ROMANTICISM SEMINAR

Reading around in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism:

The negative meaning of “idealism” implies that most things that are commonly taken to be real are not so in fact, that is, they do not exist at all, or at least not in the manner that has been assumed. The positive interpretation of “idealism,” in contrast, involves seeing the term as adding rather than subtracting significance, as emphasizing that, whatever we say about the status of many things that are thought to exist at a common-sense level, we also need to recognize a set of features or entities that have a higher a more “ideal” nature.

Karl Ameriks

In other words, the re-enchantment of the world. Adding to it meaningfulness. W/the Modernist turn, this project can no longer be announced directly. It must be done by other means, one of which was to announce the impossibility of the project. This negative version would be similar to what Eliot said of Baudelaire, that his atheism was actually a kind of faith, for someone with a real lack of faith wouldn’t be talking about God at all.

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