>The romantic withdraws from reality. He does this ironically,

File: SchmittKoenen-1.jpg (888KB, 1253x1548px) Image search: [Google]

888KB, 1253x1548px

>The romantic withdraws from reality. He does this ironically, however, and in a spirit of intrigue. Irony and intrigue do not constitute the state of mind of a person in flight, but rather the activity of a person who, instead of creating new realities, plays one reality off against another in order to paralyze the reality that is actually present and limited.
>He ironically avoids the constraints of objectivity and guards himself against becoming committed to anything. The reservation of all infinite possibilities lies in irony. In this way, he preserves his own inner, genial freedom, which consists in not giving up any possibility. By this means, however, he also defends himself against the objection that would necessarily destroy his pretensions: that all the promises and the grandiose projects he has opposed to the limited achievements of others are unmasked as a fraud by his own real production.
>For him, the concrete accomplishments that are actually at hand amount to nothing more than byproducts. He protests against having himself or any of his proclamations understood within the limits of current reality. This is not what he is. This is not his ego. At the same time, he is still infinitely many other things and infinitely more than he could ever be in any concrete moment or specific expression.
>He regards being taken seriously as a violation because he does not want the actual present confused with his infinite freedom.

I see a lot of parallels here to existentialism and the post-modern brand of radical individualism. I think this description fits a lot of the well-off urban young intellectuals that see such an appeal in existentialism.

What is there to be learned from Schmitt's observations today?