ROMANTICISM SEMINAR

Reading around in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism:

Fichte’s solution to this dilemma is his concept of striving….This concept is the very heart of the early Wissenschaftslehre, which Fichte even called “a philosophy of striving.” According to this concept, the absolute ego, which creates all nature, is not a reality but only an idea, the goal for striving of the finite ego. All that is left for the finite ego is constant striving, the ceaseless struggle to make nature conform to the demands of its rational activity.

Frederick Beiser

I always thought that when Allen Grossman said “per impossible,” he meant something like this. It’s a trope found all over the twentieth-century, such as in, according to Bruce Fink, Lacan.  It’s a hallmark feature of humanist thought, perhaps a distinguishing feature of Romantic Modernism, so you could call it Humanist Modernism, and the stuff that refuses all this striving “applesauce” could be called Anti-Humanist Modernism. But that kind of naming is no fun. (“Anti-humanism” is a term I first ran across on T.P. Uschanov’s old web site, the Icy Frigid Aire. The term is one of those things I read once then spent years trying to guess what it meant.)

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