Romanticism
Romanticism
is a philosophical movement during the Age of Enlightenment which emphasizes emotional
self-awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving society and
bettering the human condition. Like the German Idealism and Kantianism
with which it is usually linked in a philosophical context, Romanticism was
largely centered in Germany during the late 18th and early
19th Century. It stands in opposition to the Rationalism and Empiricism of
the preceding Age of Reason, representing a shift from the objective to
the subjective.
Romanticism
in general was a reaction against the scientific rationalization
of Nature during the Age of Reason, which left little room for the freedom
and creativity of the human spirit, and it stressed strong emotion
as a source of aesthetic experience. It was embodied most strongly in
the visual arts, music, and literature, but it also had a counterpart
in philosophical thought.
Philosophical
Romanticism holds that the universe is a single unified and
interconnected whole, and full of values, tendencies and life,
not merely objective lifeless matter. The Romantic view is that reason,
objectivity and analysis radically falsify reality by breaking it up
into disconnected lifeless entities, and the best way of perceiving reality is
through some subjective feeling or intuition, through which we
participate in the subject of our knowledge, instead of viewing it from the
outside. Nature is an experience, and not an object for manipulation
and study, and, once experienced, the individual becomes in tune with
his feelings and this is what helps him to create moral values.
The roots
of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble
savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought that civilization
fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true
nature and original freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental
Idealism (see the section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly see "things-in-themselves";
we only understand the world through our human point of view, an idea
developed by the American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.
The German
Idealists who followed on from Kant and adapted and expanded his
work with their own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered
Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most important were Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and
(arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most influential
of the German Idealist philosophers, and his idea that each person's individual
consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism)
had far-reaching effects. After his death, however, the Hegelians were split
between the "Old Hegelians" who uncritically accepted Hegel's
Romantic views, and the "Young Hegelians" who wanted to
continue the revolution of ideas using his concept of dialectics.
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