Kant and the romantic ontology

Abstract

In the first part of the paper, the author displays the specificities of the romantic concept of subjectivity. Based on the assumption that the Man is but a minute part of what he might be, the romantics emphasize on the imperative of infinite subjectivity. Giving up on the division of philosophical disciplines, the romantics request a unity of spirit in history. The relationship between Kant and romanticism is mostly deliberated under the auspices of the terms of anarchy and the nomadic spirit, which are pointed out by Kant in the beginning of the foreword to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as the symptoms of the crisis of metaphysics. What Kant sees as a crisis, the romantics embrace as constitutive moments of subjectivity which aspire to soften the modern rifts by breaking up with all substance. Trying to develop a sketch of the ontology of existence, Friedrich Schlegel evokes Plato’s term ontos on, but ties it with the process of establishing the individual ideal, as opposed to the former link with the objective being. The author concludes that the ontology of existence with romantics is at the same time the metaphysics of subjectivity which cares mostly about originality, selfness and authenticity, about the integration of Kant’s term of dynamically sublime in the midst of the philosophical speech about the true being.

Keywords

• ontology
• romanticism
• irony
• nomadic spirit
• sublime