Enthusiast: We wouldn't be what we are without romance!
Skeptic: Even if that's true and not just an advertising slogan, does that speak for romance?
It's not true either, by the way.
Enthusiast: Oh yes.
The path of the human spirit leads to greater and greater completeness.
The time before Romanticism lies on the other side of the mountain range, on the other side of the great watershed, in another country to which we cannot go back, we have since become richer, more contradictory.
Skeptic: I never left this country.
Enthusiast: Yes, you have, you too.
Even those who reject romance are shaped by romance.
Feeling is just as much a learned cultural technique as thinking.
We have felt differently since the romantic era.
Skeptic: “We.
.
.
? "
Enthusiast: Germans, British, French.
Spaniards.
Italian.
We Europeans.
Please not the anti-colonialist perspective now, it really has nothing to do with it!
Let's talk about content!
Skeptic: Oh, content.
Gladly.
Enthusiast: Schlegel writes: “Romantic poetry is progressive universal poetry.
She wants to make poetry alive and sociable, and make life and society poetic.
It can hover in the middle on the wings of the poetic reflection, multiplying this reflection again and again and as if in an endless row of mirrors.
.
. "
Skeptic: This is not content, this is advertising copy.
“Making life and society poetic” - what does that mean?
Doesn't that just mean that romanticism is the first intellectual movement to have its own press office?
If you want slogans then how about this one?
"I call the classic the healthy, the romantic is the sick."
Enthusiast: You had to quote that, of course.
Skeptic: At first, Goethe's verdict seems very harsh, but the longer you think about it, the more you find yourself.
.
.
Enthusiast: Find yourself, you mean to say!
Skeptic:.
.
.
I find myself ready to agree.
Turning away from the idea that the world should be organized in a meaningful way.
The rejection of the education because she forgot the feeling.
The premonitions, the ghost night, the soul grounds.
In general, the whole sinister cult of the deep.
Someone tells you something that is well thought out and well thought out, and instead of dealing with it, you weigh your head and mumble: Yes, that may be true, but it is not that correct.
.
.
flat?
The terrible German rejection of logic and consistency in favor of something that one is not even prepared to formulate as an opposing position, because if one could formulate it, it would be too close to logic and consistency and numbers and figures and thus, of course, lack the depth.
Enthusiast: Are You Done?
Skeptic: Far from it.
Enthusiast: First, in the sentence about the romantic as the sick, it is not Goethe the cultural thinker who speaks, but Goethe the philistine who, incidentally, also wanted to banish humor from literature, with the reference that jokes are for people with a bad character.
Second, you are right about a lot.
But -
Skeptic: But only in a superficial way!
Enthusiast: But only halfway, and yes, only on the surface.
Skeptic: Not in depth!
Enthusiast: Just seeing the objection coming doesn't make it wrong.
Take Goethe and Voltaire, for example.
When we read it today, we do it with love and admiration.
With gratitude.
But no matter how determined you are to be enthusiastic about Voltaire's pious joke and Goethe's marble beauty, yes even - there is something missing about them, and that's because we are different from what they were.
What we are, how we are, is no longer fully captured in the classics.
With them, the person is still the master of the house.
From a spiritual-historical point of view, this is their untruth.
We have learned a lot since then.
Skeptic: Of course, through Freud!
Enthusiast: And Einstein.
The curved space and the maze of lusts.
Romanticism understands this even if it cannot yet pronounce it.
That's why she sometimes stammered.
Skeptic: “What people did not consciously or not think about.
.
. "
Enthusiast: “.
.
.
walk through the labyrinth of the chest in the night ”.
Yes, he was already a romantic.
That is why there is Mephisto.
Goethe himself has already partly taken the next step, which was necessary, which was inevitable, which the human spirit itself demanded.