Romanticism Context:

Killing the Old Monsters and Building the New

Alternative Titles: "Why We Camp" or "What's Up With Wordsworth and Sheep?"

Rousseau plants the seeds of Romanticism in the middle through the late 18th century, when the greatest minds were almost universally investing themselves in Enlightenment perspectives.

The success of Rousseau's "counter-Enlightenment" vision can partially be explained by Rousseau's own rhetorical genius: he presented his ideas in relatively well-reasoned, logical "Enlightenment" style arguments, and then he spread his philosophy more broadly through his popular novels, memoirs and educational guidebooks.  We still apply his political, psychological and educational principles in part because, quite simply, they make sense.  The question we're interested in, though, is why they make sense to us, since it is clear that different ideas make sense to different peoples through different times.

The seeds of radically new ideas only take hold and and become popular when the soil is receptive to their growth, and while Rousseau deserves a great deal of credit for essentially "inventing" Romanticism, we  need to understand why, at about the turn of the 19th Century, Europe and North America suddenly became so eager to cultivate Rousseau-ean Romanticism.  Understanding this process will also help us understand where and why Romanticism continues to either flourish or fade in our contemporary culture -- or even within our individual lives.

One explanation for the spread of Romanticism is simply that it is right, valid, true; perhaps it's true that an overly rational world is a dangerous one, and compassion is a natural instinct necessary to balance our also inherent drive to survive through competition and reason.

Another explanation is that, right or wrong, Romanticism is comforting; regardless of its objective "truth", perhaps mankind either needs or clings to irrational, emotional, spiritual "thought" because it makes us feel good.  Science can often save our lives and make us more comfortable, but it cannot address our larger existential or emotional questions.  So regardless of their factuality, Romantic ideals make us feel better. To put it bluntly, not everyone wants to see the hard truths science provides us with, and we all yearn for a time when we could assume instincts and feelings led to Truth. 

Another explanation is that it's much easier to think about one's feelings, and it takes an immense amount of effort to learn about science.  It's easy to read Frankenstein or watch Avatar or listen to The Beatles and think/feel "science is bad and all you need is love, love, love," while it's hard to understand the intricate principles of genetics or calculus or physics.

The historical argument, however, is that the Enlightenment simply didn't -- and perhaps never can -- deliver all it promised, and by the turn of the century most could see that like any powerful tool, extreme rationality and scientific thinking presented as many dangers as benefits, and these dangers needed to be held in check by counter ideals.

In addition to giving us the foundation of our constitutional democracies, it was as true then as today that the Enlightenment /did immediately deliver/ /increased technological control /over the natural world.  The Enlightenment gave us, and continues to give us, The Industrial Revolution: the application of science to the material world, and here we find the most obvious explanation of why Western Civilization turned to Romanticism.

What objective, scientific rationality gave us, then, was the ability to see that mankind was not really capable of being trusted to think objectively and rationally, or that mankind was cunning enough to apply reason as readily to destruction as to creation, or, perhaps more fittingly, to create those things that now had the power to utterly destroy that which we most hoped to save.

All of the above lead to the Romantic Reaction to Enlightenment Values

The solution was a return to nature and, most importantly, to "man's natural goodness" or what Rousseau defines as "pitíe": compassion.  Love.

See: Frankenstein, Enlightenment and Romanticism:  Major Themes and Conflicts