Prelude
While Romanticism as a social and cultural movement is sometimes (or often?) viewed historically as a non-rational or irrational or even supra-rational reaction to ideas about reason and science prominent in the European Enlightenment, looking back it seems, to me at least, to be in some respects in keeping with the Enlightenment insofar as it often complements various facets of same or fills out those forms of sense and sensibility that did not, at the time and for some time thereafter, receive their due attention and consideration (to cite but one example: sundry types of sociability, such as salons and reading societies). I thus prefer to view Romanticism as simply softening the harder or cruder edges of European rationalism (in the end, more continuity than difference, the latter being a necessary yet not sufficient condition of the former). That said, I agree with Raghavan Iyer that the
“Romantics sought refuge from industrialism [and ‘the ideological superstructure of bourgeois capitalism’] in art and it was natural, though sad, that their apotheosis—art as a basis of moral protest—should have ended up in almost religious worship of art for its own sake. As aesthetic standards were threatened by industrialism, there was an overcompensation in the tendency to judge religion, morals, and society by purely aesthetic standards.”
Here is the opening paragraph from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s enjoyable essay in the NYRB, “Symphilosophizing in Jena,” although of course I recommend the entire piece. This is followed by a brief note from yours truly.
“The cult of individuality was born amid a melding of minds. Meldings must be preceded by meetings, of course, and the meetings took place in Jena, a university town in the German duchy of Saxe-Weimar with a population of 4,500 or so. If Jena was small, the minds that gathered there in the last years of the eighteenth century were large, and included the most consequential poets, critics, and philosophers of the era. The sparks they threw out electrified the world.”
A brief note:
August Wilhelm Schlegel and his younger brother Friedrich (‘Fritz’) apparently coined the term “symphilosophy” (and thus symphilosophizing), what Appiah calls “communal cognition” in this review essay. I came across this concept once before, in an article by the late Hector-Neri Castañeda, “Philosophy as a Science and as a Worldview” (in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, 1989), although its conception is appears to be far less vague than its original meaning among the Romantic philosophers (I do not know if Castañeda was aware of its origin, although I would be surprised if he was not). Castañeda here explains how his methodological proposal for philosophers arrives at the state of “sym-philosophy,” which is the result of seeing the world in light of both an ontology and metaphysics that respects pluralism and relative epistemic perspectives, much like what we see in Jain philosophy, with its doctrines of anekāntavāda, syādvāda, and nayavāda (and, it seems, in the spirit of Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes,’ which was not so much a principle as an attitude or approach forged in the fire of rhetorical polemics with Rationalist):
“Perhaps human-world reality is not a monolith, but a many-sided perspectival structure. Perhaps the greater understanding will be achieved by being able to see human reality now one way and now another way. Thus, we need ALL philosophical points of views to be developed, and ‘developed’ is meant in earnest: the more it illustrates the harmonious unison of the encompassing Forest Approach and the riches of the Bush Approach. Hence, all philosophers are part of one team collectively representing the totality of philosophical wisdom, and individually working the details a point of view: we are ALL parts of the same human project. Looking at things this way, we realize that we need not polemicize against the most fashionable views hoping to supplant them with our own view [emphasis added]. Instead, with a clear conscience, we may urge the defenders of those views to extend them, to consider further data to make them more and more comprehensive, pursuing the goal of maximal elucidation of the structure of experience and the world. At the same time we urge other philosophers to develop equally comprehensive views that are deliberately built as alternatives. The aim is to have ALL the possible most comprehensive master theories of world and experience.
To be sure, we cannot foretell that such a plurality of views as envisaged is ultimately feasible. But neither can we prove that in the end there must be just one total view, bound to overwhelm all others. If many master views are feasible, then the greatest philosophical illumination will consist alternatively to see reality through ALL those master views. It would be still true that the greatest philosophical light comes, so to speak, from the striking of theories against each other, but not in the destruction of one theory in the striking process, but rather in the complementary alternation among them. Each master theory would be like a pair of colored glasses with different patterns of magnification so that the same mosaic of reality can appear differently arranged [this calls to mind my youthful experimentation with psychedelics!]. Here Wittgenstein’s reflections on the duck-rabbit design are relevant. The different theories of the world give us different views, the rabbit, the duck, the deer, the tiger, and so on, all embedded in the design of reality. The analogy is lame on one crucial point: the master theories of the world and experience must be forged piecemeal: with an eye on the Bush Approach, patiently exegesizing the linguistic and phenomenological data, and with another eye on the Forest Approach, building the theoretical planks (axioms, principles, theses, rules) carefully and rigorously.” [….]
Among the consequences of “pluralistic meta-philosophy” noted by Castañeda is a “later stage in the development of philosophy” in which we will be rendered fit to engage in a “comparative study of master theories of the world and experience,” or what he terms “dia-philosophy.” In other words, our master theories of philosophical structures will be sufficiently rich and comprehensive for us to be able to articulate holistic and dia-philosophical critique: “compar[ing] two equally comprehensive theories catering to exactly the same rich collection of data, and, second, assess[ing] the compared theories in terms of their diverse illumination of the data.”
“The natural adversary attitude” will take the form of “criticisms across systems or theories,” but “not as refutations or strong objections, but as contributions of new data as formulations of hurdles for steady development.” Castañeda christens the development of master theories of the world and experience for dia-philosophical comparison “sym-philosophy:” “Thus the deeper sense in which ALL philosophers are members of one and the same team is the sense in which we are all sym-philosophers: playing our varied instruments in the production of the dia-philosophical symphony.”
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