What is New Romanticism? From Novalis to Rorty

New Romanticism: Dream, But Do the Work

There’s a reason people keep coming back to Richard Rorty. He gave up on philosophy as the search for foundations and turned it into something looser—less math, more jazz. Less mirror of nature, more toolbox of metaphors. For a lot of readers (myself included), his books, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity felt like a door opening.

But what kind of room did it open into?

Homage to Delacroix by Henri Fantin‑Latour (1864)

Turns out it’s a room we’ve been in before. Smells like ink and smoke. Blake’s muttering in the corner. Wordsworth’s pacing by the window. Shelley’s lighting a cigarette. And in the center: Novalis, building bridges between imagination and reason.

Rorty never called himself a Romantic. But he may as well have.

And it’s time we name it: New Romanticism.

Romanticism, Round One

The first Romantics weren’t dreamers in the escapist sense. They weren’t running from the world. They were trying to rescue it from the flattening force of Enlightenment rationalism. The Enlightenment said: reality is out there, truth is knowable, reason rules.

The Romantics said: sure—but also, no.

They pushed back. They argued that reason has its limits. That the imagination isn’t just decoration, it’s infrastructure. That language doesn’t describe the world—it builds it. They didn’t want to burn down science, they just didn’t want to live in its shadow.

Sound familiar?

Rorty, two centuries later, said the same thing—but stripped it of transcendence, theology, and metaphysical romance. His was a Romanticism with its sleeves rolled up.

Enter Rorty: Romanticism Without Illusions

Édouard Vuillard – The Seamstress (1893)

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty takes a flamethrower to the idea of objectivity, foundations, and “Truth” with a capital T. He trades all of it for something far more interesting: contingency, vocabulary, and self-creation.

He tells us the self isn’t discovered—it’s written. Language isn’t a mirror—it’s a paintbrush. You don’t fix cruelty with logic—you fight it with empathy, novels, stories. Imagination.

Romantic? Absolutely. Sentimental? No. Not even a little.

Rorty’s Romanticism is pragmatic. Dream big—but do the work. Change the metaphor, sure. But also do the dishes.

Novalis: Blueprint for the New Romantic

Novalis saw it coming. In his notebooks and fragments, he fused science and poetry without apology. He didn’t want to choose between them. Two sides of the same coin—he wanted synthesis.

Paul Cézanne – Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897)

“Philosophy is really homesickness—the urge to be at home everywhere.”

Sounds exactly like Rorty.

Novalis treated language as a space for becoming, not conclusion. Just like Rorty’s ironist, he believed in truth as a project—not a place. If Rorty built the pragmatic poetic self, then Novalis was its ghost architect - doing it with stars and dreams and metaphysical smoke.

Enter AI

Now the world’s changed again. The Enlightenment had reason. The Romantics had nature.

We have AI.

Claude Monet – The Train in the Snow (1875)

Everything is data now. Identity, creativity, attention, even love. The endless feed eats nuance. Tech flattens. Algorithms optiomize and scale. Mystery is no more. If the Enlightenment reduced us to reason, tech is trying to reduce us to pattern recognition.

New Romanticism says: no thanks.

Not by rejecting the tech—but by refusing to become it. Use the tools. Create art.

Write your blog post. Invent an app. Just make sure the code serves the metaphor—not the other way around.

To Recap

New Romanticism isn’t nostalgia. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s a stance. A refusal. And a practice.

• Dream. But do the work.

• Build selves, not systems.

• Don’t ground—redescribe.

• Do art.

• Keep the imagination central.

• Don’t escape the world. Re-narrate it.

The Romantics looked at the Enlightenment and said: you’ve narrowed the soul—downgrading feeling and imagination. Now, the New Romantics look at AI and say: you’re narrowing the self—flattening identity into prediction and performance.

But New Romantics aren't trying to go back. They’re trying to move forward without losing what makes us human—machine learning and art, Pragmatism and imagination.

Because language (art) doesn’t just describe the world. It builds it.