I have said that Hegel's project is the critique of Romanticism.  But what is Romanticism?

Trying to define Romanticism is famously difficult.  It resists definition, it defies categorization.  And if anything, it is that resistance.

If I could try to describe Romanticism with one word, it would be rebellion.  But of course that's too simplistic.  Romanticism and rebellion are not simply synonyms.  Romantics do not always rebel, and when they rebel, they rebel in a specific way.  The Romantic poet or the Romantic artist usually says something like, "I am a human! I am a person! I am an individual being, with feelings, real feelings!"  Romanticism is a rebellion from the heart, so to speak.  Romantic rebellion is not about taxes or insurance or debt reform or many of the other material things that have historically incited insurrections throughout history.  The Romantic - the Romantic poet, for instance - demands recognition.  Every Romantic poem means something like "See me for who I am!"  

And what does the Romantic want us to see?  Not just dry facts: a Romantic doesn't just want to be regarded as the equivalent of a video camera, passive absorbing sense data.  Nor does the Romantic want to be psychologically analyzed.  What Romantics want us to see, a phenomenologist might call intentionality.  Not to see the contents of consciousness as just inert, static data points, but a kind of directedness, feeling, motivation, commitment, will, emotion - ultimately, you might say, love.  Or spirit - as in spiritedness.  The spirit is directedness.  This could be understood in purely secular, material terms, or, for those inclined, we might call it the "soul".

The ceaseless cycle of romanticism, that is, ceaseless rebellion, inevitably tends towards a kind of chaos.  So to rebel against romanticism would be to will some kind of order.  But it cannot be any kind of order, it cannot be arbitrary, for if it were purely arbitrary it would just be another part of the chaos.

A system that emerges from love by a kind of inner necessity - a system of the spirit.

Now, Hegel was not alone in this.  Many of the Romantics were great philosophers in their own right, and they too were seeking a system of the spirit.

Hegel's solution to the puzzle of Romanticism is very radical.  What does the spirit seek?  The spirit seeks that which it is directed towards - you might say, that which it loves.  What does it flee?  It flees that which it hates, or fears.  Another way of saying this is that spirit is directed towards the good and away from the bad - towards the positive and away from the negative.

But Hegel's radical solution to the problem of Romanticism is to see negativity in the positive and positivity in the negative.  For Hegel, the Romantic is not wrong; Romanticism is not wrong, but incomplete.  To see only the good in the good is one-sided.  The Romantic demands to be seen.  Hegel sees the Romantic, and sees more.  To see the positive in the negative and the negative in the positive: this is what is called dialectics.

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