The Strum und Drang movement in the late 18th century that swept over Europe (Germany in particular) questioned the so called enlightenment thinkers of the age. Emotion over the rational, passion over reason and the sensual world opposed to the scientific world of number. Life was more than the machinery of equations and predictability of Newtonian physics. It could not be reduced to laws and number.
The men which spearheaded this movement, placed the primary emphasis of what could be known, on what the senses could reveal. Empirical knowledge was limited to the world of sense, color, sound, scent and feeling were superior in revealing the world as it is to rational thought and reason. Reason led men down the road to error. The passions, the senses these were the true phenomena. There was no neumena, the world was as it appeared to be to the senses and nothing more. Words were tricks of the mind to imprison experiences that could not be contained. Who can say what love is? Who can describe the scent of a flower? The outward appearance of "things" was nothing but the coming to be of the inward. All things emerged. Everything was brought to fruition by a gradual unfolding through gradations. Everything had its own perspective, its own view. There were no universal truths because there were no universal perspectives period. It was a movement against all universal ideals, all encompassing ideals and all religions which tried to explain the world in one language.
The error of modern philosophers was to find fault in this truth, to try to correct viewpoints with a universal glass which many could view the world from. A universal world view was anathema to the movement, but more it was absurd, a deception of the mind and spirit. To them the soul and the body were the unity, the real life existed in the passions, the Dionysian above the Apollonian, the epicurean desires and drives, the appetites were not to be suppressed but indulged. The body was but the expression of the soul, the life, the blood, was everything, sought everything. To be "down here" was the greatest joy man could have, life was not suffering, that was the product of rationalism and enlightenment thinking, but was an endless sea of emotions and feelings. To live was to experience the full gamut of them, to savor joy, pain, sorrow, love, hatred as the result of activity, these were because life was, and they were to never be pursued for their own sake or avoided.
