The Cartesian rupture split the fabric of our knowing, severing mind from body, spirit from matter. In its wake, nature became a mute extension—measurable yet voiceless, and the self a buffered observer, sovereign yet estranged. The world no longer addressed us; meaning retreated behind the calculator.

Romanticism rose as a counter-offensive, seeking to heal the severance. Against the mechanistic cosmos, it proclaimed nature a living presence—visible spirit, inwardly kin to the soul. In German Romantic poetry, knowing is not the imposition of a priori categories upon inert data, but a participation in a dynamic unfolding. Language, imagination, and feeling are not distortions of reason but its completion. The world becomes a text in which the Absolute inscribes itself, and poetry a privileged access—attentive, resonant, and open to transformation.

Kant had revolutionised epistemology by restoring the subject to the centre of our world, positing transcendental categories as the constitutive condition of appearance, while consigning the noumenon to permanent inaccessibility. This preserved the human sovereignty within Humean empiricism, but at the cost of hollowing out human identity. Taylor reopens the cosmic connection: the noumenon is not a void, but the necessary moral horizon of social reality, capable of self-disclosure through resonance. In a triangular onto-epistemology, the subject engages both phenomenon and noumenon through “subtle languages” — metaphor, narrative, symbol — that mediate strong evaluations.

Reason thus ceases to be merely the application of universal laws to empirical data; it becomes the cultivated capacity to hear the call of the Good in the very texture of things, and to respond in ways that shape the world while grounding identity.

Such knowing is dialectical: reality is grasped through presences and absences alike. The unfulfilled good is as real as the evil that mars it, and the task of wisdom is both to remedy privation and to bring latent potential into being. In participatory metaphysics, the Good is encountered not as a distant ideal but as uncreated potential flowing into the world, inviting communion by analogy. Knowledge is not factual representation but co-activity with the source—radiating the light by walking in it.

This poetics stands as a profound challenge to the Enlightenment’s self-image. It denies that reason is fulfilled in detachment, insisting that care is constitutive of truth—caritas in veritate. It rejects the confinement of the normative to the private or the abstract, demanding its integration into the very ontology of the world.

Poetry is thus not a romantic ornament but an act of resistance: a reclamation of the world’s subtle voice, a refusal to live as if our moral reality was an optional fiction. In its cadence, we hear again the world’s invitation—not to master it, but to become human by joining its unfinished song.

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