Three Theses of Romanticism


1. The universe is a single unified whole. Everything is connected to everything else. (The world is not simply a collection of unrelated atomic particles and isolated minds.)

2. The universe is full of values, tendencies, and life. (The universe is not composed merely of lifeless matter; it is not completely objective, consisting only of the formal mathematical properties of matter extended in space and time.)

3. Reason, objectivity, and analysis radically falsify reality by breaking it up into disconnected lifeless entities. The best way of perceiving reality is through some subjective feeling or intuition, through which we participate in the subject of our knowledge instead of viewing it from the outside.

© 2006 David Banach 

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