The phenomenology of introspection

One significant part of the romantics' legacy was their awareness of layers beneath human consciousness and the desire to explore them. Studying the ways in which many romantics approached this counterfoil to consciousness, or “night side of science” as one of their key proponents called it, amounts to describing the emergence of a theory. Yet the usage of the word “theory” requires some qualification, for all the tentative or emphatic references to the sub-conscious in romanticism resembled an attempted mapping out of unknown territory, consisting of assumed inner landscapes of boundless expansiveness but necessarily without much empirical data to support this undertaking. The fact that the romantics insisted on exploring this sphere by means of what were deemed dubiously pseudo-scientific methods has given critics sufficient grounds for questioning what they saw as the blunt expression of irrationality by mostly poetically minded intellectuals.

What those critics did not appreciate was the romantics' main presupposition: namely, that there is a non-rational area of human existence with its own logic and pronounced forms of, at times erratic, expression. The romantic project of exploring the non-conscious or sub-conscious stretched, incidentally, from some notes by the poet-philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (otherwise known as Novalis, 1772–1801) on psychological phenomena, to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's (1830–1916) late romantic novella in the shape of correspondence cards, Die Poesie des Unbewussten 1883 (The Poetry of the Non-conscious), which, ironically, refuses to differentiate between consciousness and non-consciousness.