Discussion of the Assignments for Week Eight/Assignment Link is Now Active

This week we step back in time, and we take an important turn in the course, that from the Age of Romanticism and into the Age of Reason.  Because this is such a big turn, this week, part of your reading will be a discussion of where we have been, a review of Romanticism, and an overview of Enlightenment thought to get you started into this new unit of the semester.  

Most of the literature we've read the first half of the semester took place in the New Republic (1789-1830) of the Antebellum [that is, "Before the War] Period (1820-1861).  In one way or another, it was influenced by Romanticism.  If you noticed, I first set up a few touchstone authors--Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson--who you could use as representative Romantics.  From them, you learned that Romantics:

• valued the individual;
• valued feeling over thinking and reason;
• valued the underdog;
• valued the savage and "close to nature" noble savage over what they saw as the corrupting forces of civilization;
• valued cultivating emotion, sensitivity, and the ability to feel;
• valued individual, place, and group genius;
• tended toward idealism and Protestant Christianity as grounding philosophies; 
• used Plato and Neo-Platonic philosophers and various forms of mysticism as authorities;
• often used Nature--capital "N"--as a means of finding resonance with the Godhead in others and throughout the world; and,
• the list goes on.

You also learned that the Romantics fostered change in society by helping others to feel for the oppresses and by using a cultivated ability to feel deeply and to feel for others as a kind of index to oppression.  

What I didn't discuss with Romantics much is how their loose, individualistic artistic and philosophical stance came into being as a reaction to the dominant philosophy of the predecessor generation.  Harold Bloom, a Romantic critic and writer, argued that one means of understanding change in literature, the arts, and philosophy was to recognize that each generation rebels against the literature, philosophy, and the art of their parent's generation.  It's a means of defining one's generation and peer-community in difference to the mistaken values of the parent.  While there are holes in Bloom's model of change, by-and-large, it can be useful when thinking about the Romantics, who rebelled against the idealism and optimism of Enlightenment Philosophy and the so-called, Age of Reason.  

Loosely speaking, the Age of Reason begins at the end of the Renaissance and with the beginning of the Modern Era, that is, sometime in the late 1600s, and it never has really ended.  Although, most folks quit seeing it is a dominant influence around the time of high Romanticism.  Roughly, you can think about the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment as running from 1700-1820 or so.  

Enlightenment thinking gave us the true beginning of the Scientific Age.  It allowed democracy to come into being and created most of the supporting intellectual infrastructure--ideas like, the Social Contract, all humankind is created equal, the belief that humankind can understand the world and make it better through debate and reason, the value of the individual's insight as an instance of seeing something in their observations of our shared world that others had missed, the believe that the universe runs on unwavering basic laws and principles, religious freedom, the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and--finally and most important--humankind can come to understand how the universe works and to use this understanding to build better lives for everyone.  Without the Enlightenment, America would never have come into being.  The nobles and the church would likely still be in charge of Western civilization.  Most people would not be educated, and the Industrial Revolution would have taken a radically different path.

Just as the Romantics rebelled against their figurative philosophical parents, Enlightenment thinkers rebelled against the religious grounded controversies of the 15th and 16th Centuries.  The centuries which had seen the Inquisition, the religious Thirty Years War in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, witch trails, the growth of the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, the Enclosure Movement, etc. et etc.  In the stead of an old world order based on religious conviction, superstition, the privilege of the nobility, Enlightenment thinkers latched onto science, shared reason, and ultimately came to see society as a compact of individuals, not ordained by God, by by choice.  

Most of those who embraced high Enlightenment thought did not reject Christianity, but they did apply the measure of reason to received Christian doctrine, and high Enlightenment thinkers tended toward religious views based on what came to be called, Deism or the belief that there was a God, one who created the universe to run by knowable laws, a God who was not capricious, and one who started the universe to run, and then only intervened in the world only occasionally.  In such a world, our lives and the world were what we made of them and our value to God was in our ability to use reason to understand and appreciate God and the universe God created.  Deist tended to believe that the object of life and individual action was to use the God given faculty of reason to understand the world we share and to mediate the worst of human's animal passions, which they saw as deriving from one's emotional passions, individual selfishness, ignorance, and human tyranny.  According to most Enlightenment thinkers good and truth could be observed and noticed by everyone, that is, if  everyone practiced reason and resisted their worst, animal natures.  

By and large, good action consisted of helping others (and yourself at the same time) to live easier, understand the nature of the world, and to enrich the lives and freedoms of others.  Enlightenment thinkers also tended to believe that the more people who could exercise reason and had good information about the world--an education--the more we could know and the better we could make the world and our lives.  They were optimists who saw the increase in human understanding and freedoms only increasing--that is, if tyranny of thought, superstition, and ignorance could be overcome--and, as our shared understanding of the social and natural world increased, allowing better lives for all.  

Finally, Enlightenment thinkers tended to look toward Rome and Greece as their intellectual forbears, to see the intervening period before the Renaissance as a Dark Age, and to believe that we were in the process of regaining our intellectual heritage and stepping out of the Dark Age into the light--hence, the name, "Enlightenment."

If Enlightenment thinking sounds familiar, it's because you encounter it in most scientists and Engineers, and it is the intellectual foundation on which the institutions and Constitution of the United States was built.  

Just as you have Poe, Emerson, and Thoreau as touchstones of Romantic artists and thinking, over the next several weeks, you'll get Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine as touchstones through which to understand the Age of Reason and the birth of America.  

We'll begin with Ben Franklin, who was kind enough to leave us an autobiography.  While biography and autobiography is a familiar genre today, it was once a rare genre, and the idea of someone like Franklin, not of noble birth nor of particular religious value as a saint, to write his own biography was at the time Franklin was writing a fairly radical undertaking.  However, it is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment.  Franklin saw himself as an example; indeed, his apprentice with nothing to man of wealth and statue, has become an archetypal, rags-to-riches genre which is familiar to each of us.  You'll also see elements of how-to writing in Franklin's autobiography, as he talks about such ambitious undertakings as a plan to make himself morally perfect through exercising virtue and avoiding vice and in his discussion of how he (and we) can create a better life for ourselves and others by bringing people together to act for each other's good in the creation of such institutions as a public library, volunteer fire companies, or in propagating ideas or scientific inventions into daily usage.  If for nothing else, read Franklin to figure out how to retire by age 42 and help people around you along the way.