From Enlightenment to Romanticism

1600-1900

Malaspina Great Books

The Death of the Virgin 1601

Something happening here

Skull with Cigarette 1886

Angst

Starry Messenger 1609

Birth of Modernity

The idea that human beings were governed by the same laws as governed the course of the stars and planets, and that by observing those same laws human communities could move with the same order and regularity as the heavens was attractive.

1687

William Blake's Newton (1795),

Age of the Enlightenment

• autonomy of reason

• perfectibility and progress

• confidence in the ability to discover causality

• principles governing nature, man and society

• assault on authority

Intellectual Setting

• Rationalism

• Impulse of Natural Science

• Out with “Innate” & In with “sense”

• Progress

Method

• Method of Newtonian physics applied to the entire field of thought and knowledge.

Religion

• Severe shift to impersonal deisms and “natural humanistic religions” – this is a central theme of the enlightenment

This movement provided a framework for the American and French Revolutions, as well as leading to the rise of capitalism and the birth of socialism.

John Locke (1632-1704) Karl Marx (1818-1883)

"Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!"

Immanuel Kant What is Enlightenment? 1784

Naïve

Man not so simple

Problem of Evil

Problem of Original “Sin”

Rousseau’s Solution

• Offers a new and modern solution to problem of evil

• The “fall of man” not caused by God or Man but by “Society”

• Salvation -> Social Contract

The Break

Lisbon Quake 1755

• The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:20 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in history, killing well over 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon.

Implications

• Caused many people to begin to wonder about natural law that could govern the planets in their steady and mathematical course but could also include sudden and unexplainable calamities. It began to seem as if natural law provided no assurance of order or of permanence.

Failure of Enlightenment

• A perfect rational argument is like a balloon. If any one point fails, the entire argument fails. The Lisbon Earthquake was a point at which the argument upon which the Age of Reason was constructed failed.

Lynn H. Nelson - Department of HistoryUniversity of Kansas.

Voltaire’s Candide (1759)

• Candide pointed unerringly to the great defect in the idealism of The Age of Enlightenment. Even if the universe were governed by natural law on the basis of which humans might live in perfect peace and harmony, the fact of the matter is that human beings do not always behave rationally. It would seem that, in many if not most human beings, passions, personal desires, and just downright silliness often prevail over the exercise of reason. We are quite capable of thinking one way and then acting in quite a different, and often irrational, way.

Women’s position degraded

Capitalism severely restricted women’s rights to property

In 1600 2/3 of businesses in London run by women; In 1800 that became 1/10

Educational opportunity expanded in quantity but degraded in quality

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Women and the Enlightenment