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April 16, 2007
So this is where the entrenched view that the Romantics were anti-enlightenment came from--Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.According to this review by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert. Isaiah Berlin says that Romanticism represented not only a transformation of values, but a rupture with the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and objectivity. Millán-Zaibert states:
Berlin’s lectures perpetuate the myth that Romanticism is basically an anti-Enlightenment movement, it must be so because it is an anti-rational movement, and, as we all know, the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason, and any movement that renounces reason would also renounce the Enlightenment.....Berlin continues with his insistence that to be romantic was to be against reason, to embrace the irrational desires of humans rather than the rational explanations of the scientists ... The roots of Romanticism are those of irrationalism, anti-rationalism, unconscious drives, the dark forces of human nature ....Berlin portrays the Romantics as a group of thinkers lost in swells of passion and a will guided by nothing more than the indulgences and excesses of the individual creative spirit, thinkers bent on a path of the destruction of reason and science.
This view was deeply held by analytic philosophers, where rationality is associates with the theoretical, the scientific, the deductive and the certain; romanticism with narrative, rhetoric, the historically situated and the emotions. Romanticism makes the shift to aesthetic reason and the ethical in the nineteenth century.
Millán-Zaibert states that of all of the features presented in Berlin’s portrait of Romanticism, it is the passionate embrace of the self-creating will that is pivotal for the development of what Berlin claims were the two prominent consequences of Romanticism: existentialism and fascism. According to Berlin, existentialism is rooted in the turn toward the inward aspects of human life. This shift, argues Berlin, could not have taken place without the transformation of values carried out by the Romantics. While the Romantics assault reason, they also clear a space for a deeper look at the inward aspects of human life. Fascism joins the romantic clan "because of the notion of the unpredictable will either of a man or of a group, which forges forward in some fashion that is impossible to organize, impossible to predict, impossible to rationalize" .
Simplifying this we can say that f the heartbeat of philosophy is the separation of appearance from reality, and if the lifeblood of art is interrogation of the world of appearances and philosophjy is concerned with reality, then philosophy will approach art with the severest mistrust - either denying the legitimacy of art's adherence to mere appearings or, turning art against itself, showing that the appearances point to a reality separate from themselves after all.
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