Irrationalism vs. Enlightenment: Romanticism and Its Critics

Irrationalists and the Romantic Reaction

Thomas Carlyle and his friend Mazzini were among the "irrationalists" who opposed the Enlightenment and believed men needed a "new religion" (Stromberg 50) to guide them toward future progress. The Napoleonic Wars had upset the order that the Age of Enlightenment had cultivated — essentially a Protestant takeover throughout Europe in which the Protestant ethos sat at the heart. The backlash against this Puritanism, however, was the Romantic Era, which pushed in the opposite direction from the "science" of the Enlightened Protestants. It elevated passion, intuition, spirit, nationalism, history, the arts, nostalgia, poetry, and the humanities. As Stromberg notes, the "irrationalists" and their followers "made art the chief avenue to truth" (Stromberg 148).

Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, they believed that art held the mirror up to nature and told man who and what he really was. The men of Enlightenment science were negligent with this mirror — refusing to look at it, suffering from idealistic dreams and Utopian visions. Many Romantics suffered from this as well, while others held a more realistic view and produced gothic works, such as the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife, Mary. Stromberg describes the "irrationalists" as "postscientific" — men like Friedrich Nietzsche whose philosophy was born out of a poetic fancy rooted in Romanticism yet decoupled from the medieval scholasticism that had truly set the standard of reason centuries earlier. Nietzsche embodied the spirit, in a way, of Dostoevsky's Underground Man — possessing all of the animosity towards the artificial, superficial world of the Enlightenment, yet none of the Christian virtue that Dostoevsky's later heroes recognized as the only possible, rational antidote to the philosophes.

Political Backlash: Metternich and Burke

There was also a political reaction, as shown by men like Klemens von Metternich, who wrote "The Odious Ideas of the Philosophes," attacking the French philosophes and their "false systems" and "fatal errors" embedded in their rationalistic doctrine (Perry 164). Metternich called their aims "detestable," their goal "all the more odious as it was pursued without regard to results, simply abandoning themselves to the one feeling of hatred of God and of His immutable moral laws" (Perry 164). Thus, on one hand, "science" had reigned supreme under the Enlightenment, while on the other, there arose a desire to see a restoration of order rooted in medieval morality. The French Revolution was a major reason for this push toward restoration, as it revealed the ugly Reign of Terror lurking just below the surface of the Enlightenment — with its prideful certainty regarding how man could be "corrected," and the blood that would flow when he resisted. The Enlightenment fed directly into the brutal totalitarianism of the French Revolution, thereby alienating men of intellectual caliber who understood both the heights to which man could rise and the depths to which he could sink.

Edmund Burke was another who criticized the developments in France, seeing the Revolution as an ill-conceived plot to overthrow everything good and sacred in that country. "The nature of man is intricate," argued Burke; "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs" (Perry 163). Burke's was a "rational" response to the Revolution, however, and would not be categorized as an "irrationalist." He stood for the societal order that still existed in England and was not a revolutionary himself.

Marx, Darwin, and the Extension of Enlightenment Materialism

Others, like Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, did advocate revolutionary changes to the old order — and in one sense did not so much challenge Enlightenment ideas as push them to their logical conclusions. Marx saw no sense in "reform" and so advocated a "working class revolution" in which the laboring class would overthrow the bourgeoisie and destroy the ideology of capitalism (Perry 133). Yet Marx himself had no ideology with which to suitably replace capitalism — only communism, another philosophy rooted in materialism, as though materialistic answers were the only way to solve mankind's societal problems and inequalities. If one system did not work, another surely would — it was all in ironing out the mechanics. The problem was that Marx did not consider human nature at all. Humans at the top of a communistic system could still be just as corrupt as those at the top of a capitalistic one. Inequality and injustice would still flourish.

What, then, was the answer to man's corrupt side? Darwin proposed that "all life on earth had descended from earlier living forms; that human beings had evolved from lower, nonhuman species" (Perry 190). This was essentially the type of thought that Metternich had attacked as "odious" — and it certainly undermined whatever religious principle still existed in the West.

Conclusion: The Enlightenment and Its Legacy

In conclusion, the Enlightenment produced various responses in the West: in Paris, there was a bloody revolution, followed by the Napoleonic Wars as the general attempted to institute his own order; this was followed by a renewed spirit of nationalism and a nostalgia for the old ways. This in turn was combated by the same Enlightenment spirit that refused to die. Thus, everyone was an irrationalist and a rationalist at the same time, as each tried to piece together the mystery of man without acknowledging the instruction that had been provided in the medieval era. If a new religion was needed, as Carlyle asserted, the question arose — why? Were there not already enough new religions in the West?

Rather, what lay at the heart of the Enlightenment Age and caused all the trouble was a brooding rejection of the Old World religion, overseen by the Roman Church, which had itself suffered from a terrible corruption among the clergy. The result was a more terrible blowback — the Protestant Reformation, which became the root of the Age of Enlightenment, the cause of the Modern Age, and the source of its lurking dependence upon nihilism.

Works Cited

Perry, Marvin. Sources of the Western Tradition, Volume II, 9th Edition. Wadsworth, 2014.

Stromberg, Roland. European Intellectual History Since 1789. Prentice Hall, 1994.