Dialogue about Romanticism

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Romanticism is indeed a descendant of protestantism for it is characterized by an excessive freedom of the individual. The Romantic is the 18th and 19th century revolutionary and reactionary. He is the Rousseauian collectivist, worshiping the possibilities of primitive man, of human rights, and of tolerance. He is the reactionary aristocrat, spurred to emotion by ancient ruins, tradition, and the possibility of metaphysical certainty.

That would explain all the Protestant humanists (an outlook generally opposed to Romanticism) on the one hand and all the collectivist, nationalist, and populist strains of Romanticism on the other. Seriously, as the book aruges above, romanticism, being a type of consciousness, couldn't be said to be a descendant of Protestantism and its individualism any more than it could be said to be a descendant of Catholicism and its sensualism. Romanticism as a child of Luther is far too facile.

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Neither the revolutionary nor the reactionary Romantic can ever have what he pursues.

As the saying goes, satisfaction is the death of desire. The romantic does not so much want what he pursues, or rather, he wants the “heroic” experience of yearning or striving towards something. It is similar, after a fashion, to Taoism in the east, where acquisition and attainment is “against the way of the Tao” but instead manifests in the “Sturm und Drang” manner of the European soul where one achieves “transcendence” not by freeing himself from attachment and desire but pursuing the unattainable with gusto.

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The Romantic is the one who revolves around himself as his own priest, hoping to make everything external to him an occasion for emotional experience.

All events and objects already contain subjective, emotional experience. Man experiences subjectivity in simply perceiving anything. Romanticism is an acknowledgement and celebration of this, and a call to experience with passion as above. Treating yourself as your own priest is simply removing the spiritual middle-man.

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Kierkegaard's aesthetes in Either/Or - both A and Johannes the Seducer - are archetypal manifestations of the Romantic. Faced with the despair inherent in a disinterested, scientific world view, they recoil into subjectivism, treating being as simply an occasion.

It would be more accurate to say that the romantics in general reject Being for Becoming, a la Heraclitus (see comparison with Taoism also again), instead of treating them as somehow failing to acknowledge Being properly. No one would understand Heraclitus or Lao Tzu if one adopted the attitude that they were reactionaries who disavowed Being somehow and going from there. This attitude is also too easy. Rather, the (German at least) romantics recognize the cosmos as flux and fire, and so ideologies are subject to the vulgarities of vicissitude as anything else, and so we should rather hold value to be in phenomena and experience itself.

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The actual skeptics of the enlightenment (and Hamann seems to be one of them) were realists. They easily detected the unrecognized metaphysical assumptions of the enlightenment - the latent subjectivism in the monumental abstractions of liberal politics.

Ah, a screed against liberalism, that's what we're on about here. . .

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Romantics certainly attached themselves to such reactions to the enlightenment, but they also attached themselves to the enlightenment (Rousseau). Thus, a definition of the Romantic must be divorced from either the counter-enlightenment, or the enlightenment; the definition must include subjective occasionalism. The Romantic attaches himself to numerous ideologies, positions, and attitudes for they are all equally valid in his eyes - they are only occasions for subjective play.

I disagree. It is not a question of all ideologies being equally valid. When one is playing, the question of validity has no meaning period. Children do not play for results but from an enthusiasm for life and desire to learn of life, and that is the essence of romanticism and hence its tendency towards vitalism, not a simplistic reduction to “subjective occasionalism” and a link to modern liberal politics, which I could just as easily argue (granted, I part with the author of the piece above here) from classicism and/or humanism.

As was stated by me though, holding value to be in subjective experience itself does not necessarily link to all interpretations, ideologies, attitudes, etc. being equal. The Romantics would not so consistently argue amongst themselves if they treated all the various of their own traditions as equally valid. Going from positions only being valuable if they are pursued with passion to all being identical is a non-sequitur.

I see your post as agenda-driven psychologizing here and it ultimately misses the point in my opinion.