300 words on From Enlightenment to Romanticism

KANT

 

Here’s a day in the life of Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers of all time, who lived from 1724 to 1804 and abided by this schedule every single day of his adult life (source: Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers):

 

4:55am: Kant’s footman, Lampe, would march into his master’s room and cry, “Herr Professor, the time is come.”

 

5:00am: Kant would be seated at his breakfast table. He drank several cups of tea, smoked his pipe of the day, and began to prepare his morning lecture.

 

7:00am-9:00am: Kant went downstairs to his lecture room to teach.

 

9:00am-12:45pm: He would go back upstairs to write.

 

12:45pm (sharp): He would call to his cook, “It has struck three-quarters” (meant that lunch was to be served).

 

1:00pm (sharp): He would eat lunch, which was the only time he’d have guests over. He never discussed philosophy over lunch, and women were never invited. After the meal was over, he would take his famous walk, by which everyone in Königsberg was able to tell the time (the only time he missed his walk was when he was too absorbed in the reading of Rousseau’s Émile). He walked alone so that he could breathe through the mouth, which he thought was healthier. He was disgusted by perspiration, and during summer walks would stand perfectly still in the sade until he dried off.

 

He would spend the rest of the day reading and writing, and then would go to bed at exactly 10:00pm. While putting on his pajamas, he would repeat the name “Cicero” to himself several times. He slept extremely well.

 

So, in other words, he was pretty uptight, which you may be able to surmise from the dry tone of his writing. And yet, from his tiny village in Königsberg, Prussia (which is technically Poland now, but was the epicenter of German culture), he revolutionized how we understand the world with his groundbreaking work, The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781. This book outlines a paradigm shift in thought, what he calls the “Copernican Turn,” because he accomplishes in metaphysics the same sort of shift in perspective that Copernicus had accomplished in astronomy. Copernicus resolved the problem of explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies by rejecting the assumption that the earth was motionless. Similarly, in metaphysics, Kant rejects the idea that reality is knowable-in-itself and that our experiences conform to the world. Instead, he adopts the view that the mind largely determines the nature of our experiences. In other words, Kant holds that objects conform to our knowledge, thus rejecting the traditional view that knowledge conforms to objects in the world. But unlike Copernicus, Kant rejects the traditional view of cognition because he wants to avoid the skepticism of David Hume and the idealism of George Berkeley, not because of empirical data which contradicts the traditional view.

 

Kant is so rigorous and meticulous in his method that his philosophy cannot be dismissed as either purely subjective (this would incline toward the skepticism of Hume) or absolutely objective in all things (because that is an arrogance that humans cannot assume). In his philosophy, we are thinking subjects who try to comprehend an external world of objects. We cannot ever fully know an object as a thing-in-itself, because there are limits to human understanding. This is where his famous word critique comes into play. The practice of critique is to delineate the limits of understanding, and to assess what the faculty of our comprehension can enable us to access from the outside world, and what it cannot.

 

When we confront an object in the world, Kant distinguishes between the object as a phenomenon and as a noumenon. A phenomenon is how the object appears to us, how we perceive it. A noumenon is an object as a thing-in-itself. Here’s an example: I am currently sitting on a chair. I can describe how the chair looks, how it feels, the measurements, proportions, etc. What escapes my perception of the chair, though, are the numerous atoms that compose it, the electrical charges swirling around these atoms and keeping this structure whole. All of that belongs to the noumenal qualities of the chair. As you can see, my perception of the chair is highly limited; I can only really perceive it to the extent that it is a phenomenon, but I can’t perceive it as a thing-in-itself (i.e. I can’t perceive all of its noumenal qualities).

 

To Kant, the universe is fundamentally unknowable as a thing-in-itself. This is what he is famous for: the subject-object split. There will always be some kind of gap or chasm between the subject and object. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t come close. Far from giving up, Kant follows Copernicus’ lead: he shifts his attention from the nature of the object to the limits of human understanding instead, and how we can generate meaning in this world out of the shared human faculties, especially reason. Reason is what allows to access the external world to the extent that our human faculties can equip us with.

 

 

 

He therefore marries the two traditions of empiricism (what I can understand through the perception of my senses) with idealism (what metaphysical principles beyond the limits of my senses I hold true). Kant insists that there is an objective reality, and we can come close to comprehending it, but never in its entirety. Reason is the highest principle by which we can understand the world.

 

This celebration of reason at the time he was writing was synonymous with the Enlightenment. But what was the Enlightenment, exactly? There was a famous essay contest in 1784 that posed this exact question. Kant submitted his response, but didn’t win the prize. His essay, nevertheless, was still circulated and cited as one of the most salient texts of Enlightenment thinking. And this is the text of his that I assigned for you to read.

 

Let’s do a close reading of the first sentence together: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” (105).

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the word “tutelage” before. It’s an awkward term that I only ever see in English translations of Kant, for whatever reason. Let me propose a better translation—and in order to do that, let me walk you through the original German:

 

,,Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.”

 

Aufklärung is the German word for “Enlightenment”. If we do a close reading of just this single word, we observe that the word “light” is embedded in “Enlightenment,” so we can gather that Enlightenment is a process by which we move from a state of darkness to a state of light, by which things are illuminated for us in understanding. There is a slightly different nuance in the German word Aufklärung. Sure, klar involves light, but the sense in German is more of a “clearing up,” a kind of decluttering of material into clearly organized and designated categories.

 

Ausgang is “exit,” a literal going-out, and Menschen is the genitive declension of Mensch, which means “human,” not “man” (it is not gendered), and selbstverschuldeten means “self-imposed” or “self-incurred,” like this translation puts it. But at the root of this word is Schuld, which means “guilt” or “burden”.

 

Before we reassemble all these pieces back together, I want to highlight the last word, which is an important one: Unmündigkeit. It’s a very ordinary German word, which just means “immaturity.” I have no idea why pretentious translators settle on “tutelage.” But if we break this word apart, the root of it is Mund, which means “mouth.” The privative prefix “Un-” functions in the same way that it does in English, so that what the Germans understand by their word for “immaturity” is literally a state of “un-mouth-edness,” which is obviously not a word in English, and not something that can easily be translated in a concise way that captures this nuance. Embedded in this word is the emphasis on not being able to use one’s mouth, one’s voice. When you’re immature, you just parrot back what’s told to you. A clunkier, but more accurate way, of translating this first sentence, then, is to say that, “Enlightenment (Clearing Up) is the exit of humans from their self-imposed immaturity/unmouthedness.”

 

In future texts assigned for this class, especially those next week, pay attention to the function of mouths and voices, and see how you can bring them into dialogue with Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment.

 

What he is saying here is essentially defining Enlightenment as an injunction to grow up. Stop being children. Think for yourself. “Sapere aude!” he writes in Latin, in the same introductory paragraph: “Dare to know!” (105). Take responsibility for your thoughts and actions. Don’t passively accept secondhand knowledge, but learn for yourself. And abide by reason as your principle of acquiring knowledge.

 

THE POLITICS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 

It is no coincidence that the Enlightenment emerged out of the Scientific Revolution that followed quickly on the heels of the Renaissance. Enlightenment wasn’t just a question of how we arrive at knowledge, but how we also arrive at values. So the project of Enlightenment is very much a political one, demonstrating that philosophy is at the core of politics—and it always has been and always will be. If you want to understand the political situation we are going through right now, you need to have a robust historical and philosophical understanding of how the dominant ideas and values have taken shape through power structures in our country and in our world. The Enlightenment did a great deal to shape these values.

 

Because the Enlightenment is based on critique, and critique allows us to evaluate principles in order to possibly reject them in favor of others, the Enlightenment has been at the center of political revolution. The American Revolution was a direct product of Enlightenment thinking, adopting John Locke’s Enlightenment principles that every man (and yes, this term is gendered) has a right to life, liberty, and property. Sounds familiar, right? Because this was inserted into the Declaration of Independence—but with a notable change. “Property” was slyly replaced by the dubious phrase “pursuit of happiness,” which sounds pleasant enough until you do a close reading of that term in its historical context. What does “pursuit of happiness” actually mean? The short answer is: nothing. You aren’t guaranteed happiness by this Declaration, just the “pursuit” of it, which is a term that is so vague that it could basically mean that you are free to want to be happy. Huh?

 

This phrase is vague by design. Notice what term it replaces in Locke’s original formulation of “life, liberty, and property.” The only reason why the Founding Fathers sidestepped that last term was because of the question of slavery. Don’t forget who these “Founding Fathers” were: wealthy, white slave-owners. They didn’t want slaves to have the right to property, so they got rid of the term altogether, and used the blank space of that term’s absence to fill it up with pretty words that are essentially meaningless, and that hide their sordid motives of paradoxically defending their bizarre understanding of “freedom” on the basis of slavery.

 

This is an example of how close reading can empower you to not fall for nice-sounding language that actually communicates something much more horrific. Don’t be fooled by pretty words that may possibly conceal something much more sinister. The United States of America was not the only country to be birthed by Enlightenment values: so was modern France. The American Revolution occurred in 1776; the French Revolution started just over a decade later, in 1789. The French heard reports of what was going on across the Atlantic, and were familiarizing themselves with these Enlightenment ideas of intellectual and political freedom, ideas that championed democracy rather than tyranny. They were tired of laboring for scraps of bread, with little labor protections, while seeing the monarchy indulge in obscenely lavish displays of luxury. Enough was enough, and the French people rose up in Revolution, using the slogan of, “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!” (“Freedom! Equality! Brotherhood!”).

 

All of these words, like the rhetoric of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, sound beautiful and exciting. Clearly they rallied enough masses behind them to create massive changes in a fundamentally unjust system. There was no question that things couldn’t go on as usual. Radical change was clearly necessary—as it is in any society with such hideously enormous gaps in wealth (like ours right now). Such a system cannot hold onto power for very long, especially when the masses are hungry and furious at the injustices perpetrated against them. But then another question comes up: what system do we end up putting in place? And what do we do with the former oppressors in the monarchy and aristocracy?

 

In the early 1790s, the answer to this was the guillotine: a garish, public display in which people would gather to see the former monarchs and their accomplices beheaded for entertainment. This period of the French Revolution was known as the “Reign of Terror,” led largely by Robespierre until he, too, was eventually beheaded. And after Robespierre, a successful soldier quickly rose up the military ranks and made a name for himself that spread throughout the world: Napoleon Bonaparte. He essentially reinstated a monarchical style of government, in which he claimed himself to be Emperor, and invaded and colonized most of Europe and parts of Africa, ruling France as a dictator. Meanwhile, all of this was happening under the same rhetoric, the same slogans of “freedom” and “equality” and “brotherhood.”

 

Many who were fervent supporters of the French Revolution in its early days grew cynical and disillusioned. The hope of an experiment with democracy failed and became a dictatorship, but this dictatorship and the Reign of Terror were all created out of the Enlightenment rhetoric. So now we have a severe crisis of language—a crisis that has a parallel with the way political rhetoric is used in the U.S. today. What does “freedom” actually mean in a carceral society that exploits a loophole in our 13th Amendment, which abolished “slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime,” thereby exploiting prison labor in which 97% of prisoners never had a trial, occupying jail cells that, since 1970, grew in population by 728.9% even as the U.S. population grew only 161%, and are so racially targeted that 1 in 3 Black men are expected to go to jail in their lifetime? (Sources: Sentencing Project Organization, U.S. Prison Population Trend, The 13th by Ava DuVernay). Is this “freedom”? Are we living in a “free” society when BIPOC are brutalized by cops for the color of their skin, and when peaceful protestors who rise up against police brutality are also beaten up without provocation?

 

Now, unfortunately, is an urgent time to seriously question and re-evaluate the kinds of rhetoric we may have grown up with and internalized and taken for granted. This is not just a question of politics, but a question of philosophy (of the values and principles we abide by, why we abide by them, and how we arrive at these values), and, ultimately, a question of language. The generation that was disillusioned by the French Revolution was a generation that we now call the Romantics.

 

ROMANTICISM

 

The Romantics were people who had once espoused the values of the French Revolution in its infancy, looked on in horror as the Revolution exploited the rhetoric of these values to justify atrocities, and then reacted strongly against what they were seeing. They were so important because, in this crisis of language, they were able to carve out a rhetoric of their own, with words that hadn’t become cynical clichés like “freedom” or “equality.” They reinvigorated language with their poetry, and they were wildly popular for people who were in need of a new kind of expression for a new kind of political experience.

 

What is Romanticism? It may sound like “romance,” but this is not some stupid Valentine’s Day cult. The Romantics (please be careful to capitalize this, to distinguish this particular group of artists from people who are just “romantic” in a Valentine’s Day sense) were harsh critics of the Enlightenment precisely because these ideas set into motion the machinery that would end up in the guillotine. The words sounded nice, but they ended up justifying such horrifying atrocities, so the Romantics turned as far away from Enlightenment values as possible. Instead of reason, they celebrated emotion and the irrational—this was a political move. So if you happen to come across any of these Romantic poems and may feel uncomfortable with some flowery language indulging in excessive emotional outbursts, keep in mind the historical and political context: they are doing this as a way to hold up their middle finger to the older generation. Kant’s writing, as you can tell, is dry and emotionless. The tone that the Romantics adopted was carefully chosen to be the exact opposite: exclamatory, bursting with emotion, fervent, and passionate.  

 

The generation discrepancy is also significant in the history of Romanticism. Kant was already sixty when he wrote the essay “What is Enlightenment?” All the Romantics were young—very young, and they celebrated their youth (most of them ended up dying by the time they were in their early to mid-twenties). Remember Kant’s injunction to grow up and become adults? Their answer was: nah, we’re good. And we don’t need to listen to you older people who fucked up the world, leaving your mistakes for us to fix.

 

Whereas Enlightenment thinkers celebrated only the use of the mind, the Romantics explored other realms of experience and sensation, turning their focus to the body. They often used drugs and indulged in sexuality as a way to enhance their art. Instead of living their lives like Kant’s machine-like existence with his regimented schedule that was repeated day after day, the Romantics were restlessly on the hunt for new and overwhelming, exciting, adventurous, and even dangerous experiences. Because of the lethal flaws of humans, the Romantics instead turned their attention to nature and landscape. Whereas so much government legislating—writing Enlightenment values into law— occurred in cities, the Romantics flocked to the countryside. Whereas the Enlightenment paraded itself as the ideology of “progress” into a future understood entirely by science and reason, the Romantics turned to the past and were inspired by medieval stories of magic, enchantment, and the supernatural. Basically everything that the Enlightenment stood for, the Romantics went in the opposite direction. They were the creators of the modern counterculture movement driven by youth. It is no coincidence that there was such a resurgence of interest in the Romantics during the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution, and gay rights, all movements that rebelled against the old order.  

 

There is clearly a parallel to be drawn between the Enlightenment/Romanticism divide and the politics we are experiencing today. Our generations are inheriting a world that has been screwed up by the wealthier representatives of the Boomer generation, who are leaving this earth worse than they found it. The values that they took for granted are now falling under severe scrutiny, and for good reason. If those values led us to where we are today, to the urgent life-and-death problems we are struggling with as a result of policies that were passed on the basis of these values, then maybe some of these values ought to be rejected. The older generation may, like Kant, insist that we remain calm and dispassionate, view everything from “all sides” and remain polite when we disagree with a different political perspective. But some of us are sick and tired of sitting politely and listening to a political perspective that promotes racism and government-sanctioned violence. Being able to stay calm and politely listen is a luxury that some of us don’t have, and we recognize that what’s needed, under certain circumstances, is impassioned screaming in the streets and an unequivocal defense of human rights without wasting our time being trolled by anything resembling a fascist politics, because we know what happens under fascism. Polite political debate is not always the way to create necessary change to protect the most vulnerable, and not all sides in a political argument are legitimate—this is a lesson we’ve learned from the Romantics. Not calmness, but passion. This is a problem that cannot be reduced to logic, but to a philosophical outlook on what kind of society we want to live in. Anyone who thinks that logic is somehow superior to passion in all cases is still trapped by the prejudices of the Enlightenment. (Certainly there are situations in which logic needs to prevail, but the point is that this is not true of every single situation).

 

We are also paying more and more attention to the climate and the environment, and some of the leaders in this attention-raising are teenagers, such as Greta Thunberg. There is something strikingly Romantic about this, too, and there is a strong symmetry of politics today in this country with the politics that emerged in response to the French Revolution.

 

The emphasis on data and science and algorithms as the ultimate arbiters of truth is also just a prejudice inherited from the Enlightenment. The Romantics challenged this notion. Data and science are absolutely necessary for the disciplines they govern, but they do not give us a complete picture of all truth in all circumstances at all times. There are severe blindspots to this emphasis on numbers and technology. What about truths of human dignity and worth? These are questions that require qualitative description, not quantitative data. What about questions of how we arrive at personal and political meaning? The biggest (and possibly most meaningful) questions of who we are, what meaning we have in this world and for each other—these are questions that require a robust and rigorous foundation in the humanities, not the qualitative sciences. If you spend your life just crunching numbers, you are profoundly impoverished when it comes to understanding the breadth of human experience. And maybe the most important lesson that we can learn from the Romantics is that data is rarely neutral, but often carries ideological weight that data scientists have ignored and treat as “objective” when the objectivity itself ought to be called into question. Take, for example, financial data. All of these infinite spreadsheets of numbers and signs are all predicated on a fiction that money has any intrinsic value. It does not. It only has value to the extent that certain people agree that X quantity equals Y amount of dollars. But this is a fiction; it is a fabrication. Nowhere in nature is it a law for a manufactured computer to cost a certain amount of money. The assignation of values are created based on certain philosophical principles; but investors and stockbrokers and accountants can freely do their jobs while ignoring these philosophical principles and ignoring the way they are fabricated, arbitrary, political, and historical. They are fictional narratives that are enforced in reality on pain of punishment if lesser enfranchised people refuse to operate by these fabricated rules. A background in the humanities exposes this fiction for what it is, and gives you the language to articulate it. This gesture, by the way, is deeply Romantic. Maybe we are on the verge of a new Romantic era that will put this fetishization of data in all aspects of life to rest.

 

So it is in this historical context—which parallels our own—that I would like you to read Kant and the Romantic poets this week. When making observations about the poems, it is crucial that you use the Survival Guide of Literary Devices that I uploaded to Blackboard. This will enable you to break apart the poem into its component parts (devices), and explore the function of some of the devices at work. If you come across a metaphor (or any other device), ask: what is it doing there? How does it contribute meaning to the poem? I’m not looking for any free associations here, and I will give zero credit if you just blab about how a poem makes you “feel”. Stick closely to the text. Respond to the specific language in the poem (or Kant’s essay).  

 

I only gave a close reading of the first sentence of Kant’s essay, to get you going. But there is so much more to explore here. For example:

 

-How does Kant distinguish between public and private use of one’s reason in this essay? Remember not to project. Tell me what Kant means by these phrases in this specific context, not the way you would define them for yourself out of context. Once you define them (correctly), then you can critique his ideas.

-What does Kant say about “laziness and cowardice” in his second paragraph (105)? How can we read Keats’s “Ode on Indolence” as a possible response?

-What does Kant mean when he says, “It is so easy not to be of age” (105)?

-According to Kant, if an officer in service disagreed with a command he was given, should he obey this command or not? Why? What do you make of Kant’s reasoning?

-What are some observations you can make about gender in Kant’s essay and/or the assigned poems for today?

-Citing specific elements in Kant’s essay, do you think that the project of Enlightenment is utopian? Why or why not?

-Based on Kant’s essay, does Enlightenment describe a period, a historical moment, or a process? What would an enlightened age look like?

-What does the following line from Wordsworth mean: “The child is father of the man”? How can we read this as a possible rebuke against Enlightenment values? What else in this poem could be construed as a rebellious gesture against the Enlightenment? What does the phrase “natural piety” mean in the context of this poem?

-Who are the three figures in Keats’s “Ode on Indolence”? What is the speaker’s relationship to them?

-What does Dickinson mean when she writes, “Much Madness is Divinest Sense”?

-How do you make sense of all of the dashes (—) in Dickinson’s poem? What are they doing there? What effect do they have?

 

Again, if there are any other specific observations you would like to make about any of the texts assigned for today that aren’t addressed by the prompts above, feel free to write about your observations instead. If you do pick a prompt from above, try and stick to just one—I’d rather see you go into depth with a highly specific observation than go all over the place without offering much insight.

 

Remember that you can’t just rehash anything from these lecture notes or from your classmates in your posts. You need to contribute something new, and build on the conversation. There is a lot of material here to choose from, and a number of different possible interpretations to make.