Spring 1999#9
Romanticism
Romanticism is a perennial philosophy.But it can also be understood as an intellectual and cultural movement of the late 18th and early 19th century. Some characteristics of Romantic thought include:
1)the discovery of personality
The Romantic underscored the complexity of the human mind.It is not just a reasoning machine, as the philosophes of the Enlightenment had tended to believe.Mind includes imagination, intuition, and sentiment, as well as reason. It integrates them into a unique personality or soul. Therefore the Romantic paid more attention to the particular than to the universal in the human condition.
The discovery of personality involved the exploration of private feelings.It promoted the cult of sensitivity, which included sincerity and sympathy for the private feelings of others.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most romantic of the French philosophes, argued that the quest to realize the democratic ideal meant creating a community in which there was such honesty in human relationships.
2)striving for personal experience
Romantics were noted for their wanderlust.They felt alienated from conventional life, with its routines, caution, love of creature comforts and security, and its acceptance of discipline as a way to success. They saw new experience as a means of self-discovery, and life authentically lived as a hero journey.Hence their interest in myth as the story of experiences that one weathers as a route to self-understanding.
Wanderlust was a stance of youth, which was itself a stage in life about which people were becoming self-conscious in the early 19th century.Youth was conceived as a stage of psychological development, lodged between and different from childhood and adulthood.The youth of the Romantic era were among the first to identify coming of age as a crisis of identity, ironically because of the many new possibilities that life offered them.
During this era, one also notes the first expression of the notion of the alienated youth as a social pariah.Some disenchanted youth took this as a badge of honor.
There are 2 archetypal Romantic myths of this striving for ever more life experience: that of Don Juan and that of Faust.Both were seducers of life.
3)an openness about the possibilities of the future.
Romantics were moved by the mystique of a better if dimly perceived destiny.The future was a dream, a fantasy worth pursuing.
Romantics, therefore, were at one with the philosophes of the Enlightenment in their belief in the possibility of transcendence.But rather than the growth of the intellect, they stressed the personal transformation that comes through life experience.
The Romantic possessed a strong, if visionary conception of the transcendent nature of history.The most famous Romantic philosopher of history, G.W.F.Hegel, offered a dialectical view of history in which the human spirit explores the possibilities of its experience over time, leading to the metamorphosis of history in an upward spiral toward its culmination in modern times.
4)nostalgia for the past
Romantics expressed a sense of loss of the past conceived as a golden age;
They were caught up in the mystique of ruins, exemplified in the paintings of the French artist, Hubert Robert;
They idealized traditional society and the simple lives of ordinary people.They held a belief in the intrinsic goodness of ordinary people;
They idealized the Middle Ages (scorned by the Renaissance) as an era of harmony, beauty, and coherence;
They created a fantasy past, a place of lost innocence, a world that they had lost.
One of the best examples is the poetry of the German poet, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)
But they also recognized that the past is different from the present and cannot be retrieved.This played into their fascination with death.It was characterized by heroic grieving for loved ones.For the Romantics, inconsolable grief was the other side of unrequited love.Ostentatious grieving became commonplace at funerals, and remembrance of ordinary people with elaborate grave statuary became prevalent for the first time. The cemetery came to be viewed as a private garden.
Attitudes toward death were ambiguous, a mixture of the erotic and the grotesque.
5)an idealization of nature, whose moods, they believed, mirror the human personality. Romantics idealized:
forests, especially in Germany
bucolic countrysides, especially in Great Britain
tempestuous seas
stormy nights
rivers leading upstream toward unknown hinterlands
Whether its images were benign or terrifying, the romantic representation of nature was always beautiful. The notion of particular landscape in which one’s personal sense of identity was to be found became popular.This love of landscapes reinforced the longing for rootedness, as if nature were a place in which God dwelled.
Exemplary of this romantic landscape painting are the works of the German artist, Caspar David Friedrich.
6)the pantheist God.The Romantics tended to identify God with Nature. Through contact with nature, one intuits God’s archetypes, which nurture the imagination.
The English poet William Wordsworth is famous for his representation of nature. As a boy he roamed the hills and woods near his home; later he became a mountain climber. Wordsworth believed that Nature formed the imagination of the poet, and that contact with nature had a therapeutic effect upon everyone.
7)aesthetics.The Romantics viewed art as imaginative expression.They emphasized the genius within each of our souls. The English literary critic Samuel Coleridge formulated a theory of the organic unity of artistic creation. Artistic creation, he claimed, displays an organic unity in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.Rules and conventions do not add up to the vision of the artist.
The artist’s vision, moreover, can be highly personal; it need not have social utility.It elicits empathy; it does not attempt instruction.The subjective vision of the artist is one that we must strive to appreciate and understand.
8)politics. Romantics tended to judge politics less by its efficacy, more by its beauty:
the liberals of the Enlightenment stressed parliaments, constitutions, laws, efficient governmental institutions.
the Romantics thought in terms of emotional participation: parades, festivals, clubs and secret societies, fraternal groups, popular insurrections.
It is worth noting that Romantic politics cuts both ways: it plays into conservatism but also into radicalism.Sometimes there are interesting crossings between the two.
The romantic political impulse comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of a society in which people could treat with one another in openness and trust, a community in which relationships were based upon what he called transparency.
Romanticism as a revolutionary political impulse plays into French radicalism (Jacobinism), utopian socialism, and German nationalism.
youth movements:
in the Germanies:
the role of Friedrich Jahn (1778-1852), a professor at the university of Berlin.He launched youth movements to oppose Napoleon:
turnerschaften - gymnastic societies
burschenschaften - politically active fraternities (<---> drinking and dueling societies of the aristocratic students). They sponsored festivals to promote the idea of German unity.
in France:
the defiant prophecy of Gracchus Babeuf
the revolutionary agitation of Auguste Blanqui (1805-81)
9)The Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement:
share principles of
(1)the goodness of human beings
(2)the search for transcendence
but display a contrast of mindsets:
EnlightenmentRomanticism
(mid-->late 18th c.)(late 18th->early 19th c.)
---> liberalism---> romantic radicalism
reasonimagination
practical changevisionary forecasting
empiricismidealism
dispassionfeelings
individual rightspersonal exploration of the soul
adult responsibilitychildlike creativity
accomplishmentexperience
social value of strugglesocial value of harmony
progress through reformprogress through transformation
constitutionsshared traditions
= before lawshared commitment
the efficacy of politicsthe aesthetics of politics
representative governmentgeneral will
polemicistspoets and novelists
electoral campaignsfestivals
present-mindedpast and future oriented
deismpantheism