ABSTRACT
While several Romantic tenets held great appeal for me, in many respects the most compelling ideas were those that reconfigured personal identity. As previously discussed, the the key innovation concerned the self’s relation to its addressed object. That object could be the outside world or some inner self-consciousness. Relation became the key precept, for when one is in dialogue, the experiencing self is absorbing and responding. In the process of experience, which now became the watchword of romanticism, the very idea of a set identity, one fixed and unchanging (and thus incapable of evolution), becomes anathema. The cardinal rule is self-reflection, and in an endlessly recursive process, the self experiences itself, more particularly its world, the other, and its own experience. Relation replaces entity.
