German romanticism was born out of the belief that all natural processes were divinely inspired, and therefore should be treated with reverence and awe. Their focus was on nature, and what we could learn about ourselves through observation of nature. The idea of nature as a holistic entity began to emerge during this time. Nature had a soul, and was alive and aware. Humans became a part of nature, and the two were inseparable. Romanticism arose as a reaction to rationalization and industrialization, and the movement’s influence could be seen in Rousseau’s view of the state of nature and Spinoza’s Pantheism.
Friedrich Schelling was among the circle of German Romantics. His philosophy of nature chimed well with their ideals. Schelling’s reaction against Fichte‘s ideas argued that a knowing subject could not exist without an object and vice versa. Reality is not a creation of our “I” -there is no difference between subjective experience and objective external reality. So life isn’t separate from matter, and nature’s a living thing, a continuously developing process characterized by its creativity. For Schelling, human creativity represents the high point of nature’s development towards self-awareness.
