 Romantic poetry is not alone in exposing the conditions of finite existence, but accompanied by an ironic way of living. Irony is a mode of self-restriction, whose “value and dignity” as a crucial dimension of human life, must be recognized (F. Schlegel, CF: #28). Irony is the balance between “self-creation and self-destruction” (CF: #28), which means that irony is creative—it is constructive of its own perspective on the world. But at the same time, it is also “destructive” of the pretensions implicit in any perspective—the pretention to be holistic. Irony thus presents its perspective as restricted—as only one among many different perspectives on the unconditioned whole. Accordingly, what romantic irony insists on through its restricting function is (a) the conceptual inaccessibility of the “Absolute” (explained in  §3),  and (b) what is known as “perspectivism”—the view that human beings are capable only of finite and limited perspective on the universe as a whole. Being ironic is a way of consciously and intentionally bringing out the fragmentary nature of the human situation as lacking a “view from nowhere”.