Outlook: The Fantastic and Musical Modernism After 1900

The “new shudder” of Jean Paul, to which the fantastic in Romanticism is linked, is at the same time the Romanticism’s modernity against the Romanticism criticism. For the “new shudder”, which the fantastic in art speculates on, is the “feeling of modernity”. Against the background of the “disenchantment of the world” by the modern natural sciences and the individual being thrown back on one’s own ego by transcendental idealism of Fichte and Schelling, the modern consciousness has a doubt, a world pain, which the fantastic evokes because it keeps the memory of a being lifted up by a higher instance alive, the “longing for the infinite” and the “premonition of the true” after Jacobi, to which the modern man can hold on while being “dazed and lonely” in the meantime in front of the mechanically roaring world machine.