Romanticism was, in Berlin’s account and others’—it’s a cliche—a reaction to Enlightenment Rationalism.
Rationalism, sometimes, is just an optimism about the possibility of knowledge, especially in social, moral, and political affairs. Euclid showed that, and how, secure knowledge was possible in geometry; much later, Newton did the same for physics. Could there be a similar science of humanity? What is our nature? How should we live? What customs and institutions make for a good society, and a good government? These questions too have answers, rationalists thought; answers that, if we investigate rightly, we can come to know.
These claims about Reality and Knowledge were bundled, in rationalism, with a claim about Virtue: virtue is knowledge. The virtuous person knows the facts about his situation, knows (the objective truth about) what that situation calls for, and is moved to act accordingly.
Whether any of this is right, shouldn’t we hope it’s right? We could discover Utopia; we could create or anyway approximate it here. But Berlin’s rhetoric is equivocal. The essence of rationalism, he says, is that “there is a body of facts to which we must submit.” To submit to a body of facts one cannot change: one cast of mind may find this a relief, but another rebels against it; another cries freedom! and raises up its sharpened axe. Maybe you feel its pull.
The most conservative anti-rationalism says that society and human nature and too complex, and each of us too small, for very much useful knowledge of those topics to be possible. But—there is still a “way things are.” Romanticism, in Berlin’s telling, is a far more radical doctrine, bordering on the mystical:
there is no external check, there is no structure which you must understand and adapt yourself to before you can proceed.
If the claim is that we have no nature, then it is baffling. A better interpretation is the existentialist one: our nature is what we make it. We do have a nature, but it is not an “external check”; it is not a constraint on how we should live. For (Berlin’s) Romantics, the answer to how should we live is not written in the sky to be discovered; we write it ourselves (let the Romantic rhetoric flow) in our own souls.
Romanticism consequently holds up different attitudes and traits as virtues. Virtue is not responding correctly to the (given) facts. Virtue is the creation of value; and also virtue is living up to the values one creates, however much they diverge from the values of others. It’s a kind of relativism: my values are no better or worse than yours; they may be compared, but they may not be judged. On this point, Berlin really gets into it:
The values to which [the Romantics] attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science ... not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king, or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was martyrdom for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism ... the state of mind of a man who is prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or for some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it—this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.
Again, in Romanticism
there is admiration ... for defiance as such ... for every kind of opposition to reality, for taking up positions on principle where the principle may itself be absurd; the fact that this is not regarded with the kind of contempt with which you regard a man who says twice 2 is 7, which is also a principle, but which nevertheless you know to be the assertion of something false—this is significant. What Romanticism did was to undermine the notion that in matters of value, politics, morals, aesthetics there are such things as objective criteria which operate between human beings, such that anyone who does not use these criteria is simply either a liar or a madman.
Virtues, and one might take this as a definition, are traits that are to be admired. And there is a great shift from what rationalists think admirable, to what is admirable for the romantics. Take Milton’s Satan, who, after being cast into Hell, still proudly defies heaven, and vows to “make evil my good.” For a rationalist, Satan is to be despised for his love of evil; and as for Satan’s great energy for pursuing evil, and his great power to inspire others to follow, they are only grounds for fearing him, and despising him more:
persons able to put the whole of themselves into the theory and practice of falsehood were simply dangerous persons, and ... the more sincere they were, the more dangerous, the more mad.
But for the Romantics, and Blake is the paradigm, Satan is a hero. Satan has pledged his whole being to a value he has embraced. He acts and acts decisively in its pursuit. That’s why a true poet will be of the Devil’s party. Satan at least is free (“Here at least / We shall be free”), not a slave. God’s “goodness” counts for nothing; what counts is his monarchical claim to absolute authority, which must be opposed.
What then about freedom? Freedom was an Enlightenment value. The Enlightenment saw the birth of Liberalism. “Life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment.
The Romantics were also all about freedom, but freedom differently understood. Freedom wasn’t, or wasn’t just, the removal of laws and social conventions that penalized, through state coercion or through shunning by one’s peers, this or that behavior or lifestyle. Freedom was acting authentically, from one’s true self. Only a life lived in liberated pursuit of freely chosen values was a good and meaningful one. You see this in John Stuart Mill, who is more a Romantic than an Enlightenment man:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties... It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?
This elevation of a new conception of freedom is linked to the romantic virtue of value-creation: the “true self” from which one must act, to be free, is a self one must create, and doing so is, in part, choosing the values to which one will pledge one’s troth.
The Romantics, as a result, were against anything, any idea, that threatened to undermine this freedom. Explaining Schlegel’s conception of irony, Berlin writes,
the general notion is that, corresponding to any proposition that anyone may utter, there must be at least three other propositions, each of which is contrary to it, and each of which is equally true, all of which must be believed, particularly because they are contradictory—because that is the only way of escaping from the hideous logical straitjacket which he is frightened of, whether in the form of physical causality, or of State-created laws, or of aesthetic rules about how to compose poems, or of rules of perspective or rules of historical painting or rules of other kinds of painting laid down by various mandarins in France in the eighteenth century. This must be escaped from. It cannot be escaped by simply denying the rules, because a denial will simply bring about another orthodoxy, another set of rules contradictory of the original rules. Rules must be blown up as such. [emphasis added]
There is no structure of things; and, the good life is one of value-creation, and the free exercise of the will: These are Berlin’s two pillars of Romanticism, and they are, he asserts, “connected,” but what is the connection? Sometimes the connection is an emotional one: once one has elevated freedom and value-creation, as the Romantics did, one will fear and dread any “structure of things,” since, as in the passage above, any rule, or indeed any fact at all, is a potential limit on what one may do.
This, however, is no reason to believe that “there is no structure of things.” Reality does not comport itself to make our ideals possible. Berlin dazzles with his intimidating mastery of Romantic thought, and of the systems of so many Romantic thinkers. But if, upon closing his book, one thinks back and asks, did Berlin attribute to any of those thinkers an actual argument that “there is no structure of things,” or that “there is no body of facts to which we must submit”?—well, I had trouble coming up with one.
Anyway these theses are obviously false. Sure, we are free, in some ways, and could be freer still, if certain legal reforms were undertaken. But there are facts about our nature that we cannot escape and to which we must submit. Some are obvious and not too threatening—food and sleep are real human needs and few are very upset about this. Others, however, might prove obstacles to the project of creating values, pledging oneself to those values, and still flourishing as a human being.
hi again, someone on here shared a book Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics - a Game of Theories by Jim Baggott and i just now looked through the table of contents and this is the title of a chapter, 'For a specific physical system or situation, thereis no such thing as the ‘right’ wavefunction" which might challange your positing that the Romantics' notion of no set structure unless self-determined is false because there's obvious facts. it might not actually be the case there's facts as i'm understanding your notion of facts?
thanks! I enjoyed reading this. with your last question asking about the argument for the Romantic's conclusions that "there is no structure of things,” or that “there is no body of facts to which we must submit”. i think they are more specifically talking about value and morality, not facts like we as humans cannot fly without aids. There are no facts of value or morality is what I think their argument is as I understand it from reading your post here.
on another note. I reckon from reading your piece here that Nietzsche could be considered a Romantic; what do you think?