This is an extensive excerpt from the antiquarian book Misinterpretation of Man (1947) by the philosopher Paul Roubiczek (1898-1972). (There is also a Swedish version of this text here.) The book criticizes the thinking of our time, still under the spell of the 19th century brother-pair of philosophy: Materialism and Romanticism. You will also find that Roubiczek’s criticism applies to the phenomenologism which has surfaced among Jungian theorists since the seventies and which has tragically distorted Jungian psychology. The premises of Archetypal Psychology (here) are surprisingly close to those of the Romantic movement of the 19th century. The whole of this important book concerns this treacherous way of thought. This very chapter is perhaps not the best one, but it highlights the crucial points of the criticism. Roubiczek, being a Christian Jew, had to flee from the Nazis, and he lost his notes to the book in the process. That’s why the citations lack direct references.
The Romantic Movement in Germany, the source of Romanticism
throughout the world, rests upon the achievements of Kant and
Goethe. It starts the new century fully conscious of itself.
“Aurora has put on seven league boots,” Friedrich
Schlegel writes, “soon the whole sky will burn in a single
flame, and then all your tiny lightning-conductors will no longer
be of use. Then the 19th century will indeed begin.” (See
Bibliography below).
The Romantics are correct in their recognition
that the most important achievement of their great predecessors
is their liberation of personality, but this very emphasis upon
personality is immediately exaggerated and distorted. Kant had
shown that the human mind is not only a passive recipient of the
world surrounding us, but also its creator and law-giver. To know
the whole of reality, therefore, we must also explore the laws of
thinking. Now, however, this new and surprising task of the mind
is overestimated so that mind is considered not only as having
the same importance as reality itself, but as its sole creator,
and man is seen as absolute master of the world. Fichte’s
argument is: as it is I who think and recognize the world, and as
of the thing per se nothing is certain but the fact that I
recognize it, this “Ego” is the only thing which is
certain. In this Ego object and subject become one; it is known
not only as an external object, but also as an inner experience;
I can have direct, absolute knowledge of it, and thus it
represents the whole of reality. The Ego becomes the creator of
the world, and objective reality is for Fichte only the
“Non-Ego” which is artificially created by the Ego in
order to serve certain ends. The whole world, man as well as the
external reality, is determined by this Ego alone, and all idea
that “the substance of our perceptions might be given from
outside” is utterly rejected.
Fichte himself is frightened by the
boundlessness of the prospects opened by this idea, and he soon
erects new boundaries. But to the Romantics these thoughts are
the most welcome, and while Fichte still speaks about an abstract
“World-Ego” which could replace God, the Romantics
believe only in the individual Ego of every single person, and
thus in unlimited individualism. All that matters for them is the
real and intoxicating power of achievement of the individual.
“I am able to do what I want to do. For man nothing is
impossible.” This glory of man is presupposed without any
misgivings, and his inner life, therefore, becomes all-important.
“Within ourselves and nowhere else lies eternity with all
its worlds, the past and the future.” The human mind
becomes the sole absolute power, and as all laws are established
by the agency of the laws of thinking, it is mind which makes the
laws without itself being determined by laws; mind creates the
world arbitrarily, according to its own wishes. “Mind needs
nothing but itself . . . for what I recognize as the world is its
most beautiful work, its reflected image, created by the mind
itself.” Other creatures and objects “exist because
we have thought them . . . we are the fate which keeps them in
existence.”
This sovereign arbitrariness of the mind is for
Romanticism the ultimate good, and in order to maintain it the
Romantics try, time and again, to refute all binding laws and
everything which might tie them down to earth. The flight from
necessity is the common characteristic of all the different and
contradictory trends within the Romantic Movement. It is for this
reason that irony takes the first place in their programme, for
with the help of irony the absolute freedom of the mind can be
proved. In real life, man cannot avoid taking single experiences
and objects seriously and considering them as real, but with the
help of irony the mind can lift itself above them and express the
consciousness of its omnipotence. Irony secures also the
magnitude and infinity of the spirit which is excluded by
necessity. The realm of the spirit is so immeasurable that no
finite human being could ever exhaust it. If man wishes even to
hint at the existence of this infinity, he must endeavour to
realize the most extreme contrasts and contradictions, and in
this he is helped by irony because it removes from everything all
weight and seriousness. An entirely free play of the mental
forces becomes possible, and thus the mind is enabled to jump
from one of these extremes to its opposite.
At first, this new liberation of the mind from
all restrictions is extraordinarily fruitful. A new world,
inaccessible through the old concepts, is waiting to be awakened,
and only a mind which is utterly unfettered can go on incessantly
absorbing new objects and thus rediscovering the fullness and
abundance of life. The stimuli which result from Romanticism are
unusually numerous and important. The conscious ordering of the
world is confronted with its unconscious background; the
simplifying of the world brought about by the Enlightenment is
replaced by the mysterious wealth of the senses and the
instincts, of the heart and the soul. In this way, old symbols
and myths regain their meaning, half-forgotten tales and legends,
surviving only among simple folk, are revived, and the spiritual
life of primitive peoples is explored. By the recognition of the
unconscious man becomes able to grasp the essence and importance
of religion, so that Christianity and some of the Eastern
religions, awakening a new emotional response, acquire new
meaning and new life.
As the Romantics acknowledge neither compulsion
nor a binding spiritual law, they are indeed able to awaken to a
fuller life. Without distorting them by their own laws, they can
accept and follow all modes of art and penetrate into their real
structure, and they can understand and appreciate epochs foreign
to them. The valuation by absolute standards which we find in
Goethe and Schiller, which led them to falsify many periods, is
replaced by a just appreciation. With the help of religion, the
Middle Ages, previously despised and neglected, are recognized
for the first time in their true significance as one of the great
epochs of European history. But it is not only the significance
of the Gothic style which is recognized, but that of the
Renaissance too, and antiquity is freed from the wrong conception
of Classicism by the recognition of the passion that was always
present in it. Germany owes to the Romantics the translation and
assimilation of the other literatures of the world, for the
translations of Shakespeare, of Dante, and of the Spanish novels
and dramas preserve to an amazing degree the peculiarities of the
original, and at the same time the modern history of the arts and
modern philology are coming into being.
By their longing to prove the breadth and
variety of the mind, the Romantics are continually forced to look
for new subjects. They turn to the Orient, to the Balkans, to
Indians and savages. They discover the beauty of landscapes
previously shunned, of high mountains, dark forests, the sea.
They look for night and horror as well as for loveliness and a
new understanding of the mysterious, the twilight and the
uncertain begins. Imagination is set free and fairy-tales,
ghost-stories and the most fantastic inventions flourish. At the
same time, mind in its playing with reality penetrates deeper, so
that the investigation of national characteristics and a growing
emphasis on them help towards the development of the nations, and
social Romanticism and social Utopias lead towards socialism. All
the discoveries of the natural sciences are taken up and
developed by the imagination, and this has as stimulating an
effect as the experimental invention of new philosophical
possibilities. In this way most of the doctrines of the century,
the belief in progress, the theory of evolution, and every form
of the philosophy of history are, at least in a fragmentary form,
anticipated.
The flight from necessity is, in this respect,
a great help to the Romantics. These new subjects are for the
most part unknown, and thus their real and necessary structure
cannot be disclosed at once, so that it is impossible to
assimilate them into an art bound by strict forms. It is only
because the Romantics shun all laws and accept every subject just
as it appears to them, even though this may be in its most
superficial aspect, that they are able to embrace such a variety
and wealth of new subjects. But this very quality of Romanticism
justifies us in not dwelling on its positive effects. For all
these stimuli gain importance only so far as they are taken up by
those outside the Romantic Movement, only so far as the
successors of the Romantics try, seriously and without irony, to
discover their real structure and the laws which govern them.
Only when they are developed according to the laws to which, of
necessity, they must conform, do these subjects produce lasting
effects, and only then are these sudden flashes of insight
transformed into something stable and, powerful. Those of its
results which have any significance, therefore, lead very quickly
beyond Romanticism. We, however, in this study want to know what
is meant by “Romanticism,” and what has been
preserved of it in spite of these further developments. On which
elements of Romanticism is based that attitude which we call
“romantic” today? We must, therefore, investigate its
sources in order to gain more understanding,of our own spiritual
life, so as to be able, the more correctly, to measure its
value.
Those consequences of the flight from necessity
which become visible at once are the disastrous ones.
Fichte’s advance into the sphere of the unbounded
introduces a falsification of Kant’s system which is
characteristic of the thinkers throughout the century, and which
exercises a pernicious effect on their works.
Kant, in his first discoveries, was
considerably in advance of his time. Neither he nor his
successors can stop at those boundaries of knowledge which he had
discovered; they cannot be content to leave the “thing per
se” unknown. But whereas Kant reintroduces only indirectly
and with the help of morality the metaphysics which he has
dethroned, all his followers try to avoid this roundabout way.
They acknowledge Kant’s discoveries, but they all try to
discover a single exception by which, in spite of the laws
established by Kant, they may gain a direct knowledge of the
thing per se. Only in one single case do each of them claim to
refute these laws, but this one exception is sufficient for them
to smuggle into the theory of knowledge a complete metaphysical
system. Fichte considers the Ego and its omnipotence as such an
exception, Hegel an abstract concept of the spirit and of
history, Schopenhauer the will, and Nietzsche the psychological
knowledge of the Ego. All these conclusions are wrong, for it
remains impossible to bring forward a complete proof of the
exception, and thus they only introduce a new age of errors.
Fichte makes use of the knowledge of the power
of the intellect to avoid taking reality as his starting point,
for he asserts that reality must be such as we think it and that,
therefore, every logical conclusion must be real, and thus he
takes his start from thinking alone. Kant is always concerned
with life and with the real world. Even when, in his old age, he
loses himself once more in metaphysical speculation, he still
struggles with concepts which, though overlaid by conventions,
nevertheless refer to reality. Fichte, however, is the founder of
a new scholasticism; starting from purely logical propositions,
he follows them as far as possible, without feeling the necessity
to examine whether they still correspond to reality. Thus he
succeeds in constructing a purely speculative metaphysical system
which explains the world in all its details, so that he claims to
know the structure, the meaning and the purpose of the universe,
without noticing that he has lost all contact with the real
world. It is hard to understand how such a pretension is possible
after Kant, but it is welcomed by the Romantics. Friedrich
Schlegel blames Kant for what are in fact his merits: “Kant
concludes with the opinion that, in the realm of speculation, we
cannot know the one thing which is certain, the true nature of
godhead,” and he asserts: “Posterity will probably
judge the spiritual greatness of this excellent man particularly
by his physical writings . . . while his philosophical writings
are inevitably doomed to fall into oblivion.” But in Fichte
he sees the beginning of the new era. Novalis says: “Fichte
is the higher . . . Kant the lower organ.”
Yet this boundless individualism revenges
itself upon them, and grotesque metaphysical systems and
uncontrolled and empty thoughts regain the power they had just
lost. Schelling gives as a fundamental rule: “The existence
of God is an empirical truth and the basis of all practical
experience,” and he meets all contradictions in a purely
speculative way and by a forced logic. “As there can be
nothing outside God, this contradiction (namely that there are
things) can be solved only by the assumption that things have
their source in that which, within God, is not God
himself.” In this way one can explain everything, without
explaining anything. Schlegel and Novalis find that men belong
more to the mineral kingdom and women to the vegetable, and true
love to them is not a single flower, but a producer of vegetable
nature. In this manner they can go on philosophizing
indefinitely, and they finally believe that they know everything
about God and ghosts, about the stars and the worlds, and about
the mystical being of man. But in fact they do not attain to the
slightest knowledge, and yet, from their lofty world, they look
down upon reality with arrogance and pity.
The disastrous consequences of this way of
thinking first become visible when, in the political writings of
the Romantics, it clashes with reality — and this leads straight
to the heart of our present situation. The Romantics are bound in
these writings to make use of concepts taken from reality, but
they give them an ideal meaning without concerning themselves
with their real content. They defend, for instance, the
institution of kingship and glorify it in mystical terms, without
noticing that the real institution has become decadent and
debased and not at all worthy of support. By this they achieve
the opposite of what they desired, because the revolutionary
aims, for the sake of which they support kingship, are too
abstract to become effective, and so their defence simply helps
to preserve the debased institution which they actually want to
abolish. The Romantics believe that they understand the absolute
order of the world, and therefore ask for absolute power to
organize the world accordingly; they put forward reactionary and
dictatorial demands so that they may more quickly achieve their
revolutionary aims. But these abstract aims are bound to remain
ineffective, and thus it is their reactionary demands alone which
have real consequences.
Fichte, in his Speeches to the German
Nation, proposes a very revolutionary system of education,
but when in consequence of this he is asked to draw up a plan for
the new Berlin University, his project is altogether impractical
and has to be rejected. Thus it is only the demand for a stricter
use of power which is really effective in his speeches — a demand
most welcome to the reactionary powers — and the slogans which
help to transform a healthy national awakening into a disastrous
nationalistic mania. It is very easy to behold the kingdom of God
and in thought to transform all earthly life according to it, and
it is just, as easy to glorify the long bygone Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation and to show off its paltry remnants in an
artificial light. But the most beautiful programmes, however
logical and consistent, are of no use if their components which
have to be taken from reality have acquired a quite different
character. Real life has a very strong vitality of its own and
cannot be altered by the weaving of fantasies about it; rather
will these fantasies, though based on misconceptions, be used to
support it. It is no accident that the wars of liberation against
Napoleon, which are enthusiastically supported by the romantic
revolutionaries but condemned by Goethe, lead to the reactionary
Holy Alliance. It is both foolish and disastrous to take part in
politics on the assumption that kingship is holy, that the Church
is perfect, or that law is just, for their imperfect
representatives will make a frivolous or criminal use of such
political romanticism. Only the struggle to influence and
transform the world can be justified in politics.
An especially dangerous aspect of this policy
is the glorification of national character. Fichte starts by
attributing “everything original which is not yet deadened
by arbitrary regulations” to the Germans, and by denouncing
everything else as foreign. He declares: “To have a
character and to be German mean beyond doubt the same.” As
he is an abstract thinker, it is very easy for him to prove that
the German language is the only “genuine language,”
and that the Germans alone are “truly a people.” It
does not matter to him that in support of this theory such
typical German characteristics as the preoccupation with death
and the passive acceptance of whatever seems their political
destiny have to be stigmatized as of foreign origin. Similarly,
Schleiermacher asserts that “those proud islanders . . .
know nothing but profit and pleasure,” and as “an
admirer of religion” he can hardly bear the sight of
Frenchmen because “with almost every word they tread the
most holy laws under foot.” Only “here in the
Fatherland do you find in profusion everything that adorns
mankind.”
The Romantics find beautiful everything which
they can manage to call German, and as a result of this
indiscriminate admiration everything which is really German is
gradually covered with a thick layer of rubbish. Novalis does not
even try to discover what the French Revolution might have meant
to Germany, but contents himself with declaring: “The best
thing the French have won by their revolution is a portion of the
German character.” The consequences which follow from the
overestimation of the mind are paradoxical; first, by this
overestimation the abstract ideal of “the German” is
established, and then the mind is undiscriminatingly subordinated
to everything which seems German, however inimical to the mind
and however senseless it may be. While the claims of the mind
become abstract and useless, the world which must progress grows
more foreign to it than ever before, and finally the mind bows
down to this distorted reality, overlaying it with sentimentality
instead of transforming it. At the same time, this uncritical
glorification of the nation must, sooner or later, bring its
development to a standstill and lead to its decline, for if all
its weaknesses are praised, it has no way of developing and
improving, but is rather kept within its existing limits.
Confirmed in its faults and overwhelmed by this false glory, it
must lag behind other nations.
This, however, is but one of the dangerous
manifestations of Romanticism. The Romantics are so intoxicated
by their discovery of the omnipotence of the mind that, in other
respects too, they will have nothing to do with reality. It is
not only that in their philosophical writings they ignore the
existing world, but that they always build up in their
imaginations a world as it should be, without considering in the
least whether this world of the imagination can be translated
into reality. “Imagination is the highest and most original
faculty of man, and everything else only reflection upon
it.” In all the writings of the Romantics the images of a
Golden Age of the past and of the future continually recur, and
they settle down in a cloud-cuckoo-land from which they can look
down upon the real world with contempt. “I know how the
world should be; it is not worth while, therefore, to know how it
is.” This flight not only from necessity, but also from
reality, is considered as the highest duty of man: “A
really free and educated man must be able, at will, to tune
himself to philosophy or philology, criticism or poetry, history
or rhetoric, the old and the new, quite arbitrarily, just as an
instrument is tuned, at any time and to any pitch.”
This attitude gradually destroys even the
original and important merits of Romanticism. The Romantic
Movement is not only a spiritual but also a very consciously
philosophical one. There is hardly any other movement in
literature and art where such comprehensive theories precede the
real works, so that it seems that all these works are created in
order to prove the theories. Schlegel denounces the
“folk-and-nature poets” who despise all study and
look for their salvation to the formless. Philosophy is for all
the Romantics the highest and the. essential faculty of man.
“Without philosophy, the roost important powers of man
remain in discord. . . . He who knows what philosophy means knows
also what life means.” This consciousness, however, and
this philosophy are directed towards the unconscious, the
primitive mind, the feelings, the mysterious and the mystical,
towards an emotional religion and towards the dream that is,
towards everything which can be in a good sense of the word
called romantic, but which contradicts consciousness. And the
Romantics do not try to raise the unconscious and the mysterious
into consciousness, which would be a fit task for the mind; on
the contrary, the mind has to “tune” itself
romantically, and the omnipotent mind is used to conjure up the
unconscious and the twilight which cannot bear the clear light of
thought. Thus a task is put before it which it cannot solve and
the mind, compelled to produce naíveté
artificially, loses the ability to distinguish the genuine from
the false, and feelings or mystical or religious experiences,
created in this way, are bound to remain vague and unreal. The
Romantics are forced to create phantoms which are not natural and
primitive, but simply lies. Worshipping indiscriminately
everything which seems spontaneous and full of feeling, they
themselves rob the romantic subjects of their value, and supply
all the enemies of the Supernatural with their most effective
weapons. The impression is created that everything irrational is
only a deception and that it can be brought into being only by
fraud. The knowledge of the irrational and mysterious parts of
man, which ought to liberate him from all gods of clay, is
discredited, for these false irrational creations are only fit to
be attacked.
Romanticism forces the mind to commit suicide,
and this effect, too, is one which persists. The cry of
“Back to nature!” had already been dangerous, for it
is not possible to deny the spirit once it has been awakened, nor
to turn the tide backwards. Yet this demand had still been
honest, for it transformed the primitive man into an ideal and
only denied the intellect. The Romantics, however, do not want to
deny the intellect; they make use of it to add to simple things
an impression of the primitive and a mysterious power of
enchantment. The Romantics consciously look for the attraction
which primitive things acquire when seen through the intellect.
But this conservation of the spirit for the sake of the primitive
is quite impossible; one cannot, at the same time, both preserve
the spirit and deny consciousness and thinking.
The mind can discover simple and primitive
things, but it is forced by its nature to understand and so to
transcend the primitive state by steadily increasing the sphere
of consciousness. The artificial preservation of the unconscious
can lead only to the suppression of the mind. If the realm of the
unconscious may not be penetrated by the mind, it can only be
recognized by its being foreign to the intellect, a totally
different sphere, and the more foreign, and even the more stupid
and false it is, the more probable will its primitiveness seem to
be. The mind, therefore, of necessity degenerates, grows confused
and dulled. The overestimation of the intellect by the Romantics,
therefore, leads once more to consequences which are paradoxical,
for this tendency leads to the intellectual finding himself in
the grotesque situation of struggling against the mind and
bending the knee before a false simplicity and even before
complete foolishness, throwing away his best weapons and trying
in vain to subordinate himself where he ought to lead. The
situation arises in which the cultivated mind, to which the
naturally developed simple man aspires, serves to glorify the
lack of intellect. In this way, the intellectual becomes disposed
to accept any humiliation, to worship strength and stupidity and
to betray himself in order to preserve what seems to be
“the primitive.”
Romanticism gives to all the adversaries of the
intellect an apparent justification, for if the only task of the
mind lies in the falsification of original primitivity, and if
the intelligentsia themselves consider this doubtful charm as
their highest achievement, then the turning away from any
intellectual endeavour is indeed the only possible delivery. Thus
the most dangerous trend of our time begins. We are in danger,
not because we are too spiritual or intellectual, but because the
intellect is cultivated in a perverted and one-sided manner. Yet
this wrong tendency cannot be corrected by innocence which is
always threatened anew by every scrap of knowledge which it has
to acquire, but only by a comprehensive development and education
of the reason, and this correction becomes impossible if the mind
is only used to justify what is foreign to it. The way to reason
is blocked.
The most conspicuous example of this wrong
tendency is the romantic attitude towards religion. Friedrich
Schlegel writes to Novalis: “My biblical project is not a
literary, but a biblical one, entirely religious.” But this
does not prevent him from adding: “I feel courage and
strength enough not only to preach and be zealous like Luther,
but also, like Mohammed, to go about the world conquering the
realm of the spirit with the fiery sword of the word, and to
sacrifice my life like Christ.” This is his
“deadliest earnest,” but be asks nevertheless:
“Or perhaps you have more talent for a new Christ?”
This frivolity is approved of by all the Romantics, even by the
theologian Schleiermacher. For him, too, the most important thing
is an artificial attitude of mind; religion for him means a
“taste for the universe,” and he admires the
“virtuosi of religion” and the “virtuosi of
holiness.”
This senseless playing with religion is only
one of the attitudes to it which the Romantics find possible, but
the other is as dangerous. Where the religious feeling is
genuine, as it is in Novalis, its manifestations are so hostile
to the proper use of the mind that, not content with fleeing from
intelligence, they heap abuse upon it. Novalis, for example,
finds it justifiable that “the wise head of the Church is
opposed to the insolent development of human gifts . . . and
untimely and dangerous discoveries in the sphere of
knowledge” when this head prohibits “courageous
thinkers from declaring publicly . . . that the earth is an
insignificant planet.” Religion is not served by such
distortions and fears, and the passionate wrestlings with
religion of a Dostoevsky will show how much more fruitfully in
this sphere can an honest and self-conscious mind be used. The
return of most of the Romantics into the bosom of the one
redeeming Church represents nothing but a betrayal of the spirit,
a cowardly renunciation of all their previous convictions and a
despicable self-annihilation. It has nothing to do with genuine
religion, for the spirit surrenders to those dead traditions
which can only binder the true revival of religion. The most
dangerous features of the Church are strengthened and given a
justification. The overestimation of the individual avenges
itself man, for, as the “Ego” does not really create
the world and as this world is more than a mere
“Non-Ego,” man cannot bear his freedom when it is
increased to licence so that he surrenders unconditionally when
delivered by the Church from this false freedom. He who does not
acknowledge an inner law has eventually to ask for external
compulsion.
Naturally, these weakening and distorting
effects of Romanticism are greatest in its proper sphere of
literature and art, which for the Romantics are man’s
highest achievements. They elevate the artist to a level upon
which he is “among men what men are among the creatures of
earth.” The arts have to be entirely independent of any
reality: “The essence of the poetical feeling, perhaps,
lies in the fact that man stimulates himself by reacting upon
himself . . . and that he can exercise his imagination without
external stimulus.” And “the arbitrariness of the
poet” must not acknowledge “any law above
itself.” But this very overrating of the arts robs them of
their value, and it is due to the Romantic Movement that they
begin to lose their influence upon life and degenerate into mere
ornament.
Even in the arts, the Romantics do not give up
their claim to grasp the absolute directly. But the absolute
itself cannot be embodied in any form. They are, therefore,
immediately driven into a blind alley. They have to shift the
emphasis from the content of the artistic form to its meaning and
to strive for an allegorical form, an endeavour which must needs
lead into the void. If a single event is represented
realistically and explored to its very depths, a living symbol is
created, for in these depths every single thing takes part in the
essence of the whole, and so far as it discloses these depths it
embodies the whole and can symbolize it. The Romantics, however,
believe that they know the meaning of the whole and, starting
from this knowledge, they create allegories to represent it. They
do not transform a character, an event, or an experience into a
symbol; rather does the fairy-tale become the highest form of
art, and imaginary kings, sorcerers, plants and elements perform
a fantastic ballet, in which they are supposed to present the
world order. In this way, the point of every artistic creation is
blunted. It can no longer, without any preconceptions, advance
towards a fuller and deeper representation of the world, but is
reduced to filling prescribed outlines with superficial
ornaments. The work of art loses its autonomy and receives life
only from a meaning grafted on it from outside. If this meaning
is not accepted nothing remains, for its intrinsic value is
destroyed.
Still more dangerous is the attempt of the
Romantics to represent infinity as an essential quality of the
absolute. Infinity, too, cannot be grasped directly, and so they
introduce into the arts a never-ending agitation of the spirit
with which they hope to replace it. When their ideal artist looks
down into the abyss of his mind so that he may draw up from it
something to fashion into artistic form, it is “as if he
looked down into an unfathomable whirlpool where wave after wave
beats and foams, and where yet one cannot distinguish any single
wave . . . where all the currents, again and again, whirl into
one, without pause, without rest . . . a rushing and roaring
enigma, an infinite, infinite raging of the angry and turbulent
element.”
This struggle must not be mistaken for
Goethe’s infinite striving, for the Romantics take over
from him only what they can misinterpret in their. own way.
Goethe is perpetually impelled by the abundance of the world, by
the many-sidedness of the human spirit, and by his need to fulfil
the highest potentialities of our life on earth. He progresses
from one fact, from one experience, to the next, and it is only
because he cannot exhaust reality that he can find no rest. The
Romantics, on the contrary, make use of reality, or rather of a
distorted shadow of it, to represent a theoretical infinity.
Infinity for them is an atmosphere to be introduced into the work
of art, and the creation of this atmosphere of the infinite is
their highest aim. But this aim also is directly hostile to the
creation of genuine works of art. It is true that a complete work
of art has a certain tone, but if the creation of this tone is
one of the aims from the beginning, the process of creation is no
longer free, the form has to be twisted and deformed, and the
work of art is once more subordinated to ends foreign to it. For
the sake of giving this impression of infinity, the Romantics
must frustrate a natural development so as to prolong a
particular mood, or they must break up the form of their works so
as to give the impression of incompleteness, thus excluding a
consistent conclusion to their productions. Or they must retire
into the realm of reflection, but a reflection which must not
lead to any results which might bring the process to a
conclusion. The Romantics look on reflective poetry as the
highest kind; romantic poetry has to “hover on the wings of
poetic reflection, increasing this reflection again and again, as
if multiplying,it in an endless row of mirrors.” The
endeavour of the artist is completely divorced from any
obligation or inner necessity and becomes a mere attitude
unsupported by any vital sanctions.
Allegory, the atmosphere of the infinite,
poetry of romantic reflection, all of these lead straight to the
perversion of art into an ornamentation which smothers life. As
it is not possible to satisfy all these demands, Romanticism
needs more and more trappings which, at least, give an appearance
of success. First, they strive for an impression of
indistinctness. “Who would not wish to walk in twilight,
when the night is interpenetrated by light, and the light by
night, into more intense shadows and colours?” This
twilight, beautiful in itself, becomes unbearably permanent. Then
hunting-horns drown the rustling of the woods, every step is
accompanied by lute and zither, waterfalls do not make their
appearance without lightning and thunder, the moon shines upon
ruins and decayed walls, and moss-grown monuments recall past
ages. Novalis goes so far as to consider the lute as an original
human element; the hero of his novel Heinrich von
Ofterdingen “felt that he lacked a lute, without
knowing how it was built and what effects it produced.”
These are the ideal subjects for romantic paintings as they are
described by Tieck: “Solitary, ghastly landscapes. A rotten
and broken bridge over an abyss between two precipitous rocks;
between them a foaming and roaring brook. Wanderers who have lost
their way, with garments fluttering in the wet wind; the terrible
figures of robbers coming out of a defile; attacked and plundered
carriages, a struggle with the travellers. . . . Brook and
waterfall, with the fisherman, the angle, and the mill turning in
the moonlight.” Poetry, and human life too, are drowned in
vague moods. Once more, an important sphere of human endeavour
has been transformed into one of meaningless amusement.
Thus by endangering every genuine feeling,
romantic art eventually becomes dangerous to life itself. Man is
forced by strong and genuine feelings to seek clarity and
consciousness, passionate decisions and definite results, but the
Romantics, on the contrary, stress the state of feeling itself.
They do not want to follow it up, but to revel in emotions; they
want perpetually to indulge in their feelings. Therefore they
must make feeling weaker than it is, so that it does not lead
anywhere and comes to no conclusion, so that it can become a
permanent mood which is passively enjoyed. Longings make man
thirst for fulfilment, but to the Romantics longing itself is the
most welcome realization of a feeling for the infinite, and
because it becomes their aim and must be preserved, it must not
be satisfied. At the same time, the Romantics are aware that
their intellect is stronger than their feelings, and they are
always afraid that it may overcome their emotions. The conscious
goal towards which man is driven by feeling appears to them as
its annihilation, and they therefore sever the connection between
the feeling and the mind. Feeling is weakened at any cost so that
it cannot give rise to any activity of the mind, which might lead
to a real decision.
The most serious and binding force in human
life is thus degraded, for feeling alone can connect man with the
absolute for which the Romantics strive. In this sphere alone, if
a man is honest with himself, no definite shirking or lying is
possible, for here every error makes itself felt, in the end. But
the Romantics thin it down until it altogether loses this power,
until it is only another ornament gilding over reality. Human
existence, whether happy or unhappy, is weakened until it becomes
a mere indulgence. “Religious feelings should accompany
every activity of man like holy music” — everything
becomes merely a sweet accompaniment to speculation or sensation
which can stimulate without exercising any compulsion. The
revelling in feeling becomes heavy or sentimental, sunk in
sadness and Weltschmerz; irony disappears in its
expression. But in a deeper sense it is now that irony celebrates
its full triumph, for human life itself has become formless and
insincere, an empty allegory, an ironical fragment. It has no
longer any connection with what is truly infinite, and the voice
of the absolute is drowned in false sentimentality.
When the first exaltation has died down and
reality, this powerful and ever-present reality which cannot be
discussed out of existence, comes again to the fore, the
Romantics are no longer equal to it, for they have destroyed
vitality itself. Their arrogant contempt for reality is
transformed into impotent hatred, into Weltschmerz and
querulousness. Eventually, Romanticism manifests itself only as
an inability to cope with life, and a complete decline is thinly
concealed under an artificial pessimism. Following Novalis’
example, the Romantics desire to flee this “pale
existence” without having the strength to deny it
completely. They can only complain: “What are we to do with
our love and loyalty in this world?” The ecstatic praise of
the new century is abandoned for a weak turning towards the past:
“The old things are in contempt, but what do the new matter
to us?” For the first time, youth itself fights against the
things of the future and despises them: “Lonely and deeply
saddened is be who fervently and piously loves the days of
yore.”
The results of the betrayal of the spirit are
most clearly and strikingly seen. The Romantics, because of their
weakness, are no longer able to wrest concepts of value and
purity from life, and so the spirit is entirely without
influence. A strange aristocracy comes into being; the most lofty
poets are transformed into brutal egotists; unable to live,
despising the masses, and worhipping a secret ideal, they think
that they are entitled to follow the worst customs of the masses.
To do evil is the only way of proving their strength, and
satanism comes into fashion. Other Romantics, following a
different path, subordinate themselves to those who despise the
spirit; adoration of “the German” and poetry combine
in the mass production of all that doggerel which almost
succeeded in smothering real art. True art, the spirit of man and
life itself have been debased; they can be saved only by a
struggle against Romanticism.
Certainly, it is true that this does not apply
to the whole of the historical Romantic Movement. Only in its
beginning is it so surprisingly poor in true works of art, but
later many of its weaknesses are overcome by the Romantics
themselves. To divide those whom we call Romantic so sharply from
those whom we do not is to make an artificial distinction, for
the Romantics frequently take over foreign elements and advance
towards realism. Sometimes they base their fantastic products
upon reality, and so can make them believable and enchanting. But
those very characteristics of early Romanticism which are so
disastrous have remained effective, and again and again,
Romanticism has been renewed at these sources. The most dangerous
form of Romanticism is more powerful today than ever before. The
overestimation of the power of the intellect and the flight from
reality into extreme individualism lead to an equally extreme
materialistic reaction, and in face of this reaction extreme
Romanticism appears, in its turn, as the only possible attitude
for the spirit of man. The mistakes of the Romantics are
responsible for both materialism and the retreat of the spirit
into romantic sentiment.
First, however, the materialist reaction takes
place; Romanticism clears the way for the overestimation of the
purely material personality. Reality, neglected by the spirit,
gains too strong a life of its own, and the deification of the
hero begins.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER IV
The following are those works of the Romantics which
show most clearly the ideas whose development is traced here:
J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.
---, Reden an die deutsche Nation.
F. Schlegel, Lucinde.
F. Schleiermacher, Reden über die Religon an die
Gebildeten
unter ihren Verichtern.
F. W. J. Schelling, Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilo-
sophie.
Bruno oder Ueber das natürliche und göttliche
Prinzip
der Dinge.
L. Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen.
H. Wackenroder und L. Tieck: Herzensergiessungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders.
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
---, Fragmente.
The correspondence between various of these authors and
the letters of A. W. Schlegel are also of the greatest
interest.
See also Paul Roubiczek homepage (here).
See also my critique of post-Jungian psychologists Edinger
(here),
Romanyshyn (here) and Hillman
(here).
