The Romantic Attitude and The Existential Attitude
Ethics of Self-Responsibility contra Making Thoughts into Things and Making Things into Thoughts
This a reflection on Theodore Ziolkowski’s writings on Hermann Hesse as between romanticism and existentialism in his characters of tormented romantic seekers of the spiritual ideal.
The journey in either the romantic attitude or existential attitude begins with a common state of affairs. The self, subjectivity, has an experience of fragmented or even chaotic order. This fragmentation results in uncertainty when attempting to find meaning or reconciliation. The individual is forced upon himself or herself as the zero point, and the grasping to find meaning becomes connected to a quest for identity and authentic selfhood. This implies the freedom of the individual to determine his or her own world. Whether the self is in either the romantic or the existential attitudes is defined by the emphasis of the response to the themes of this condition of fragmentation and uncertainty such as doubt, alienation, and introspection. Two other German words are useful here, Zerrissenheit which means strife or dissension, and Angst, a specialized German term in psychology that means neurotic fear or anxiety.
The romantic attitude responds by seeking a resolution in a transcendent unity and harmony. This is a kind of enchanted subjectivity. The existential attitude, in contrast, responds by focusing on finding meaning in the fragmented, chaotic, or unjust world, a world of deep crisis. This is a kind of disenchanted subjectivity. The existential attitude is a confrontation with reality. Perhaps it is a “realistic” state; I use scare quotes here because reality in this case refers to the mere facticities at hand and not necessarily justified ontological givenness to states of affairs. To say it differently, the state of affairs clashing with the ideal or the undesired.
Themes limited to proper romanticism only are expressed as magical thinking. This is after all one of the key elements of fairytales, where resolution and consolation are found through harmonizing unities and overcoming dissonances in a mode of confrontation that is enacted in aesthetic detachment through contemplative or imaginative idealizing. This can be useful. This played a central role in historical Romanticism as well as literary typological romanticism. But staying limited to the romantic attitude leads to a type of idealizing or magical thinking described well in Novalis’ conception where he bases senses of the soul and exterior senses on Romantic Naturphilosophie—theory of spirit and nature inspired by Romantic philosophy. Ziolkowski quotes Novalis’ Schriften: “If you cannot make external objects of your thoughts, then make thoughts of external objects. Both operations are idealistic. He who has both completely in his power is the magical idealist.”
Here, we have the magical idealism of Novalis being ontological in a technical sense of Naturphilosophie, whereas Hesse’s magical idealism is ethical. The supposed ontological sense of belief in unity of Novalis’ Naturphilosophie does not solve the problems of existence in the world. For Novalis’ magical idealizing is a feeling of mind that does not come to be in existence in the world compared to Hesse’s magical idealism. Hesse shifts from transformation of the external world in the mind, a supposed ontological idealizing, to the transformation of the individual’s internal world, an ethical transformation. As Ziolkowski puts it, “[…]imminent and ethical rather than transcendent and ontological[…]”, and implies that Novalis’ magical idealism is an achievement of idealizing and Hesse’s magical idealism is ethical and concerned with present reality. And this is the difference in between the romantic attitude and the existential attitude. Hesse crosses the border area from idealizing harmonies to the ethics of being in the world. Here, Hesse’s attitude is the “Janus head” looking simultaneously from the romantic standpoint to the existential standpoint.
There is dialectical tension between the romantic seeking of resolution in a transcendent unity and its existentialist counterpart which is finding meaning and responsibility in one’s self-identity or subjectivity in a difficult and paradoxical world. The irony may be that the ideal of the former is really achieved or found in the work of the latter. For Hesse, it is not transcendent resolution that is preferred, but rather the individual’s confrontation with reality which is more important than a supposed picture of ultimate resolution. The point is that self-responsibility is more important than a harmonious worldview idealizing that reality doesn’t bear. Rather the individual must ever work from a self-responsible standpoint. As Ziolkowski points out, Harry Haller (from Hesse’s Steppenwolf) has his vision of the Immortals (the spiritual elect of humanity), but is seemingly condemned to live in this world. This is also the case with The Glass Bead Game protagonist Joseph Knecht (the German “knecht” means servant) “who rejects the aesthetic ideal [worldview idealizing, theory aestheticism, worldless and feckless ivory tower discourse, and magical thinking of the golden age situation] in favor of existential commitment [skin-in-the-game] to his fellow man” (brackets mine). This is to say that rather than seeking consolation in an aesthetic timelessness where we idealize harmony and unity, we must take responsibility with the existential encounter with reality. In my view, it is obviously not an either-or, which would present problems of one sidedness, but rather a realization of the call of the self to reality; in other words its responsibility. This is what Ziolkowski appropriately calls “pendulation”.
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