As Marx and Engels perceived it, they became units of production: cogs in an impersonal productive machine. People and nature were objectified, and reduced to commodity status. This was regarded as undesirable and leading to the degradation of the humans. It was also a way out of the fumes of the growing industrial centres for the new industrial rich.
Inspired by the works of romantic authors and poets such as Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly, they hopped on the newly developed railways and travelled to the Lake District. Spoliation of a pure natural landscape was regarded as undesirable and destructive.
These ideas are still with us and led the way for modern day conservation and environmentalism as well as outdoor recreation and appreciation for natural and historical heritage. Source: Wikimedia Commons. This image is probably one of the most famous romantic paintings. Additionally, the romantic community as a whole is prior to the individual citizens i.
To properly function and achieve the ethical aim of sociality, the links between the political members should be organic: the members should not be connected to one another by an externally imposed social contract, but by natural love, affection and attraction.
Unsurprisingly, it is through poetry that the familial-like bonds, required for the ideal state, should be developed over and above the unit of the biological family. While the state as a whole should be prior to its parts in this sense , the law of such a state should not be imposed on its citizens from outside, but be self -determined.
Individual autonomy should be supported by promoting the direct and active participation of all individuals in the political process. The organic unity of the state, then, implies reciprocity: the parts are dependent on and are posterior to the whole, while the whole, in respect of its essential self-determination, also depends on and is posterior to its parts. When genuine, art is characterized exactly by the kind of holistic, organic, but egalitarian and pluralistic unity that must characterize the ideal community:.
Many works that are praised for the beauty of their coherence have less unity than a motley heap of ideas simply animated by the ghost of a spirit and aiming at a single purpose. An organic state is called for also because the mechanistic structure of the modern state is responsible for the decline of religion.
Both in their early and late phases, the romantics believed that poetry was the best way for inspiring spirituality and religiosity. Schleiermacher confirms and develops this connection when suggesting that poets are:. They place the heavenly and eternal before them as an object of pleasure and unity, as the sole inexhaustible source of that toward which their poetry is directed.
They strive…to ignite a love for the Highest…This is the higher priesthood that proclaims the inner meaning of all spiritual secrets and speaks from the kingdom of God.
Schleiermacher, On Religion [translation modified]. Schlegel, PF: In such an ideal republic everyone must be an artist who, by means of the poetic spirit of love, is related to the other citizens as artists relate to one another.
But the romantic transition from a more liberal framework to a more conservative one is explained primarily by their reaction to the terror of the French revolution. Though many of the romantics kept allegiance to the revolution until fairly late , the acknowledgement of its failures and the dangers involved in any revolutionary act led them to modify, though not to renounce, their republican ideal. Even during this stage of their development, the romantics believed that the republic offered the best political structure.
But, while still involving democratic elements, a proper republic, they argued should also involve aristocratic and monarchical elements because the educated should rule over the uneducated:. A perfect republic would have to be not just democratic but aristocratic and monarchic at the same time: to legislate justly and freely, the educated would have to outweigh and guide the uneducated, and everything would have to be organized into an absolute whole.
Rather than opposed to the original romantic ideal, this late view is a natural outgrowth of the earlier ideal since it does not only maintain the early republicanism, but also continues, through modification, the early romantic emphasis on Bildung as a necessary condition for a proper republic. Since even during this later period, the romantic political ideal consisted of a republican, holistic community grounded in love, art and aesthetics still played significant ethical and political roles in the late romantic phase.
Even later on in their careers, the romantics insisted that art and aesthetics were crucial models and resources for the pursuit of ethical and political ends. Aesthetics is capable of re enchanting nature insofar as it brings out a different conception of nature as organic rather than mechanic.
Like romantic poetry, nature should be viewed as an organic and spontaneous whole. We have fallen out with nature, and what was once as we believe One is now in conflict with itself, and mastery and servitude alternate on both sides. It often seems to us as if the world were everything and we nothing, but often too as if we were everything and the world nothing.
Not only has modernity divided man from himself by enforcing the duality between reason and sensibility and severed the individual from his natural social relations section 4 , but it also alienated man from nature. Through the lens of modern science, nature was regarded as an inanimate, mechanistic domain of dead and meaningless matter that is composed of separate atoms and thoroughly determined by efficient causality.
The troublesome consequences of this approach to nature are multiple. In the epistemological and metaphysical domains, varieties of skeptical doubts loom large behind the modern approach to nature. If modern science is right then the relation between nature and normativity is unclear.
But if nature cannot provide rational norms, then how can we account for and justify our empirical claims to knowledge human experience? On the flipside of this epistemological worry is a metaphysical concern about the nature of the subject. For the subject, as the source of meaning, is seen as only that—a dematerialized source of meaning, devoid not only of a body, as Descartes emphasized, but, if Kant is right, of any substantiality at all see Bernstein Third among the consequences is the threat to any awe-inspiring stance towards the world.
Not only can the divinity once attributed to nature no longer be found therein, but modern science was also seen as posing a challenge to any attempt at a secular alternative to religion. Seen as fully accessible to the calculative part of the human mind, nature becomes transparent and devoid of any mystery or human-transcending power. Are we left without a source of wonder, awe or reverence in our modern world?
The romantics understood this as calculative reason when it is isolated from non-calculative reason, sensibility and imagination. This is crucial because, if the romantics are to retrieve the lost unity of nature itself and our lost unity with nature, they must propose a new scientific methodology, or, what comes to the same thing, a new approach to nature. It should be no surprise that this holistic approach to nature—the new romantic science—is, in essence, poetic.
Anyone who finds in infinite nature nothing but one whole, one complete poem, in every word, every syllable of which the harmony of the whole rings out and nothing destroys it, has won the highest prize of all. Ritter, Fragmente 2: Why synthetize these seemingly opposed philosophical projects—a form of idealism with realism, indeterminism with determinism, and dualism with monism?
Briefly, in Fichte, the romantics found a philosopher that took the Kantian insight about the absolute value of freedom a step further, and in Spinoza, one who recognized the genuine monistic structure of the universe, where the mental in the form of reason and subjectivity, the seats of freedom is the flipped side of the physical in the form of matter and objectivity. If nature itself is both physical and mental, if it has a soul or reason and a body, then, it differs from human beings only in degree, not in kind.
But this is only the metaphysical presupposition behind the romantic conception of nature. Their understanding of nature, not only as monistic but also as an organic whole that is self-forming and self-generating—in their terms, as a creative, living force—is inspired by what, according to them, Kant only started to point to, but failed fully to develop in the third Critique since he restricted it to a regulative and heuristic conception: namely, the conception of organic nature.
Thinking about nature as Spirit, different from the human merely in degree, already presupposes a holistic conception of nature, where the whole is prior to the parts.
But insofar as nature is also an all encompassing organism, then just as its parts are dependent on it for their existence and intelligibility , so it depends on its parts for its existence as the organism that it is: independently of its parts, an organism could not sustain its particular organization, i.
In an organism, the parts are the reciprocal cause and effect of one another and of the organism as a whole. But an organism is also self -organizing and self -forming. While the organization of artifacts is imposed on them from outside by their producers, the particular organization and so the life form of any organism is self-produced. Consequently, to view nature as an organism is to view it dynamically—not as a dead matter, but as self-forming and self-generating.
Indeed, for the romantics, nature is one living force, whose different parts—not only self-conscious philosophers, creative artists, animals, plants, and minerals, but also kinds of matter—are different stages of its organization. From moss, in which the trace of organization is hardly visible, to the noble Form [ Gestalt ] which seems to have shed the chains of matter, the one and same drive within rules, a drive that strives to work according to one and the same ideal of purposiveness, strives to express ad infinitum one and the same archetype [ Urbild ], the pure form of our Spirit.
Beauty in nature and art is a key for this organic and dynamic conception of nature for multiple reasons. First, the holistic and unifying character of poetry is suitable not only for the reformed scientific methodology that fuses together reason, imagination and feeling, but also for unraveling analogies and unities that are usually hidden from the bare eye, for example, the unity between kinds of matter and self-conscious human beings as different stages in the organization of the same life force.
Second, natural beauties and artworks inspire an interest in natural organization and life by their analogy with organisms, or as the romantics often put it, by being themselves organic in nature.
The transcendental poetry of the future could be called organic. When it is invented it will be seen that all true poets up to now made poetry organically without knowing it. Novalis, Logological Fragments : I, To begin with, the analogy concerns their structure or unity. Both have holistic unities, where the parts and the whole are reciprocally interdependent. Artworks and natural beauties are so structured since 1 their beauty as a whole depends on the existence and the exact organization of their parts for, if, say, any of the specific shapes, hues, or composition of a painting were to change, the painting as a whole may not be beautiful any longer , and 2 their parts are recognized as what they are as beauty-making parts, or parts of a beautiful object only in light of the whole so that, for example, a mere shade of white may be beautiful only in light of the beauty of the painting to which it contributes as a whole, but not necessarily beautiful on its own, or when it figures in any other object.
Kant claimed that the main difference between the holistic unity of organisms and the holistic unities of artworks and natural beauties is the difference between a causal or existential unity and what he called a formal unity. In organic life, the reciprocal interdependence between parts and wholes is causal and existential in the sense that it is life-sustaining.
Kant thought that in aesthetics, the reciprocal interdependence is formal, rather than causal or existential, in the sense that it does not explain the existence of the objects at stake, but their beauty.
While, for example, a painting might continue to exist as a painting even if some of its parts changed say, if its composition, shapes, or hues changed , the beauty of this painting is unlikely to survive such a change. In this case, it is the beauty of the whole painting that depends on its parts, and it is the beauty of the parts, rather than their existence, that depends on the beauty of the whole: for were the painting as a whole not beautiful, its parts would not be recognized as what they are, namely, beauty-making parts.
The romantics seemed to diverge from Kant on that matter. For them, great poetry is materially and not merely formally organic:. The innate impulse of this work [ Wilhelm Meister ], so organized and organizing down to its finest detail to form a whole.
No break is accidental or insignificant;…everything is at the same time both means and end. Schlegel, WM: — This means that the romantics took the work of art to be analogous to organisms in yet a stronger sense—not only in terms of its holistic unity, but also in terms of its life—its self- organization and self-judgment. In romantic terms, every work has its own self-judgment.
Seen as such, the artwork is not a mere artifact, but a quasi -organism in the sense that it organizes and regulates itself. And like other organic products of nature, the work too has, as it were, a life of its own, even though it is not self- organizing in the strict sense:.
Just as a child is only a thing which wants to become a human being, so a poem is only a product of nature which wants to become a work of art. It is the holistic unity and life in the aesthetic domain that draws our attention to organisms and inspires us to seek the organic structure of nature as a whole. Third, following Kant, the romantics believed that the beauty of nature reveals the purposiveness without a purpose of nature as a whole.
It inspires and guides us in seeing nature as purposively organized—organized as if according to a specific purpose—even though we cannot attribute this purposive structure to any will, creator, or any end-governed activity:. That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic, and therefore, the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love.
While this view is to be found in the third Critique , the romantics went a few steps further than Kant: first, they considered purposiveness, teleological structure and life real features of nature, rather than regulative principles for approaching nature. Second, they took these features to indicate that nature is different from self-conscious, creative human beings only in degree, but not in kind: like human beings, nature is end-governed.
It is beauty, above all, that inspires this realization. The more we properly attend to beauty and art the more capable we would be of seeing nature and humanity as different aspects of a single, unified phenomenon:. Actually criticism …that doctrine which in the study of nature directs our attention to ourselves…and in the study of ourselves directs it to the outside world, to outer observations and experiments—is…the most fruitful of all indications. It allows us to sense nature, or the outside world , like a human being.
Novalis, General Draft : Not only did modern science portray nature as a brute domain of mechanism, and thus devoid of any awe-inspiring power, but it also rendered it completely transparent to the human mind, and thus lacking in the kind of mystery and magic that may inspire awe in a secular world.
Changing our attitude towards nature and inspiring awe for it requires that we recover a sense of mystery and magic in nature, and, indeed, in everything ordinary, in everything that we have come to take for granted. Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualitative raising into higher power…. By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinity to finite, I romanticize them.
By its non-ordinary use of language, attention to details and evoking power, poetry brings out in vivid colors what we are usually blind to, even if it is, literally, the closest and most familiar to us.
Poetry has the power to make the most familiar new, refreshing, and thus, other than familiar—different and even mysterious. Like Novalis, Wordsworth is one of the first proponents of romanticizing in this sense. Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
While romantic irony is the basis for a way of life that is centered on humility, it also paves the way for awe and reverence for it suggests that there is much beyond our comprehension, much that remains mysterious, incomprehensible, greater than our capacities and possibly infinite rather than finite like us.
There is much around us that merits awe. A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels, All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. With far deeper zeal Of holier love. Through the romantic lens, then, nature becomes alive and a locus of Spirit.
Rather than an alien force, nature speaks to us as we speak to it and to each other. Nature is a temple where living columns Sometimes let confused words come out; Man walks through these forests of symbols Which observe him with a familiar gaze.
This is liberating and re-enchanting, but it also puts certain demands on us, for example, the demands to love nature as we love other human beings:. Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature!
Have I not worshipped thee with such a love As never mortal man before displayed? Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation, And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage?
As eccentric as the romantic call to poeticize nature and science may initially seem, it is arguably of relevance today. The organic and re-enchanted conception of nature did not only anticipate some currents in the modern ecological movement, but it also contains resources for further developments in contemporary environmental philosophy and philosophy of science.
While there are very interesting and well-established connections between romantic aesthetics and modernism see Abrams , Frye , Cavell , this section focuses on the attempt to draw a link between the former and postmodernism, a link whose ground is significantly weaker.
In recent decades, a large number of romantic scholars have argued that romanticism, in general, and the romantic primacy of aesthetics, in particular, is a precursor of the fundamental outlook of postmodernist and poststructuralist views see, for example, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy , Bowie , Bowman , and Gasche Some lines in romanticism—skepticism about foundationalist philosophy and system-building, the emphasis on human creation, language, and the role of historicism and hermeneutics—are indeed related to certain strands in postmodernism.
But reading romantic aesthetics as proto-postmodernist is limited for a host of reasons. Second, in spite of the romantic stress on the fragmentary nature of human experience embodied in their choice of the aphoristic style, which is emphasized by their post-modernist readers , the romantics never gave up the striving after unity and wholeness.
Art was not meant as a replacement for unity, but exactly as the best way to strive after and approximate unity in our modern and fragmentary condition. For the philosopher…art is supreme, for it opens to him the holiest of holies, where that which is separated in nature and history, and which can never be united either in life and action or in thought, burns as though in a single flame in eternal and primordial unity. Schelling, System of Transcendental Philosophy , , in Heath For such a desire is anathema to most post-modernist thinkers, who resist and shun the possibility and desirability of any absolute reality.
Fortunately, this interpretation does not force itself on us since there are many other charitable and historically, textually and philosophically well-grounded readings of the proclamations just mentioned and of the romantic primacy of the aesthetics. Many of these readings were proposed in this entry under the umbrella of the formal approach to romantic aesthetics. Little known during his lifetime, Blake's works were rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the 19 th century, and as more artists continued to rediscover him in the 20 th century, he has become one of the most influential of the Romantic artists.
This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench.
In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher. While Gros' teacher Jaques Louis David also portrayed Napoleon in all of his mythic glory, Gros, along with some of David's other students, injected a Baroque dynamism into their compositions to create a more dramatic effect than David's Neoclassicism offered.
Gros' depiction of suffering and death, combined with heroism and patriotism within an exotic locale became hallmarks of many Romantic paintings. The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick.
Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned. The work was exhibited at the Salon de Paris, its appearance timed to occur between Napoleon's proclaiming himself as emperor and his coronation. Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein. The Art Story. Ways to support us.
Romanticism Started: c. Summary of Romanticism At the end of the 18 th century and well into the 19 th , Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment. Later Developments and Legacy.
Key Artists Francisco Goya. Quick view Read more. Share: Twitter Facebook Pinterest Email. Romanticism in literature Romanticism in English literature started in the late eighteenth century, with the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romanticism in art Nature was also a source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. Romanticism in music The Romantic Movement in music originated in Beethoven, whose later works drew upon and developed the classical styles of Mozart and Haydn.
Romanticism as a mind-set Romanticism may be best understood not as a movement, but as a mind-set. Our Romantic places and collections. Visit Wordsworth House. William Wordsworth once owned this semi-open woodland which is known for its fine displays of bluebells and daffodils. National Trust Images. Visit Dora's Field. Visit Coleridge Cottage. Visit Flatford. Visit Cherryburn.
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