Romanticism Vs. Enlightenment

EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORY Romanticism vs. Enlightenment. BEGIN!!

Joking aside, I'm very confused about the whole thing. From our article, you get the impression that Enlightenment guys are Science Hero types while romantics are Bomb Throwing Anarchist Reactionary Luddites. But then while discussing the topic with other Tropers, Rousseau was suggested as a figure of romanticism, opposite Voltaire. This greatly confused me; in my mind, the two might as well have been best pals, and they were most certainly on the same side.

My view of E vs R is very coloured by my experience of it in Spanish high school: Enlightenment came in the Eighteenth century together with the Bourbon dynasty and was synonymous with democracy, progressive and liberal legislation, social welfare, agricultural and technical innovation, and so on.

Romanticism came in the Nineteenth, was associated with Ferdinand VII and the reactionary movement against anything French-like, including the re-institution of the Inquisition, an obsession with tormented nature, broken ruins, and broken, ruined, tormented people, and extreme fatalism.

From the Article, I get that both terms have different connotations in different countries, and it wouldn't be the first time my Spanish background has led to misunderstandings, so how about we sit down and figure this out together?

I believe that I am the person who inspired this thread. Therefore, to get the conversation started, let me just copy and paste my comment here:

"Spock vs Mc Coy??? I'm talking about Hume vs. Kant. The British Empiricists vs. the German Idealists. Voltaire vs Rousseau (who practically invented progressive education). This was the greatest philosophical debate in history, which is still going on, and likely always will. As you may be aware from previous posts of mine, I tend to side with Kant and Voltaire."

In other words I occupy the center somewhere. Just to be clear, I'm claiming that the TV Tropes page, which discusses R vs. R primarily as a clash of genres (and does seem weighted more toward the Rationalism side) misses the historical importance of the debate between two rival philosophies, which had more to do with whether a civilization based primarily on scientific principles is either possible or desirable.

Oh, and Rousseau clearly considered himself a Romanticist. Just look up his very first public essay "Discourse on the arts and sciences" in which he savages enlightenment society as corrupt and decadent.

Again, I'm perplexed. It doesn't get more enlightened than Kant. The man was pure clarity. Methodical, systematic abstraction. A man of deontology, principles, and deduction.

As for Rousseau... yup, you're right, that's definitely proto-Romantic nonsense, and bears very little relation to reality. Humans are better off in the palaeolithic? The arts and sciences are just a distraction from our servitude? Society corrupts natural human goodness? While I can see where he might have gotten these notions, he's wrong, wrong, wrong.

Life in caves is nasty, brutish, and short. The arts and sciences are a double-edged tool that may well, in their ultimate form, end servitude entirely. Depending on the setup of incentives and deterrents, society can reward people acting on their worst instincts, or channel those into something productive, but the power for evil and good is in every human heart, and living in caves won't remedy that, but living in an intelligently-ordered society can mitigate it enormously.

A Misaimed Fandom, then?

edited 16th Dec '14 2:33:24 AM by TheHandle

Seeing as Romanticism venerates irrationality and anti-intellectualism and promotes Black-and-White Insanity and Democracy Is Bad as well as loving logical fallacies like Appeal to Nature; I'd say romanticists are just worse in any way imaginable.

Political ideologies with romanticist bends tend to be the worst and most moronic as well. Fascism, theocracies, royalists, nationalism, gold standard fetishists and the anti-GMO crowd.

What are the redeeming qualities of romanticism?

I'm guessing you'd count Conservatism in that list as well, even in the careful sense expounded by Edmund Burke? Would you destroy all old history, art, architecture, ideas and music just because it was old, because you thought it irrelevant?

Tradition is important. Humans are irrational creatures, and need a sense of belonging.

edited 16th Dec '14 7:39:47 AM by Greenmantle

They tell more entertaining stories.

No, not all conservatism is romanticist. Some are just cautious and for slow change. Preserving the environment out of necessity isn't romanticist either.

And why should I destroy old stuff for shits and giggles? Claiming that new stuff is inherrently better than old stuff would be the same romanticist mistake as claiming old is inherently better than new.

Just for your information, I actually studied history for a while. I won't be destroying it anytime soon. But there's a difference between knowing history and thinking it was better in the old days. In fact the former is often detrimental to the latter.

edited 16th Dec '14 7:52:50 AM by Antiteilchen

Indeed they are, but tradition can be alienating as well, especially once the purpose is lost or forgotten and it becomes "the right and propah way to do things" or "our way" rather than "we started doing this because of reasons A and B".

That sounds like a strawman attitude. What would be the point of destroying records? On the contrary, the more data is saved, the better. Understanding the past is essential to forming the dream of the future that is to come.

Looking back is fine, as long as we keep walking forward. At the very least, it gives us a sense of perspective and accomplishment. Have you ever climbed up a high mountain?

Certainly destructiveness and unbridled passion make for good conflict.

edited 16th Dec '14 7:50:11 AM by TheHandle

And just because humans are flawed doesn't mean we have to cater to those flaws and enable them further.

What we need to do is acknowledge and accept them, account for them, study them and understand them well, and then harness them for productive uses when possible, and mitigate and avert them when not possible.

I see that it's up to me to defend the Romanticist perspective, even though I may be underqualified for this because I'm really a centrist who thinks humanity couldn't possibly survive without both in balance. Neither Rationalism nor Romanticism could successful as a stand-alone philosophy, but TV Tropes is clearly biased toward the Rationalist side, so let me attempt to provide some balance (which is, by the way, what Kant also set out to do, so I'm following in his footsteps).

First, I'll just admit that that the most extreme Romantic arguments, which usually go something like "The objective universe doesnt really exist so humanity is free to express itself without limits" is a weak argument with little support in the real world. But more moderate Romantic positions are less easily dismissed, it seems to me.

Science isnt bad, wrong or evil, but it is meaningless. That is to say, the objective universe is without any human meaning at all. And meaning, the ability to make a connection between something outside of yourself and your own internal need to express yourself emotionally, is necessary for survival and happiness. In other words, the way to live a life that maximizes your satisfaction, according to Romanticism, is to see the universe literally as a work of art. That's the essence of Romanticism.

Connected with that notion is the belief that people are born "good", and only become bad when they allow external forces to suppress their inner goodness. Those external forces are associated with social institutions, which as they become more powerful inevitably act to suppress individual human freedom of expression. Science is one of those institutions. Romantics understand science not as an intellectual process (that they often have a great deal of respect for) but as a set of organizations and institutions that act to promote the interests of the social establishment. Allow science as an institution to become too powerful, and it too becomes corrupt just as the legal system, the business arena, or the political process does. Society itself must be kept in check, so that individual people can be free.

I offered Rousseau as the quintessential Romantic Philosopher. He developed intellectually after that first essay; after all he's the one from whom we get the idea of a "Social Contract". The "State of Nature" that he held up as an ideal had nothing to do with the paleolithic or any actual period of humanities past- it was an idealized hypothesis of how humans could live if they were not suppressed by social institutions, nor each other's negative ambitions. He also understood that such a state was no longer possible. So in it's place he proposed a society based on a social contract, that is, a society based on the expression of something he called the "General Will". His most disputed concept is his suggestion that it is proper to compel an individual to obey if he pursues an interest different from the common interest as expressed by the General Will. Here's how Rousseau put it: "The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before."

The idea that you can have your social order and your individual freedom without compromising either is a very romantic notion. As I myself once put it here "What we would like to achieve, as Radical Democrats, is to help people work together and collaborate toward common goals more effectively and in greater harmony, without sacrificing any individual's unique interests or potential."

All this was intended to be contrasted with more rationalistic notions, like Utilitarianism, with which this approach is incompatible. In utilitarianism, you sum everyone's needs and wants together into one sum, and adopt the policy that will satisfy the largest number at the highest possible level. When you do this, you must inevitably sacrifice the needs and desires of some minority. In other words, the greatest number are served at the expense of the lessor number, which is anathema to Romanticism. "Human Rights" (another Romantic notion) don't do very well under Utilitarianism.

So, my contention is not that Romanticism is right and Rationalism is wrong, but that both political philosophies have important contributions to make to social policy.

Kant's position, by the way, was to treat Romanticism and Rationalism as independent domains, and neither should interfere with those aspects of life which properly belong to the other (this is the origin of the "Non Overlapping Magisteria" idea popular in the debate between Science and Religion). Politics is one of those areas where they have no choice but to mingle.

So that's my argument. Sorry for the wall of text, but this topic is one of my passions :)

That doesn't sound like 'romanticism'. That sounds like 'the modern liberal consensus'. Smoothing we can all find agreeable. Uncontroversial.

The "humans are born good without social institutions" seems like a very clumsy way of approximating the idea of "lost purposes", which is to say, that big organizations require a constant effort to keep them on-mission, otherwise they lose sight of their goals and become tools of oppression and havens of corruption. Certainly any Rationalist worth their salt is appalled at the state of science as a social process: it is extremely and obviously flawed.

Utilitarianism as "one big, inconsiderate, heartless sum" is a naive view (and yes, I believe the first utilitarians might have been naive, perhaps with a vested interest in justifying why people had to be miserable in workshops so that they and their ilk could enjoy darjeeling tea and suits made of silk): anyone who's got any experience doing that kind of "optimization of one big sum" study knows that there's a lot of subtleties to it, and that it's the algorithm that needs to adjust to the needs of the group and find the most acceptable compromise of everyone's needs, not the other way around. And that's just for optimizing quantifiable stuff: we certainly don't have a comprehensive model of "happiness" yet, and I mean just as in the gross, rough, "report your general state of happiness from one to ten".

edited 16th Dec '14 9:08:44 AM by TheHandle

I think that's the gist of it all, really. I can appreciate the principles laid out by Romanticists such as Wordsworth, Keats and Thoreau. I can also appreciate the principles laid out by Dryden, Pope and Swift.

It's certainly true that both philosophies can and have been misused. For example, Thoreau's assertions of civil disobedience and rugged individualism have been appropriated as knee-jerk anti-regulatory rhetoric and overzealous castle doctrine. I've noticed that a lot of hardcore winner-take-all libertarians identify Thoreau as a major source of inspiration, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. On the other hand, Neo-Classical Enlightenment thinking has been used to justify things like economic policies that hurt racial minorities (redlining, gentrification, apartheid settlements) as well as (strangely enough) sexism against women.

You're going to find bad apples who affix themselves to any philosophy, so it's not something I'd get too hung up about.

EDIT: On a more personal note, I spent one of my semesters taking a course on Neo-Classical Enlightenment literature back-to-back with a Romantic literature course, both with the same professor. It was always a treat to take notes in one hour and then take notes in the next hour and to later compare and contrast the ideas being expressed by the selected authors. Having that immediacy and consecutive input really helped me evaluate the two areas of thought more easily.

edited 16th Dec '14 10:09:53 AM by Aprilla

Oh, that sounds awesome. Are those notes digital, by any chance?

No, sorry. I've got them sitting in a plastic tote with my essays and homework.

"That sounds like 'the modern liberal consensus'."

Of course it does. Historically, that's where the liberal consensus came from, just as Rationalism was one source of the modern European conservative consensus. One of the problems is that Romaticism was in some ways too successful; people only remember the extremes, and have forgotten all the ideas that have been assimilated by mainstream society.

"The "humans are born good without social institutions" seems like a very clumsy way of approximating the idea of "lost purposes"..."

That's totally wrong. The very purpose of modern social institutions (to allow the operation of a more complex society) is itself problematic, since complex modern society is equated with conformity, corruption, and oppression.

Operations Research (or as we call it in the US, Decision Science) is much broader than Utilitarianism. The first is just a much more sophisticated way of modeling any decision algorithm, but it doesnt prescribe any particular outcomes as superior to any other. Utilitarianism is an attempt to arrive at a particular outcome- maximum satisfaction of the most people.

"And that's just for optimizing quantifiable stuff: we certainly don't have a comprehensive model of "happiness" yet" Yes, that's precisely the point.

@Aprilla: That does sound like an awesome class.

So Utilitarianism pretends to "objectivity" "scienciness" but turns out to be a non-answer, on account of us not knowing what happiness is or how it stacks.

Indeed OR is broader, I'm just saying that familiarity with it shows the extreme difficulty of the special case that is the "maximize sum total happiness" problem. If we did figure out a metric for happiness, then Operations Research would be the path/tool towards optimizing it.

"Happiness" is nothing but a signpost. It's a catch-all term for personal happiness, and opportunity, as well as understanding.

It has to be qualified by other factors. Preferrably factors that can be actually measured.

Meh: I vote with Hume. People are fascinating, wonderful... and, they suck. A lot. But, totally worth mixing things up in a bid to understand. Use what works, but don't forget the fact that the unconscious is a thing that also needs to be catered to or the wheels fall off. However dumbass it seems.

You can use the rational to try understanding the irrational. And, the irrational to try kicking the rational out of comfortable grooves that turn into stultifying habits over time.

edited 16th Dec '14 3:36:31 PM by Euodiachloris

Technically utilitarianism just says that outcomes can be measured by some utitiy functions and the the best moral action is the one that maximizes expected utitiy under this good function.

Some text books examples are U=H-1*(suffering) U=Pleasure U=Happyiness-suffering

All of these have big problems regardless of what "happiness" means.

The 3rd could be maximized by engineering happy wire heads.

@Handle/Super Merlin: What do you do if humanity is divided into factions each of which are using criteria for happiness that are inherently incommensurable? In other words, if people manifest needs that are incompatible? "Majority Rules" will result in endless war, because there's a limit to how far you can compromise your emotional needs.

To take just one example, the Chinese criteria for happiness surely includes far more collectivism and less individualism than Americans are prepared to tolerate. I could list such examples endlessly.

Now, lots of people believe that you can inspire people to overcome those differences. But that's not Utilitarianism, that's the Romantic notion of the brotherhood and sisterhood of Man.

It may be that one day we can quantify happiness as a function of neuronal activity or some such, but that's really a chimera. Happiness is not anything that we should be striving for as an inherent goal; rather, it is the probable outcome of positive utility. After all, a gambling addict may find a form of happiness in the pull of the slot machine handle, but few would suggest that this is a desirable way to live one's life.

The Founding Fathers of the United States recognized this: the Declaration of Independence doesn't say that everyone has the right to be happy (despite being oft misquoted as such). It says that people have the right to pursue happiness — that is, to seek out things that may generate happiness, fulfillment, etc. Inherent in this assertion is the belief that hindering individual fulfillment is a wrongness that must be justified.

In other words, conflating the emotional sensation of happiness with the philosophical concept of utility is a serious error — or a deliberate strawman, depending on your angle.

Also, one has to remember that aberrant individuals may find happiness, or at least pleasure, in things that cause significant unhappiness or disutility for others, and society has an interest in restraining or redirecting these individuals. This does not disrupt the basic principle.

edited 17th Dec '14 7:11:07 AM by Fighteer

Well, what's the difference?

Between what things? Utility and happiness? Happiness is a transient emotional state that is largely outside our conscious control. Utility is an expression of the contribution of a particular thing (individual, labor, product, outcome) to an individual's benefit and/or that of society as a whole. Happiness may be a consequence of utility but this is not an axiom.

A child is not happy when you take away her toy and demand that she go to school, but she benefits in the long run from this action.

edited 17th Dec '14 7:16:56 AM by Fighteer

So... "utility" is equivalent to "fulfillment of human values"?