ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a facet of Hartmut Rosa's fertile idea, that the good life is impossible without a relation of resonance between self and world. The connection here is of an intrinsic nature and meaning, not causal and instrumental, but constitutive. In this mode, the subject is capable of "appropriating" the world in a manner that transforms the self's essence through "connection". In discussing the origin of the concept in the period, the chapter focuses on humans' relation to nature and to art; and moreover, showing the two relations to be closely connected and interwoven. The chapter concentrates on German writers of the 1790s, articulating the thinking, one might say the ontology of the Romantic generation of the 1790s. What Romantic poetry strives to do is recover an adequate reading, and this would of necessity mean the creation of a mode of symbolic access.
