To be sure, the Romantic temperament shared much with its Enlightenment opposite, and their complex interplay could be said to constitute the modern sensibility. Both tended to be “humanist” in their high estimate of man’s powers and their concern with man’s perspective on the universe. Both looked to this world and nature as the setting of the human drama and the focus for human endeavor. Both were attentive to the phenomena of human consciousness and the nature of its hidden structures. Both found in classical culture a rich source of insight and values. Both were profoundly Promethean—in their rebellion against oppressive traditional structures, in their celebration of individual human genius, in their restless quest for human freedom, fulfillment, and bold exploration of the new.
But in each of these commonalities there were deep differences. In contrast with the spirit of the Enlightenment, the Romantic vision perceived the world as a unitary organism rather than an atomistic machine, exalted the ineffability of inspiration rather than the enlightenment of reason, and affirmed the inexhaustible drama of human life rather than the calm predictability of static abstractions. Whereas the Enlightenment temperament’s high valuation of man rested on his unequaled rational intellect and its power to comprehend and exploit the laws of nature, the Romantic valued man rather for his imaginative and spiritual aspirations, his emotional depths, his artistic creativity and powers of individual self-expression and self-creation. The genius celebrated by the Enlightenment temperament was a Newton, a Franklin, or an Einstein, while for the Romantic it was a Goethe, a Beethoven, or a Nietzsche. On both sides, the autonomous world-changing will and mind of modern man were apotheosized, bringing the cult of the hero, the history of great men and their deeds. Indeed, on many fronts at once, the Western ego gained substance and impetus, whether in the titanic self-assertions of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the new self-awareness of Rousseau and Byron, the advancing scientific clarities of Lavoisier and Laplace, the incipient feminist confidence of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand, or the many-sided richness of human experience and creativity realized by Goethe. But for the two temperaments, Enlightenment and Romantic, the character and aims of that autonomous self were sharply distinct. Bacon’s utopia was not Blake’s.
Whereas for the Enlightenment-scientific mind, nature was an object for observation and experiment, theoretical explanation and technological manipulation, for the Romantic, by contrast, nature was a live vessel of spirit, a translucent source of mystery and revelation. The scientist too wished to penetrate nature and reveal its mystery; but the method and goal of that penetration, and the character of that revelation, were different from the Romantic’s. Rather than the distanced object of sober analysis, nature for the Romantic was that which the human soul strove to enter and unite with in an overcoming of the existential dichotomy, and the revelation he sought was not of mechanical law but of spiritual essence. While the scientist sought truth that was testable and concretely effective, the Romantic sought truth that was inwardly transfiguring and sublime. Thus Wordsworth saw nature as ensouled with spiritual meaning and beauty, while Schiller considered the impersonal mechanisms of science a poor substitute for the Greek deities who had animated nature for the ancients. Both modern temperaments, scientific and Romantic, looked to present human experience and the natural world for fulfillment, but what the Romantic sought and found in those domains reflected a radically different universe from that of the scientist.
Equally notable was the difference in their attitudes toward the phenomena of human awareness. The Enlightenment-scientific examination of the mind was empirical and epistemological, gradually becoming focused on sense perception, cognitive development, and quantitative behavioral studies. By contrast, beginning with Rousseau’s Confessions—the modern Romantic sequel and response to the ancient Catholic Confessions of Augustine—the Romantics’ interest in human consciousness was fueled by a newly intense sense of self-awareness and a focus on the complex nature of the human self, and was comparatively unconstrained by the limits of the scientific perspective. Emotion and imagination, rather than reason and perception, were of prime importance. New concern arose not only with the exalted and noble but with the contraries and darkness in the human soul, with evil, death, the demonic, and the irrational. Generally ignored in the optimistic, clarified light of rational science, these themes now inspired the works of Blake and Novalis, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Hawthorne and Melville, Poe and Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. With Romanticism, the modern eye was turned ever more inward to discern the shadows of existence. To explore the mysteries of interiority, of moods and motives, love and desire, fear and angst, inner conflicts and contradictions, memories and dreams, to experience extreme and incommunicable states of consciousness, to be inwardly grasped in epiphanic ecstasy, to plumb the depths of the human soul, to bring the unconscious into consciousness, to know the infinite—such were the imperatives of Romantic introspection.
In contrast to the scientist’s quest for general laws defining a single objective reality, the Romantic gloried in the unbounded multiplicity of realities pressing in on his subjective awareness, and in the complex uniqueness of each object, event, and experience presented to his soul. Truth discovered in divergent perspectives was valued above the monolithic and univocal ideal of empirical science. For the Romantic, reality was symbolically resonant through and through, and was therefore fundamentally multivalent, a constantly changing complex of many-leveled meanings, even of opposites. For the Enlightenment-scientific mind, by contrast, reality was concrete and literal, univocal. Against this view, the Romantic pointed out that even the reality constructed and perceived by the scientific mind was at bottom symbolic, but its symbols were exclusively of a specific kind—mechanistic, material, impersonal—and were interpreted by scientists as uniquely valid. From the Romantic’s perspective, the conventional scientific view of reality was essentially a jealous “monotheism” in new clothes, wanting no other gods before it. The literalism of the modern scientific mind was a form of idolatry—myopically worshiping an opaque object as the only reality, rather than recognizing that object as a mystery, a vessel of deeper realities.
The search for a unifying order and meaning remained central for the Romantics, but in that task the limits of human knowledge were radically expanded beyond those imposed by the Enlightenment, and a larger range of human faculties were considered necessary for genuine cognition. Imagination and feeling now joined sense and reason to render a deeper understanding of the world. In his morphological studies, Goethe sought to experience the archetypal form or essence of each plant and animal by saturating the objective perception with the content of his own imagination. Schelling proclaimed that “to philosophize about nature means to create nature,” for nature’s true meaning could be produced only from within man’s “intellectual imagination.” The historians Vico and Herder took seriously modes of cognition such as the mythological that had informed the consciousness of other eras, and believed that the historian’s task was to feel himself into the spirit of other ages through an empathic “historical sense,” to understand from within by means of the sympathetic imagination. Hegel discerned overarching rational and spiritual meaning in the vast data of history by means of a “logic of passion.” Coleridge wrote that “deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling,” and that the artist’s “esemplastic power of the imagination” gave to the human mind the ability to grasp things in their entirety, to create and shape coherent wholes out of disparate elements. Wordsworth recognized the numinous vision of the natural child as possessing a deeper insight into reality than did the opaque, disenchanted perspective of the conventional adult. And Blake recognized “Imagination” as the sacred vessel of the infinite, the emancipator of the bound human mind, the means by which eternal realities came to expression and consciousness. Indeed, for many Romantics, imagination was in some sense the whole of existence, the true ground of being, the medium of all realities. It both per
vaded consciousness and constituted the world.
Like imagination, the will too was considered a necessary element in the attainment of human knowledge, a force preceding knowledge and freely impelling man and universe forward to new levels of creativity and awareness. Here it was Nietzsche who, in a uniquely powerful synthesis of titanic Romantic spiritual passion and the most radical strain of Enlightenment skepticism, set forth the paradigmatic Romantic position concerning the relation of will to truth and knowledge: The rational intellect could not achieve objective truth; nor could any perspective ever be independent of interpretation of some sort. “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—‘There are only facts’—I would say: No, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.” This was true not just for matters of morality, but for physics too, which was but a specific perspective and exegesis to suit specific needs and desires. Every way of viewing the world was the product of hidden impulses. Every philosophy revealed not an impersonal system of thought, but an involuntary confession. Unconscious instinct, psychological motivation, linguistic distortion, cultural prejudice—these affected and defined every human perspective. Against the long Western tradition of asserting the unique validity of one system of concepts and beliefs—whether religious, scientific, or philosophical—that alone mirrors the Truth, Nietzsche set forth a radical perspectivism: There exists a plurality of perspectives through which the world can be interpreted, and there is no authoritative independent criterion according to which one system can be determined to be more valid than others.
But if the world was radically indeterminate, it could be shaped by a heroic act of will to affirm life and bring forth its triumphant fulfillment: The highest truth, Nietzsche prophesied, was being born within man through the self-creating power of the will. All of man’s striving for knowledge and power would fulfill itself in a new being who would incarnate the living meaning of the universe. But to achieve this birth, man would have to grow beyond himself so fundamentally that his present limited self would be destroyed: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.” For man was a way to new dawns and new horizons far beyond the compass of the present age. And the birth of this new being was not a life-impoverishing otherworldly fantasy to be believed by ecclesiastical decree, but was a vivid, tangible reality to be created, here and now, through the heroic self-overcoming of the great individual. Such an individual had to transform life into a work of art, within which he could forge his character, embrace his fate, and recreate himself as heroic protagonist of the world epic. He had to invent himself anew, imagine himself into being. He had to will into existence a fictive drama into which he could enter and live, imposing a redemptive order on the chaos of a meaningless universe without God. Then the God who had long been projected to the beyond could be born within the human soul. Then man could dance godlike in the eternal flux, free of all foundations and all bounds, beyond every metaphysical constraint. Truth was not something one proved or disproved; it was something one created. In Nietzsche, as in Romanticism generally, the philosopher became poet: a world conception was judged not in terms of abstract rationality or factual verification, but as an expression of courage, beauty, and imaginative power.
Thus the Romantic sensibility advanced new standards and values for human knowledge. Through the self-creating power of imagination and will, the human being could body forth unborn realities, penetrate invisible but altogether real levels of being, comprehend nature and history and the cosmos’s unfolding—indeed, participate in the very process of creation. A new epistemology was claimed both possible and necessary. And so the limits of knowledge established by Locke, Hume, and the positivist side of Kant were boldly defied by the Idealists and Romantics of the post-Enlightenment.
The two temperaments held similarly divergent attitudes toward the two traditional pillars of Western culture, Greco-Roman classicism and the Judaeo-Christian religion. As the Enlightenment-scientific mind developed during the modern era, it increasingly employed the thought of the classical era only to the extent that it provided useful starting points for further investigation and theory construction, beyond which ancient metaphysical and scientific schemes were generally perceived as deficient and of mainly historical interest. By contrast, classical culture for the Romantic was still a living realm of Olympian images and personalities, its artistic creations from Homer and Aeschylus onward still exalted models, its imaginative and spiritual insights still pregnant with newly discoverable meaning. Both viewpoints encouraged the recovery of the classical past, but for different motives—one for the sake of accurate historical knowledge, the other to revivify that past, to enable it to live again in the creative spirit of modern man.
It was along such lines that their respective attitudes toward tradition in general differed. While the rational scientific mind viewed tradition in more skeptical terms, valuable only to the extent of providing continuity and structure for the growth of knowledge, the Romantic, although no less rebellious in character and often considerably more so, found in tradition something more mysterious—a repository of collective wisdom, the accrued insights of a people’s soul, a living, changing force with its own autonomy and evolutionary dynamism. Such wisdom was not merely the empirical and technical knowledge of the scientific mind, but spoke of deeper realities, hidden to common sense and mechanical experiment. New appreciation thus arose not only for the classical Greco-Roman past, but for the spiritually resonant Middle Ages, for Gothic architecture and folk literature, for the ancient and the primitive, for the Oriental and exotic, for esoteric traditions of all sorts, for the Volksgeist of the Germanic and other peoples, for the Dionysian wellsprings of culture. A new awareness of the “Renaissance now emerged, followed in subsequent years by a new consciousness of the age of Romanticism itself. By contrast, such matters concerned the scientific mind not out of empathie appreciation or inspiration, but by virtue of their historical and anthropological interest. In the Enlightenment-scientific vision, modern civilization and its values stood unequivocally above all its predecessors, while Romanticism maintained a profound ambivalence toward modernity in its many expressions. As time passed, ambivalence turned into antagonism as Romantics radically questioned the West’s belief in its own “progress,” in its civilization’s innate superiority, in rational man’s inevitable fulfillment.
The issue of religion posed the same contrasts. Both streams were in part predicated on the Reformation, for individualism and personal freedom of belief were common to both, yet each developed different aspects of the Reformation legacy. The spirit of the Enlightenment rebelled against the strictures of ignorance and superstition imposed by theological dogma and belief in the supernatural, in favor of straightforward empirical and rational knowledge and a liberating embrace of the secular. Religion was either rejected altogether or maintained only in the form of a rationalist deism or natural law ethics. The Romantic’s attitude toward religion was more complex. His rebellion too was against the hierarchies and institutions of traditional religion, against enforced belief, moralistic constriction, and hollow ritual. Yet religion itself was a central and enduring element in the Romantic spirit, whether it took the form of transcendental idealism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, pantheism, mystery religion, nature worship, Christian mysticism, Hindu-Buddhist mysticism, Swedenborgianism, theosophy, esotericism, religious existentialism, neopaganism, shamanism, Mother Goddess worship, evolutionary human divinization, or some syncretism of these. Here the “sacred” remained a viable category, whereas in science it had long since disappeared. God was rediscovered in Romanticism—not the God of orthodoxy or deism but of mysticism, pantheism, and immanent cosmic process; not the juridical monotheistic patriarch but a divinity more ineffably mysterious, pluralistic, all-embracing, neutral or even feminine in gender; not an absentee creator but a numinous creative force within nature and within the human spirit.
Moreover, art itself—mu
sic, literature, drama, painting—now took on a virtually religious status for the Romantic sensibility. In a world made mechanical and soulless by science, the pursuit of beauty for its own sake assumed extraordinary psychological importance. Art provided a unique point of conjunction between the natural and the spiritual, and for many modern intellectuals disillusioned with orthodox religion, art became the chief spiritual outlet and medium. The problem of grace, focused on the enigma of inspiration, now seemed of more vital concern to painters, composers, and writers than to theologians. The artistic enterprise was elevated to an exalted spiritual role, whether as poetic epiphany or aesthetic rapture, as divine afflatus or revelation of eternal realities, as creative quest, imaginative discipline, devotion to the Muses, existential imperative, or liberating transcendence from the world of suffering. The most secular of moderns could yet worship the artistic imagination, hold sacred the humanistic tradition of art and culture. The creative masters of the past became the saints and prophets of that culture, the critics and essayists its high priests. In art, the disenchanted modern psyche could yet find a ground for meaning and value, a hallowed context for its spiritual yearnings, a world open to profundity and mystery.
The artistic and literary culture also presented the modern mind with virtually an alternative, if more complex and variable, world picture to that of science. The cultural power of, for example, the novel in reflecting and shaping human experience—from Rabelais, Cervantes, and Fielding, through Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and on to Mann, Hesse, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka—constituted a constant and often unassimilable counterpoint to the power of the dominant scientific world conception. Having lost belief in the theological and mythological master plots of earlier eras, the literate culture of the modern West turned its instinctive hunger for cosmic coherence, for existential order, to the narrative plots of imaginative fiction. Through the artist’s ability to give new contour and significance to experience, in the mystical crucible of aesthetic transfiguration, a new reality could be made—“a rival creation” in Henry James’s words. Here in the novel, as in theater and poetry and the other arts, was expressed a concern with the phenomena of consciousness as such, as well as with the qualitative details of the outer world, so that artistic realism could (again in James’s words) “survey the whole field.” Here in the realms of art and literature was pursued with penetrating rigor and nuance that broad phenomenology of human experience that was also entering into formal philosophy itself through William James and Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger. Rather than conducting experimental analysis of an objectified world, this tradition focused its attention on “being” itself, on the lived world of human experience, on its unceasing ambiguity, its spontaneity and autonomy, its uncontainable dimensions, its ever-deepening complexity.
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