영국낭만주의에서의 전체성과 개체성

Totality and Individuality in British Romanticism: The Cases of William Blake and S. T. Coleridge

Terry Eagleton has long suggested an irresolvable 'contradiction' between the 'organicist' and'individualist' components of Romanticism. The Romantic poets and thinkers, however, seem to have explored an 'organic' relationship between those very components, particularly with their conception of the individuation of totality in 'infinitely various' forms. As well illustrated by Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and Blake's "All Religions Are One," the British Romantics conceive of the all-encompassing divinity as the immanently transcendent power-to-be, an infinity that presents itself precisely as finite and singular beings. In this perspective, individuality (finitude) and totality (infinity) occur together, and this only insofar as one individual being represents neither totality nor other individual beings. There is an undoubted resonance here between the British poets and the German thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, although one may locate more dynamism and subversive energy in Blake than in his British or German contemporaries. Overall, the Romantic conception of totality and individuality involves democratic impulses and as such claims ideological kinship with liberalism, republicanism, or even multiculturalism, its fascistic potentials notwithstanding.