Overcoming Romanticism

There is a huge difference between someone who seeks ways to measure things and someone who rejects the existence of anything he cannot measure.

Measuring is a mysterious activity.

*

A Romantic correctly notes that some things are beyond the grasp of cognition, and positively values these things. The commonest form of Romantic, however, proceeds to make a mind-boggling mistake: preserving the cognition-resistant truths as rare, fragile, precious mysteries. The greatest mystery is that anything like an ordered, cognizable world could arise at all. The Romantic is the crowning achievement of this order: they spontaneously see the most mysterious thing of all as the opposite of mystery.

*

Humility demands that we recognize the surpassing reality behind and beyond whatever a man can think. Knowledge does not and cannot possess or master anything. It only relates.

*

The fullest form of relationship a human being can have is the human-to-human relation, whether this relationship is to another person or to the entire world as a whole.

I might actually disagree with Buber on an important point: The I-Thou relationship does not exclude the I-It relationship, and I-Thou is not a complete human-to-human without I-It.

One thought on “Overcoming Romanticism

  1. What a grim and unpleasant life Buber must have led.

    I wouldn’t recommend letting absolutist musings and personal definitions tendered by philosophers as ‘fact’ jaundice you to “Romantics”.

    Philosophy is only necessary to service the lust of a particularly rarefied form of romantic.

Leave a Reply