My dude is out here hiking in jean shorts during a pandemic to properly educate us all on the marvelous Romantic spirit; thank you so much for making and sharing this content!
You're amazing. The fact that I'm only one of 8,000 people to have had the privilege to watch this beautifully done video blows my mind. I respect what you do so much. Keep it up, good sir!
Romanticism is a legacy that simply must be acknowledged, your videos on it are excellent. It is one of the most vital trends in British intellectual history.
After many years now of holidaying in the Lakes, at least ounce a year, I can fully relate to this notion of the clarity and catharsis that comes from walking the Fells, especially with friends in deep conversation. The whole nervous system seems to relax into more natural rhythms. I can completely understand how the romantics influenced psychoanalysis. Excellent video, hope to see you there in the future one day 😆
*WIND WARNING* (Think of it as intentionally Romantic). Seriously, though, thank you to everyone who watches, subscribes, and pledges for making this possible. I hope, if you all like it, to continue these adventures in a variety of forms and on a range of topics in the future. Much love. If you want to support this video the best thing you can do is give it a quick upvote over on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/ioy9cr/the_roots_of_romanticism_the_lake_district/
I'm at a turning point in my life, having recently lost a long-term, cohabiting relationship. I turned to the Stoics, but all that talk of Reason just didn't speak to me at all. Keats, on the other hand...Lord Byron, Goethe, Gustav Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Now, they speak to me, and on a profoundly deep level. I am flying to South Africa tomorrow, to stay with my family on their farm, and I'll be reading a lot of the Romantics amidst mountains and along rivers. Thank you for this beautiful, enjoyable, and enlightening (no pun intended) piece :-)
You can romanticize this comment by giving your hearts to me. * hearts may or may not be returned in original condition ** also accepting thumbs pointing up
I put a like on the video the moment it came out. Finally got the time to watch it, and now it is in my favourite playlist. You never disappoint, and this time you outranked my expectations. Such a beautiful art that swept the hour like a minute. You are indeed a romantic.
I read Critique of Pure Reason twice and now I'm about halfway thru Hegel's Phenomenology and I can only say that I have utterly dispensed with Romanticism. It sets a false dichotomy between emotion, beauty, being in the moment, on one side and systematic knowledge about the world on the other. Any hope of replacing logical rigor with emotion as such is intellectual deficiency, whether for want of capacity, want of effort, want of honesty, want of self awareness, or whatever the cause may be. Not a personal attack of course, but I think the Enlightenment fundamentally got at least method right. And that's what really matters. I used to be an ardent proponent of emotional exploration and I would say that I still am. But as before and even more so now, I would suggest that all such explorations are most worthwhile when they are understood and contextualized according to what is true. Learning music theory doesn't stifle creativity like the quintessential adolescent guitar player thinks. Gaining systematic knowledge according to principles of reason only aids you in the quest of becoming a wider vessel for rich experience. If logic and reason feels oppressive to you, it's only because there is a logical problem in your own mind that you haven't resolved. The solution, then, is not to avoid logical expression, but to expand your own consciousness in terms of logical skill and comprehension so that reasoning itself doesn't feel so limiting and cumbersome. If walking up and down stairs makes you feel out of breath, the real solution is not to avoid stairways but to get your body in shape so it can tackle physical tasks more easily. I guess I just fundamentally see Romanticism as escapism, not a path to truth but a running from it. Romanticism is for people who want to be brutes but pass for oracles. All due respect, of course, just my take. I can appreciate Romantic art; I've always loved Shelley and Poe, but, as a philosophy, as it was stated in a quotation included in a previous video about art and beauty being an organon for truth, that's just not the case.
The inherent contradiction of Romanticism is that it wants to give a classification 'Romanticism' to the very idea of resenting schematic classification. It wants to demarcate a zone of thought where further demarcation is not allowed, but this is obviously arbitrary. Once you've given one heading, how is it fair to whine about and resent subheadings?
@@iste7057 I cant answer that question without using logic and I think that answers the question. The illogical is impossible; only the real has value.
I don’t know if it’s best to see Romanticism in a broad sense as the rejection of reason so much as an understanding of its limits-an acknowledgement that life is filled with arational problems, problems to which reason offers no guide. It does not necessarily exclude logic or rigor, though it might take umbrage with the kind of system-building excesses of Kant, seeing it as an example of the Enlightenment’s excessive confidence in what human inquiry/reason could establish and failure to truly establish it. Thus, it is, in a sense, acknowledging the underlying subjectivity in areas where the Enlightenment sought objectivity, embracing a healthy kind of individualism. Again, this does not exclude rigor in general: I think that perhaps the finest example of a movement in philosophy with a strongly Romantic flavor was American Pragmatism, and CS Pierce, at the forefront, was a logician. Some of the more recent pragmatists-Davidson comes to mind-could surely not be accused of being anti-reason or insufficiently rigorous, but there is certainly still a Romantic streak that survives in their work in where they see reason’s limits and what to do in light of them. (There’s a great conversation on RU-vid somewhere between Rorty and Davidson where they discuss the Romantic concept of Pragmatism which is worth a watch.) To turn to your guitar player analogy, because I think it’s somewhat illustrative: consider great Romantic composers like Wagner. Wagner in no sense rejected theory. He was well aware of just about everything a composer could be aware of, technically-a master like few before him. (And a prick, but that’s not particularly relevant at the moment.) Still, he saw the limitations in how composition had been systematized and reduced to something somewhat formulaic by theorists of that time, and revolted against the excess systematization. (Fux’s Gradus is a clear example.) Now, this is where the analogy begins to break down, as Wagner took the old ideas (functional harmony, for example) and pushed them to their limits, whereas the “intellectual” Romantics believed that the old ideas were being extended into areas to which they did not apply, but the commonalities are nonetheless present. So, in summary: Romanticism is not “reason bad,” but rather “reason has been misapplied in some areas and we need to break out of that and embrace a bit more individuality and humanity.” That’s at least my understanding of Romanticism.
I think you are getting things wrong, hegel and kant are part of the enligthment, hegel is the ultimate consumation of the reason that can comprehend it all, he, in fact, called descartes a hero because he brougth the notion of the subject as a foundation of the rational nature of everything and created a distinct hierarchy of objective aesthetics, you should know all this if you are halfway througth the phenomenology.
Great video! I love these long works of yours, which provide enough time to really cover the material with sufficient depth. If I could make a suggestion for the future, it would be to ensure a more consistent sound throughout the video, by investing in a microphone that you could use wherever you are, even as you're walking. As they say, sound is more important than the image! It doesn't really matter to me if the video is filmed with an IMAX camera, or a potato, but the ever-changing sound quality is what tends to disorient me.
Great. I was brought up with Transcendentalism (the American cousin of Romanticism), as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were standard reading in high school. Not sure if that's still the case in US public school. Your discourse also reminded me of the Art and Crafts movement, another reaction against industrialization.
I too enjoy escaping our urbanised environments but imagine that that's all you knew or grew up in, perhaps we would crave urbanised landscapes the way we crave ones that aren't? Maybe it's just novelty we desire and a temporary escape from reason, although even our passions too have their reason. We are a part of nature as are our artifacts unless you think that a bird's nest, for example, isn't natural? In other words, nature is inescapable.
Between the human individual and the environment is something like an X. The human gives attention and receives, likewise the environment. At that focal point of the x is identity and values. According to business, it's all up for grabs.
I find it funny how romanticism is all about individuality while there plenty of tourist and the area has been "developed"...where does "untoched" nature really lie?
There isn't as much of a contradiction as you think....i used to think like you about other places ie maccchu picchu and its personal spiritual element when so many tourists. Best way I can explain it is that romanticism also preaches acceptance, so you could find nature in your or someone else's garden even though it may be heavily 'designed'. The most important thing is what it means to you, what inspiration it inspires in only you. Then it becomes about discovery, rather than the 'place'
romanticism relates more to reality seen via right brain hemisphere over left brain hemispheres function . Left brain deals with logical reasoning, numbers, semantics and categories, while our right brain hemisphere deals with visuospatial, meaning, music , the big picture and feelings.
Great video, clever theme and design. Sound quality sometimes very low. Also the video was a bit long and I lost track of narrative a few times. Maybe you can also make a shorter version of this video, a re-mix.
With California and a lot of the west burning, your piece was a comma, a place holder in Emersonian thought, if I can extrapolate; you can make the world a better place in your mind. Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, they seem the same. The English poet, the cowboy in the openness of the western places, they seem the same. One name that dominates the English Romanticism for me is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He completes the trinity of "sex, drugs and R&R. The common idea is that it started in the sixties, the hippies invented it but the English Romantics did. Beethoven was the R&R, sex was Lord Byron's escapades and drugs were opium and hash.
The reason why your subscription level remains stubbornly low is because there is a considerable portion of your subscribers who don’t want to share you; You make them feel depthful-they don’t want to share THAT fact, that they are thoughtful creatures because of you. Instead, they would rather pseudo-intelligently make careful discourse with their closest friends...as if your ideas were theirs...
