Romantic Science is founded on an understanding of the world through the organizing idea (Francis Bacon) of dynamic, living polarities - such as center-periphery, expansion-contraction, centrifugal-centripetal forces, masculine-feminine, light-dark, levity-gravity. This idea of polarity is built into the very start of creation (Genesis) and pervades Ancient Greek culture.

 

The Romantic Idea emerged in Western culture in a conscious way ​with Romanticism (1750-1850). The philosophers and scientists involved in this movement in philosophy and science sought to use the insight that life emerges out of dynamic polarities to penetrate beyind the outer appearances of things to their inner essence. They sought thereby to overcome the growing doubt and uncertainty about reality created by the purely materialistic approach of the physical sciences. They also sought to understand the challenging issue of Life beyond seeing man as a complex machine or a series of complex chemical interactions.

 

While the inertial sciences (physics, chemistry) could be usefully applied to inert nature, a proper understanding of living nature required a new approach and the development of sciences of life and not just matter. From the Romantic understanding of the living principle in nature came a deeper understanding of the problem of illness and restoration of health. A major part of Romantic Science has since been the development of a more dynamic, energetic approach to medicine and healthcare. 

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The Romantic Idea is an organizing idea through which to study and understand the world we live in - historically, philosophically, economically, culturally and scientifically. The Idea (in the sense Plato meant it - as an organizing method based on a real insight into the nature of the world) is that life and creation in all its forms in time and space is based on the interplay between opposing, yet interconnected and inter-dependent powers, forces and energies in the universe. As Genesis states it symbolically - in the beginning God created 'the heavens and the earth'. 'Heavens' in Ancient Hebrew means 'the elevating, expansive power' and 'earth' means 'the compressive, densification power'. Or as modern physics states it - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. From this initial dynamic polarity, all of life flows, through a cascading series of lesser polarities, all derived from the very principle of polarity itself at the heart of creation.  

 

Without such an organizing idea with which to approach the study of nature and man, as Francis Bacon, the Father of Western Science, wrote, knowledge is fragmentary, disconnected and superficial, tending to doubt, relativism and confusion as to meaning. Without meaning, actions and life in general become empty and unfufilling. What you get is (data bits) information but not knowledge.

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Romantic Science is based on an understanding of the world through the Idea of dynamic, living polarities, such as center-periphery, expansion-contraction, centrifugal-centripetal forces, masculine-feminine, light-dark, levity-gravity. This polarity is mentioned at the very start of Genesis and pervades the Ancient Greek culture. 

 

The Idea of a dynamic polarity of powers, forces and energies as the essence of creation and the key to its understanding is what is known as the Romantic Idea. This Idea (in the sense that Plato used it) was brought into distinct consciousness in Western culture with the emergence of Romantic philosophy and science at the end of 1700s and early 1800s.

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The effort to understand life and health, as well as illness and death, from the perspective of the Living Principle, rather than from that of matter, was most intense up to about 1850, when it was overshadowed by the materialistic prediliction of the Western mind, and natural science came to be reduced to material science to the point that the term science has become synonymous with mattter and form. This science of outer forms (natura naturata) is taken to be 'objective' and Romantic science, which seeks to penetrate to the inner essence of things (natura naturans), was derided as being 'subjective', meaning value-laden and relative. 

 

Material science has come to dominate science generally, and life is taken to be a product or resultant of matter. However, this form of science, which also dominates Western medicine and healthcare generally, treat disease and health as chemical issues, and man as a machine to be cut or drugged. The whole being is lost, the deeper meaning and understanding of health and illness ignored as unimportant. And yet Western material medicine is unable to deal with life itself, and is powerless in the face of growing chronic disease-conditions, only able to suppress symptoms or remove offending matter (surgery).

 

The Romantic Idea - A Way to Health

 

​The Romantic Idea provides a scientific foundation for developing further the work of the Romantic philosophers and scientists, and those various individuals who have carried on work along these lines in the last 150 years. With this organizing idea, we can study Man in his dynamic wholeness and come to an understanding of health and illness that gives us a systematic, effective and rational system of treatment, even, or rather, above all, for chronic, complex disease-conditions - RomanticScience Healthcare.