HUM 3306: History of Ideas

Prof. Bruce Harvey

 

ROMANTIC versus ENLIGHTENMENT:

               Emotional                                         Reasonable and Practical

               Individualistic                                    Public Responsibility

               Revolutionary                                    Conservative

               Loves Solitude & Nature                   Loves Public, Urban Life

               Fantasy/Introspection                         External Reality

               The Particular                                    The Universal

               Subjective Perception                        Objective Science

               Right Brain                                         Left Brain

               Satisfaction of Desire                          Desire Repressed

               Organic                                              Mechanical

               Creative Energy-Power                      Form

               Exotic                                                Mundane

               "Noble Savage"-Outcasts                   Bourgeois Family

               Idealist Philosophy (Kant)                   Materialist-Empirical Philosophy (Locke)       

 

ENLIGHTENMENT OR AGE OF REASON (roughly, the 18th-Century):

 

1) TRIUMPH OF RATIONALITY AND SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE

 

--1687: Newton's Principia Mathematica explains laws of physics.  Nature can be understood rationally and controlled.

--Leads to Deism: religious philosophy that sees nature as a vast mechanism (world like super-complex clock).  Design in nature means there is a creator.  Understand God best, not by reading Revelation (the Bible), but by looking at marvelously ordered cosmos. (Thomas Paine makes this point.) 

--Also leads to use value of nature being emphasized (remember Locke's phrase "rationally and industriously" in respect to land use).

--1717 Robinson Crusoe published : Lockian man, ingeniously transforms island.  Does not see island life as picturesque.

--Drive to understand nature as system: thus knowledge accumulated and organized: 

--Linnaeus in System of Nature (1735) catalogues plants: emphasis on order/classification

--Diderot and other scholars in France = the Encyclopediasts

--Encyclopedia Britannica first published in 1771

--Peale painting, "The Artist in His Museum"

--Historical overall consequence: Science pragmatically applied = technological development = industrial revolution in the late 18th century/1st 1/2 of nineteenth century.

 

2) RISE OF MIDDLE-CLASS AND COMMERCIAL/MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES

 

--Locke emphasizes the centrality of property (and governmental powers that secure property).

--Individual increasingly known in economic terms rather than spiritual terms (jokingly, I said Equiano = emergence of homo economicus).

--Franklin: "a penny saved is a penny earned"--Protestant work ethic.      

--Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations (1776) calls England an "island of shop-keepers."

 

3) RATIONAL FREE-THINKING/SPECULATION ABOUT IMPROVING SOCIAL MECHANISM:

 

--Laws of government, like Newtonian laws of nature, can be understood and rationally implemented.  American Constitution adopted after rational discussion/public debate (Federalist/Anti-Federalist Papers).

--Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding: tabula rasa.  Knowledge gained through sensory input=hence environment/education important.  According to Locke, we are not born with innate ideas or innate corruption/sin.  Locke's ideas puncture the Christian notion of inherited sin, from Adam & Eve's fall.

--Human nature can be perfected if we are in the right social environment.

--Proto-anthropology develops via sea-exploration.  Captain Cook "discovers" Hawai'i; emphasizes "progress" of societies from "savage" to "barbarian" to "civilized," and yet also makes Europeans--Rousseau, who inaugurates the "noble savage" idea--doubt the merits of civilization's complications.

 

 

ROMANTIC REBELLION (1780-1830, with Queen Victorian becoming queen in 1837, ushering in the Victorian era).  The trajectory of Enlightenment is the mainstream and continues into our era: only poets and writers and artists are really rebelling against some of the negative consequences of the Enlightenment.  Romantics tend to be anti-establishment. 

 

1) DETACHED RATIONALITY/SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE SEPARATES US FROM NATURE

--Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German "Idealist" philosopher:  Basic philosophical premise is that we cannot absolutely know external "reality" because it is always shaped, a priori, by the mind's faculties. 

--Nature not just an extrinsic mechanism to be rationally understood/manipulated.

--Rather, nature evokes emotion/ and our emotion may shape and in effect create the landscape.

--Landscape valued over land per se (does Locke or Equiano ever see landscape as beautiful?)

--What is beauty? does it exist in subject or object; or in between?

--Natural/organic process valued over the technology or mechanical artifice.

            --Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818) demonstrates failure of mechanical to imitate nature

            --John Keats says in a letter: "poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree"

 

2) ROMANTIC ARTIST TYPICALLY ALIENATED FROM MIDDLE-CLASS AND MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES

 

--Romantic artist alienated because poetry doesn't sell very well (no longer a patronage system: Locke had a patron).

--Romantic artist tends to be fascinated by

            --his/her own psyche

            --the exotic (the Orient, altered states of consciousness) or the forbidden

            --the heroic (Napoleon)

            --with visionary thinking/ with subconscious processes/dreams.

--Romantic artist celebrates spontaneity over convention or the routine.

--Romantic artist likely to value spiritual intuitions over dogmas of established religion.

--Romantic artist likely to be radically egalitarian.

--Keep in mind that all of society is not engaged in the “Romantic Rebellion”. It is mostly an aesthetic/philosophical counter-culture, with much variation in whether the writers/artists were accepted/appreciated in their own age or not and the extent of revolt in their personal lives (Shelley and Byron wildly pushed beyond the edge; Wordsworth became the consummate Victorian gentleman in his later years, quite stodgy).

 

3) INDIVIDUAL (ENERGY/PERCEPTION/FREEDOM) MORE IMPORTANT THAN SOCIAL SELF OR SOCIAL STABILITY

 

--Subjective, unique experience celebrated over public or objective values (Rousseau prides himself on being "different").

--"Noble savage"/ rural or "primitive" cultures valued for simplicity and naturalness.

--Urban life deadens perception: walk in a field, not in a street (See Wordsworth's "Getting & Spending").

--Society corrupts: children and childlike innocence celebrated.

--Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" notes the outcast hermit/vagrant, but supplies no economic-political explanation, instead integrating the hermit's wood fire into the general aesthetic harmonized landscape.

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "We are born free, but everywhere are in chains."