The Arguments Against Romanticism and the Blue Flower

The Case Against Romanticism

Arthur Schopenhauer

• "The Romantic movement is a symptom of our diseased civilization, and represents a form of self-delusion that leads to misery and disappointment." - (from The World as Will and Representation)

Claude-Joseph Vernet The Shipwreck 1772

Schopenhauer was the ultimate pessimist and he emphasized the inherent suffering of humans and the harsh realities of the natural world. He believed that Romantics were narcissistic and self-delusional. Their retreat from reason and embrace of an emotional life could only lead to misery and disappointment,

The Takeaway: Romanticism is self-delusion dressed up as depth.

T.S. Eliot

• "Tradition... cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year... Tradition... involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." (from "Tradition and the Individual Talent")

Caspar David Friedrich Morgen im Riesengebirge 1810

Eliot is saying that artists should draw on the richness of tradition and collective knowledge, rather than just rely on personal imagination or emotion, like the Romantics did.

The Takeaway: Art needs more than emotion.

Theodor Adorno (The Frankfurt School)

• "The Romantic attitude represents a retreat from the world of reality into the world of imagination, a withdrawal from the task of transforming society into a utopia of freedom and equality. Romanticism is a form of bourgeois ideology that reinforces the dominant social order by encouraging individuals to seek refuge in private fantasies rather than engage in collective action to change the world." (from "Culture Industry Reconsidered")

Carl Philipp Fohr - Knight before the Charcoal Burner's Hut

Adorno, a Marxist, had little interest in individualism or imagination.He also didn't see nature as a source of beauty or spiritual renewal. From a Marxist perspective, Adorno saw nature as another resource exploited by capitalist and industrial forces.

The Takeaway: Don't numb yourself with fantasy.

The Romantics' Rejoinder:

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man." -"The Poet"

Romantics argued that focusing on the individual didn’t mean rejecting community or tradition. Instead, they saw the individual as a creative force that could contribute to the greater good. They believed individual creativity could renew and revitalize tradition, not simply reject it.

Imagination isn't some of luxury. It's what keeps us alive inside.

William Blake

"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow." - "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

William Blake The Ancient of Days 1794

The real world lives in the imagination, not in data or machines.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation." - "Biographia Literaria"

According to Coleridge, imagination reveals truth far deeper than reason ever could.

In the end, the critics saw Romanticism as retreat, but the Romantics saw it as return —not an escape from reality—but a deeper engagement with what makes life worth living.