IL ROMANTICISMO COME PENSIERO
DELL'INFINITO:
IL CULTO E L'ESALTAZIONE DELL'INFINITO IN ETA' ROMANTICA
Laura Tomasi (3°A - anno scolastico 1998/1999 - Liceo U. Foscolo)
Riassunto del percorso presentato all' esame di stato:
I chose to discuss this topic on the basis of my personal interest in both philisophical and literary displays of European Romantic culture, partly deriving from my own readings (Novalis, Hoffman, a few English Romantic works). My first idea was to deal with the whole Romantic period, but then it seemed to me that Romanticism was a too involved and complex phenomenon to sum it up in a few words without running into superficiality and mistakes. So I decided to pick out one theme which is peculiar to Romantic sensitivity and which is at the same time the beginning and the ideal core of several philosophical artistic displays, that is the restlessness to the Finitive and its limits and the search for Infinity.
In fact, this longing to Infinity seems to be both the reason and explanation of several aspects of romantic culture, as for example the polemic character towards Enlightenment Reason, the importance being stressed on art and feelings, the extolling of either faith or dialectical reason, some prevaling behaviours and moods like Sensucht, titanism, search for a new kind of harmony between men and Nature and yet the idealistic doctrine defining Spirit as a sort of creating power. Besides this longing to Infinity inclines Romanticists to burden the finitive with boundless meanings, to consider the man as the bearer of Infinity and to give his mind an ontological value as creating power.
Romanticism has been a European movement but its most significant outcomes have been achieved among German thinkers; particularly, it's among German Romantic philosophy that the aforesaid attitude has taken shape in the rebuilding of philosophical systems being centered on a metaphisycal principle which is in fact the Absolute.
The Idealistic philosophy appears to be an Absolute-philosophy, claiming to understand the whole of reality, in contrast with the Illuministic philosophy, as a limit-philosophy whose organ is intellect. On one side of the question Kant has denied any theoretical value for metaphysics, ori the other side Fichte, Schelling and Hegel build up some metaphyfisics again, nevertheless being pretty different from the pre-Kant ones and being centered on a rationalist Mind whose peculiar feature is an unlimited creative power.Besides the theme of Infinity is given a great stress from the aesthetic view point because of the central role of art among Romantic thought: art is considered a way to Absolute and the artistical pattern, with its features of creativeness and freedom, is loked upon as a reading key for reality. Coherently, Romantic aesthetics deny the imitation principle and the classical rules of art as a kind of mimesis; they appear to be more concemed with creativeness and art as poiesis, always being in progress according to the artist's endless freedom.
Among these aesthetics, the Sublime, with all its existential and psychological meaning, is a central concept , which is borrowed from some previous thinkers' works, as Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft and Schiller's aesthetics. As regards this topic, on one side I tried to point out the pictorial results of this Sublime theory in some painters as Blake and Fuessli, on the other side I endeavoured to make a comparison between the Sublime theme in Kant and the most significant previous theorization on that topic, which is expressed in Pseudolonginus Perì physeos; I tried to underline similarities and dissimilarities between these works and to place Pseudolonginus' theory in its specific historical and cultural context.
Finally I've chosen to inquire how the theme of Infinity has been assimilated by Italian Romanticism, particularly in Giacomo Leopardi's work, where this subject-matter interpenetrates with the author's Illuministic, rationalist and sensistic forming, giving origin to an Infinity which is more a frame of mind than a transcendent entity.
I'm aware that the theme of Infinity could be connected with several other topics dealing with philosophy, mathematics, physics, cosmology, but I preferred not to treat this subject-matter in a diachronic way and rather to focus on how it has been interpreted in a precise, defined historical moment. In fact I think that trying to discuss the evolution of human thought about Infinity throughout history would have been a too high ambition.
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