 In recent decades, a large number of romantic scholars have argued that romanticism, in general, and the romantic primacy of aesthetics, in particular, is a precursor of the fundamental outlook of postmodernist and poststructuralist views (see, for example, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, Bowie 2003, Bowman 2014, and Gasche 1991). This reading is based on the skepticism the romantics raised about first principles and about systematicity, the romantic emphasis on human creation and language, historicism and hermeneutics, their view of the fragmented nature of modern life and on certain formulations of the primacy of aesthetics that may seem, initially, to erase any distinction between what is “real” and what is “poetic”, a product of the creative imagination. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, proclaims: “No poetry, no reality…. There is, despite all the senses, no external world without imagination” (AF: #350), and “Everything that rests on the opposition between appearance and reality…is not purely poetic” (FLP: #146). 