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.The romantic ideal of excellence, of unity with oneself, consistsof three basic components: (1) totality, that a person should developall his or her characteristic human powers, (2) unity, that thesepowers be formed into a whole or unity, and (3) individuality, thatthis whole or unity should be individual or unique, characteristicof the person alone.The demand for totality means that we should overcome all one-sidedness, that we should not neglect any side of our being,because we are as human in our sensibility as in our reason.Thedemand for unity means that we should form all these powers intoa single organic whole.The romantics would sometimes formulatethe demand for unity in aesthetic terms.They insisted that weshould make our lives into novels.Like all works of art, they shouldshow unity in multiplicity, where the unity must be spontaneous,deriving from within rather than being imposed from without.Thedemand for individuality means that each person should developnot only those powers characteristic of humanity in general, butalso those distinctive of her or his individuality; each work of artshould be unique, expressive of the individual alone.The romantic ethic of self-realization has to be conceived incontrast against its two main alternatives: the utilitarianism ofBentham and Helvetius, which defined the highest good as happi-ness and happiness in terms of pleasure; and the ethics of duty ofKant and Fichte, which made the highest end in life the perform-ance of moral duties.The romantics rejected utilitarianism becauseit sees human beings as passive consumers of pleasure and neglectsthe active development of characteristic human powers.They 40 Hegelobjected to the Kantian Fichtean ethic because it divides humanbeings into reason and sensibility and develops rationality at theexpense of sensibility.To achieve unity with oneself, the romantics, true to name, laidthe greatest importance on the experience of love.They weregreatly inspired by Plato s Phaedrus and Symposium where love unitesthe two sides of the soul, reason and need.They saw an ethics oflove as indeed superior to an ethics of duty.Love supersedes dutybecause in acting from love we do our duty from rather than contraryto inclination.Although we act from self-interest in love, the self nolonger separates its essential interests from others; rather, the selffinds itself in others; it becomes what it is only through others,which it perceives as equal to and independent of itself.This ethic of love appears in Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher,Novalis and Hölderlin.Its father was Schiller, who had suggested itin his Philosophical Letters and Grace and Dignity.10 Perhaps its mostenthusiastic exponent was Hegel himself.In his Spirit of Christianityhe argued that love should be the fundamental principle of ethics,and that only love could overcome the dualisms of Kant s ethics.Insome early Frankfurt fragments he had developed a whole meta-physics of love, maintaining that the unity of subject and object, theidentity of the self with the universe, is attained only through theexperience of love.Although Hegel had great debts to the romantic ethic, he wouldlater distance himself from it in two respects.First, Hegel did notlay the same high value on individuality.For Hegel, to be an indi-vidual means to have a specific place or role within society and thestate.11 Hegel would later criticize Friedrich Schlegel s concept of divine egoism for its perverse and presumptuous separation ofthe individual from the social world.Second, despite his initialenthusiasm, Hegel abandoned the ethic of love.He began to realizethat the feelings and inclinations of love are insufficiently universalto serve as the basis of moral and political life.I love my parents, mysiblings, and my friends, perhaps, but not my compatriots, still less Early Ideals 41humanity in general.Hegel already knew this in the Frankfurtyears; but he drew the full consequences from it only in his Jenayears; by the time of the Philosophy of Right he had confined love tothe ethical life of the family.12POLITICAL IDEALThe romantic ideal of unity with others is their concept of theorganic state.The model for their organic state was the ancientrepublics of Greece and Rome.The romantic republic consists in(1) the right to participate in public affairs, to elect rulers and todetermine public policy, (2) the freedom of its individual mem-bers, i.e.rights for equal protection of their property, freedom ofspeech and press, and (3) care of the state for the education anddevelopment of its citizens.The romantic republic was, in part, a reaction against themachine state of enlightened absolutism, where the command ofthe prince would set all wheels in motion If everything in enlight-ened absolutism was done for the people, it was never done by thepeople.Contrary to the machine state, the organic state woulddevelop from the participation of its citizens.The romantic republicwas also a reaction against the atomistic state of liberalism, whichwas held together by a contract between self-interested individuals
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