Romanticism as a Reaction to the Enlightenment

¶ … European Enlightenment: The Revolution of Romanticism The European Enlightenment has often been described as a resurgence of interest in classical learning and a belief in the value of rationality as a way of explaining the ways in which the world worked. One of the most popular philosophies during the Enlightenment was Deism, which viewed the universe as a kind of a clock that had been set into motion by a divine being but which then operated according to the principles of the universe, not the careful surveillance of God.

Deism and other Enlightenment philosophies had their roots in the scientific revelations of "Galileo, Kepler, and, especially, Newton" which "resulted in a vision of the world that was remarkably orderly and precise in its adherence to universal mathematical laws" (Staloff). This later was extended to political philosophy.

Enlightenment era philosophers such as John Locke maintained that all human beings, regardless of status, had a right to exercise their rationality and rather than an unquestioning belief in the divine right of kings, people had the right to exercise reason in allowing a just sovereign to govern who would not interfere with their rights. Disillusionment with the Enlightenment began to surge given the dramatic failure of the French Revolution to realize its promise of the principles of equality to create a new and more perfect society.

"What started as a revolt against tyranny with the aim to put in place a government created according to the highest principles of enlightened thought turned into a blood bath demonstrating the lowest side of human character" (Carreira). Artists also began to chafe against what they saw as the constraints of the Enlightenment's emphasis on order and rationality. Romantics such as Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats celebrated irrationality and the value of personal, intuitive knowledge versus the empirical and rational.

There was also a profound distrust of science and an idealization of the pastoral and medieval within the Romantic aesthetic.

The witty and satiric works and a fascination with rhetoric and Greek and Roman epics that were noteworthy in the poetry of the Enlightenment-era poets such as Alexander Pope's "Rape of the Lock" were replaced by Romantic verse which emphasized lyricism and personal feeling as seen in poems such as Percy Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark." Percy's wife, Mary Shelley, wrote one of the most famous anti-science novels of this era, Frankenstein, which highlighted humanity's alienation even in the face of scientific progress in the form of the monster.

"The Romantics felt that the Enlightenment notion that the universe was knowable and controllable was naive. The universe was infinite, mysterious and ultimately unknowable" (Carreira). Unlike the medieval era which they often expressed nostalgia for, Romantics celebrated passion, even when passion was misdirected. Many Romantic heroes are in fact antiheroes who meet bad ends but they still exhibit the Romantic qualities of "authenticity, moral integrity and passion" (Carreira). There was also less confidence in Romantic era philosophy about the ability for rational analysis to understand the world.

"Kant in response created a new vision of reality. He rejected the universe of the universal laws that could be discovered and instead.