Roy’s Reviews > The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism > Status Update

It will just take very few more reviews of you until I get too interested and also need to dive into German romanticism.
You really seem to be onto something, or just crazy.

Daniel wrote: "It will just take very few more reviews of you until I get too interested and also need to dive into German romanticism.
You really seem to be onto something, or just crazy."

Hahaha, I'll just decide to take that as a compliment! Please don't take my writings too literally, I just use this as a very concise notebook of sorts. I don't have much space to write in the reading updates.

In truth, it's probably a bit of both, it's hardly ever one or the other ;)

At least it feels like I'm onto something, but not in the sense of finding a final, definite answer to things; it's more like finding the last pieces of the frame of a puzzle, clarifying the limits of the image, and showing you the domain you have to work in. That is in the full realisation of there being a world outside of the frame of the puzzle, but in the acceptance that there simply is no way for us to ever move beyond it. We can stretch the limits, continuously, from inside (which is basically what growth is), but we can never move outside or beyond it.

Which is actually very close to what the early German romantics thought, or at least in the way that Manfred Frank explains it. He explains them to be in the development of a never-ending progression, of an ever-continuing approximation of - in this case - knowledge.

The clearest I can put it with my current level of understanding, is that - according to Frank - the early German romantics reject an epistemology (theory of knowledge) based on fundamental principles; in other words, a single piece of truth that everything ultimately refers back to, either directly, or indirectly. Rather, they consider an epistemology that is more... dynamic in nature, or perhaps fluid. Be what may, it is everything but singular or rigid. How something fluid or dynamic is supposed to ground something, I do not (yet) know exactly, but I do know that I find it an infinitely more interesting idea than that of the first principle, and to me seems to be much closer to be in accord with (human) reality.

When we're speaking of epistemology (knowledge) that is, when we address ontology (theory of being) or metaphysics (theory of the foundations to being) I'm not as sure. It still seems very reasonable to me, but I'm less sure. Humans are definitely quite ambiguous, and so must knowledge then be, but reality certainly seems to be less so.