Abstract

Romanticism sought a new mythology to transform the fragmented echoes of the Enlightenment into a symphonic age of scientific knowledge, Bildung, and political freedom that would sanction the normative values for the future. Yet the difficulties that so concerned the romantics are still with us, chief of which is the damage we do to our natural environment. In 1804 Schelling warned that modern thought would inevitably lead to “the annihilation of nature,” and advanced as an alternative an organic form of philosophy whose mythology of nature offers the utopian potential and emancipatory power capable of perhaps liberating an engaged hope from its current bondage to our contemporary ideology of resigned irony that emasculates transformative political action.