In this short collection of essays Berlin ponders the precursors to Romanticism, its ideals, and its lasting influence. He starts by admitting that any all-encompassing idea of Romanticism is hard to pin down. Many historians agree that it “was a passionate protest against universality of any kind.” Berlin goes on, “the values to which they 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 in political power, not interested in happiness, 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 of your body, and 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, not in a philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is prepared not to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes 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.” That was the worldview that most readily encompassed Romanticism. The Romantics cared more about the motives of an act than its consequences. The movement was anti-Enlightenment in the sense that Romantics did not think that all virtue was encapsulated in knowledge. It was a movement opposed to compromise of all kinds, but most importantly compromising the ideals within yourself. All virtues were not compatible. There were opposing ultimate values in the world, each equally valuable, which could not be reconciled. This was true as much for aesthetics as for morality. There was no universal pattern or platonic ideal. “The notion that the purpose of art is to give pleasure to a large number of persons, or even to a small number of trained cognoscenti, is not valid. The purpose of art is to produce beauty, and if the artist alone perceives that his object is beautiful, that is a sufficient end in life.”
Montesquieu, with his cultural pluralism, and Hume, by placing belief before reason, started to poke holes in the Enlightenment edifice, despite being solid sons of that movement. The Pietists that rebelled against Frederick the Great’s German reforms tried to smash the very ground that the Enlightenment rested upon. “General propositions were baskets of an extremely crude kind…. What they left out, of necessity, because they were general, was that which was unique, that which was particular, that which was the specific property of this particular man, or this particular thing. And that alone was of interest…. What men wanted was for all their faculties to lay in the richest and most violent possible fashion. What men wanted was to create, what men wanted was to make, and if this making led to clashes, if it led to wars, if it led to struggles, then this was part of the human lot…. Creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalysable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle…. For them a work of art is the expression of somebody, it is always a voice speaking. A work of art is the voice of one man addressing himself to other men.” That was the essence of Pietist philosophy as espoused by Lutheran Germans like Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder “disliked every form of violence, coercion and the swallowing of one culture by another, because he wants everything to be what it is as much as it possibly can…. He is the originator of all those antiquarians who want natives to remain as native as possible, who like arts and crafts, who detest standardization- everyone who likes the quaint, people who wish to preserve the most exquisite forms of old provincialism without impingement on it of some hideous metropolitan uniformity…. If variety and difference are not merely a fact of the world but a splendid fact, which is what he thought it to be, arguing for the variety of the imagination of the creator and the splendour of human creative powers, and the infinite possibilities still before mankind, and the unfulfillability of human ambitions, and the general excitement of living in a world in which nothing can ever be fully exhausted- if that is the image, then the notion of a final answer to the question of how to live becomes absolutely meaningless…. That is to say, he is one of the fathers of the movement whose characteristic attributes include the denial of unity, the denial of harmony, the denial of the compatibility of ideals, whether in the sphere of action or in the sphere of thought.”
It is ironic that Kant is considered a progenitor of the Romantic movement, as he despised Romanticism. “He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwarmerei (fanatical gush), any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion.” He was firmly in the camp of science and reason, as espoused by the Enlightenment ideals. However, Kant also firmly stood for human freedom. He believed that morality was impossible without freedom of choice. “Man is man, for Kant, only because he chooses.” This is what distinguishes man from mere objects and beasts. “The will is that which enables men to choose either good or evil, either right or wrong. There is no merit in choosing what is right unless it is possible to choose what is wrong…. Kant supposed the whole notion of moral merit, the whole notion of moral desert, the whole notion which is entailed by the fact that we praise and we blame, that we consider that human beings are to be congratulated or condemned for acting in this or that way, presupposes the fact that they are able to freely choose.” This is Kant’s first categorical imperative. “Any kind of use of other people for purposes which are not these other people’s, but one’s own, seems to him to be a form of degradation imposed by one man on another, some form of hideous maiming of other people, of removal from them of that which distinguishes them as men, namely their self-determining liberty.” That is Kant’s second categorical imperative. “A value is made a value- at least a duty, a goal transcending desire and inclination, is so made- by human choice and not by some intrinsic quality in itself, out there. Values are not stars in some moral heaven, they are internal, they are what human beings freely choose to live for, to fight for, to die for. That is Kant’s fundamental sermon.” And that is the essence of what the Romantics took from Kant’s philosophy. Either there is human agency in the world or you are a slave with no free will, compelled by causes and powers beyond your control. “If man is part of nature, then he is determined, and morality is a hideous illusion…. When he is at his freest, when he is at his most human, when he rises to his noblest heights, then he dominates nature, that is to say he moulds her, he breaks her, he imposes his personality upon her, he does that which he chooses.” All authority, whether it be nature, or government, or parents, or traditions cannot be accepted simply because it is authority. That kind of simplicity and abrogation of responsibility revolted Kant. His morality was firmly anti-authoritarian. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte would take Kant’s inclinations and run with them. In their stories, heroic men “die uselessly because they belong to a society which is incapable of making use of them; they are superfluous persons; they are superfluous because their morality, which is a morality superior, we are meant to understand, to that of society around them, has no opportunity of asserting itself against the fearful opposition offered by the philistines, the slaves, the heteronomous creatures of the society in which they live.” Fichte admitted, “at the mere mention of the name “freedom” my heart opens and flowers, while at the word “necessity” it contracts painfully.” Later, he continues, “we do not act because we know, we know because we are called upon to act…. I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will…. I am not determined by ends, ends are determined by me.” The dramatist Ernst Raupach sums up the milieu of this German school, “to be free is nothing, to become free is very heaven.”
The Romantics embraced the idea that life is in the action- that it is the striving and yearning which makes the man. “For these Romantics, to live is to do something, to do is to express your nature. To express your nature is to express your relation to the universe. Your relation to the universe is inexpressible, but you must nevertheless express it.” It is in the doing that we live our lives. “There must be a field for action. The potential is more real than the actual. What is made is dead. Once you have constructed a work of art, abandon it, because once it is constructed it is there, it is done for, it is last year’s calendar. What is made, what has been constructed, what has been already understood must be abandoned. Glimpses, fragments, intimations, mystical illumination- that is the only way to seize reality.” Berlin sums up the ethos of the Romantics in two features. “These two elements- the free untrammeled will and the denial of the fact that there is a nature of things, the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything- are the deepest and in a sense the most insane elements in this extremely valuable and important movement…. Those are the fundamental bases of Romanticism: will, the fact that there is no structure to things, that you can mould things as you will- they come into being only as a result of your moulding activity- and therefore opposition to any view which tried to represent reality as having some kind of form which could be studied, written down, learnt, communicated to others, and in other respects treated in a scientific manner.” The Romantics were opposed to any inclination of natural laws, as all law was a human construct. Politics and economics were not unalterable, just as poverty and squalor were not a given. Chateaubriand describes the Romantic ideal, “the Ancients scarcely knew this secret anxiety, the bitterness of strangled passions, all fermenting together. A large political life, games in the gymnasium or on the field of Mars, the business of the Forum- public business- filled their time and left no place for the ennui of the heart.” Byron was perhaps the epitome of the Romantic. “Byron’s chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of voluntarism, the whole philosophy of the view that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons, takes his rise from him.” This insatiable desire was also expressed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. It was expressed in the idea of irreconcilable ultimate values and unattainable ends. It was expressed in the ideal of the noble savage. It was equally expressed in the ideal of the superior man stuck amongst mere mortals who make up society. “This is the typical note of the outcast, the exile, the superman, the man who cannot put up with the existing world because his soul is too large to contain it, because he has ideals which presuppose the necessity for perpetual fervent movement forward, movement which is constantly confined by the stupidity and the unimaginativeness and flatness of the existing world…. The fact that he is sincere, that he’s prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is a morally noble fact. Anyone who is sufficiently a man of integrity, anyone who is prepared to sacrifice himself upon any altar, no matter what, has a moral personality worthy of respect, no matter how detestable or how false the ideals to which he bows his knee.” This notion of idealism was invented by the Romantics. “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…. 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 in life, can in principle be perfect or true- all this we owe to the Romantics.”
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