Some notes on romanticism

One way of understanding romanticism: 

I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world.

The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad."

I can understand my New Atheist friend's frustration.  But all my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it.  (Including me!)

To my mind, this shows that we are still, in some sense, romantics.

That is: romanticism resists the existence of a standard by which one would judge whether something is romantic.  And in some sense, that resistance is what romanticism is.

To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism.  

We are still romantics.  Even classicism is a kind of romanticism.  (The classicist romanticizes the classical.)  Even realism is a kind of romanticism.

I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism.

If there were a way out of romanticism, it would be the establishment of some kind of standard that people would agree upon.  But we can imagine what would happen if such a standard were imposed - immediately, there would be people who would angrily refuse and rebel against that standard.  It seems there will always be people who will be - or at least who will see themselves as, or aspire to be - anti-establishment.  And so no standard can become universal.  Is that really true?  (See this.)

It is in that sense that romanticism is anti-managerialism. 

Correlated with the development of industrialism was the development of science, technology, engineering.  With the development of industrialism came the development of capitalism. With the development of capitalism came the development of managerialism.  With the development of managerialism came the modern state, modern corporate structure, etc..  And romanticism arose in response to this, as anti-managerialism.

These are all self-reinforcing, exponential processes.  There may be temporary setbacks, reversals, jagged lines, randomness, but the general trend is increase and accelerating increase.  The value is positive, the averaged derivative is positive, the averaged double-derivative is positive.  Slope goes way up.

Romanticism is anti-managerialism, but also, by challenging managerialism, shaking it up, preventing the bureaucracy from ossifying, it can make managerialism more efficient, more competitive, thus improving managerialism long-term and making it exponentially more powerful.  Thus romanticism is ultimately integrated into the total system.

One way of putting it: romanticism is integrated into the total system in a way that managerialism can never fully comprehend. 

This is not just - not even primarily - true for art.  Wide variety of human endeavors.  Romanticism really began in religion. 

Sometimes I think that the first romantic was Pascal, on his famous "night of fire," rejecting what he called "the god of the philosophers" in favor of the true God, the personal God.  Pascal insisted, again and again, on a religion of the heart - le coeur.  As he said, "the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know."  That's a very romantic statement.

But in its earliest moment, romanticism meant a relationship with Jesus in person, but not necessarily Jesus's relationship with an individual.  More often, it meant the relationship of Jesus with a nation.  That's why I say that nationalism is the ur-romanticism.  (This leads me to say that the first romantic was Joan of Arc.)

Romanticism often takes the form of a passionate identification with the people - especially the common people, the poor, the peasants, the oppressed, etc. - and at first this was understood in a national sense, and often in opposition to another nation (France against England, for instance).  For the French, the English have always seemed a bit managerial, and have seemed like they were arrogantly pretending to have some kind of standard of objective truth that they did not in fact have. 

What would be a "managerial" standard that could overcome romanticism?

The Eleatic Stranger in Plato's Sophist was attempting to point at something like this, trying to dialectically arrive at an agreed-upon taxonomy - in his case, a means of categorizing and sub-categorizing some way of distinguishing between sophists and philosophers.

Probably the most impressive attempt at overcoming romanticism in this way (besides Hegel, of course) was attempted by Edmund Husserl.  Husserl recognized a profound problem in science, and attempted to develop a scientific system that would include the subjective into itself.  But it would be hard to claim that Husserl succeeded or completed this Herculean task.

Romanticism most often takes the form of resistance towards empiricism.  I would say that this is the predominant form of romanticism.

(Sometimes, this means anti-western, or more often, specifically anti-British - including American anti-British sentiment, German anti-British, French anti-British, Irish anti-British, and even British anti-British sentiment, as in Blake's "dark Satanic mills."  Sometimes empiricism is used against empiricism.)

Question: is there also a romanticism in science?