Social Studies II--Romanticism

Romanticism

Beginning with the late -18th to the mid -19th century, new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revulsion against established values (social order and religion). Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the orders, they favored the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them).
   Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
   The German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel first used the term 'Romanticism' to label a wider cultural movement. For the Schlegel brothers, it was a product of Christianity. The culture of the Middle Ages created a Romantic sensibility which differed from the Classical. Christian culture dealt with a struggle between the heavenly perfection and the human experience of inadequacy and guilt. This sense of struggle, and ever-present dark forces was allegedly present in Medieval culture.
   While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. 


In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, musicians, political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. This movement is typically characterized by its reaction against the Enlightenment; while the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the Romantics demonstrated elements of knowledge through intuition. A precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism were objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without the emergence of any great measure of consensus.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. Perhaps the most instructive and succinct definition comes from French symbolist poet, Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."

Some modernist writers argue that Romanticism represents an aspect of the Counter-Enlightenment, a negatively charged phrase used to label movements or ideas seen by them as counter to the rationality and objectivity inherent in the Enlightenment, and promoting emotionalism, superstition and instability.

Generally, Romanticism can be understood as a pursuit for the value of beauty on the part of humans because they have the faculty of emotion. Of course, humans also have two other faculties: Intellect and will, which pursue the values of truth and goodness, respectively. But when intellect (reason) is emphasized one-sidedly as in the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and when will is stressed very much as in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant around the end of the eighteenth century, human beings naturally react with their faculty of emotion as in Romanticism.

Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that ran from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature. It elevated folk art, language, and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on usage and custom.

Romanticism arose as a reaction against the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment. It drew upon the French Revolution's rejection of aristocratic social and political norms. It was also influenced by the theory of evolution and uniformitarianism, which argued that "the past is the key to the present." Thus some Romantics looked back nostalgically to the sensibility of the Middle Ages and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in the medieval.

The ideals of the French Revolution influenced the Romantic movement in other ways. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society, and legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.

The flaw in the Enlightenment mind, represented by the moral philosophy of Kant with its overemphasis on intellect (reason) and will, was its disregard of the faculty of emotion which is so central to human life. Romanticism was the inevitable reaction to Enlightenment Rationalism. The artistic and literary works of the Romantic movement have lasting appeal, because the human faculty of emotion runs stronger and deeper than the intellect or the [[will].