Blog Series on Romanticism #1: Introduction

Romanticism was a huge cultural movement that emerged in the Western world over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The essay will be organized into four parts. The first part will provide a definition of Romanticism itself. Then, the second part will proceed to consider the emergence of Romanticism within cultural-historical context. After this, the third part will turn to a consideration of what could be called the dark side of Romanticism. Finally, the fourth part will sketch the trajectory of the present blog series as a whole. 

What Is Romanticism?

As a cultural and intellectual movement, Romanticism can first and foremost be understood as an ethos adhering to the values of individualism, emotion, and subjectivity. Romanticism tends to eschew values such as objectivity, science, and progress, in favor of self-expression, imagination, and a return to the past. More generally, Romanticism also implies a rejection of the primacy of reason as a mode of understanding or finding meaning in the world. As the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica have put it: "Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental" (paragraph 1). This was accompanied by a new idea of the artist as a prophetic genius who is able to access the deeper realms of truth and human nature—those realms that can only be accessed through individual creative inspiration, and not through rational or objective reflection.  

Although Søren Kierkegaard is not generally considered a part of the Romantic movement, his philosophical affirmation that "subjectivity is truth," which can be found sprinkled across his major work Concluding Unscientific Postscript, could perhaps be understood as capturing the ethos of Romanticism in a nutshell. The Romantics did not care about the empirical external world, or the objective reason that is used in order to apprehend that world. They cared about the individual human soul, with all of its messy and irrational passions; and insofar as the external world mattered to them, it was almost only insofar as it was refracted through the prism of the soul or a metaphor for the soul itself. For example, a Romantic would have found it repugnant to think of a forest in terms of the wood that could be gathered from it. Rather, he would have been more fascinated with the moods inspired by a forest, or how the structure of a forest corresponds to certain structures of subjective emotion within his own individual soul. 

Historical Context

Within historical context, Romanticism can be understood as a response to the cultural movement that preceded it. As Iyer has written: "A key philosophical innovation of roman[ticism] is the equation of passion with truth. Historically, this can be understood in terms of the romantic tradition's general response to the zeitgeist of the enlightenment. The latter emphasized the role of the reason in the search for truth; and the romantic stress on the non-rational dimension of human experience emerged as a dialectical rebuttal to its predecessor's thesis regarding knowledge" (36-37). In essence, Romanticism stood for everything rejected by the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism: it replaced reason with the irrational, objectivity with subjectivity, science with poetry, the future with the past, and so on. Romanticism emerged in response to the perception that the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, had in fact hollowed out the soul of all of Western culture, and that a revival of subjectivity was thus very much in order. 

In the twentieth century, the Existentialists can be identified as one of the key heirs of the Romantic tradition. A blog series on Existentialism has also been presented by Ultius. One of the posts of that series was dedicated to Lev Shestov, whose major work is called Athens and Jerusalem. In terms of the historical context of Romanticism, it can be suggested that Athens stands for the Enlightenment and the supremacy of reason, whereas Jerusalem stands for Romanticism and the primacy of the irrational. Shestov concludes in no uncertain terms that Athens is a barren wasteland as far as human truth and meaning is concerned, and that people would do much better to look into the dark depths of Jerusalem if they want serious answers to such problems. This is a conclusion that would have done any Romantic proud, since the whole idea of Romanticism is that truth and meaning are to be found not through objective reason but rather through subjective soul. 

The Dark Side

The very nature of Romanticism is such that it has an inherent darkness woven into its very fabric. This is easy to understand if one simply bears in mind that the breakdown of reason is basically associated with what can only be called the advent of madness. A person who becomes fully immersed in his own subjectivity, to the point where he can no longer perceive let alone interact with the external world, would in point of fact be a schizophrenic. And in actuality, the Romantics have always had a tendency to romanticize madness itself, on the grounds that madness is not necessarily just madness but rather the potential for the breakthrough of a new kind of truth. This is congruent with the Romantic thesis that reason is essentially repressive in nature and alienates people from the truths of their own souls. 

The dark side of Romanticism can also be seen when the Romantic ethos is allowed to bleed into the political sphere. In principle, Romanticism would be antithetical to modern democracy, insofar as modern democracy is essentially an Enlightenment project, and the Romantics have tended to feel a greater affinity with the Medieval era than with this kind of Classical rationalism. Romanticism, when involved with politics, tends to seek more ancient foundations for a social order than the one provided by simple rational agreements or social contracts. This can lead to mythical notions regarding race or land or blood (Berlin 110-111). While perhaps not problematic at the level of principle, matters can turn rather ugly at the level of actual practice. Nazism, for example, was an ideology fully animated by the notions of race and land and blood, and it produced one of the most repressive societies in modern memory. Again, this darkness is logically connected to the fact that when reason is deliberated rejected in favor of myth, the consequences that follow will not necessarily adhere to any rational conception of common morality. 

Arc of the Series

Romanticism emerged in various nations in the Western world at about the same time, and it also spread through mutual influence. The present blog series will thus explore Romanticism within the context of a few individual nations: namely, Germany, England, and America. The post dedicated to German Romanticism will address the key writer Goethe and his early work The Sorrows of the Young Werther, and it will also consider the ways in which Romanticism manifested itself in the German philosophy of the time. Romanticism in England will be dedicated to primarily to poets such as Byron, Keats, and Shelley, with a consideration of the extent to which Blake could be included in this tradition. Finally, Romanticism in America will consider not only the earlier, darker writings of Hawthorne and Poe but also the later writings of Transcendentalists such as Whitman and Emerson. 

Romanticism, though, was not a movement that was confined exclusively to the sphere of literature; rather, it was a much broader intellectual movement that permeated all of Western culture. This includes the sphere of music. So, after discussing Romanticism in the nations mentioned above, the present blog series will turn to a consideration of Romanticism within the general tradition of Western music. This will include a brief history of Western music that will provide the right context for understanding the Romantic innovation that was inaugurated by the composer Beethoven. This post will also consist of a discussion of the ways in which Romantic music is tied to the Romantic tradition in general, and a consideration what has happened to Romantic music in the modern era, or whether it would even be appropriate to speak such a thing in this day and age.

Next, the penultimate post of the present blog series will consist of an in-depth exploration of the dark side of Romanticism, or the relationship between Romanticism and madness. In order to do this, the post will first establish a conceptual framework regarding the nature of the mental illness known as psychosis; and then it will argue that the Romantics almost willfully toyed with psychosis in the name of their own creative and visionary endeavors. The point will be made, though, that the Romantics were not necessarily mistaken in doing this, insofar as creativity and psychosis are in fact closely related at the level of psychological structure. The post will refer to the concept of prophecy as it appears within the Bible in order to make this point in a clearer way; and the conclusion that will emerge is that while the Romantics were in fact playing a psychologically very dangerous game, they were nevertheless perhaps justified in doing so. 

Finally, the last post of the present blog series will consist of a reflection on Romanticism and the future, or the potential ways forward for the Romantic tradition within the context of the twenty-first century. This post will consider the challenges inherent in finding a way forward within the context of a world and culture that has almost entirely lost touch with the entire subjective dimension of soul with which the original Romantics were so deeply obsessed. From this point, though, the post will proceed to consider three potential ways forward, on the basis of ideas that are presently available in today's world. The first of these is schizoanalysis, developed by Deleuze and Guattari; the second is metamodernism, developed by several people and expressed most succinctly by Turner; and the third is lucid romance, developed by Iyer. This final post of the series will analyze the ways in which each of these ideas are tied to the Romantic tradition, and how they can potentially offer ways forward for the Romantic tradition within the context of this late modern world. 

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of an introduction to the cultural movement known as Romanticism. The essay has defined Romanticism, considered Romanticism within its historical context, reflected on the dark side of Romanticism, and finally sketched the arc that will be followed by the present blog series. This concludes the first part of this series on Romanticism offered by Ultius; the series as a whole will consists of seven posts in all. The next three posts will focus on Romanticism in three different nations, and the first nation up is Germany. Germany was one of the strongholds of Romanticism when it first emerged, and perhaps the place where Romanticism became most strongly intertwined with philosophy proper. If what has been written thus far has managed to grab your attention, then please make sure that you stay tuned for what's coming up next.

Works Cited

Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2013. Print. 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Romanticism" Encyclopaedia Britannica. n.d. Web. 16 Jun. 2016. <http://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism>. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of the Young Werther. New York: Oxford U P, 2012. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

Kierkegaard, Søren Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1992. Print.  

Shestov, Lev. Athens and Jerusalem. Trans. Bernard Martin. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Print.