From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 6 Romantic and Artistic Worlds: Symbolic Pluralism

In response to the abstraction of Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism reclaimed the cosmos as a plural, affective, and imaginative field of possibility. Where Newton and Leibniz construed potential as calculable or harmonised by reason, Romantic and artistic traditions opened alternative symbolic worlds: those of feeling, vision, and aesthetic intensity. Here, possibility is not exhausted by scientific law or rational system but emerges from the creative interplay of imagination, nature, and subjective perspective.

Romantic construal foregrounds the relational and affective dimensions of existence. The cosmos is alive, imbued with meaning not reducible to mechanism. Goethe’s scientific writings exemplify this sensibility: his Theory of Colours resists Newtonian optics, construing colour as relationally constituted by light, darkness, and perception. Possibility, for Goethe, arises in the dynamic interplay between observer and world, where aesthetic experience discloses truths inaccessible to rational abstraction.

William Blake pushes this further, construing art itself as a symbolic cosmos. His illuminated poems and visionary engravings collapse distinctions between myth, theology, and philosophy, constructing worlds in which imagination is the measure of possibility. Blake’s “worlds” are not merely literary but ontological: symbolic universes where human perception and cosmic structure interpenetrate. Here, possibility is expanded through visionary creation, challenging the reduction of the cosmos to calculable order.

Early Romantic cosmologies more broadly emphasise the unity of nature and spirit, where possibility is not governed by external law but disclosed through aesthetic participation. The sublime—the overwhelming power of mountains, storms, or infinite space—becomes a symbolic horizon where the human imagination encounters and construes cosmic potential beyond rational mastery.

Romanticism thus inaugurates a symbolic pluralism: multiple ways of construing possibility coexist, from scientific to poetic, rational to aesthetic. Art and literature do not merely illustrate the cosmos; they generate alternative symbolic orders that expand the range of potential. In doing so, Romantic and artistic worlds remind us that construal is never only conceptual—it is affective, relational, and creative.

In contrast to Enlightenment systematisation, Romanticism demonstrates that possibility is as much imagined and felt as it is abstracted and calculated. Through this symbolic pluralism, art becomes not an ornament to knowledge but a parallel construal of the cosmos itself.