Saturday, July 4, 2026

Fragment 225, Word count: 542.

Tags: French Revolution 1789-99, romanticism, metaphysics, Enlightenment, aristocracy, European history, Christianity, social hierarchy, philosophy, art, human existence.

Romanticism is founded on the conviction that the truth of human existence is irredeemably and indecently ugly and brutal, inspiring only nihilism, and since philosophy is the quest for truth, it will be increasingly dispiriting and dark as it makes advances. Romantic philosophers felt that advances in materialist-mathematical science had reduced life and the world far too much to dead clockwork, and they concluded that the best antidote to the resulting nihilism was to revive the enchantments of the past. They wanted to re-enchant the world. So, in Romanticism, art is vastly more important than philosophy, beauty more important than truth. The power of human imagination is the light in the abyss, with power to construct beautiful stories, poems, songs, and images to inject a measure of brief pleasure and joy into human lives.

The core negativity of Romanticism comes from the ugly, but thoroughly ‘enchanted’, drama of sinful human nature in the context of divine command and punishment in Christianity, and it resonates with the politically conservative world-view which evolved from that old culture. The negativity also comes from the aristocratic fear, especially after the Revolution in France from 1789-99, that Enlightenment philosophy, especially in the work of Kant and Fichte, had come to a new kind of metaphysics that would undermine the hierarchical social order of the whole European past. That new metaphysics had no need of divine or otherwise supernatural teleological forces, no gods or demons, no afterlife of heaven or hell; and the teleological forces that remained, namely embodied humans, showed up as all equally and independently creative in positing the external world, their own individual essence, and the force of self-legislated laws. Such power and elemental equality simply negated utterly the old aristocratic and Christian universe, and the aristocratic young Romantics recoiled in fear and loathing from the social upheaval it implied, with the Revolution still fresh in collective memory.

From time out of mind, aristocrats have believed that their worldly exceptionalism is a demonstration of divine approval. In Christian societies their wealth put them in a position to accumulate vast divine merit by good works, mainly donating grandly to various Church related causes and institutions. They were comfortably certain that wealth and power would save them from the righteous wrath of divine, or any other, judgment. (The present day class of billionaires believes likewise that their wealth and power will save them from environmental and social collapse.)

The new metaphysics might have been embraced as inspiring great hope, since its conception of human nature is strongly positive, not in the least dystopian, unlike the legacy Christian conception. The original philosophical Romantics, however, experienced the loss of exceptional privileges by their social stratum as catastrophic and overwhelmingly tragic. Deeply embedded within their legacy of Euro-Christian culture, they had no ability to conceive a less dystopian configuration of their society, and they clearly represented the fears of the most powerful factions of European society. Their response was to encourage and participate in a revival of thrilling enchantments from the past: stories of magicians, capricious spirits, damsels in distress rescued heroically by mighty knights, brave soldiers, tragically beautiful lost causes, restless young men on wild windswept hills; and their appeal was sufficient to take popular culture along with them.

See: Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335) (of gods & demons).

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.