Romanticism developed as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought was based on three basic tenets: rationalism, or the belief that the universe followed rules that man could figure out and a general belief that the intellect could understand the world and make it a better place; empiricism, or the belief that our knowledge of the world comes through our senses; and skepticism, or the belief that truth can only be found through a rigorous questioning of assumptions. The Enlightenment found expression in science through (among others) the rise of modern disciplines like chemistry; in politics, Enlightenment ideals were behind the American and French revolutions.
Romanticism arose in response to a growing disillusionment with Enlightenment thought. In particular, reaction against the French Revolution, which led first to the atrocities of the Terror, and then to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, caused a renewed emphasis on aesthetics over reason. The Romantics rejected the skepticism of English philosophers like Hume, whose radical empiricism eventually led him to question the validity of all knowledge. Instead, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant posited that there is, in fact, an essence to reality that cannot be experienced directly by our senses. This reversal led to the Romantic insistence on the primacy of beauty and art. For the Romantics, nature is known through our aesthetic appreciation of it, as expressed in Keats’ formulation at the conclusion of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” For Keats, Wordsworth, and American Romantics like Emerson, the essential “truth” of things is gotten at through our direct interaction with nature and the cultivation of a kind of poetic appreciation for natural beauty. For Emerson, and even moreso for American poet Walt Whitman, nature becomes explicitly connected to an apprehension of God. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of strong emotions,” and it is that sort of passion that, for the Romantics, provides the greatest insight into the nature of reality.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
How does Romanticism change the dichotomy (the opposition) between Reason / Passion in which Reason must be the dominant and controlling faculty for the human?
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