Speculative Romanticism

Romantic Nature from a Realist Point of View

“Speculative realism” has lately emerged as one of the most provocative, and frequently misrepresented, currents in contemporary intellectual life. As articulated during the 2007 conference from which it takes its name, speculative realism encompasses an entire spectrum of philosophies “committed to upholding the autonomy of reality … against the depredations of anthropocentrism” (Brassier et al. 306).¹ After a century of phenomenological and deconstructive investigations into consciousness and language, speculative realists take seriously the metaphysical claim that the world exists, independent of the mind and its perceptions. At the same time, in contesting all forms of relativism or anti-realism, they are joined in an appreciation of what Graham Harman calls “the strangeness of the real: a strangeness undetectable by the instruments of common sense” (Quentin viii). Speculative realists speak of reality in surprising, even uncanny, ways.

Skeptics have dismissed speculative realism as everything from the philosophical form of neoliberal economics to the dangerous renouncing of all political alignment.² In this essay, I will argue not only for its philosophical importance, but also for its potential to reshape debate about “nature” in literary studies. My investigation therefore turns to romanticism, a literary and philosophical movement defined by its sustained reflection on the concept. Reading speculative realism through romanticism, and vice versa, suggests that much remains to be said about nature, even in its romantic instantiation – which turns out to be less familiar than we might have thought. It also shows how nearly our present theoretical moment hews to a certain romanticism.

For most speculative realists, the tradition of modern anti-realism begins with Kant’s epistemology. Responding to Hume’s skeptical attack on the uniformity of nature, Kant established the possibility of empirical realism by grounding it in a transcendental idealism. According to the familiar story, the Kantian revolution ensured the validity and coherence of our phenomenal experiences, but at the cost of transforming things in themselves into mere logical placeholders. After Kant, dogmatic speculation about the world in itself is supplanted by critical inquiry into the conditions under which experience of the world is possible.³

The story is hardly new. More strikingly, though, the speculative realists insist that this transcendental procedure provides the basis for nearly all forms of modern thought. This poses major challenges for a renewed realism, since any contemporary thinking about the nature of reality begins with what Iain Hamilton Grant terms “the excision of the ‘in itself’ from metaphysics” (3). Grant draws on the work of F.W.J. Schelling, who declared in Kant’s immediate wake that nature does not exist for modern philosophy. Replacing ontology with the transcendental analytic and cosmology with the transcendental dialectic, Kant’s “anti-physics” (10) forecloses on speculation about the in-itself or its origins. The transcendental method ultimately prevents us from engaging with nature other than as it is shaped by the conditions of human knowledge.

If this is an accurate account of modern philosophy’s failure to engage with nature, it also comes close to the thinking about nature that characterizes romantic literary criticism. For romanticists, nature has always been both near and hard to grasp. Indeed, romantic studies is afflicted by an antiphysics of its own. For example, when humanist scholars of the 50s and 60s tried to account for the interplay between the human mind or imagination and the natural world, they drew on the theory of the sublime.⁴ Deconstruction and new historicism, even when most critical of humanism’s mind-nature dialectics, continued to leverage the sublime as a way to theorize the breakdown of correspondence between mind and world.⁵ In relying on the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, humanist, deconstructive, and new historicist critics alike conceived of nature in relation to human experience (no matter how fraught or mystified the relation). The sublime invariably reduced nature to a set of epistemological or phenomenological problems and made it impossible to think about nature in itself.⁶

In the aftermath of its humanist absorption by imagination, its deconstructive alignment with aesthetic ideology, and its new historicist reading as a “displacement of history,” romantic nature remains difficult...