The Enlightenment and Romanticism

Problem This Solves

The Enlightenment and Romanticism are often treated as opposed movements -- cold reason versus warm feeling. McGilchrist shows they are better understood as successive phases in the hemispheric cycle: the Enlightenment represents left-hemisphere rationality mistaking itself for the whole of reason, while Romanticism represents the right hemisphere's inclusive response that sublates (not negates) the Enlightenment's genuine achievements.

Key Principle

Two fundamentally different cognitive modes have been confused under the single word "reason":

• Nous/Vernunft/reason: flexible, shaped by experience, embodied, context-dependent, allied to common sense -- a right-hemisphere capacity.
• Logos/Verstand/rationality: rigid, mechanical, rule-governed, context-independent -- a left-hemisphere capacity.

The Enlightenment's fatal error was elevating rationality above reason, when in fact "the primacy of reason is due to the fact that rationality is founded on it." Rationality cannot ground itself; its premises and its very value must be intuited. The proper cycle mirrors hemispheric processing: reason gives rise to rationality, which must submit its products back to reason's judgment (A -> B -> A).

Romanticism restored this cycle, not by negating the Enlightenment but by sublating its best values. The Industrial Revolution then externalised left-hemisphere logic in the physical world, creating a self-reinforcing environment that outflanked the right hemisphere's corrective.

Good Examples

• Imagination versus fancy: Imagination is the right hemisphere's capacity to make the familiar genuinely new -- clearing away obstructions so we see the thing as it is. Fancy merely recombines familiar elements in novel arrangements. "Originality is antithetical to novelty" (Steiner). Scheler: poets "press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed."
• Romanticism as Aufhebung: "The best of Enlightenment values were not negated, but aufgehoben, by Romanticism." Berlin concluded that the Enlightenment could be summed up in a few beliefs, but Romanticism never could, because its concern was with a whole disposition toward the world.
• Wordsworth's spots of time: Moments of visionary experience that come unbidden while attention is focused elsewhere. "The hiding-places of my power / Seem open; I approach, and then they close." Right-hemisphere insight cannot be approached directly.
• Goethe on participatory perception: "My thinking is not separate from objects... Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us." The Romantic dissolution of the subject-object divide.

Bad Examples

• Descartes' schizophrenic phenomenology: Detachment from the body, suspicion of the senses, reduction of others to potential automata. Looking out his window and seeing what might be "mere machines, wearing hats and coats." His certainty that clear and distinct ideas are all true was "the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought."
• The rise of boredom: A concept that arose in the eighteenth century as a symptom of left-hemisphere dominance -- "the dreariness of non-engagement," passivity, the replacement of lived time with an "endless present."
• The uncanny as return of the repressed right hemisphere: Doubles, automata, detached body parts, the confusion of animate and inanimate -- all hallmarks of schizophrenia. Frankenstein as "the left hemisphere assembling a living whole from dead parts."
• Liberty, equality, fraternity as abstractions: Pursued explicitly as left-hemisphere goals, these ideals became negative forces. Equality became the drive to pull down what stands out; liberty became nihilistic casting off of constraints. "Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found" (Burke).
• The Industrial Revolution as left-hemisphere incarnation: Identical, interchangeable products; rectilinear forms; elimination of the body's evidence. Heisenberg: technology as "a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment."
• Symmetry as left-hemisphere aesthetic: Enlightenment portraiture shows faces "represented more symmetrically than in any other Western style." Yet humans do not find symmetrical faces attractive -- they border on the uncanny. Perfect symmetry is absent from the living phenomenal world and signals the mechanical, not the beautiful.
• The myths of science: Scientific materialism developed its own mythos: the unity of science, the sovereignty of method, science as above morality, and science as uniquely free from preconception. Each myth makes science immune to the critique it applies to everything else -- "a result of the Enlightenment failure to understand the contextual nature of all thought."

Key Quotes

"The ultimate achievement of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can't get as far as understanding that." -- Pascal, cited in Chapter 10

"That [Descartes] could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true -- that was the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought." -- Chapter 10

"How difficult it is to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign; to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word." -- Goethe, cited in Chapter 11

"The hiding-places of my power / Seem open; I approach, and then they close; / I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, / May scarcely see at all." -- Wordsworth, cited in Chapter 11

Rules of Thumb

1. Distinguish reason (contextual, embodied, tolerant of contradiction) from rationality (abstract, rule-based, intolerant of ambiguity). Rationality is a tool of reason, not its master.
2. Distinguish imagination (which returns us to the origin, the ground of being) from fancy (which produces mere novelty). The test: does it reveal what was always there, or recombine what was already known?
3. The most valuable insights come as by-products of attention directed elsewhere. Effortful, explicit pursuit changes the nature of its quarry.
4. When a culture generates boredom and the uncanny simultaneously, left-hemisphere dominance is at work.
5. Beware the externalisation of left-hemisphere logic in technology and environment -- it creates a self-reinforcing loop that progressively excludes right-hemisphere correction.
6. Values like liberty, equality, and fraternity can only emerge as accompaniments of a tolerant disposition, not as targets of explicit pursuit.

Related References

• [[ancient-world-renaissance]] -- The previous swing of the pendulum, from Greece through the Reformation
• [[hemispheric-pendulum]] -- The overarching model within which the Enlightenment-Romanticism cycle is one phase
• [[aufhebung-and-primacy]] -- Romanticism as the paradigmatic example of successful Aufhebung in cultural history