Download The Enlightenment and Romanticism

THE ENLIGHTENMENT
AND ROMANTICISM
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
• In the late Renaissance (1550 – 1700) we see an intellectual
movement take form that changes history and the way we approach
the search for Truth.
• Movement gives rise to empiricism and the scientific method.
• This time period and the ideas = the scientific revolution
• Formal Definition of S.R.: the historical process by which modern
science became the authoritative method for investigating and
describing the world.
• Overthrow of Aristotle’s natural philosophy & church as resources
for natural truths (for explaining nature)
• Modern scientific method:
1. Empirical observation of nature as the means for arriving at scientific
truths
2. The verification of proposed truths through experiment and mathematical
calculation
THINKERS
• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543): the earth revolves around the sun
• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630): further’s Copernicus’s theories; realizes planets
move in elliptical orbits, not circles
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642): Improved the telescope, proved Copernicus
theory, father of astronomy
• William Harvey (1578-1657): how blood circulates in the body
• John Locke (1632-1704): Empiricism, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
JOHN LOCKE
• No innate ideas; no universals; human beings are not born
knowing certain things
• Tabula Rasa – Blank slate
• Children and mentally impaired adults
• You can’ t know and not know; it can’t be in the mind and for us
not to be conscious of it
• Knowledge is come to true experience (the senses)
ENLIGHTENMENT (1650-1800)
• The Enlightenment is characterized by the belief in the supremacy of reason.
• It can be defined as a period during which thinkers and writers emphasized human reason and
individualism and were deeply invested in the idea that through the use of reason and through
education, human society could be improved.
1. Encyclopedias
2. Scientific approach to governing, politics, and history
3. Questioned religion (Christianity), scorned superstition
4. Believed that “reason and conscience were perfectly adequate” to guide human
conduct
5. Society could corrupt, but if we used reason we would prevail
6. Chief barrier to human progress was not human nature, but social intolerance and
injustice
7. Deists: God created the universe to operate by rational laws. God neither intervened
nor did he reveal his will in a bible.
ROMANTICISM
(1775-1850)
ROMANTICISM
• Romanticism can be said to be a reaction to three essential historical
circumstances:
1.
The Enlightenment: Romanticism reacts against the Enlightenment ideals (reason,
rationality, logic) which posit reason over all else and against the Enlightenment’s
scientific rationalization of nature. They are not necessarily anti-science, but they
don’t see in science the end all and be all. (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)
2.
The Social-Political Norms of the Enlightenment period: Nobility and Aristocracy,
unashamed indulgence.
3.
The Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): characterized by the introduction of and
reliance on water and steam-driven machinery for labor. We see the beginning of
mass production especially in textile factories and the rise of the INDUSTRIAL CITY.
ENLIGHTENMENT VS ROMANTICISM
• Reason
• Emotions
• Actuality
• Idea
• Observation
• Imagination
• Scientific Genius
• Creative Genius
• Reasonable
• Melancholic, sad
• Reality
• Fantasy
• Nature is scientific
• Nature is mystical
OTHER CHARACTERIZATIONS OF
ROMANTICISM
• Everyday world is filled with horror, mystery, and the grotesque.
• Grotesque: The essence of the grotesque is that it erases the boundary
separating the human and animal realm and, by so doing, frequently reduces
man to an impotent puppet who sinks in the fateful determinism of hostile
forces. Through personification, the grotesque extends its range to
encompass the mechanical, which develops a threatening life of its own and
through which man’s subjectivity is threatened. The grotesque becomes the true
reality.
• Reality and fantasy are hardly distinguishable the one from the other.
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
• The Gothic Novel is noted for its emphasis on setting and its concern with
a fallen world.
• Romantics sought the sublime in transcendent experience of mystical spaces. The
Gothic emphasis on describing setting can be seen as an attempt to articulate
these mystical spaces.
• Romantics saw the modern world of science and rationality as fundamentally
flawed. They sought mystery in the ruins of the past—an era untouched by the
rationality of the Enlightenment.
THE SUBLIME
• One of the most central preoccupations of Romanticism is the concept of
the Sublime.
• Romantics wanted to find those elements of the human experience of the natural
world that couldn’t be accounted for by Enlightenment science and reason.
• Romantics were specifically interested in those experiences that inspired “awe,
terror and danger.”—experiences they say as transcendent. These experiences
granted access, they thought, to the “Sublime” or the region beyond the known
and knowable.
FRANKENSTEIN
“When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”--Elizabeth
“Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them
more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be
nearly free; but now we are moved y every wind that blows and a chanc eword or scene that that
word may convey to us” (67)
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it” –
monster (68)
THE SUBLIME
• Pg 64-65: “The weight upon my spirit was
sensible lightened as I plunged yet deeper in
the ravine of Arve. The immense mountains and
precipces that overhung me on eery side– the
sound of the river raging among the rocks, and
the dashing of the waterfall, spoke of a power
mighty as Omnipotence – and I ceased to
fear…”
• “Then I spurred on my animal, striving so to
forget the world, my fears, and, more than all,
myself– or, in a more desperate fashion, I
alighted, and threw myself on the grass,
weighed down by horror and despair.”
The Valley of Chamounix