Abstract

This dissertation examines the Platonic coincidentia oppositorum, or meeting of opposites, as a contemplative method and model for a Romantic-Hellenic conception of virtue. The argument takes issue with leading intellectual historians on virtue's disposition after the Enlightenment, and focuses on five key rhetorical devices as the poetic means of teaching contemplative virtue: correlative negation, chiasmus, parataxis, synaesthesia, and oxymoron. A threefold ethical progression of the coincidentia oppositorum is cited. Chapter One considers how the meeting of virtue and necessity produces a non-dual understanding of virtue and an individual sense of destiny. In Chapter Two, self-love and love of the good combine to create a comprehensive ero-philic view of love as neither purely virtuous nor vicious. From the meeting of human and divine, unconditional love and gestures of self-sacrifice emerge, which are examined in Chapter Three. ;The Meno, Queen Mab, and "Das Schicksal" are analyzed to reveal what virtue means to Shelley and Holderlin. This also brings forth the four-part structure of the dialectic of virtue: false opinion, ignorance, true opinion, and knowledge. Within Plato's Symposium, Percy Shelley's "Alastor" and "On Love," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Holderlin's Hyperion, four kinds of erotic love are cited, namely the lover-beloved relation, mutual love, self-love, and love of the good. Each is a discrete term within a chiastic structure of agreement and opposition. Empedokles and Prometheus Unbound are read for their rhetorical and dramatic gestures that unite the human and the divine. ;Romantic Hellenism is understood as a contemplative humanism oxymoronically yoking human imperfection and divine perfection. The maintenance of that meeting of opposites--experienced most fundamentally as that between pleasure and pain or joy and suffering--is a foundation for the practice and poetics of virtue