2. The Free and Independent Individual
• “I am a citizen of the world; I am not at the service of
the emperor, nor of the king of France, but simply at
the service of truth, who is my sole queen; I have
taken no oath but of obedience to her; I am her
devoted knight. (Pierre Bayle, Huguenot, 1697; qtd.
in “Bayle on the Chronicler’s Duty”).
• “I write as a citizen of the world who serves no
prince. I lost my fatherland to exchange it for the
great world” (Friedrich Schiller, 1784; qtd. in Catlin
475).
3. Rooted in Pascal and Rousseau
• Pascal: “The heart has its reasons of which reason
knows nothing”
• Rousseau: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is
in chains. One thinks himself the master of
others, and still remains a greater slave than they”
(The Social Contract, 1762)
4. Major influences on Romanticism
• Jean-Jacque Rousseau: The unique, naturally free individual
• Edmund Burke: The Sublime
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Passion over reason
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778; Swiss)
• The Confessions: points toward Romanticism
(intense personal expression):
“I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto
without precedent, and which will never find an
imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of
a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.
Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and
I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen;
I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those
who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am
different” (qtd. in Benton and DiYanni 293).
– In the first sentence Rousseau pronounces his
uniqueness. So also did Descartes. Descartes hoped to
establish truth, Rousseau only to establish himself.
6. “The summer of that year *1749+ was excessively hot.
Vincennes is some six miles from Paris. In no condition to pay
for cabs, I walked there at two in the afternoon when I was
alone, and I went fast so as to arrive early. The trees along the
road, always lopped according to the custom of the
country, hardly gave any shade; and often I was so prostrated
with heat and weariness that I lay down on the
ground, unable to go further. One day I took the Mercure de
France and, glancing through it as I walked, I came upon the
question propounded by the Dijon Academy for the next
year’s prize: Has the progress of the sciences and arts done
more to corrupt morals or improve them? The moment I read
this I beheld another universe and became another man.”
Rousseau’s Confessions, quoted in Blanning 515
7. Edmund Burke and the Sublime
(1729-1797)
• Burke today is the historical figurehead of conservatism (in
the US).
• He is noted for his Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790).
– Yet in his political ideas, he did not bow to grand-sweeping theories of
“what ought to be”
• “It is precisely abstract political theory and attempts to impose analytic
and systematic projections on the essentially
irrational, instinctual, contingent flux of human affairs which the counter
revolutionary scorns and repudiates” (Steiner, cited in Introduction to
Burke, Philosophical Inquiry ix).
– Burke relied on the virtue of prudence, the application of which is
indicative of a certain healthy skepticism. Indeed, this disposition
revealed itself in his early work on the Sublime, the “terrible
uncertainty” . . .
8. Edmund Burke and the Sublime
• Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757): insight by means of feeling.
– “It is an experience of intolerable but inescapable scepticism, what Burke calls ‘terrible
uncertainty’” (Phillips’ Introduction to Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry xxii).
• Manifestations of the sublime:
– “Astonishment”
– “Terror”
– “Obscurity”
– “Power”
– “Privation” – “Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence”
– “Vastness”
– “Infinity”
– “Suddenness” (incl. violent storms)
– “Cries of animals”
– “Sound and loudness”
• Pain and pleasure can both be positive and are not necessarily opposites;
he notes the way dramatic tragedy affects people
9. “I think there are reasons in nature why the obscure
idea, when properly conveyed, should be more
affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things
that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our
passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most
striking causes affect but little. . . . The ideas of
eternity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we
have, and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we
really understand so little, as of infinity and eternity”
(Burke 57).
Recall Pascal: “The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces fills me with dread” (Pensée 201).
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):
The Reaction of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
– Against religion and reason, Werther commits suicide
• Influenced by Burke’s On the Sublime
• Goethe was also greatly influenced by Gottfried
Herder, who dispensed with Enlightenment standards, and
instead “found nature in folklore as the voice of the
people, in Gothic architecture with its myriad imaginative
forms, in Shakespeare's plays and in the sublime” (Fleming
476).
• Faust (Part 1, 1808; a play): The one who sold his soul in the
pursuit of knowledge. Faust is torn between reason and
romance. Faust ruins himself through the pursuit of
knowledge. He finds that “only by seeking for the
unattainable can the divine spark ignite and illuminate the
course of human existence” (Fleming 476).
11. Romanticism =
heightened Enlightenment individualism and freedom
• Emerges with the Renaissance
– e.g., Michelangelo secretly inscribed his name on the Pieta when he heard it
ascribed to someone else.
• And with the Reformation
– What must I do to be saved?
• Finds a place in the history of Enlightenment philosophy
– e.g., Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant
• Finds a place in the development of Baroque music
– The concerto form as a play between structure and innovation/invention (cf.
later jazz music)
• The ensemble and the soloist; unison vs. individual expression
• Looking forward:
– Compliance vs. self-expression
– Form vs. freedom
• Order vs. chaos
– Form without freedom = a prison
– Freedom without form = chaos
– Leads back to the issue of the One and the Many
• How is a person to be distinguished from the rest of the Many?
• The “Many” itself has become an enormous “One.”
• Is there a place for the individual any longer?
12. Characteristics of Romanticism
• A reaction against Neoclassicism/Enlightenment as artificial and unfeeling.
• Celebrated the “unbounded and untamed” (Matthews and Platt 461);
promoted the sublime, feeling, emotion, imagination and intuition; there are
some things Reason cannot reveal (Pascal)
• Characteristics of Romanticism:
– An attitude rather than a style.
– Not just merely the importance of the individual (Renaissance), but the triumph of
the individual.
– Originality, not virtuosity (Renaissance), is important; “The true original”;
Imagination.
– Freedom over form; freedom of form. Individual importance in the ever-increasing
universe.
– A reaction to the precision, even desire, for certainty:
“The aesthetic faculty is . . . *no longer+ the prisoner of the ‘clear and distinct.’
Allowed for indeterminacy . . .The aesthetic imagination takes fire and develops only
in the presence of something that is not yet fully defined or thought” (Cassirer, qtd.
in Benton and DiYanni 256).
– Emphasis on, even glorification of, the self (Rousseau), but not in a Cartesian sense.
– The artist/writer as the new visionary; universal genius/prophet (cf. Beethoven)
– Democratic spirit. Often reflected the values of the French Revolution. Anti-
institutional; desires social and political change.
• As a reaction to Enlightenment optimism, artists noted “man’s
inhumanity to man.”
13. Romanticism and Nature
• Emphasis on, and reverence of, nature, but not in a Newtonian sense. This
emphasis on nature includes a study of the sublime: Untamed and even
terrifying aspects of nature:
– “wild and awesome aspects of nature – tempests and torrents [storms and
rough seas], impenetrable forests, mountain avalanches, and Alpine scenery”
(Fleming 476).
• Prized the “irrational” and “idiosyncratic” (Swafford 196). Walter Pater
noted Romanticism involves “the addition of strangeness to beauty” (qtd.
in ibid. 197)
• The Folk, Folklore Nationalism later on
• As a reaction against Enlightenment optimism, art portrayed man’s
inhumanity to man (e.g., Goya, Gericault, Delacroix), and the corrupting
nature of reason (Blake)
• A reaction to the Industrial Revolution
• Championed heroism, especially on the part of the downtrodden: “The
bohemians identified with others they saw as victims of the bourgeois
order: the poor, the criminals, the ethnic and racial outcasts”
(Brooks, Bobos in Paradise 68)
• Fleeting Joy; clouds often symbolize this, and Chopin’s etudes reflect the
floating-about nature of existence.
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gothic
• Gothic was the name given to certain medieval architecture considered
barbaric
• But Goethe was aesthetically moved by Strasbourg Cathedral
• He wrote “Concerning German Architecture”
– “Any idea that beauty could be found by joining schools, adopting principles
or following rules was emphatically rejected: they were so many chains
enslaving insight and energy. The ghastly good taste, harmony and purity
demanded by classical aesthetics did violence to nature’s untamed
spontaneity” (qtd. in Blanning).
– Goethe: “The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from
deep, harmonious independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to
itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant of everything foreign, then it is whole and
living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment” (qtd. in
Blanning).
– Writes Blanning, “The crucial adjective is ‘characteristic’ (karakteristische), by
which he meant art which grows naturally and spontaneously from the
culture within which it is produced, not something that has been imitated. . . .
[Strasbourg Cathedral] had been produced on German soil ‘in authentically
German times’.”
Blanning 517-8
15. William Blake
(1757-1827)
• Artist and poet; the poet as prophet
• A reaction to the Enlightenment
– Attacks Natural Religion (i.e., Deism), Newton’s mechanistic universe, and
Urizen.
• In There is No Natural Religion, Blake’s target was Deism:
“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic &
Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand
still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. He
who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only
sees himself only.”
• Sublime view of nature: “I can look at the knot in a piece of wood until
it frightens me” (qtd. in Johnson, Birth of the Modern 591).
• Emphasis on the individual. The painter Joshua Reynolds had said that
generalizing was the key to good art; Blake countered, saying, “to
particularize is the only merit” (qtd. in EB).
• Songs of Innocence (1789) and [vs.] Songs of Experience (1794):
Focuses on two contrary states of the human soul.
• Champion of human rights and met Thomas Paine; Reacted against the
Industrial Revolution and “man’s inhumanity to man.”
• He also believed in the beatific state of consciousness in childhood.
18. Immanuel Kant and German Idealism
• Kant attempted to save religion from science, but for Kant religion was
ethics, which is in the realm of intuition Romanticism
“Though it disabled the rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth
century, the Kantian revolution did not [undo] the self that had moved
under the power of Enlightenment philosophy and science. After
Kant, that self would soar with new wings – those of the recently
discovered faculty of the imagination. It is important, however, to
remember that, at least for Kant, this active, creative self was not an
isolated ‘I’ but the ‘transcendental ego’ of humanity imposing its forms
upon the random facts of experience . . . [quoting Behler+ ‘It was not
until Kant that the realm of aesthetics assumed its own right . . .
Romanticism brought about a new appreciation of artistic creation – a
glorification of creative imagination – and made the artist a spokesman
for the godhead, an orphic seer, and prophetic priest’” (qtd. in
Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation 50).
Art is becoming personally expressive, not just mimetic.
19. Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”
translation by Aaron Green
• “O friends, no more these sounds! Let us sing more
cheerful songs, more full of joy!”
– In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
20. Interests of Romanticism
• The Sublime
• Nature (especially its unpredictable aspects)
• Gothic architecture
• Childhood
– Critical of the effects of civilization
• Compares favorably with later lyric:
– “A child is born with a heart of gold;
the way of the world makes his heart grow cold”
(Earth, Wind and Fire, “That’s the Way of the World”)
• The Heroic
– The heroic individual
– Promethean people admired
• See C. S. Lewis and Promethean nature of evolution: “The Funeral of a Great Myth” in
Christian Reflections: Most of the essay can now be found here:
http://fpb.livejournal.com/297710.html
• To end tragically is to end heroically
– Often the artist or the outcast is heroic
• Nationalism
– Nazis and romanticism
21. Kant’s scheme
(simplified and abbreviated)
Noumenal realm
(God, the self, and the Ding an sich;
beyond the senses and reason = non-empirical and non-rational)
_____________________________
Phenomenal realm
(world of experience; known through the reason with the mind’s a priori
transcendental forms (e.g., space and time) and
transcendental categories (e.g., quantity, quality,
and relation, which incl. causality)
22. G. F. W. Hegel: a philosophy for Romantics
• Hegel collapsed Kant’s upper story into Kant’s lower
story.
– The divine (spirit) marches progressively to its ultimate
realization in the realm of the phenomenal world.
– The process involves an ongoing dialectic: a thesis is acted
upon by its antithesis, resulting in a new synthesis.
• This process continues within the continuous unfolding of the
divine within the world; strife and conflict are a part of the divine
unfolding
• It would later be secularized within the economic theory of Karl
Marx
23. Early English Romantic Poets
• The Lake Poets: The language of poetry should be
natural (democratic impulse); utilized folk idioms.
– William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• “I wondered lonely as a cloud”
• “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky; / So
was it when my life began / So is it now I am a man / So be it
when I shall grow old, / Or let me die! / The child is father of
the man” – Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
• With Wordsworth, wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
• Outstanding mind that suffered at one time from opium addition
(overcome by 1815). Believed in the individual and society.
Despised slavery and the neglect of the working poor.
• John Keats (1795-1820)
24. Two radical English poets
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
– Husband of Mary Shelley
– The “Eton atheist.” Against oppression and injustice.
– “Ode to the West Wind”: the poet as “unacknowledged legislator of
the world”
• Likened himself to the wind
– Growing up, his family feared him (proclivity to violence)
– Sexually liberated
– First wife (Harriet) committed suicide
– His second wife, Mary Godwin Shelley, wrote Frankenstein
• Lord Byron (1788-1824; fig. 28.1)
– Like Shelley, overturned certain values
– Rebellious
25. Women Romantic authors
• George Sand (1804-1876):
– Dressed in male attire. Romantic as social activist (1848 uprising)
– Indiana (1832)
– Lélia (1833)
– One-time lover of Chopin, the composer
• The Brontë sisters (Emily, Charlotte, Anne):
– Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Byronic Heathcliff; Gothic
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Overall, no move toward social action
• Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851): Frankenstein, or the
Modern Prometheus (1818).
– Published when she was about 19 years old; classic Gothic novel
– The pursuit of knowledge regardless of cost; compares favorably to
Goethe’s Faust
– Owed much to Wordsworth and Coleridge (Rime of the Ancient
Mariner) for descriptions of nature (OCEL 372).
26. American Transcendentalism
• American literary expression of Romanticism that revolves
around Concord, Mass.
– Influenced by European Romanticism, Swedenborg, Boehme, and
eastern religious literature, as well as Kant and Plato.
– Religion is part of the picture.
– Descendants of the New England puritans who had not given up the
City on a Hill vision, but jettisoned the underlying doctrinal
foundation.
– Nature vs. industrial economy.
– Tremendous influence.
– More devoted to the simple life and nature than the European
Romantics (also less nihilistic).
27. American Transcendentalism
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
– Rejected puritan roots; former Unitarian minister. Considered himself
a poet.
• Went to Europe in 1832, meeting Wordsworth (who influenced him in reverence
for nature), Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle (who became a life-long friend).
• Influenced by Coleridge and Herder, he was a romantic who espoused social
action, including anti-slavery, cessation of the relocation of the Cherokee
nation, and women’s rights.
• Democratic ideals permeated his thinking.
– Believed in unmediated access and apprehension of divinity
(Transcendentalism), and espoused self-emancipation through self-
trust and self-acceptance
– Emersonian individualism stands against social conformity.
– Walden Pond was on his property.
– Writings include Nature (1936), “Self-Reliance,” and the famous
Harvard Divinity School address.
– Circle of friends included Thoreau, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Bronson
Alcott, and Whitman.
28. American Transcendentalism
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):Walden and On the Duty of
Civil Disobedience
– America’s best and best-known prose essayist.
– Described himself as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural
philosopher to boot.” Famous for his “experiment in self-sufficiency”
(OCEL 990).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
– Good friend of Melville. Half-willing follower of Transcendentalists;
questioned Emersonian optimism. Called Melville’s symbolic novel
“Romance.”
• Bronson Alcott: Father of Louisa May Alcott
29. Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
• Influenced by Emerson.
• Volunteered as a hospital worker during the Civil
War.
• Wrote Leaves of Grass (1855), containing the famous
poem “Song of Myself.”
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