of acting as he would wish everyone else to act under the same conditions. If he should act in that way, he must have the freedom so to act; otherwise he would not be responsible for his act. The sense of responsibility in man, then, leads to the postulate that he is free. In Kant's theory of experience, however, there could be no freedom. Everything came kinder the law of cause and effect, If man's will is free, it must be that his will, his self-the self-embodies in itself such a responsible will; it must be that it belongs to the world of "things-in-themselves)" and not to the world of our immediate, our phenomenal experience. But the order of the world as it appears in experience is a mechanical order. That is, it is an
(77) order in which the effect is the necessary result of the preceding cause --in which, therefore, the Idea, the end, the purpose that a person could have, all the idea or purpose involved in life, is such that it can have no causal value. There can be no final cause in a mechanical world. And yet, as Kant pointed out, our whole understanding of that which is living, and our whole understanding of that which is beautiful, which is art, implies ends. There is a determining purpose. There is something in our comprehension of the world which transcends the order of the world as science presents it to us. And this something would have to be found in the realm of " things-in- themselves," the noumenal world.
Well now, the Romantic movement, as I have said, grew out of this phase of the Kantian doctrine. Kant thought of a mind which gives laws to nature. But these laws which the mind gives to nature are simply the forms of the mind, the molds into which experience inevitably falls. If the mind has a certain form, then its experience must take on that form. We postulate freedom on the part of the individual, but we cannot know it. We cannot know ourselves in our freedom. We cannot help postulating that we are free, but our knowledge of ourselves is always a knowledge of cause and effect. For example, if a person considers one of his acts, he inevitably explains it in terms of the reasons for his conduct, and those reasons are expressed in terms of his motives. One's explanation itself is one which seems to wipe out the freedom which he attaches to his own conduct. One feels responsible for one's acts, and yet they are explicable in terms of cause and effect. This is a paradox, one of the antinomies that Kant says we cannot avoid. One does not, then, give laws to nature in the sense that the self is the source of them. The laws arc already there, embodied in the mind itself -- not in the empirical self, the self which is the concern of psychology, but in the one that has to be postulated as lying back of the forms, a self which is free.
In other words, the problem that lies back of skepticism and of the empirical school, and that to which Kant gave his critical
(78) answer, was met by the romanticists by the indentification of the object of knowledge and the very process of knowledge in so far as that was found in the self. Kant had to postulate that the self must be a thing-in-itself; or, at least, he had stated that this was a postulate that conduct involved. All our conduct involves the assumption that the self is a cause, and that the conduct which results from this cause is accompanied by a sense of obligation. Obligation implies freedom, and freedom implies causation on the part of the self. But, from Kant's standpoint, this self could not enter into the field of knowledge; it could be only a postulate.
In dealing with this problem, the Romantic school went back to the experience of a self as involving itself as an object. This is the experience which corresponds to the reflexive mode to which I was referring. In that mode, you will remember, the self is present as a subject only in so far as it is present as an object, and is present as an object only in so far as it is present as a subject. There cannot be one without the other. Our self-consciousness involves both of these essential characteristics. If, now, one can make this relationship of subject and object a primary relation in experience, one more fundamental than those of substance and attribute, cause and effect, then it can be said that we have, in self-consciousness, the self presented as both subject and object.
This relationship guarantees the reality of our knowledge. It does this not simply in the sense that there are certain experiences there, certain impressions and ideas, but in the sense that there is a self there that finds an object in itself. That was the position of the romantic idealist that distinguished him from the position of Kant or of Descartes. Kant affirmed that the self was postulated as an ultimate entity. It was a reality, but it could not possibly be known. Descartes affirmed that the self must exist because we think; and because we think, we must be. But he did not posit an immediate experience of the self in this thinking. It is to the experience of the self as such that the romanticist goes back-that experience in which the self is the
(79) most real thing, the most poignant reality in experience. Then the romanticist undertakes to carry back all experience, at least all cognitive experience, to this immediate experience of the self. All other experiences flower out of this one.
Now, the romanticist, on coming back to the experience of the self, found not only the evidence of existence which Descartes has signalized in his Cogito ergo sum, that is, found evidence not only of the ego or self, but also found in that self an object of knowledge such as Kant affirmed could not be found through introspection. It is this which gives the peculiar character to Romantic philosophy. It comes back to an experience in which both subject and object are immediately given. In introspection -- that is, in the introspection of the English empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume-one is dealing only with states of consciousness, with impressions and ideas, or sensations and images, but not directly with the self. Hume undertook to show that the empirical self is simply an association of these states of consciousness. That is, it is not primary, but secondary. It is a congeries of some importance, an importance that gathers about the significance that comes from the body. This self was analyzed by Hume into a set of relations, of associations. It was not an object of knowledge. That is, it was not given as an object of knowledge in the process of knowledge, and there was no way of reaching it, as knowledge, in that process. The states of consciousness were those out of which the self was built up; they were simply associated together into a self. The self was not given first with the states dependent upon it. The states of consciousness-that is, the impressions and ideas-were present, and they became associated with each other in a certain pattern which constituted the self. If you undertook to analyze this group of impressions and ideas, you saw that they were simply associated together as those impressions and ideas which, when brought together, go to make up a table, tree, or any other object. Kant took this same position as far as the empirical self was concerned. Such an object was simply the organization of our so-called inner experiences,
(80) although Kant said that these fall under the categories of substance and attribute, cause and effect. But these categories belong to the mind, they do not actually reveal the self as an entity, as a composition of these impressions and ideas.
The Romantic philosophers, like their predecessors, came back to the age-old problem of knowledge: How can one get any assurance that that which appears in our cognitive experience is real? The skepticism to which we have referred had shattered all the statements, all the doctrines, of the medieval philosophy. It had even torn to pieces the philosophy of the Renaissance. As we have seen, it had destroyed the substantial structure which had been presented in such a magnificent fashion by Spinoza. It had shattered the natural structure of the world which the Renaissance science had presented in such simplicity and yet- such majesty, that causal structure that led Kant to say that there were two things that overwhelmed him, the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This picture of a world which was the expression of simple but universal laws had also been shattered by the skepticism of Hume, and the only antidote that Kant could present was the postulate of conduct.
This is the old problem of assuring one's self of the reality of one's cognitive experience, that our world was not such stuff as dreams were made of, that it was there as we know it, was there again for this new philosophy to try its teeth upon. And the romanticists approached it, of course, from the point of view of the self, but a self which was not simply an associative experience. The self to which they came back was the presupposition of such an experience, a self which was the most real thing in the experience of the moment. The assurance was, first of all, largely temperamental an emotional experience. It was the assurance that the adolescent has that he is the most important element in the whole universe, an assurance which leads him to test everything from the point of view of his own judgment. It was that assurance, but it was something more too. It was an assurance that was backed up by this discovery
(81) that one can, by taking the role of the other, come back upon himself and secure himself as a given object of knowledge. It was this, I say, which was the center of the Romantic philosophy; and it was by using this point of view, this leverage, that the romanticists undertook to deal with the problem of knowledge.
It is interesting to contrast this philosophy with that of Spinoza, because he exerted a profound influence upon thinkers of this period who were not technically philosophers-such men as Goethe, for example. Spinoza's philosophy was like the philosophy of the Romantic school in that it was monistic. That is, it came back to the conception of a single principle, a single divine principle from which all that appears in experience must be thought of as arising, or within which all that was found in experience could be conceived of as placed and ordered, getting its reality from this fundamental principle. The Spinozistic approach was from the point of view of substance. Spinoza's Ethics, his principal philosophical work, starts with the definition of this divine principle as the causa sui, the cause of itself, that which is responsible for itself, which does not look elsewhere for the reason for its existence. This was conceived of as a fundamental substance which had an indefinite, infinite number of attributes, one of which was extension and another consciousness, or thought, as Spinoza expressed it. I have brought that out to show that the positions of subject and object are in these different respective philosophies. Spinoza's conception is, as I have said, of a divine, substantial Being which exhibits itself in the form both of extension and of thought. The world as we think it, as we are conscious of it, is the same God, under the aspect of consciousness, as is the world of extension. It is the same reality from two points of view. There is then a necessary point-for-point relationship between the two. That is the Spinozistic doctrine. Here you see the relationship between a subject that knows and an object that is known. That relationship of subject and object belongs to the attributes of the one substance. The relation between them, then, must be a one-to-one rela-
(82) -tionship. That is, everything that appears in extension must also appear in thought, and vice versa. Here is, among other things, the beginning of the parallelistic doctrine so widely used in psychologies of today. But the subject-object relationship is one that follows from the attributes of this substance. Substance and attribute have to be accepted, first of all, as the fundamental character of reality; and it follows from this that there should be a mind that knows an object, but it is the same substance expressed both in the mind and in the object.
If one wanted to make a statement to bring this out from a more concrete psychological standpoint, it would be a distinction between the sensation and that which is sensed, or what modern psychology refers to as the "sensum," and the sensation as the sensing. We can take it from either approach, either as that sensed or as the sensing. In somewhat the same fashion we may say that Spinoza conceived of this fundamental reality both as that which is extended, and as that of which we are conscious. Both are the same substance.
The romanticist comes back to a different form of experience, that which is referred to in grammatical construction, as I have pointed out above, as the reflexive mode. In this mode of experience we have both the subject and the object given in the same process. Then, seemingly at least, we have something of which we can be sure. If we know ourselves, we seem to have a case of knowledge which can be depended upon. It is going back in one sense, of course, to Descartes' syllogism or inference, "I think, therefore I am." But Descartes was simply assuring himself of the existence of himself. What the romanticist is doing is assuring himself of the existence of the object of his thought. In his thinking, Descartes started off from the knowledge that he existed; but whether that which he thought about existed was another question, and he had a long metaphysical probe before he got an answer to that question which satisfied him, and which, incidentally, has not satisfied most philosophers who have succeeded him. All the romanticist maintained was that this attitude to which I am referring is an attitude that
(83) assures him, not only that he exists in his own thinking, but also that the object of his thought exists, or that not only he exists in his consciousness but the object of his consciousness also exists. Where Descartes could assure himself simply of the existence of consciousness itself in the process of self-awareness, the Romantic philosopher assured himself of the existence of that of which he was conscious. Not only the thinker that thinks, but also that about which he thinks, exists in this reflexive mode. For Descartes, I am conscious and therefore exist; for the romanticist, I am conscious of myself and therefore this self, of which I am conscious, exists and with it the objects it knows. The object of knowledge, in this mode at least, is given as there with the same assurance that the thinker is given in the action of thought.
If one can make this reflexive situation the central position in one's philosophy, if one can come back immediately to the consciousness of self instead of to substance and attribute, one can say that this consciousness of self is at the center of the universe. In this, one has, so to speak, a test -- a philosopher's stone-by means of which one can determine what is given in knowledge. It was, of course, a very sympathetic attitude for a Romantic age. That is just what a romanticist does. All values are those which he feels as a part of himself. Out of this experience, in which the mind, the soul, the individual, is both subject and object, the romanticist builds a universe. The self of this mode becomes the assured center of the universe, that out of which the world is to be built.
I have just pointed out the elements of this identification between the self and the not-self. The very unity is assumed in our experience. It is a unity which comes from the very process of experience. The latter may be composed of an indefinite number of different elements, and yet it appears as a unit, organized and related with reference to our own organism. Thus, the very unity of the object is the unity of the self. The great sphere of the heavens is a projection of the sphere of the eye; the straight line is a projection of the line of vision; our
(84) sensuous world is the structure of our very process of sensation. We cut out, so to speak, the world in which we are to act. The content of perception is taken back to the content of our own sensation; the organization and content of the object can be taken back to the self. Yet, the perception is not the sensation; the object is not the self. In fact, the self can appear in experience only in so far as there is a not-self which yet has this very content and form of the self. As I have been saying, the fundamental opposition to which these romantic idealists came back was this opposition between subject and object, with the assumption of a fundamental identity between them. The self and the not-self are opposed to each other, and yet they are identical. Whether you take it from the point of view of morality, as Fichte did, or from the point of view of the artist's intuition, with Schelling, or from that of thought, as Hegel worked it out, there is always this opposition between the self and the not-self; and yet underneath this opposition lies the assumption of their identity
