Unity with nature

Another Romantic answer to the demand to prove the existence of the self was staged in encounters with ‘nature’. The basic idea was that all beings are united by a universal and natural self that underlies all seemingly coincidental aspects of life. Striving to transcendence and absolute unity seems to contradict the Romantic focus on individuality. However, several Romantics stress that radical individuality is the condition of possibility for speaking in someone else’s name, loving, and thus reaching out to universal categories, that is, to nature. The task was to unearth a basic and natural likeness of man, a task expressed as a political project in Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (An die Freude), which Beethoven employed in his Ninth Symphony.

Unlike earlier writers, these Romantics did not simply use images of landscapes as conventional allegories of the inner condition of man. Rather, the encounters between the individual and nature marked the beginning of a complex dialogue that allows exchange between concepts of subject and object, speaker and listener, observer and observed, and inside and outside (Coleridge, Hölderlin, Wordsworth). Such encounters were considered to engage the human faculties of imagination and intuition, that is, the realm of inner sentiments that was deemed to be natural and true. The goal was to catch these faculties in the act, to manifest them, and thereby to prove the existence of the free inward self, the innermost nature that connects all beings. This form of selfhood has been called ‘expressive selfhood’ by Charles Taylor. Expressing and articulating the inner voice was considered the proper access to ‘nature’, a nature that did not operate along the lines of an inside-outside dichotomy, since the inward self was in essence natural.

Wordsworth in particular dedicated many of his major works to transcending singular experiences, in an attempt to arrive at the natural self. Reaching this universal selfhood was essentially connected to acquiring a double vision that used images of nature as a means of entry into the world beyond the visible realm. Therefore, the ability to see beyond the visible world was the key faculty that unites mankind. Wordsworth considered individually acquired imagination to be this faculty. The most individualistic faculty is thus the very door to universality: the better one understands that which makes the individual an individual, namely imagination, the better one understands mankind in general. Wordsworth considered recollection to be the means of accessing an individual’s formation of imagination—the topic of the Prelude. The work of recollection is therefore the key to understanding not just the individualistic, but also the universal self. In the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1802–4), Wordsworth wrote:

Those first affections, Those shadowy reflections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.

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The recollections from early childhood colour all later perceptions in such a way as to make possible their unity, a unity that becomes the condition for transcendence, as the ode makes clear later on:

Though inland far we may be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea.

Critics in the 1990s stressed the degree to which the telling of early recollections in Wordsworth is a project of conscious constructivism that finds or invents those primal scenes that seem necessary for explaining later visions, thus delineating Wordsworth’s project as a Bildungsroman of the imagination.

Unity with nature