The Experience of Everything: Romantic Writing and Post-Kantian Phenomenology

Abstract

Philosophically unselfconscious writing in the Romantic period figures post-Kantian philosophical developments, in particular the departure from Kantian dualism for various kinds of phenomenology. The indeterminate appreciation, which was the basis of Kant’s aesthetics, was increasingly treated as a kind of experience escaping scientific determination rather than a kind of judgement. No longer subservient to formal philosophical discipline, originally aesthetic reflection on experience could now be taken from very different kinds of writing. Potentially it became the experience of anything we experience. Through this typically expansive transformation of itself, the Romantic aesthetic escaped being arrested in a monolithic “literary absolute.” In showing this I am assisted by the degree to which such an idea is actually a contentious theme of some major English poetry of Byron and Shelley: Byron’s poetic grasp of the “thing” and Shelley’s evocation of “life.”