Enlightenment vs Romanticism: Key Differences and Kant’s Dual Legacy

The Enlightenment and Romanticism represent two significant philosophical currents, often understood as distinct "moods" or Stimmung in German. These two movements, while often in tension, also intermingle and shape much of subsequent philosophical thought.

The Enlightenment Mood: Progress, Reason, and Order

The Enlightenment is characterized by an optimistic and progressive outlook. Key tenets include:

• Progressive Time: A belief in continuous forward movement towards better things, driven by increasing knowledge.
• Human-Centered Reason: Humans are special due to their capacity for reason. This is a highly humanist movement, prioritizing human beings over other creatures.
• Natural Rights: Humans possess inherent rights because they are rational beings, distinguishing them from animals.
• Rational Order: Enlightenment thinkers, despite their differences, shared a belief in the possibility of establishing a rational order and understanding of the world.
• Scientific Model: Human life, including science, love, art, politics, and social behavior, can be understood through the lens of the natural sciences, particularly Newtonian physics. Empirical observation, classification, and calculation are central to advancing knowledge.
• Optimism and Comprehensibility: The world is fundamentally comprehensible, even if not fully understood yet. All questions are believed to be answerable, and objective truth is discoverable. This fosters an optimistic, calm, and orderly mood.
• Harmony of Interests: A belief that increased knowledge can lead to a world where individual and collective rights are reconciled, and good things can coexist.
• Reason Leads to Virtue: An implicit assumption that rational beings will naturally desire to behave virtuously.
• Liberalism: This philosophical current, emerging from Enlightenment thought, emphasizes individual rights, civil liberties, free trade, government by consent, and the abolition of serfdom and censorship. It champions human dignity and natural rights based on reason. The word "reason" itself holds a transcendent aura within Enlightenment philosophy.

Romanticism: Rebellion Against Rationality

Romanticism emerged as a revolt against the Enlightenment mood, often termed the "counter-Enlightenment." Its illustrative genres are poetry and plays, in contrast to the Enlightenment's social contract theories and encyclopedias.

• Excess and Emotion: Romanticism embraces the excessive and emotions that cannot be rationalized. Emil Cioran's quote about the Balkans, where "one is simply excessive," captures this spirit.
• Disenchantment and Emotional Unsatisfaction: While the Enlightenment brought a sense of disenchantment (the world losing its magical quality), Romanticism found this emotionally unsatisfying.
• Key Romantic Concepts: Passion, beauty, longing, creation, and will are central to Romantic thought.
• Rejection of Enlightenment Principles:
  • Rejects the hard sciences as the sole model for understanding.
  • Challenges rationalism as an unquestioned virtue.
  • Disputes the notion that all questions can be answered or that all virtues are compatible.
  • Questions the harmonization of interests.
• Individual Soul and Creation: Emphasizes the preciousness of the individual soul, often in conflict with others. Truth is not discovered externally but produced internally through an act of creation.
• Nature and Darkness: While the Enlightenment is associated with light, Romanticism embraces darkness, bad weather, and the wildness of nature, often idealizing forests and provincial settings.
• Rousseau as a Transitional Figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau embodies elements of both movements. His political theories (e.g., The Social Contract) are Enlightenment, but his autobiographical writings (Confessions) and his idealization of nature and nostalgia for a pre-social state are distinctly Romantic. His concept of "nostalgia" as a longing for a past that never truly existed is a key Romantic theme.
• Becoming vs. Being: If the Enlightenment focuses on understanding "how things are" (being), Romanticism emphasizes "what we can become" (becoming). This concept of self-creation and being "under-determined" is crucial.
• Authenticity: A core Romantic theme, derived from Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. Authenticity involves being true to oneself, often requiring a retreat from a society that fosters vanity and inauthenticity. Society, with its politeness and competition, is seen as corrupting.
• Passion over Reason: Romanticism posits that the essence of humanity might contain more passion than reason, placing these two in tension.

Kant's Dual Legacy: Enlightenment and Romanticism

Immanuel Kant is a pivotal figure, influencing both movements:

• Enlightenment Voice: Kant's essay "What Is Enlightenment?" provides a definitive slogan: Sapere Aude ("Dare to know" or "Have the courage to use your own reason"). This emphasizes intellectual autonomy and the exit from self-imposed immaturity.
• Critique of Pure Reason: This work explores the limits of human reason, not pessimistically, but to define what can and cannot be known. Kant proposes a compromise between realism and idealism: the "thing-in-itself" (Ding-an-sich) exists independently of our minds, but we can only access reality as it conforms to the structures of our consciousness (e.g., time, space, causality). This is his "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy.
• Moral Philosophy and the Will: Romantics draw heavily from Kant's moral philosophy.
  • Free Will: Morality requires free will, which, though unprovable, must be posited.
  • Moral Duty and Intentions: Moral actions stem from a sense of moral duty, not mere inclination. The "categorical imperative" (acting only on principles that could be universalized) is a test for moral action. Intentions, rather than consequences, are paramount in moral evaluation.
  • Human Dignity: Free will, alongside reason, confers human dignity. Kant famously states that human beings should always be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means. Anything with dignity is beyond price.
  • Primacy of the Will: Romantics seize upon Kant's emphasis on the will, transforming it into an absolute value.

Romanticism's Embrace of Will and Creation

Romanticism takes Kant's concept of will and expands it:

• Volo Ergo Sum: Replacing Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) with "Volo ergo sum" (I will/desire, therefore I am), Romantics ground subjectivity in desire and will, not just cognition.
• Existential Imperative to Create: The will drives an imperative to act, to create, and to become. Truth is not found but created, with art, not science, as the model.
• Sincerity and Ideals: Sincerity and acting on one's ideals are paramount, even if it leads to irrational or tragic consequences. The purity of heart and the refusal to betray one's ideals are central.
• Emotion and Intensity: Emotions should be direct and authentic, often leading to violence or a longing for intensity rather than peace or harmony.
• Irreducible Singularity: Each individual soul is unique and precious, defying scientific classification.
• The Sublime: Romanticism values the sublime—that which is too beautiful or profound to be fully expressed in language, often associated with agony and despair.
• Expressivism: The moral imperative to express authentic feelings, a "Sehnsucht" or mystical yearning, is a virtue in itself.
• Nationalism: Emerging from Romanticism, nationalism posits that nations, like individuals, possess irreducible souls. Influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder, it emphasizes language, land, and a deep human longing for belonging, rejecting Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in favor of organic communities with traditional roots.

Consequences and Legacy

Romanticism, while offering a powerful critique of Enlightenment rationalism, also carries potential for disastrous consequences due to its fetishization of motive over consequence.

• Alter Ego of Enlightenment: Romanticism serves as an alter ego to the Enlightenment, leaving a legacy of radical subjectivity and eternal torment.
• Successors: Its influence extends to Nietzsche (post-Romantic thinker), Cioran (irrationalism), existentialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis.
• Dostoevsky's Critique: Fyodor Dostoevsky, a post-Romantic proto-existentialist, offers a profound critique of the Enlightenment in Notes from Underground. His Underground Man rejects rationality, finding it oppressive and boring. He argues that reason only fulfills the reasoning capacity, while desires manifest the whole of life, sometimes even leading to a love for suffering or pleasure in violence. He questions the Enlightenment's promise of a perfectly rational, yet potentially dreadfully boring, future.

The French Revolution's Reign of Terror (1793-1794) is sometimes seen as the moment when Enlightenment ideals, in their attempt to implement liberalism, tragically transformed into a Romantic "orgy of bloodlust."

Ultimately, while the Enlightenment championed the mind, Romanticism focused on the soul, setting the stage for ongoing philosophical debates.