Between Delirium and Luminosity: Larra's Ethical Nightmare

Abstract

SN the Critique of Pure Reason Kant proposes an t epistemological reversal that reflects a major step in the transformation from neoclassical to I I romantic ideology. He writes: It has hitherto been assumed that our must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge has been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition (qtd. in Philosophical Writings 6). This Copernican turn (as he called it), when joined to the work of Fichte, Schiller and the Schlegels, attempted to help resolve many of the unacceptable consequences deriving from seventeenthand eighteenth-century thinking. Hans Eichner has pointed out how the romantics inverted classical epistemological systems in order to escape the limitations placed on free will by the concept of a mechanical universe. During the last thirty years this romantic ideology once again has become fashionable. In the speculative arena deconstructionists have found the notion of romantic irony, with its premises of paradox, deferment of meaning, and inclination toward self-subversion, to provide prototypical texts for their analyses. Even in the physical realmthe hard sciences--in which romantic ideology always had to sur-