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What was the worldview of the Romantics?
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The Romantic worldview emerged as a response to the Enlightenment, which prioritized reason over faith and imagination. Romantics valued mystery, creativity, and the organic connection between individuals and nature, viewing the world as a living work of art. They emphasized subjective experience and individualism, believing in social solidarity through personal expression. This perspective sought to unite subjective and external realities, offering an alternative to the mechanistic, rational approach of the Enlightenment.
To some extent, the Romantics sought to remedy what they saw as the deficiencies of the Enlightenment project. During the Enlightenment, many of the old certainties were turned upside-down, especially in relation to religion, philosophy, and politics, to name but three. For Enlightenment thinkers, reason rather than faith or authority was the universal standard against which everything should be judged. If existing social, religious and political arrangements could not be justified on rational grounds, then they must be replaced by those that could.
The repercussions of the Enlightenment were significant and far-reaching. Some were genuinely shocked at the radical social, intellectual, and political forces unleashed. To many it seemed that much of value had been discarded along with the superstition and the obscurantism. The early Romantics generally accepted the need for this development, but felt that it was necessary to reclaim some of the mystery of the world that had...
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been lost during the Enlightenment.
Reason was important, they felt, but it wasn't the only thing. There was also a place in the world for faith, imagination, enchantment. Contrary to what many Enlightenment thinkers believed, Romantics argued that the world around us wasn't simply a gigantic machine, an object to be studied, manipulated, and controlled for the benefit of humankind. It was a living force in its own right, one that could combine with the creative imagination to produce great works of art. The mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment was replaced by the organic conception of the Romantics. Everything and everyone was linked together as part of a giant whole, not a random collection of discrete atoms as Enlightenment materialism maintained.
The Romantics' worldview was deeply aesthetic. They looked upon the world as an enormous work of art which, in all of its aspects, pointed towards the sublime and the transcendent. Even those Romantics who didn't actually believe in the orthodox God of Judeo-Christian tradition felt that they were a part of something much greater than themselves. In their numerous poems, paintings, symphonies, and plays, Romantic artists sought to convey this imaginative insight, thus providing an alternative to the rational, scientific worldview of the Enlightenment.
The Romantic world view is a complex one. On a certain level, the Romantic thinker believed in a solidarity amongst all human beings. Romantic thinkers write what they do and articulate what they do in order to forge connections with others. Their expression is aimed at a universality, a type of linking with others that reveals the true nature of the world. In their writing, Romantic thinkers do not believe that isolation and alienation is the way of the world or the way of how things should be. Instead, there is an openness in their world view which is inclusive. At the same time, Romanticism is extremely driven by the sense of the individual and subjective. The Romantic world view is dependent on articulating this subjective notion of the good. The individual is more important than all else. In praising the subjective, Romantic thinkers seek to pivot to the world view, one in which there can be unity and a sense of transcendence. This only comes in the form of the subjective, though. This means that the Romantic world view is one in which it highlights the hope of social solidarity and connection through the vaulting of the subjective, or individual experience. It is here in which there is significance for there is something hoped for in terms of something larger than the individual. Yet, it is something in which the subjective is the only means to achieve it. In this, one sees how the Romantic world view requires both subjective and external reality, but has a stronger preference for the former in the hopes of achieving the latter.