Romanticism vs. Rationalism During the Renaissance

If one could define Romanticism one could do what no historian has never been able to do, what the Romantics themselves were unable to do. In fact, to define it would be to deface it, as the Romantics believed that generalized definitions and truths made life a mechanical instruction booklet, something to be followed, not lived. Surely Romance, unlike the Reason of the philosophes, differed in every single heart.

The ideology of the philosophes’ Enlightenment was chosen as the enemy of Romanticism. The Romantics accused the over-thinking philosophes of the Enlightenment of making humanity too mechanical. To say that carefully reasoned “absolute truths” or “universal laws” should be applied to the Reason and morality of every man was to make life a machine. A Romantic felt that truth was not something that could be “reasoned out” and carved out with cookie-cutters; instead, they believed every man was unique and had his own path to destiny, his own way to feel truth.

The Romantics were guilty too, however, of over-simplifying and over-defining. They created in their minds an image of the cold, logical, calculating philosophe, who could neither frown nor smile. Conjuring such a robotic enemy, rather than another soft human simply finding his own path to truth, gave them a justifiable enemy – like a science fiction story about a band of poor rebels battling futuristic androids. Having romanticized minds, how could they help but produce a romanticized enemy? Surely the feeling of constantly struggling against evil gave the Romantics feelings of adventure, epic heroism, and passion for a truth worth dying for.

The philosophes of the Enlightenment had their own cause worth dying for. They sought liberty and freedom for humanity; thus they engaged themselves in revolutions and constitutions and discussions about natural rights for all humankind. To a Romantic, these things did not matter. The romantics already saw freedom and liberty, the lofty ideas which the Enlightened Ones pursued, everywhere in life. To Althea from Prison, a poem written by Richard Lovelace in the 1600’s, explains this idea of freedom, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. . . if I have freedom in my love, and in my soul am free, angels alone that soar above, enjoy such liberty.” The Romantics saw liberty and truth everywhere; they also realized that the philosophes were forging their own chains, for as they continued to insist that freedom was something that must be achieved through governmental and Reasonable means, they forced themselves into a world where liberty had not yet been found. They were not free simply because they believed they were not. The Romantics felt this reasoning to be flawed and wagered that if the philosophes would feel instead of think, they’d find themselves among truth and freedom, which were entities that could not be thought or fought into existence.