From Enlightenment to Romanticism

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From Enlightenment to Romanticism

• 1600-1900

Malaspina Great Books
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The Death of the Virgin 1601
Something happening here
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Skull with Cigarette 1886
Angst
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Starry Messenger 1609
Birth of Modernity
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1687
The idea that human beings were governed by the
same laws as governed the course of the stars
and planets, and that by observing those same
laws human communities could move with the same
order and regularity as the heavens was
attractive.
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William Blake's Newton (1795),
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Age of the Enlightenment

• autonomy of reason
• perfectibility and progress
• confidence in the ability to discover causality
• principles governing nature, man and society
• assault on authority

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Intellectual Setting

• Rationalism
• Impulse of Natural Science
• Out with Innate In with sense
• Progress

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Method

• Method of Newtonian physics applied to the entire
  field of thought and knowledge.

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Religion

• Severe shift to impersonal deisms and natural
  humanistic religions this is a central theme
  of the enlightenment

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This movement provided a framework for the
American and French Revolutions, as well as
leading to the rise of capitalism and the birth
of socialism.
John Locke (1632-1704)
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
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"Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused
immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use
one's own understanding without the guidance of
another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its
cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of
determination and courage to use one's
intelligence without being guided by another. The
motto of enlightenment is therefore Sapere aude!
Have courage to use your own intelligence!"
Immanuel Kant What is Enlightenment? 1784
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Naïve
Man not so simple Problem of Evil Problem
of Original Sin
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Rousseaus Solution

• Offers a new and modern solution to problem of
  evil
• The fall of man not caused by God or Man but by
  Society
• Salvation -gt Social Contract

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The Break
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Lisbon Quake 1755

• The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November
  1, 1755, at 920 in the morning. It was one of
  the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in
  history, killing well over 100,000 people. The
  quake was followed by a tsunami and fire,
  resulting in the near total destruction of
  Lisbon.

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Implications

• Caused many people to begin to wonder about
  natural law that could govern the planets in
  their steady and mathematical course but could
  also include sudden and unexplainable calamities.
  It began to seem as if natural law provided no
  assurance of order or of permanence.

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Failure of Enlightenment

• A perfect rational argument is like a balloon. If
  any one point fails, the entire argument fails.
  The Lisbon Earthquake was a point at which the
  argument upon which the Age of Reason was
  constructed failed.

Lynn H. Nelson - Department of HistoryUniversity
of Kansas.
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Voltaires Candide (1759)

• Candide pointed unerringly to the great defect in
  the idealism of The Age of Enlightenment. Even if
  the universe were governed by natural law on the
  basis of which humans might live in perfect peace
  and harmony, the fact of the matter is that human
  beings do not always behave rationally. It would
  seem that, in many if not most human beings,
  passions, personal desires, and just downright
  silliness often prevail over the exercise of
  reason. We are quite capable of thinking one way
  and then acting in quite a different, and often
  irrational, way.

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Women and the Enlightenment
Womens position degraded Capitalism severely
restricted womens rights to property In 1600
2/3 of businesses in London run by women In 1800
that became 1/10 Educational opportunity
expanded in quantity but degraded in quality
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)