Tag Archives: Romanticism

Reflection

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I agree with Romanticism ideals of life, but with an appreciation for empiricism. I feel that is social media and other interactions today people have an interesting relationship to Romanticism. Many people are writing “slice of life” comics, and often discuss the small things in life. I believe that our society’s focus on STEM fields has drawn people to appreciate Romantic values and ideals as we are connected in society. However, the STEM influences allow people on some levels to appreciate the science and other technical values in our daily life. Although I enjoy a Romantic perspective as Enlightenment ideals are too cold for me, and Romanticism leads me to enjoy my life daily and with calmer actions than the anxiety caused by Enlightenment ideals.

I have started to notice Romantic values within a society that I had not noticed before, especially in social media. People are documenting their lives, but instead of analyzing it in an Empirical sense they are documenting for emotions and memories with other people. This appreciation for their lives and the technology to remember what was around them with such ideals is something I never noticed people really did before this class. People embody both Enlightenment tendencies and Romantic ideals through the combination of STEM and the connectedness we have through technology.

I hardly had any idea what Romanticism and the Enlightenment were before this class, so the most important takeaway for me is the Romantic ideology. The concept of feeling emotions so intensely, both the ups and the downs, is something I have always admired, but I had no idea it was an entire ideology. I want to take that ideology with me as I move forward to new classes and with my own future.

Also I have no idea if anyone else played this as a child but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since we saw the rainbow video in class because I did not know the app was influences by it until now: https://youtu.be/HOGqMdzCe0s

A Reflection of the Enlightenment and Romanticism

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When analyzing the perspectives of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, I have an opinion that encompasses a mixture of both of these counterparts. The Enlightenment allows individuals to prioritize rationality and reasoning in both their decision making and thought process, analyzing the duty of the individuals to themselves and society. Romanticism promotes subjectivity, individuality, and the connection the individual has with nature, emphasizing the importance of passion and desire. Thus, leading life in accord with both the Enlightenment and Romanticism allows the individual to be rational in their decision making, while additionally retaining their passion and humanity. While an excessive amount of subjectivity is damaging in some cases, humanity must be able to balance passion with the Scientific Method so as to analyze cold data and facts with compassion. When viewing our Western culture today, I now see numerous examples of how Enlightenment and Romanticism ideals shapes society and the way we live. For example, I see many ideas of Romanticism when analyzing the artistic expression displayed on campus. When looking at the graffiti art, the decorative posters, or the Stuart art collection, I now view them as forms of completely free individual expression, exercising individuality as a way for society to know the artist’s passions and life experiences. I additionally see ideals of the Enlightenment on campus as well. Many individuals pick their career because it makes the most sense logically, thinking only of the salary and the financial benefits based on the proven scientific data concerning their chosen career path. Therefore, the individual is prioritizing reason and rationality, committing to it as their life’s work. Thus, there are numerous ideals of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism all around us, and my eyes are now open to connecting the choices I make everyday to the principles of both significant movements. For me, the most interesting takeaway from this class was learning about how the ideals of the Enlightenment apply to the origins of government systems. The Enlightenment ideals of equality, and justice helped to create the conditions for the Constitution, along with many other forms of social contracts. This questioning of traditional authority embraces the notion that humanity can be improved through rational thought and reasoning, and it greatly interested me when we covered it during the course.

One or the other?

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As I have mentioned in one of my previous posts, Romanticism and Enlightenment are inseparable concepts that can barely be differentiated in nature regardless of what most of the authors claim. Both concepts are what make us human. They are ideas that have been created by humans after all. So my choice is not to agree with one or the other. Rather, I choose to be human and embrace both my sentience and emotions.

Learning about these concepts has definitely opened my eyes to the natural way humans think. The conflict between the two schools of thinking has shown me that there is no right or wrong here, it’s just people trying to justify two conceptually correct concepts. With this knowledge I will go on to implement my life choices and my interactions around these concepts. I will be putting in effort to balance my life better by taking lessons from both ideologies and shaping my values to cover a wider perspective of thinking.

The most important takeaway has been the prevalence of uncertainty in our lives. Humans don’t really know what is what and everybody is figuring out their path as they go along. Yes, there has been an improvement in our understanding of the world and people can develop their emotional intelligence; but the beauty of it all is in the uncharted territory. The unseen experiences and undiscovered knowledge is what keeps us pursuing our dreams. We should keep doing that. We should feed our minds with the best possible knowledge while allowing our personalities and emotions to flourish. We should enjoy the journey while it exists.

Out in the wild, in our minds

A Diverse Perspective

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Personally, I think this class has a strong foundation of expressing the importance of perspective.

Of all the works we read, whether they were full of logic and laws such as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, or if they were full of vibrant emotions such as in Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, there a many different approaches to living life. In the past when I thought about perspective, I realized that I only considered that everyone does have a different perspective from others, and there may be overlap between people’s agreements and disagreements. However, I never fully understood the impact of not only listening to other’s perspectives, but truly emerging oneself into someone else’s perspective, and trying to reason through their feelings, without one’s personal biases getting in the way.

This seems like a simple or maybe basic understanding of our ideals as westerners, such as following a certain structure of society and contributing to it in some form. Yet this has affected me as a thinker because it has pushed me to really look at one perspective, understand as much as I can from it, and then formulate a connection between all perspectives I have observed. Essentially, it has taught me to be more open minded, to work to fully understand someone’s thoughts as much as I can, and then act on them from there, rather than letting my bias immediately judge a situation.

Thus, through the different depictions of the world’s structuring and progressiveness as seen through Voltaire’s satire in Candide, to understanding Rousseau’s argument of man’s basic needs to survive, I think this course has been beneficial to demonstrating how progression affects our world, especially here in the quick pace of the ‘west’, in addition to challenging to think beyond our own opinions and really dive into other’s perspectives.

Therefore, I leave you with this image. This is a fairly common image people have seen in terms of perspective, but really think about it now, with all we have learned. What would Goethe say about the tragedy of it only being half full, or half empty? What would Locke argue is logical for labeling this glass: half empty, or half full, but not both? What do you think, and what are your reasons?

Image result for full perspective

When The Revolution Begins

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Throughout this entire semester. We learned the historical process from enlightenment to romanticism. Over the less-than-200-years period, people at that time witness a dramatic turn of ideology from favor of absolutism to support of liberty, from favor of rational thinking to desire of emotion. It is a time period that permanently changed the perspective of the world much more than any period could do before.

To me, I consider my agreement lies on the period of Romanticism where the freedom of subjectivity is more embraced. To me, I am always touched by Werther’s desire and pain, Wordsworth’s embrace of the freedom, Mary Shelly’s personal touch on the development of scientific movement. It feels to me that humanity’s freedom reached to a new level in the romanticism movement.

However, this love towards romanticism does not erase my respect of Enlightenment and my acknowledgement of its contribution. I rather believes, after a deep study in HUM 4, that Enlightenment deeply confirms the idea that history is a chronological pattern that will not be dramatically changed by a particular event. The absolute world will not suddenly change into democracy without the gradual effort by philosophers like Hobbs, Locke, Rousseau, who gradually embellishes each other’s work further to firmly construct the path of democracy.

What’s my biggest takeaway from this class? That probably comes from every single art contest where every time I like a paint, that paint will lose. It kinda discourages me for a bit but I definitely have my realization that people’s opinion are vary and you can’t use your own opinion to substitute everyone elses’

But anyway, here is the Beethoven’s Movement 4 of the 9th Symphony. This symphony were generally considered as the piece that opens the world of romantic music. I hope that it brings you joy.

Enlightenment or Romanticism?

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To me the central of idea of Enlightenment and the central idea of Romanticism, as presented in the class, are reason and beauty, respectively. Early on we learnt about figures such Locke, Hume, and Kant, who attempted to set standards for which how one could act rationally and adheres to reason which is universal. It is particularly apparent in Kant’s Groundwork that reason could be the highest among all other motivations human experienced, and that for a rational agent, reason is both the mean and end for which one acts upon. For these works which we’ve read under the name of Romanticism, they generally present beauty as a higher if not equivalent end to reasoning, an alternative option that explores what reason rejects and neglects. What we have here is essentially logic verses aesthetics, reasons verses sensations. Personally I’m more inclined to arguments from the Enlightenment side, as it is rational to use reason in weighting arguments. Works which are said to follow Romanticism do bring a good point in questioning whether one ought to be rational. If we can only use reason to evaluate motivation, then what is not rational is unlikely to be evaluate by reason as acceptable. In other words, we can only assume that reason is the only worthy end. This is the most interesting takeaway from this class for me thus far. The study of Enlightenment and Romanticism in the class reveals new insights to me about Foucault’ Madness and Civilization, a contemporary book examining how madness has been perceived and treated through centuries.

Reason or Emotion? Not a Dilemma

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The enlightenment thinking seems to align more with my own thinking since I was grown up and taught to base my view upon facts and reasoning. However, after studying Hum 4, I realize the importance of the thinking of Romanticism which is also not neglectable. I agree with Schiller’s idea that rationality and reason are not always the best approach to guide our life. As a human being, something that is deeply rooted in our human nature is sometimes more powerful than those objective facts we learned in our life. Therefore, I think we all need a mix of reason and emotion in order to live a better life.

Learning the thinking of enlightenment and romanticism also gives me a good indication of how to interpret western culture. It is hard to be rational at any time, and there are also so many things around us that trigger our emotions and some are negative. Therefore, we should have a clear view of the truth and facts before placing our judgments and we should also understand that sometimes it is fine to be not rational and just simply follow your feelings.

The biggest takeaway for me of this class is the acceptance of views and thinkings a learned. For me, I used to require myself to regard rationality as my top priority on almost everything and ask myself to be rational. However, I come to realize now that rationality is not the only measure of solving any problems after learning the ideas of romanticism thinkers.


Enlightenment in 10 weeks

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Throughout the course, I have been more aligned to the Enlightenment side of the rationality it upholds. I am someone who believes in hard facts and numbers because of the truth it holds. The rationality and mechanical view of humans through the scientific method or even learning about Hobbes social contract was more applicable to me personally. Despite this, I have also enjoyed learning about the Romanticism ideals of focusing on the individual and sentiment over reason. It focused more on the organic feature of humans like emotions rather than the mechanical aspect where we are just cogs in a machine.

I believe that this has a large impact on contemporary western society because of the vast amount of information we have. It is very easy to fabricate and control how arguments are directed with manipulated data or biased persuasion. The Enlightenment teaches us to progress based on reason and the scientific method which makes it consistent when making an argument of any sort. For example, Locke was more focused on people’s natural rights and how it relates to their freedom under a government. It was very clear of what was required in his Second Treatise with his use of rationality and reason.

The most important takeaway from this class for me was the balance between Enlightenment and Romantic ideals. Both are polar opposites in terms of what they focus on but the authors we read had conflicting views that forced us to consider both sides and the middle road. For example, Goethe’s focus on following our emotions in contrast with Kant’s focus on duty and rational thinking made me concerned with the middle road and the tension between those two contrasting ideals. It is a unique style of thinking that would help in arguments that I thought was the most important takeaway from HUM 4.

I thought this image was a good representation of what Enlightenment thinkers were striving for when focusing on rationality and reason. It made us less organic and more mechanical.

Human = Romanticism and Enlightenment

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Image result for balance

I agree with both enlightenment and romanticism. I think to be a complete human you need a mix of both. You need to be able to make rational decision. But you also need to be mindful of your emotions. I think the ability to apply the scientific method to come up with concrete answers is really valuable. But I also think sometimes the ability to take in your emotions and thinking together and come up with answers is the key being a complete human being. I think a lot of people in the western culture fall towards more of the romanticism side. This is seen in politics almost all the time. People most of the time vote for the personality rather than the policy. If people don’t like someone, then they don’t want to vote for them. Which is reasonable to a certain extent. But we should also be more open to listen to their policies. Our judgement should be a mix of both. But we shouldn’t let either romanticism or enlightenment overpower the other. The most interesting part for me was seeing how people think back then. And how people though before all these changes. It is really fascinating to see how two generations can struggle with the same thing.

Balance

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I think that I align myself with a mixture of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism perspective because I think it is important to always consider both reasons and emotions when making decisions. I agree with the incorporation of the scientific method into our daily lives and how rational thinking is a reliable guide to living our lives. However, I also believe that we should always consider our emotions and feelings on these decisions because we need a balance between the rational and emotional sides of ourselves.

Throughout HUM 4 and learning about the two different perspectives, I think that it has really shown me how Enlightenment and Romantic thinking plays a role in our current society. When we discussed thinkers like Rousseau and Locke, I would look at their philosophy and think “hey, that’s kinda like this other thing we have in our government/society”. It’s really an eye-opening course that I kinda enjoyed because it allowed us to discuss and explore the foundations of our society and government.

I hope you enjoy this really bad meme I found. Stay healthy everyone!

Learning how to co-exist

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As a person who would describe themselves as being more artistic and interested in the abstracts of life and culture, I find the general perspectives of Romanticism to be the most aligned with my own perspectives but I also have lots of similarities with the Enlightenment perspective. With the ideals of critical thinking and purposeful precautions and research, I think the Enlightenment ideals were necessary for the branch of Romanticism to bloom fully, as the Enlightenment formalized the practice of creating different theories and reasonings for things while the Romanticism focuses on learning embracing and co-existing with these differences.

The Romantic and Enlightenment period has paved the way for governments and citizens of modern societies to engage in political protests and give rights to freedom of expression.

Learning about Enlightenment and Romantic ideals has been an eye-opening experience in learning about how modern society even came to be in the first place. I have always been familiar with the strong historic pattern of religion in culture and daily lives, but through learning about the Enlightenment and Romantic period I understand how modern society was able to divert into diverse ideas and traditions we co-exist in today.

The most interesting takeaway I have from this class is seeing how everything in history through literature, art, etc, are essential building blocks and the foundations of the modern life that we all live in today. For example, by learning about the ideals of Hume and Locke and then comparing those texts with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, both documents that have an impact on my daily life as they are the laws I live by being a US citizen, has been a really interesting experience.

Choose your side

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i found this online..

If given the chance to pick between Romanticism and Enlightenment views, I definitely wouldn’t be able to choose because I agree with both perspectives. I couldn’t imagine life with just one extreme or the other, either live a life that is all about reason or live a life that is all about feelings. I think that there should be a balance between the two, because different aspects of life needs to be approach accordingly. Learning about the Enlightenment and Romanticism didn’t really affect the way I viewed contemporary western culture today that much but, learning about this made me think of the different ways that Enlightenment and Romanticism perspectives still remain relevant today. How the way we are living today can be traced all the way back to thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Voltaire. In my point of view, this is the interesting takeaway from this class. That despite being centuries apart from these philosophers we learned about, their struggles and questions are similar to what we are faced with today.