The Romantic Movement's Philosophy

Does anyone here like Romanticism as a movement?

The Romantic Rebellion was the push against the Enlightenment. It was saying that science and reason wasn’t the final word on Truth, that there’s more to us than just the appearance of matter. It stood for freedom, creative genius (emotional intuition). It was in the time of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the industrial revolution, and Kant’s Copernicus revolution.

Kant is key, because his rebuttal to Hume, that there are a priori powers of the mind that organize thought and experience, the pure intuitions of space and time, showed there was something behind the curtains of the physical world. Yet, there was this world of phenomenon, and a world of noumenon, but he didn’t have a way to break from one barrier to the next into the noumenal realm. German idealism after that tackles it tooth and claw. I think it’s Hegel who applies the categories of the understanding to all of reality, and that’s him trying to break the noumenal realm, Schiller, another romantic said that “man is never so authentically himself as when at play.” This idea of play was essential to romanticism, and this might be that noumenal essential self for mankind.

That play is what we do when we are most free.

Rousseau was getting at this when he started the Social Contract with “Man is born free but everywhere in chains.” What was it like to be natural man, unfettered from society and science? This natural state is when he’d be free, and perhaps goes along with the idea of play.

I also think that the Romantics might have been the first modern depth psychologists, with Frankenstien, Faust, art of fuseli and Goya, Blake’s works, and Coleridge’s Rhime of the Ancient Marinere.

I think Nietzsche picked up on these works and was able to express this more philosophically, with his own flavor, still very different from analytic philosophy we get from ordinary philoophers, Nietzsche is kind of atmospheric after all…

Does anyone want to talk about ROmanticism, in any dimension?

I wrote 2 romantic works, and I now researching to put together a romantic anthology, so I’d like to express my ideas and keep them fresh and organic as they come. I’d love to debate romantic ideas and art! Please pay the devil advocate, or I will.

Romantic philosophers: (arguable!) Kant and Rouasseau begin to lay the ground work, Goethe, Most of the German Idealists like Schelling, Schiller, Hegel. These are the thinkers, though not the artists if you like any artists we can talk about them too!

You’ve actually brought me around to appreciating Kant.

Schopenhauer was the most romantic I feel. Nietzsche is of course deeply romantic as well, his love of Carmen above all music is quite fanatic, Wagner as his earlier example is so romanticist that it borders on the pathetic, but his own writing is of a much deeper romanticism, all his sentences are cries of the heart. What could be more romantic than writing with blood.
Also, supposedly he got his Will to Power idea when he took a walk in a thunderstorm and saw the goat being slaughtered on a hilltop.

German radio is still very romantic. Austrian radio even more so. Its like they are stuck in the 19th century because they have learned quite well that things were better then.

The English are not quaint of character enough to be actually Romantic, because all citizens have a duty to be vigilant and present in the commonwealth. This is not so on the continent, men are content without political will, they put their energies in engineering curiosities of staggering complexity and frightening depth just for the sake of being present and doing something vis a vis the Earth. There is less gain to be prospected on in terms of politics or even economy itself - craft is what guarantees most the presence of meaning and sustenance. This is very romantic too, but without the idealism. And this is how I feel about Nietzsche, his thinking is pure craft. It is just really sound, an engine of thought that far surpasses the purposes of mere development, it exhibits the virtue of thought for its own sake, which gives for the sort of experience that the sound of an engine gives that is built not just for practical purposes but for the sake of engineering itself, like the thing in itself is the will to power because thats how thought is really fit. This is where thought becomes a form of music.

Can I ask questions?

I came across this site:
philosophybasics.com/moveme … icism.html

Not sure it’s a reliable source but I’ll assume it is.

Here’s a quote:

I’d like to know what “the universe is a single unified and interconnected whole” means.

Also, how does reason, objectivity and analysis radically falsify reality by breaking it up into disconnected lifeless entities? What does it mean to break reality into disconnected lifeless entities?

The continuum is at the crux of it. How can a progressively continuous developmental evolution take account of the break between what qualifies as the imperceptible jump/gap which exists within it’s own estimation of what has come to be partially differentiated fed back systems of thought?

The idea of it can no longer be perceived, sensed, as a continuum, dice the breakup into the very smallest idea/form/matter, ( Russell called it sense data and fell) .

The god particle , a search, they cost trillions, has not yet discovered it, but 'it ’ has to exist, the must assume, since then without it it can not make any sense, it all.

The idea of it as it comes the closest remains the only credible reason for its beginning, which really never began, so:

It it really never began , then it must be a necessary and eternal part of everything.

Which is equally inconceivable.Life is within an idiom of the Romantic, even within the shadows that contain an unseen light.

The blind wise ones, that lurk there know, that they can see with their ears, , the darkness within an eternal underground remains the only proof to those, whose claim of not seeing usually destroys their faith of the light without which the reason within looses all credibility.

Cogito ergo Sum, they are compelled to sing in unity, as the must retract all claims to modernity and retreat into the middle earth , unwittingly , relentlessly.

Even if, they find other habitable planets trillions of miles away, sometime in the immeasurable envelopes of their reality.

They will still be us, thread the maps and the traces the markers , they are always there.All they ever worry about is their image.

Dude the OP jus described Romanticism as what commenced with Kant.

How are you gonna quote some silly shit like that as a response?

One tip Magnus. NEVVVVVVVVVUURRRR
use anything other than your own first hand reading of philosophers to determine what a philosopher says or thinks.

Either you read Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, or you did not. If not you know nothing about them. If so, you can maybe talk sensibly with some other person who’s read them.

That’s what the website says too:

From the original post (emphasis mine):

I asked a question. He’s free to answer with “No, that’s not the position of Romanticism” or “I don’t know what that means”. No pressure (from my side, at least.)

I have no interest in reading Kant.

I haven’t read any Schopenhauer, but I hear his theory on aesthetics is still wide read, no? Is there anything you remember about his aesthetic theory?

How does the will to power come to be realized in a thunderstorm where a goat is being slaughtered on a hilltop? As I undersand the will to power, it was like schzopenhausers will to live, but Nietzsche’s will to power is greater, stronger, speaks to human impulses to dominate and take pleasure in it. Do I understand it incorrectly?

I think I will do a close reading of Schopenhauer’s aesethtic theory now that you mention him…

When see the word Romanticism I think of poets rather than philosophers
Shelley and Keats and Byron as opposed to Kant and Rousseau and Goethe

But I know little about either for there is much to learn and so little time to learn it in so do please carry on
I have Kants Critique Of Pure Reason but not yet read it and of the other two I know virtually nothing at all

I take Nietzsche is one of your main influences? =)

English Romanticism was a huge swing for the movement, but less philosophical than German Romanticism of course.

But on a whole, I think most people aren’t romantics. Romantics are like lonely wanderers who feel as though they belong nowhere in society. Blake was an Englishman and when he moved to the city he lived next to a flourmill. That mill was a horrible reminder of the dignity lost in man, for he was reduced to a cog in a machine, little else, where he worked long days and came home tired, wash, rinse, repeat. He looked at the children who were short enough to be chimney sweepers too, who gave their lives away so those in the city could have fires. They died eary deaths. He wrote poems about them too.

What do you mean Nietzsche is “pure craft”? the virtue of thought for its own sake, you say.

The will to power is the thing in itself you say? Now that’s deep! I like that a lot. But I think we’re many natured. Power doesn’t necessarily come into art, and Nietzsche saw that the right type of life, the life od dignity, was one where one was also in an aesthetic realm, no?

Do you think the will to power divorces Nietzache from the Romantic movement?

The “universe is a single unified and interconnected whole” means pantheism. It’s related to Spinoza’s view of pantheism. Pantheism states that God is Nature and Nature is God. Other Romantics believe in Panentheism. the “en” means that nature is IN God, that there is more to god than just nature. Monotheism, traditionally means that god and nature are two separate entities.

Your second question, is that objectiveity, is based on the science of Francis Bacon and Newton. Science just sees the appearance of things. Take Newton’s theory of light. He states that lights are wave lengths, different colors have different wavelengths. Science measures, and weights, and dissects things. and in this case, we can measure the wavelengths.

But what about the actual experience of the redness of red! That qualia of red we can’t see with the scientific eye. We must liberate ourselves from the scienfic eye because science isn’t on page two yet when it comes to telling us about reality. What about the experience of beauty? What about free will? The freedom of the will was central to the romantic movement. Let me give you a thought experiment, take a brain, expand it to the size of a building. Stand in that buiding and youll see mostly fat protein and water, which translates into axons, dendrites and the synapse betwixt them. This checmically stuff is made of stuff form the periodic table, which can be reduced to atoms and neutrons, and quarks and gluons. Nowhere in this do we see freedom. We see cause and effect. We don’t see ideas, motives, desires, perceptions, feelings. We see the appearance of matter. We the the extrinsic nature of reality–but what about the intrinsic aspect to nature? We experience, subjectively, the intrinsic aspect of nature, and it’s consciousness. And this is what the romantics are getting at, they take their consciousness, and apply it to the cosmos!

In Kantian terms, they take the categories of the understandings and expand it to the universe, and this is the “absolute”, if we deify it, then it’s god as nature.

This is a jump, but maybe we’re all a part of god, but we have amnesia, like Socrates said, because we’re so confused by the flotsam and jetsam of mere materiality! We’re bombarded with perceptions from birth, and our entire life we have to sort through them and find groundings, and purpose, and connection, and maybe realize what we truly are, and that’s philosophy and arts job.

And you’re right! Because sometimes we must liberate ourselves from science, reason, and philosophy to get to the noumenal, to get to real reality. Reality might be beyond our reason, so how do we get to it? There was this celebration of the creative genius, which has the power of emotional intuition. Nietzsche talked about how are emotiosn have ancient wisdom, and if we follow these emotions, and create with the free play of ideas, and feelings within us, that’s what the romantics can do, that’s what creates Frankenstin, donjuan, Goethe’s Faust, and this gets into depth psychology now, because we’re tapping into the world behind the appearrances and mapping out our souls, and the romantics were the first modern depth psychologist following the Greek tragedies.

By the way, In Goethe’s Faust, Faust is a Pantheist.

Let me quote when Gretchen asks Faust if he doesn’t believe in God:

Ah, one of the best parts of the saga. Faust as the Romantic priest. Goethe read Spinoza but the Spinoza god was too rational. Faust embodies God as a powerful emotional experience.

Thanks for the answer.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what pantheism truly stands for ):

What does it mean that God is Nature?

As I understand it, the word “god” refers to a living being (most commonly resembling humans) having power over nature and whose actions can be influenced by human behavior.

Typically, gods control things that cannot be directly controlled by humans e.g. weather. In order for humans to control such things, they must influence (e.g. appease) gods (or God, if we’re talking about monotheistic religions.)

What does “God is Nature” mean then?

In fact, is this how pantheists use the word?

For if they do, it means that pantheism is a contradictory concept. Schopenhauer said something to that effect:

I would say that color is caused by electromagnetic waves, not that any given color (e.g. red) is an electromagnetic wave of certain wavelength. They are most definitely two different, albeit causally related, things.

Generally speaking, beauty is a positive feeling that is caused by how someone (or something) visually appears.

Science can be used to study the relation between things that cause such feelings (e.g. women) and feelings themselves (e.g. more/less physically attractive.)

Science can also be used to study the relation between such feelings (e.g. more/less attractive) and one’s subsequent actions (e.g. pursuing a woman / ignoring her) as well as long-term consequences of such actions (e.g. many descendants / few descendants.)

It’s a controversial idea but given a person and their situation science can even be used to figure out what is objectively beautiful (as opposed to merely subjectively beautiful) for them i.e. what they SHOULD be perceiving as beautiful.

From this, one can quite easily deduce that I completely oppose Schopenhauer’s philosophy of aesthetics.

And with that I’ll finish this post right here and right now and continue it at a later date. The subject of freedom is too big to fit it inside this post.

Nietzache? Lol Very well hidden pun there.

But, no I don’t think so. I just followed through the logic you proposed from Kant to N.

N’s specialty was drawing ultimate consequences. But that follows from Romanticism as you did define it earlier.

I don’t think the Romantic art period was that great, though it’s Works were expressive and emoted… just not always to my tastes, but the poets/writers and composers were…

Some Romance verse…

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Romance composers… my favourites

Frédéric Chopin
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Carl Gottfried Loewe
Fanny Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Robert Schumann
Clara Schumann
Johannes Brahms
Richard Strauss
Hanns Eisler