Romanticism, Hermeneutics, and the Crisis of the Human Sciences

This study questions the Romantics' belief that the imaginative poetry of feeling could overcome the alienating effects of Cartesian rationalism, and reform civilisation by wedding the mind to this goodly universe. It begins by surveying modern hermeneutics, which attempted to develop a science of interpretation compatible with Romantic tenets. Underlying these was the belief that human nature itself could be known intimately and developed autonomously. Observing the repeated crises of self-legitimisation that thence ensued, it enquires into the purposes of the humanities. After examining how human nature had been understood in the Western tradition until the Enlightenment, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge's famous definition of the imagination as an attack on Romantic hermeneutics, rooted in the traditional view that man has been created in Imago Dei.