Edmund Burke MP. Portrait by Joshua Reynolds, c. 1769
Introduction
The rapid spread of the science-based Enlightenment (c1687-c1804) across Europe
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a cause of much dismay to
the reigning monarchies of the time. The source of their anxiety, the philosophes,
were propagating a radical new range
of ideas "centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of
knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and
ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, and constitutional
government."
The conservative reaction to such ideas was to declare the power of nature and
the primacy of god as the controlling force in the universe. This hierarchical
relationship justified the chain of hierarchical order and authority on earth that
"connected subjects to rulers and to god" thereby revalidating feudal
society and monarchy. On an individual level, emotions and spirituality were
asserted to be more important than science and reason.
This early reaction to the Enlightenment, i.e., the emphasis on capricious
feeling or overwhelmed emotions ('the inflamed passions') as described in the
works of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and later in the
Romanticist (c1790s-c1850) movement, turned culture into a burden on society.
This is because, from the idea of the cathartic terror of nature, to the
Byronic romantic hero, and on to the superheroes of today, Romanticism has
diverted people away from real change and real working-class heroes.
The Romanticist escape to Utopia, the remote, the exotic, and the unknown, is
in stark contrast with the real lives of past leaders of communitarian
movements who suffered, struggled, and died for real social change. Now we live
in stark, dark times, surrounded by media that is saturated with the
Romanticist gloop of horror, terror, fantasy, science fiction, romantic egoism,
etc., that threatens to slow society down and trap us into infinite and endless
imagination to the detriment of any progressive forms of social consciousness
and societal change.
Edmund Burke's sublime: "by the contagion of our passions"
Edmund Burke set out a new way of looking at nature not as a 'demonstration of
order but an invitation of reverence'. For example, this reverence can be seen
in the language used by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in his book The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Goethe wrote: 'From the forbidding mountain
range across the barren plain untrodden by the foot of man, to the end
of the unknown seas, the spirit of the Eternal Creator can be felt
rejoicing over every grain of dust' [1] emphasising the fearful, the mysterious
and the unsure.
This new emphasis on reverence for the Creator and fear of nature was a
reaction to the Enlightenment desire to refocus society on man and an
understanding of nature. In the writing of the Enlightenment philosophes,
Nature was given meaning in relation to man, not abstracted into the anger of a
revengeful god. For Diderot,
"a picture of high mountains, ancient forests and immense ruins evoked
episodes of classical or religious history. The roar of an invisible torrent
led him to speculate on human calamities. Everything in nature was referred to
man in society: 'Man is born for society ... put a man in a forest and he will
become ferocious.' For Rousseau, man only reached his highest insights when
alone and humbled by the savage force of nature. Both were alike in their
search for natural spontaneity, but what turned one towards society drove the
other into solitude." [2]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) had also rejected the rationalism of the
Enlightenment philosophes (the development of knowledge and the
intellect), "in favor of a form of nonrational, spiritual
"enlightenment" centered on the "holy and beneficent" inner
voice of conscience engraved on our hearts by God." [3]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1766 portrait of
Rousseau
wearing an Armenian papakha and costume, Allan Ramsay
Thus, Rousseau moved "away from
the Enlightenment's reliance on empiricism, reason, and knowledge towards a
stress on the active nature of the mind and the inner spiritual life of the
individual''. By doing this, "he helped to launch what would eventually develop
into a full-blown revolt against the rationalism and intellectualism of the
eighteenth century in the name of religion, emotion, imagination, and the
heart, themes central to the thought of the Romantic period that Rousseau
helped to inspire." [4]
Burke developed the concept of the sublime (great, elevated, or lofty thought
or language) in his book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin Of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He wrote:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that
is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the
sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is
capable of feeling.”
Burke changed the emphasis from description to drama, especially in his
emphasis on passionate language to 'inflame the heart'. He writes:
“We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. The truth is, all verbal
description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so
poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely
have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes
of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the
contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which
probably might never have been struck out by the object described.” [5]
Thus, the power of rhetoric (using 'modes of speech' combined with 'strong and
lively feeling', 'we catch a fire already kindled in another') takes over from
reality itself: "The influence of most things on our passions is not so
much from the things themselves, as from our opinions concerning them; and
these again depend very much on the opinions of other men, conveyed for the
most part by words only." [6]
In this way the passions of men can be inflamed by a strong use of imaginative
rhetoric. As reason is secondary, the implications of such behaviour, such an
idea, on a mass scale (passions creating a wildfire across nations) can later
be seen in the wars of the twentieth century (nation set against nation in WWI,
Hitler's strident speeches of WWII).
Also, to overemphasise the passions diminished the role of reason and
rationalisation in individual acts. For example, as Diderot claimed, "it
is wrong to attribute the crimes of men to their passions: it is their false
judgements which are at fault. The passions always inspire us rightly, for they
inspire us only with the desire for happiness. It is the mind that misleads us
and makes us take false roads." [7]
Romantic heroes: "misery in his heart"
If we combine Burke's "ideas of pain, and danger," with Rousseau's
"inner voice of conscience engraved on our hearts" we can see the
beginnings of the construction of the Romantic hero in pursuit of his/her own
passions, and who can be described thus:
"A romantic hero is an exceptional and often mysterious person, usually in
exceptional circumstances. The collision of external events is transferred to
the inner world of the hero, in whose soul there is a struggle of contradictions.
As a result of this kind of reproduction, romanticism has extremely highlighted
the value of the personality, inexhaustible in their inner depths, revealing
its unique inner world."
The characteristics of the Romantic hero tend to emphasise someone who has been
"rejected by society and has themselves at the center of their own
existence", with various combinations of introspection, wanderlust,
melancholy, misanthropy, alienation, and isolation.
The Lord Byron FRS. Portrait by Thomas Phillips, c. 1813
The Byronic hero was popularised in
Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818) with the passions emphasied
as "misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet
capable of deep and strong affection". A solitary figure and resigned to
suffering which was reflected in the trials and tribulations of Byron's own
life and death in Italy and Greece.
The Romantic hero can be seen as an individualist who suffers from
psychological traumas associated with alienation from society and life itself.
Working class heroes: "complaints of the hungry proletariat"
As with the Romantic movement, the Romantic hero was a reaction to the new
bourgeois social order as the ancien regime's control and rule through
aristocracy and monarchy diminished. The rediscovered and popularised
collectivist ideologies of republicanism, democracy and socialism took to the
stage and soon gathered momentum.
As Otto Grotewohl noted in 1948: "Romanticism sought models in the dark mysticism of the Middle Ages and viewed with complete contempt not only democracy and revolution but also the emancipation of the people".
And
although many of the romantics fled to the mountains or the sea to escape
burgeoning capitalism, Pyotr Semyonovich Kogan wrote that "inevitably even in the work of
such a poet as Hugo, the noise of the street and the complaints of the hungry
proletariat burst in and drowned out the gloomy sounds of medieval organs and
the tender songs of Oriental odalisques."
Kogan criticises the Romantic interest in melancholic music and the
other-worldly exoticism of Orientalism. As the practical materialism
(science-based) of the proletariat excluded Romanticism (irrationalism), the
anti-social individualism of the Romantics was replaced with the collectivism
of the working classes.
The many aspects of the working class condition e.g. hunger, loneliness, alienation, poverty, joblessness, depression or lacking in health care (some aspects actually glorified in the Romantic hero) are reversed in the common aim of working-class solidarity and activism. While the Romantic hero looked to the past, the working class looked to the future.
The characteristics of the working class hero (positive, conscious, rational, philanthropic) starkly contrasted with the idea of the highly individualistic, alienated Romantic hero (negative, anti-conscious, irrational, misanthropic).
The male and female working class heroes given to us by history are ordinary
people who rose above their living and social conditions to create a better
world for all, fighting for better wages and working conditions, birth control
and health services for both workers and migrants. Some examples:
"Mother Jones (1837 – 1930) Mary ‘Mother’ Jones was a trade union activist
who helped to organise strikes to campaign for better pay and conditions for
workers. She was an organiser for “The Knights of Labor” and the American Mine
Workers Union. She sought to enforce child labour laws. Referred to as ‘the
most dangerous women in America’ she revelled in her cause to liberate the
working class of America.
Mother Jones, American labor activist.
Margaret Sanger (1879 – 1966) Sanger was a member of the New York Socialist
Party and supported striking workers in the early 1910s. She published her
first articles on birth control in a socialist magazine. After the First World
War, she concentrated on promoting birth control and allowed her socialist
policies to elapse.
Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Bevan was the son of a miner and left school at the age of 13 to work in the mines himself. He became active in local union politics and rose in the Labour Movement to become a key figure of the Party. After the 1945 election, he set up the new National Health Service, which offered universal health care.
Walter Reuther (1907 – 1970) Reuther was an influential trade union leader who took on the major car firms and gained recognition for unions. Under his leadership, UAW became a major force, gaining substantial concessions from car companies. For his campaign to win workers rights, he was beaten up by Ford’s men and subject to two assassination attempts.
Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) Chavez was the son of Latino-immigrants and started
life working for very low wages as an agricultural labourer. He became an
American labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the National
Farm Workers Association. Chavez sought to create better working conditions for
migrant farm workers."
Modern romantics: From Ziggy Stardust to Harry
Potter
There are many contemporary working-class heroes that we don't hear about as
the mass media will inevitably exclude anyone that opposes the current global
dominance of neo-liberal ideology. What is promoted in mass culture is the
abstracted, alienated, other-worldly characters such as superheroes: bourgeois
heroes, guilt-ridden for not carrying out the claims of universality of their
class (liberté, égalité, fraternité), that can only try to
ameliorate the down side of capitalism: the proliferation of criminality
(Batman in Gotham City, Superman in Metropolis).
The Romantic heroes of today have not changed much from those of the nineteenth
century. They still have the same aloof characteristics of difference,
alienation, and disillusionment with the same desires:
"A longing for home and a longing for what is far off - these are the feelings by which the romantics are torn hither and thither; they miss the near-at-hand, suffer from their isolation from men, but, at the same time they avoid the other men and seek zealously for the remote, the exotic and the unknown. They suffer from their estrangement from the world, but they also accept and desire it. Thus Novalis defines romantic poetry as the "the art of appearing strange in an attractive way, the art of making a subject remote and yet familiar and pleasant," and he asserts that everything becomes romantic and poetic, "if one removes it in a distance," that everything can be romanticized, if one "gives a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to the familiar and an infinite significance to the finite."" [8]
David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust at Newcastle City Hall in 1972.
The 'art of appearing strange in an attractive way' has not diminished. From Ziggy Stardust to Harry Potter, our modern-day Romantic heroes are also superheroes, so wide is their fame and following. Their alienation is now represented in science fiction and magic, 'remote and yet familiar and pleasant', as far away as possible from any form of collectivist ideology and solidarity. As Hauser writes:
"The escape to Utopia and the fairy tale, to the unconscious and the
fantastic, the uncanny and the mysterious, to childhood and nature, to dreams
and madness, were all disguised and more or less sublimated forms of the same
feeling, of the same yearning for irresponsibility and a life free from
suffering and frustration - all attempts to escape into that chaos and anarchy
against which the classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had
fought at times with alarm and anger, at others with grace and wit, but always
with the same determination." [9]
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The forces of reason and science - Classicism and the
Enlightenment - opposed the attempted escapism of the day into 'chaos and
anarchy'. While the determination of the philosophes to fight against
darkness and irrationalism may have been a losing battle (with the eventual
rise of Romanticism), it was not a completely lost battle as many of the
reforms advocated by the philosophes are societal norms today, as the
Enlightenment reshaped the ways people understood issues such as liberty,
equality, and individual rights.
However, the role of the 'passions' (the heart over the head), the emphasis on emotion over reasoned thinking (which played such a huge role in the development of Romanticism) is still a worrying issue given the domination of Romanticism as the main ideology in the globalised culture of today. One could argue that the Romantic hero cannot exist without media attention, while the working-class hero must continue to organise deprived of it.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page is here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[1] The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson (Penguin, 1990) p206
[2] The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson (Penguin, 1990) p206
[3] Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment by Graeme Garrard (State Uni. of NY Press, 2003) p84
[4] Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment by Graeme Garrard (State Uni. of NY Press, 2003) p84
[5] The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson (Penguin, 1990) p204
[6] The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson (Penguin, 1990) p204
[7] The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson (Penguin, 1990) p192
[8] The Social History of Art, V3, by Arnold Hauser (Vintage, 1958) p174/5
[9] The Social History of Art, V3, by Arnold Hauser (Vintage, 1958) p174/5
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