Self-realisation

Romantic thinkers had an alternative to put in place of the conception of the human being as a cloud of jostling particles. They proposed instead the metaphor of the seed and its development into a mature plant.

This metaphor encapsulated a quite radical innovation. It gave a way of thinking of the human being as in origin inchoate, or lacking form, but as then gradually acquiring structure and differentiation as development towards maturity proceeds. This understanding was applicable to physical development, but the Romantics also applied it to the development of the person as a whole. They recommended understanding the person as something which began unformed, and as something that acquired form as time passed.

This way of thinking of development relied on the idea of a potential becoming realized. In the beginning, the fertilised egg was small and undifferentiated. Eventually it grew into something with elaborate differentiation and organisation. Development towards maturity could be regarded as the gradual realisation of that original potential. This was how the Romantics saw the life of the person as a whole, too: a movement towards the realisation of potential. They saw it as a process of self-realization, a process which begins with a real but inchoate self, and proceeds through the gradual crystallisation of characteristics and personality which had been 'pointed to' - but only 'pointed to' - in the beginning. Self-realisation, for the Romantics, was the point of life.

The new 'Romantic' conception of the self, taking shape here, is thus of a potential which undergoes development. Already I have pointed out the importance the Romantics placed on the power of the human being to initiate change. The new self is also characteristically self-powered. The drive to development comes from within. In the mind, Herder says, 'there glow forces, living sparks'. (Quoted by Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang, Manchester, 1953, Manchester University Press, p.183.) It is these inherent, autonomous, self-energising 'forces' pushing their way against the world outside that propel the self into realisation. As Charles Taylor puts it, for Herder, realising the human self involves 'an inner force imposing itself on external reality'. (Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge, 1975, p.15)

The Romantic self therefore in its primal state is a kind of seed: it was thought of as destined for development, a process which it would launch 'under its own initiative' as it were.

We have here in fact a pioneering expression of a major conceptual shift, one which Foucault identifies as marking the transition between what he sees as the 18th Century and 19th Century frameworks. For the idea of a thing defined in terms of its potential and its intrinsic power to drive the potential towards realisation - of which the concepts of the seed and the self are both examples - is taking shape here for the first time.

'The development of the forces of our soul is the purpose of our existence on earth...,' Herder says. Quoted by Pascal ibid. p.134. 'Herder's intoxication with the idea of full personal development ... finds its most naive form in the cult of the 'genius' or 'superman', the 'Kraftgenie' ...' (Pascal, ibid. p. 137.)

The Herderian theme of a potential and its realisation was taken up by another central figure in the reaction against Enlightenment science, Goethe. Goethe applied it in the development of his concept of the 'archetype'. An individual plant, for example, for Goethe was the expression of a something that was there from its beginning, a something that pointed to a mature form, and which drove the plant to grow towards that goal. This 'something', a potential and an impetus towards the realisation of it, was his 'archetype'.

The principles of the seed-self were put to use again and again by Romantic thinkers.

Nature 'herself' was thought of after such a manner. For Schelling (the philosophical parent of the Naturphilosophen - see Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge (UK Ed.) 1977 CUP - 'nature becomes a creative spirit whose aspiration is ever fuller and more complete self-realization.' Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p.332.

It was the self-realization not of the individual nor of nature but of a society or nation - or culture - that Hegel placed at the heart of his understanding of the human condition, the expression of the Geist. Whereas the 18th Century has thought of society as the aggregate of the individuals that belonged to it, for Hegel the individuals and their activities were the expression of something underlying. Once again we have the Romantic teleological leitmotif of something that is best described as a 'potential' and its self-powered progress towards realization.

Froebel articulates the basic Romantic nostrum: 'It is the destiny and life-work of all things to unfold their essence ...' (The Education of Man, trans. W.N. Hailmann, D. Appleton, 1887. p. 2)

The thesis that a new conception of the self becomes articulated post-18th Century is devloped further here.

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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

4.3 Self-realisation

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