OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOG (February 9, 2025): Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.
The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.
Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.
Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:
1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.
Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.
2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.
Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.
Owen Ware is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Return of the Gods (OUP, 2025), Fichte’s Moral Philosophy (OUP, 2020), Kant’s Justification of Ethics (OUP, 2021), Kant on Freedom (CUP, 2023), Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany (Routledge, 2024), and the co-editor of Fichte’s System of Ethics: A Critical Guide (CUP, 2021).