Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism

3,417 words

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct – Théodore Géricault, 1818

The case has been made to the point of exhaustion that the neo-liberal, progressivist, “woke” ideology that has clawed its way to cultural and political hegemony across the West displays all the attributes of religion. It has its scriptures, its martyrs, its own separate language (an equivalent to High Church Latin), its high priests and its heretics, and although to rail against it in the public square is no longer to risk your life, it is to risk your livelihood. But there is another historical analogue which repays inspection if we seek the fons et origo of the intellectual malaise currently sweeping across Europe as the Huns and the Goths did before it, and causing possibly irreparable damage to Western culture on a similar scale: Romanticism.

Isaiah Berlin’s book The Roots of Romanticism is actually six transcribed lectures given in Washington in 1965. Berlin was a philosopher born in 1909 into a Russian-Jewish family, enough to discount him as a credible writer for some as there is a strain on the dissident right whose attitude towards Jews, including their literary output, has long since passed from measured critique to pathological obsession. But to discount Berlin on account of his tribe would be to ignore a fruitful investigation into the sources of the Romantic worldview. Berlin sees in Romanticism “the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world.” And even in the midst of the transformative 1960s, when The Roots of Romanticism was written, Romanticism still had much work to do.

Berlin presents three comparable revolutions in a historically short space of time: Industrial, French, and Romantic. He dissociates the Romantic Revolution from the French Revolution on the principle that the latter was fought for using principles “of universal reason, of order, of justice”, all values anathema to the irrationalist heart of the Romantics. One would expect Romanticism to reject the principles of the Industrial Revolution for much the same reason, although the relationship between Romanticism and industrialization is more complex than merely Blake’s brooding over soot-stained manufactories as “dark, Satanic mills.” Placing Romanticism alongside the two great 18th-century revolutions is also to consider its range of effects up to the present, just as the French and Industrial revolutions left their indelible mark on Western history.

Berlin is not presenting an identity parade of Romantic figureheads and thereby calling in the usual suspects. He is interested not so much in the Romantics themselves as the philosophy which propagated their belief system. He wishes to unearth the terrain on which Romanticism flourished, and he is clear on his sources, noting two men “who were in my view the true fathers of Romanticism”, Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder.

Kant, according to Berlin, is “justly regarded as one of the fathers of Romanticism”, despite distancing himself from the movement for admirably Kantian reasons, as the great transcendentalist “detested every form of extravagance, mysticism, vagueness, confusion.” Kant also disliked the work of Hamann – another key figure in Berlin’s genealogy – and Herder, the former as a “confused mystic”, the latter lacking evidence for his “vast generalisations.” As for Hamann, this somewhat obscure German writer is also a co-founder of Romanticism for Berlin.

If Johann Georg Hamann were a character in a novel, that novel would itself be Romantic. Berlin himself wrote a rare book on Hamann entitled The Magus of the North, a soubriquet by which Hamann is often known, and his influence on Romanticism is evident despite the density of his prose. A bibliophile who reached a religious crisis, Hamann is described by Berlin as “a n’er do well.” Born into a poor Prussian family, unemployable, surviving on a little poetry and criticism, and supported by his friend and neighbor, Immanuel Kant. Hamann saw philosophy as a competitor to faith, and based his loose-knit theories on communication, both that between men, and that between God and man. Hamann was among the first, if not the first, to read The Critique of Pure Reason, having obtained an advance copy. When Baltic merchants inexplicably commissioned this roustabout to travel to London to conduct business for them, Hamann drank and gambled their money away, getting heavily into debt and close to suicide. He then had a religious revelation, read the Old Testament, and began his writing career. His work is prolix and declared by many to be unreadable, while others see him as the first philosopher of language, which he equated with reason. Berlin, however, sees him as exemplary of the anti-Enlightenment attitudes of the Romantics. Goethe, himself a rather reluctant figurehead of the Romantic “movement” (there is much academic debate as to whether it qualifies as such), wrote of Hamann:

In order to achieve the impossible he stretches his hand to all the elements… All that a man undertakes… must spring from his united powers, all separation is to be rejected.

His approach to reason and reasoning may have been unconventional, and he may be little read today, but he is both a key figure at the start of the Romantic era, and prescient in his analysis, obscure though it may be. In a 2011 biography of Hamann, Robert Alan Sparling finds the German ahead of his time:

[M]any philosophers have expressed wonder at the degree to which [Hamann] appears to ‘anticipate’ modern developments, notably the linguistic turn in philosophy, the emphasis on aesthetics, and the insistence on the concerned nature of philosophy that so captivated Nietzsche.

Romanticism did not come into being sui generis, but was rather a reaction to the other great movement of the time, which was not so much a revolution as a re-evaluation: the Enlightenment. This is, of course, a vast academic field, but Kant himself wrote an essay entitledWas ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?) in 1784. Perhaps the most famous passage from the essay betrays a certain ambivalence concerning the coming divide between Enlightenment and Romanticism:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.

This sounds in line with the rebellious image of the Romantics, although Kant was careful to separate the “courage to use your own understanding” into its separate public and private usage.

The Enlightenment is obviously a significant epoch in the West. With the refinement of reason, the French philosophes and the Encyclopedists changed the framework of thought, bequeathing the West of the future a set of principles with which it might further make sense of the world as the twilight of religion drew on. The guiding principles of the Enlightenment, particularly in the arts, “lead to the formal, the noble, the symmetrical, the proportional, the judicious”. But part of that legacy we suffer from today is also technocracy, reason levelled down to pure system, the type of bureaucratic environment whose triumph over socialism and capitalism was suggested in 1946 by James Burnham in his seminal work, The Managerial Revolution. John Ralston Saul’s 1993 book, Voltaire’s Bastards, makes the point that although we owe much to the Enlightenment, we took its call to reason too seriously, to the exclusion of those elements of the human experience which, perhaps, the Romantics recognized.

Despite their differences, Berlin says, Enlightenment thinkers agree on three basic principles:

• All genuine questions can be answered.
• These answers can be learnt and taught to others.
• All the answers must be compatible with one another.

That Romanticism “cracked” this triumvirate is what makes that movement “the greatest transformation of Western consciousness… in our time.”

That may be so, and if it is, that transformation is far more important for our own times in terms of its deleterious effects, rather than to the advantage of the West. Certainly, aesthetically, and in literary and philosophical terms, Romanticism is a striving to break free from convention, and came with all the appeal of the new. Marie-Henri Bayle – better known to us as Stendhal – believed that “the Romantic is the modern and interesting, classicism is the old and dull”. This rather elides the Romantic fascination with the past: antique Byronic heroes, the Romantic fascination with myth and legend, the ruined castles of the Gothic novel. But Romanticism’s appeal was more than merely an intellectual fad. A year before Berlin’s lectures, in 1964, Saul Bellow’s scholarly misfit Herzog, in the novel of that name, puts it rather well:

Romanticism guarded the ‘inspired condition’. Preserved the poetic, philosophical, and religious teachings, the teachings and records of transcendence and the most generous ideas of mankind, during the greatest and most rapid of transformations, the most accelerated phase of the modern scientific and technical transformation.

Perhaps if Romanticism had confined itself to the arts it would not have contributed quite as much to today’s irrationalism. For all its faults, the Enlightenment at least provided a set of guiding principles for reason, without which we are a bark tossed at sea, potential victims of a lassitude of reason itself.

The tension between two interpretations (and indeed outcomes) of Romanticism is exemplified by Berlin’s juxtaposition of Friedrich Schlegel and Ferdinand Brunetière. Schlegel, a friend and later academic adversary of Hegel, was a philosopher and literary critic. Berlin crowns him “the greatest herald and prophet of Romanticism that ever lived”, and finds in Schlegel a recognition that “there is in man a terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity, a feverish longing to break through the narrow bonds of individuality.”

Brunetière, a French writer and critic, rather brings the high-flying Schlegel back down to earth, finding Romanticism to be no more than “literary egotism, it is the stressing of individuality at the expense of a larger world, it is the opposite of self-transcendence, it is sheer self-assertion.” This clash of perspectives fits perfectly today, although outside the realm of art and literature, almost dead now in Europe under Socialism. Egotism, narcissism, and self-assertion are common currency now, which is not problematic in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with egotists and narcissists, provided they have something worthwhile to say.

Where Berlin detects in Romanticism “a great turning towards emotionalism… a sudden interest in the primitive and remote”, we are tempted not only to agree, but to admire the staying power of this anti-rationalism today. The dead past can be brought back to life, certainly, as the Italian Renaissance proved, but today’s post-modern mob have not turned to emotionalism, it is their default position. As for interest in the “primitive and remote”, this interest exists now, on the political left, only as the privileging of ancient peoples – consider the absurd “recognition” of land appropriation that prefaces every Democrat event in the US – to the detriment of indigenous whites, and the re-writing of history to include ethnicities who played no significant part in that history.

Romanticism “appeared on the surface to say everything and its opposite.” Its internal contradictions seem to require the cohabitation of mutually exclusive principles, contradictory standpoints, and once again we are reminded of the epistemological chaos we currently inhabit:

How can it be that the word ‘Romanticism’ stands at one and the same time for two such things as, on the one hand, noble savages, primitivism, the simple life, rosy-cheeked peasants… and on the other hand blue wigs, green hair, absinthe and Gérard de Nerval pulling his lobster along the streets of Paris in order to attract attention to himself.

A Dadaist Bohemianism is fine as long as it is confined to the eccentricities of social misfits and the arts, and quite possibly the two combined. When it seeps into the real world via the political system, when the Romantic worldview comes down from the clouds and interferes with the affairs of men, when those misfits wield their pens not to dash off a couplet but to sign legislation, Romanticism, which always sought the worm in the rose, becomes that very thing itself.

The morbid strain within Romanticism is an expression of Thanatos, the Freudian death-wish (although Berlin is no Freudian), and is the other side of the Romantic view of life:

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself.

Romanticism, to quote T. S. Eliot’s line from Whispers of Immortality concerning Elizabethan playwright John Webster, “saw the skull beneath the skin.”

Berlin’s roll-call of those thinkers whose combined contributions create Romanticism, unified movement or not, is also a good introduction to 18th and 19th century thought, and Berlin provides concise summations of a number of familiar names who may only be familiar as names.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is among the first writers that come to mind when Romanticism is mentioned, but Berlin finds his role exaggerated albeit undoubtedly influential, calling Rousseau’s work “the purest milk of the rationalist word”. Berlin quotes the poet Lenz, a rough contemporary of Rousseau, and it is worth quoting in full as we recognize much of Lenz’s description today:

Action, action is the soul of the world, not pleasure, not abandonment to feeling, not abandonment to reasoning, only action; only by action does one become the image of God, the God who creates ceaselessly and ceaselessly rejoices in his works. Without action, all pleasure, all feeling, all knowledge is nothing but a postponed death. We must not cease from toil until we have created free space, even if this space is a fearful waste and then a fearful void, and then we shall brood over it, as God brooded over the waste and the void before the world was created, and then something will arise. O bliss, O godlike feeling! [Italics added]

What a manifesto for today’s chaotic ideologies. Even if your action, the zenith of being, creates a meaningless void, it is still your creation.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an influential Kantian both academically and philosophically, and provides an epigram for the dangers of flouting the Enlightenment and throwing in one’s lot with the Romantic spiritual worldview or zeitgeist: “‘At the mere mention of the name ‘freedom’, says Fichte, ‘my heart opens and flowers, while at the word ‘necessity’ it contracts painfully.'”

This is, essentially, the philosophy of the child, and today we are seeing the effects of untramelled freedom contra reason. Our modern Romantics, if we can call them that (they produce no discernible art or literature), are not intellectually equipped to be able to deal with freedom when it arrives.

The English Romantic poets are a central pillar of Romanticism, and Berlin situates them in terms of their reaction against Enlightenment values. The villains of the piece for William Blake, for example, were Locke and Newton, “devils who killed the spirit by cutting reality into some kind of mathematically symmetrical pieces, whereas reality is a living whole which can be appreciated in some mathematical fashion.”

In keeping with tradition, the archetypal Romantic figure is Byron, whose “chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of voluntarism, the whole philosophy that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons.” The exile and outsider pits himself against a world which must be made to yield to his will:

The whole of the Byronic syndrome consists in adhesion to the two values which I have tried to expound, the will and absence of a structure of the world to which one must adjust oneself.

Berlin extends this clash of forces to Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as Victor Hugo and subsequent Byronic disciples.

If we owe a debt to Romanticism, it should perhaps be paid in carefully audited instalments. We owe it the freedom of the artist, Berlin writes, and also “the notion that a unified answer in human affairs is likely to be ruinous.” But at the very end of Berlin’s final Washington lecture, we have reached the internal contradiction in summing up the legacy of Romanticism:

The notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or life, can in principle be perfect or true – all this we owe to the Romantics.

If we exchange Berlin’s currency into our own, we also owe Romanticism for standpoint epistemology and cultural relativism, two “single answers” which unravel themselves.

The legacy of Romanticism, which is still with us and I would argue is causing such mischief in the modern West, is something of a Pyrrhic victory:

[The Romantic movement] preached the incompatibility of ideals, the importance of motive, the importance of character, or at any rate of purpose, over consequence, over efficiency, over effect, over happiness, success and position in the world.

This is perilously close to standpoint epistemology, a parallel universe in which subjective considerations outweigh any effects that subjectivity might have on the objective world, effects that, of course, go on to affect other subjectivities, adversely or otherwise. Berlin finds the “central sermon” of existentialism to be a Romantic one, although it is stretching history somewhat to find those impulses at the heart of fascism as he goes on to do.

Searching for philosophical and intellectual precedents for our current plight feels a little like standing on the scaffold and enquiring of the hangman which particular type of wood your gallows is built from. That said, perhaps the only way out of a disastrous wrong turning is to understand what made you take it in the first place. Just as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in 1972, when asked what the effects of the French Revolution were, replied that it was too early to tell, perhaps the long-term effects of Romanticism – outside the aesthetic realm – are only starting to become clear to us today. Berlin is concerned with “the consequences of Romanticism in the present day”. Romanticism is a positive for Berlin, writing in the 1960s, because he was himself writing at the outset of a change in Western consciousness which “transformed our values to a very profound degree”. This, he says, “is what made existentialism possible”. No doubt this is so, but elsewhere in his lectures Berlin also states that the “two main offshoots” of Romanticism were existentialism and fascism. Fascism, for Berlin, is part funded by Romanticism:

Fascism owes something to Romanticism… because of the notion of the unpredictable will either of a man or a group, which forges forwards in some fashion that is impossible to organize, impossible to predict, impossible to rationalize. That is the whole heart of fascism: what the leader will say tomorrow, how the spirit will move us, where we shall go, what we shall do – that cannot be foretold. The hysterical assertion and the nihilistic destruction of existing institutions because they confine the unlimited will, which is the only things which counts for human beings; these are a direct inheritance [from Romanticism].

In fact, Berlin would have it that Romanticism leads to something far from the embrace of fascism:

The result of Romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life; some degree of increased rational self-understanding. This was very far from the intentions of the Romantics.

It is also very far from where we are today in the West, 60 years after Berlin’s Washington lectures. What we are currently living through, an anti-Enlightenment, an Age of Unreason, makes us victims of a loosely knit school of thought which, perhaps, should never have been allowed out of the confines of philosophy, art, music, and literature. Romantic ideals are fine and good, but not if they exceed their creative bounds and escape into a world which requires reason to navigate with any surety. Berlin does not quite go this far: “The whole movement […] is an attempt to impose an aesthetic model upon reality, to say that everything should obey the rules of art.”

Despite Romanticism’s appeal (I was delighted to see maverick Argentinian premier Javier Milei name Byron’s Don Juan as his favorite poem), it also conjured up forces which we have yet to put down. A new Enlightenment is perhaps required, although nowhere visible on the horizon. Then we could sit back and enjoy Romanticism for what it should be: art for art’s sake.