The Romantic psyche feels its way through an endless succession of contrasts. At the instant it is being experienced, each one of them seems absolute, complete, self-contained; at the next instant, it is overcome by another, and in the difference between the two, the self of each is first fully appreciated. “He who holds fast to only one point,” says Friedrich Schlegel, “is nothing but a rational oyster.”

XREF: Connects to dialectical thinking (Hegel, Fichte) and the Romantic-era emphasis on self-definition through negation and difference rather than fixed identity.

DEFINE: Explains the defining feature of the Romantic temperament: selfhood emerges only through the play of opposing experiences, not from holding any single position.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 540