ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the project’s fundamental characteristics and its inherent difficulties, and briefly note their relation to the crisis of self-legitimation in Romantic poetry. ‘Romantic’ universality was seen as a means of overcoming the particular ‘objective’ truths of tradition, whether they were of the Classical or the Biblical region of hermeneutics. Paul Ricoeur claims that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics acquired ‘from Romantic philosophy its most fundamental conviction, that mind is the creative unconscious at work in gifted individuals’. The claim associated so strongly with the Romantics of the artist’s divine creative powers reflected adherence to a common belief that Kant’s transcendental subjectivity had provided a means of access to a higher plane of being. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that Kantian philosophy, particularly the Critique of Judgement, imposed Cartesian reason systematically onto humanity in all of its personal and social ethical relations. The implications of Gadamer’s insights into Kant’s philosophy range widely and deeply.
